Michael Sragow

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

Queen Latifah, the star of Barbershop 2 and Beauty Shop, and thus our reigning monarch of big-screen beauty stylists, should fund and narrate a sequel. Because The Beauty Academy of Kabul is good enough to make you want to know how they do.

A pop masterpiece.

It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share.

The fascination, humor and poignancy of Departures, this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, rests in the Japanese ceremony of preparing bodies for their caskets.

This Filthy World does many things, including transform tabloid commentary into comic art. But at its best, it shows that the child is father to the wild man.

The original French title is "La Doublure," but The Valet fits Veber. He has become a one-man service industry when it comes to spreading Gallic barbed humor and good cheer.

The movie ended just in time. Any more of it, and I'd have been crying uncle. Or maybe, given the grrrl-power of it all, crying aunt. This is one supposedly contrarian film that rouses the counter-contrarian in you.

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

Kevin Spacey delivers his least-mannered, most effective big-screen performance in years as the voice of the nearly omniscient computer-robot, GERTY, whose silky ambiguity resembles HAL's in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura...Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture.

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]

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is.

The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.

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

The movie doesn't add up to much, but it's an effervescent expression of an odd brute-hummingbird sensibility.

Has a vitality and novelty rare in any youth movie, let alone one that claps fresh eyes on a cliched vision of a model minority.

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

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

What gives the film a haunting and sometimes droll poetic unity is the way co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen trace all their characters moving in a jellyfish-like fashion.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

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.

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."

In a feat of performing imagination, Ferrell turns his usual extroversion inside out and his usual zaniness into precision, and makes it all work for him.

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.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

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.

So minimalist that you wouldn't miss much if you watched semi-awake and listened to a friend's running commentary.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an uptight movie -- the opposite of his scintillating "Out of Sight."

It may not tell us anything about terror in the new millennium, but the filmmakers' work is solid and affecting. In its own over-emphatic, sometimes clumsy way, it can move an audience to tears, cathartic laughs and cheers.

For much of its frolicsome, rambling running-time, Son of Rambow is like a guarana-spiked soft drink: It goes down easy and delivers a kick.

The good news is that Schwarzenegger is more entertaining than ever as the Terminator T-101 cyborg.

In Julie and Julia, Ephron, like her heroines, has finally found what suits her: a surprising comic and romantic realism.

All Fey does is apply a smattering of wit to the story.

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

It wouldn't stick in the memory were it not for Matt Damon's audacious, baggy-pants portrayal of corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, the antihero of this reality-based farce.

New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.

Kingsley dims divine Elegy.

As a documentary, the film is woefully underdeveloped.

If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.

Will Ferrell does chicken-fried comedy right: with crackpot discipline and stripped-to-the-beer-belly courage.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

Dubowski's movie is an act of hope that the basic human needs of the gay Orthodox will someday be reconciled with their faith.

The documentary American Teen is the most realistic movie you will see all summer.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

Margot at the Wedding is a Christmas gift for high-class depressives: a compendium of malaise fit for an L.L. Bean catalog.

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

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

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

It sheds the series' famous and influential pastel look and plunges its cast of villains and warriors into the 21st century.

Cotillard brings honesty to histrionics. She makes Piaf - "the little sparrow" - soar.

In Spy Kids 2, Rodriguez tries to hold his family-spy saga together with the digital equal of rubber bands and chewing gum.

Zellweger has a ticklish furriness reminiscent of Jean Arthur in her screwball comic prime.

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.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

All it lacks are the crucial things an inspired director could have provided: spark, soul and magic.

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.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

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

Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.

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

Stops your heart and keeps your belly jiggling with laughter. It's an improbably sunny tragicomedy.

In the end, the movie proves to be, like Brosnan's character, a tarted-up cliche: a whoremonger with a heart of gold.

The kind of joyless, over-calculated hit that may leave viewers feeling not haunted but headachy.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

Has buoyancy to spare. It's filled with bumps and scratches. But in the manner of a nicked old LP, its gnarly surface and warps-and-all sound evokes real life.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

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

A delirious surprise .

Find Me Guilty flat-lines early.

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]

Unfortunately for Fox, the softer his movie gets, the more Ashkenazi and Berger grow to resemble Ben Stiller and Ashton Kutcher in some unreleased, homo-erotic comic romance.

The bulk of the film merely yearns for lucidity and magic. At its worst, Respiro resembles My Big Fat Italian Nervous Breakdown.

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.