Michael Sragow

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.

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

It's one big miss.

Gory but lifeless.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

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

This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

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

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

Enigma, named for the Nazi secret-coding machine, has everything going for it except a pulse.

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

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.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles.

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

Handsome and well-acted, yet it can't hold a pawn to Nabokov's harrowing and moving character study.

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.

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

Has been designed to make gentle hearts soar beneath neo-grunge exteriors. It's a mixture of high-SAT humor and high-jinks so crude they're really low-jinks.

This movie is both sad and inspiring. It offers proof that Lennon's wit and art are everlasting.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

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

Freedom Writers is the rare inspirational-teacher film that is filled with genuine, jaw-dropping coups of real-life poetry.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

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

Even at its most hyperactive, Peter Pan has a core of good and bad feeling that will hit home to kids and to adults with honest memories.

Full of wit, charm and wonder. It's so hilarious, you might blow a gasket.

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

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

American movies are generally so skittish about sexuality that Adrian Lyne's appetite --and aptitude -- for exploring it in Unfaithful is a relief.

This compelling account of the explosive growth of Lyme disease grows to encompass all the peculiar politics, corruption and inertia of American medicine.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

The shows themselves are extraordinary, especially Japan's Ichigei group, which has the all-out fun and athleticism of a vitaminized Twyla Tharp troupe.

It makes for quite a rumpus, but the material never catches fire.

What sucks the wind out of the movie's sails is the vacuum at its core.

Part irritating, part inspired.

In the full-house ensemble of Henry Bromell's Panic, Neve Campbell is the wild card.

We don't experience the drama from the inside out because everything is on the surface. Redford is the only one who supplies internal life to Spy Game.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

Despite the cunning mixture of live-action footage and animatronic effects in Two Brothers, there's more imagination and wonder in a good old Sabu picture like "The Jungle Book" (1942). Two Brothers is more like a tacky jungle comic book.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon makes Bicke suffer the greatest indignity: it turns him into a relentless bore.

Drags on and on and could frighten little kids. But Kenneth Branaugh is one bright light in Chamber of Secrets.

Stripped of texture, even the sharpest comments come off as bromides.

It's an unusual and engaging romantic comedy because it's mostly about how these women ready each other for real love.

Cronenberg’s movie was an early showcase for his tense formal style and intellectual Grand Guignol. He displays a true shock-meister’s instinct by saving the worst for last. The result is a cinematic bad dream that generates recurring nightmares.

This movie's biggest contribution to film history will be resurrecting Davies' reputation as a natural comedian stuck in deadly costume pictures because her lover wanted her placed on a pedestal.

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."

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

It's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways.

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

As the threesome's movie games push them into an incestuous menage a trois, the movie loses its grip.

With all the good will in the world, I couldn't warm up to Kit Kittredge. The movie is like a 1930s or 1940s short about Americans pulling together, stretched out to feature length.

This Christmas is the rare movie about a cozy household at holiday time that's as funny and dramatic and poignant as any seasonal family get-together should be.

The script is clever and would be brilliant if it worked.

The movie mostly proves that cutting-edge humiliations are best absorbed in 25-minute segments on HBO.

It's first-class entertainment for bookish lads and lasses of all ages - and for those who never have or never will crack a paperback's spine. And it might inspire today's nascent artists to open up their sketch-pads as well as their hearts and minds.

Bubble is the moviemaking equivalent of the worst narrative journalism. Every bit of "human interest" is so painstakingly planted, so determined to be applauded for its observation and sensitivity, it ends up seeming as slick and bogus as the worst Hollywood blockbuster.

The Wachowski Brothers once again they prove themselves our reigning masters of murk.

A glorious medieval war movie. It's about war as the ultimate pitch of conflict that tries men's souls, and women's, too.

The Breakfast Club meets Rear Window. The result should satisfy dating crowds from high school to night school.

Bomback's script is the worst thing a thriller can be - a flip-flopper, using quick character changes for plot twists. And Langenegger's direction rarely sustains a mood or tone, only a sleek veneer of luxury and knowingness.

This team has succeeded at making a film that opens a subculture without programming our responses to it.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

Yet it's pretty in all the wrong ways: pretty slight, pretty preachy and pretty affected.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

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

Austin does have a psychedelic buoyancy and Dr. Evil an addle-pated sadistic goofiness that are original and engaging, but Myers doesn't build on their best stuff. That's where a real plot would help.

It's affable entertainment -- a road movie with a smart map and characters who are unpredictable human beings, not just billboard attractions.

Seinfeld is the perfect figure to center a documentary called, generically, Comedian.

In Robert Gordon's script, Handler's hilariously literate bouts of psychological torture develop no consistent tone, voice or momentum.

As a whole, The Matrix Reloaded is thin on magic, charm, surprise and fun. It's less like an all-out escape, or even a thrill ride, than a sensory workout. At best, it's a treadmill-like bridge to the hoped-for splendors of episode three, The Matrix Revolutions.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

For those of us who wish that John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" had kept the cheeky tone of Hughes' "Sixteen Candles," what ensues is the best Hughes farce that Hughes never made about adolescent snobbery and heartbreak as well as adult obtuseness.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

The filmmakers capture kids and adolescents who haven't hardened their feelings into attitudes or molded their gestures into poses.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

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.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

They put the material on lifts - and end up tripping into TV dramedy land.

If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

Ice Age snaps with visual wit whenever director Wedge breaks the stale story to pieces and pumps in some bracing fresh air. So it's fitting to find, when the final credits roll, that he played Scrat.

