Michael Sragow

Leonardo DiCaprio brings straight-razor reflexes and rooted emotion to the role of a deceptively rugged CIA man.

This picture is absorbing -- and eye-filling -- whether the prose and the passion are connecting or running on parallel tracks.

May not make adults feel as if they're 10 again, but it will awaken their memories of Saturday matinees that upped children's adrenaline without blinding them with Day-Glo colors or insulting their intelligence.

Producers hits few wrong notes on the big screen.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

Cabin Fever may not be a horror classic, but it's definitely an ideal midnight movie.

Spurlock's movie is the real-life slapstick record of a kamikaze Mac attack. Schlosser's book is the contemporary equal of Upton Sinclair's classic meatpacking muckraker "The Jungle."

The giddy excitement of Startup.com comes from feeling as if you're inside the bubble as it soars into the stratosphere - and pops.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

Christie’s passionate, vulnerable performance keeps pulling the entire movie into her point of view.

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.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

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.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

The action goes beyond conventional excitement to achieve a tragic grandeur.

Martin Scorsese’s début feature has just the slightest bit of story line, but the movie is a fascinating portfolio piece: a black-and-white blueprint for “Mean Streets."

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

You never believe that Paltrow's character is insane, even when she herself does. She has too sturdy a core.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

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

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

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

No matter how good-natured, The Holiday ends up a glutted farce.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

Even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

At over two hours, Breakfast on Pluto is too much of a merely pretty and pretty good thing.

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.

The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

Jerry Seinfeld's foray into feature animation will delight young kids and leave their elders alternately amused and bemused.

The sprawling canvas ultimately dwarfs the plucky title figure and makes him seem too small in every way.

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

The timing couldn't be better for a thriller that focuses on assassination, international war scandals and U.S. agencies of enormous influence and wildly varying competence.

Apart from the movie's moments of flesh and fantasy, it lacks the lyric impulse that would make the swank fantasy take flight.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

Although the structure is clunky, the ensuing parliamentary machinations prove witty and fascinating.

A film that climaxes in Shanghai shouldn't go down like a meal in Shanghai. But an hour after you see M:i:III, you may be hungry for a real movie.

Generally, this writer-director is too sensitive for his own good. He never lets his boy-hero lose himself fully in his new world - or relinquish hope that his parents will return.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

A smart comedy about a smart blonde -- that would be a sensation. But a dumb comedy about a smart blonde turns out to be not bad.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

Combine the title with the image of a dazzling female and a frazzled male, and you've got the movie perfectly.

You know the line about paying to hear a great actor read a phonebook? I'd pay to see Channing just leaf through one.

Plummer's performance is a miracle: In a movie as flat as a tablecloth, he suggests dimensions as wide, deep and curved as Cinerama.

David Hyde Pierce is hilarious as Drix, a take-charge dose of medicine. No performer is better at wringing laughs from an unflappable --- make that semi-flappable - delivery.

It's hard to stomp on a movie that pulls together a rich lay-about, hippies, a punk girl and an Amnesty International worker in a sort of Peaceable Kingdom, but About a Boy shows the limits of affability.

It's lumpy, odd and tonally all over the place, but its vision gets to you, and its payoff delivers a tough kid's catharsis.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

Part irritating, part inspired.

By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.

At best it's a bit like Mel Brooks' "The History of the World Part I" (except Ramis stops somewhere in Genesis); at worst it's like a Scary Movie-type parody of John Huston's "The Bible."

That's the problem of Downfall in a nutshell: It provokes insufficient emotional and intellectual responses to a grotesque and atrocious dictatorship. Instead of the banality of evil, it gives us the banality of banality.

It's so wispy that at the end you wonder: Exactly what runs in the family?

Too soft on its lead character and too willing to chalk up America's drug appetites to the times-that-were-a-changin' in the '60s.