Michael Sragow

Vincente Minnelli makes use of the wide screen with graceful, fluid movement, and he helps Martin anchor his usual breeziness with just the right amount of anxiety.

Live-In Maid is a lived-in movie. Its cataclysms may be small in scale, but the movie brings us so far into these women's lives that a shattered cup creates an earthquake.

Too bad Kidron, Fielding and company pay only cafe lip service to satire.

You go to Good Night, and Good Luck expecting inspiration, and you get it. It's also unexpectedly subtle, tense, and challenging, complex both in its take on its subject and in its craftsmanship. So the movie brings you to your feet - and, at times, to tears.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

Lumumba revives the tradition of Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" and Costa-Gavras' "Z" and "State of Siege." In substance and excitement, it joins their ranks.

Even as trick movies go, Confidence feels surfacey to a fault.

A campy riot of retro cool, a warm and fuzzy ode to the '70s buddy cops.

Brosnan turns his typical talent on its head. So does director Boorman, who forsakes his usual tingling virtuosity.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

A beautiful display of celluloid bungee-jumping.

Tykwer made Potente a star in Run Lola Run, and here she repays him 10 times over. Without her force of gravity, this film would waft into the ether.

"Happy Accidents" should retire Tomei's status as part of a show-biz urban legend and establish her once and for all as one of our most versatile and engaging performers.

What's bleakly hilarious about the whole movie is that Bekmambetov directs the nonaction scenes just as hyperbolically.

If you feel yourself glowing after Love Actually, you might be suffering from sugar shock.

The word "yuppie" has fallen out of favor from overuse, but Closer's young urban professionals are so vain and superficial they may bring it back as the ultimate putdown. This movie is a yuppie nightmare.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

The movie needs more incident and complication; it's modest to a fault.

You won't want to miss it if you care about movies that dare to chart intimacies in our age of spectacle, or about up-and-coming female performers and underused male veterans finding roles worthy of their gifts.

The problem isn't the history that the filmmakers leave in, but how much they leave out.

The whole movie aspires to set an Annie Hall vibe, especially when Tom keeps trying to re-create, first with her and then with someone else.

A delirious surprise .

It's cathartic and exhilarating.

Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since "Cabaret."

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

A refreshingly unpredictable and fizzy comic fantasy. It tickles the fancy even when it strains credibility.

Enraging and enthralling.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

Man on the Train may be a modest film, but it offers privileged glimpses of transcendence.

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

Not a perfect 10, but its imperfection is what makes it gripping and bewitching.

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

In Hustle & Flow, a star is born playing a star who's born.

So witless it wins most of its laughs when Czech-speaking characters spout obscenities that get translated into English subtitles.

Despite its haphazard rhythms and longueurs, The New World achieves an emotional payoff unlike anything else in Malick's work. It's all you think his movies are, and more.

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera.

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

You won't see a brighter, truer affirmation of the All-American messed-up improvisational family than Little Miss Sunshine.

Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

Collateral Damage isn't jingoistic; it also isn't exciting. It's a depressed rabble-rouser.

Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.

Thanks to Hallstrom's slaphappy artistry and a sparkling ensemble, Hoax is a hoot.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

No matter how "mock" this epic gets, it isn't mock enough. The "D" in the title must stand for dead weight.

What revs up the movie and keeps it humming is the driving energy of early rock, with its innocent/rebellious spirit, and its theme that teens must find their own ways to love and fight.

It's Cheadle's rich emotionality and sense of humor that have gone seriously missing in Traitor.

Even the title is off. I haven't heard an honest "Lucky You" since I was in sixth grade. For most people it registers as a sneer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.

The Son's Room is the anti-"In the Bedroom." I mean that as a compliment.

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

Most of the movie makes too much sense and is no fun at

When the cast and their director are really cooking, they conjure a bipolar sense of high school-age emotion -- and use it to fuel outrageous fantasy.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

A harrowing depiction of a woman's plight under the Taliban.

Sahara doesn't waste time on introductions. It wastes time in other ways.

The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

It wants to be like no other movie you've ever seen. It's more like every movie you've ever seen.

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

Could have been a contender, but it lacks the courage of its own ambivalence.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

The movie is edited and, worse, narrated in ways that sabotage the magic and even undercut the movie's message.

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

It's one nutty holiday fruitcake that is appetizing and tasty.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

Becoming Jane isn't just a soap opera - it's a soft-soap opera.

I found the sight of McAvoy as a piano player in jazzy-seedy duds a lot more disconcerting than Ricci's porcine prosthesis.

I love Rabbit-Proof Fence as drama, as protest, as moviemaking and as poetry.

By the time it reaches its supposedly crowd-pleasing finale, Baby Mama may have self-respecting comedy fans (and even Tina Fey fans) crying uncle.

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]

As social commentary, Fun With Dick and Jane wears Leno-thin. As a big-screen sitcom, it's a procession of hit-or-miss touches that cancel each other out.

At its best, The Mystic Masseur is like a tall tale that grows more beguiling and credible the taller it gets.

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.