Thanks to Suvari, audiences laugh nervously at the mortification of soul and flesh, but she doesn't really do them much of a favor. She simply keeps them watching as a would-be gross-out comedy turns into would-be gross-out tragedy.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

A funny, touching mood piece.

The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.

Performances by Jim Caviezel and Richard Harris make this a great adventure.

It's a courageous, moving, organically funny picture.

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

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

Overall, you're left wondering why every big novel needs to be a movie. White Oleander would work better as a four-part miniseries -- or at least as a less conventional screenplay.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

The performers are all keen at expressing different variations on uptightness and with-itness. And McDormand is sensational.

The symmetry doesn't work. Capitalism is an economic system; democracy, a political system. Perhaps Moore should have come out and said what he really wants to see us adopt: a democratic socialism.

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

Role Models has a tart surface and a heart of goo. The movie grows more obvious as it goes along.

he Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

First-time director Swicord brews an atmosphere of geniality and warmth and brings a modicum of momentum to a happily discursive book.

Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.

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.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The picture is schmaltzy and phallus-shrivelling, too.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

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

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.

What gives Notorious its staying power is what happens before AND after its hero's death.

It's absolutely the classiest big-screen version of chick lit we're ever likely to see. But it still has all the lasting flavor of a Chiclet.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

"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.

Has the grisly appetite, if not the execution of the original. What it also has are monstrously good Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton, plus a fine young Hannibal to save it.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

In Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou tries to top the breathtaking poetic spectacle of his masterpiece, "House of Flying Daggers," and instead plummets into self-parody.

The Summer Olympics may offer more intricate, arduous and high-stakes spectacles, but nothing will top the last half-hour of Gunnin' for That #1 Spot for adrenalized high spirits.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

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

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

You'll never see a more tactile expression of the intimacy between artists and their instruments than in Davis Guggenheim's elating It Might Get Loud.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

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.

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?

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

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.

It's like a breeze so slight it doesn't leave a tickle.

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

Barbershop 2 makes you want to know what happens next. In its own way, it's the Ivory Soap of sequels: 99 and 44/100% pure.

This movie doesn't pretend to be anything more than a cheerful night out, and on that count it scores.

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

Supple, eloquent and enchanting.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

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

Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

Thanks to Daniel Craig, the most Byronic of 007s, who, with scarcely any help from the filmmakers, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too.

It took guts to bring this story to the screen, but at its core it has the wrong stuff.

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

No one has caught the pride, remorse and pain of an unloved and possibly unlovable husband better than Edward Norton in The Painted Veil.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

It's a gimcrack assemblage of gags, action scenes, favorite moments from the first hit and diorama-like views of high and low Victorian culture.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

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

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

So far in this year's cartoon feature sweepstakes, Shrek the Third rules.

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.

Few directors are able to showcase actors with fast-cutting techniques. Hill is an ace at it because everything about his action is organic.

Jet Li and Bridget Fonda form a terrific bond in this action film. And the choreography adds a nice kick, too.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

Maya Rudolph's subtle, lyrical portrait of a patient wife and expectant mother enlivens and elevates Away We Go, an erratic couple-on-a-quest film.

Rambles and sometimes wobbles like a runaway movie. But Schreiber's instincts keep the film frolicsome and vital.

The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.

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

What we have here is a suburban-legend movie stripped of rough edges and cut off from any depth that might have made it insidiously haunting.

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.

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

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

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

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.

Kung fu purists may scoff, but escapists with a sense of humor should romp through The Forbidden Kingdom.

Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.

Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.

Strangers With Candy -- a perfect title -- is filled with straight-faced loonies. It's a nutcake you actually want to eat.

High School Musical 3 wore me out, but I'm not the target audience. My favorite high school musical was "Hamlet 2."

Confetti overdraws on an audience's generosity.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

Dark Blue is one of those totally happy surprises that moves so quickly and curves so sharply that it leaves this era's hyped critical hits looking like beached whales.

Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

It's exhilarating in an authentic, pathos-streaked way to see Kearns, through Greg Kinnear's inspired characterization of a wary obsessive, representing himself during his trial against Ford Motor Co. for stealing his design.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

A lovely, mischievous Casanova that will sweep you off your feet.

Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

It moves so confidently and brightly that it's ticklish as well as chilling - and, in its own dark way, enthralling.

Perfume offers eau de crud.

As a franchise, the James Bond series needs its stomach stapled.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

For most of its meandering running time Harsh Times is just a rough South Central L.A. buddy movie.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

The talented and quirky-pretty Sarah Jessica Parker gives an excruciating performance. It's a keenly self-conscious caricature - the bold, showy kind that often wins awards yet sends audiences running from the theater.

The climax and epilogue are the juiciest, most tough-minded bits in the movie. Too bad Mayer didn't work his way backward from the end.

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

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

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.

Feisty and good-humored, and if it doesn't have deep characters, it is chock-full of personality.

Needs a story.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

Willis musters a fine, beaten air as a love-struck schlub, and Hawn proves that a comedian can be infectiously funny even as a woefully depressed character. The best reason to see the film is Streep. She deliriously sends up the kind of show-biz narcissist who can turn a pelvic tilt into an expression of self-love.

Phone Booth may not be awful, but it's puny.

This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

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

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

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.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Unpretentious and brashly exploitative.

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

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.

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

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

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

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

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

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

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

Painfully boring.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

Mirrormask is a gorgeous psychedelic cameo of a movie.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

The Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

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.

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

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

Superior family fare.

Intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

Memoirs of a Geisha was never primed to be a film that burns down the house.

Intelligent and robust contempt has become so rare in movies that the first half of Art School Confidential is intermittently exhilarating.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

For all its pretensions, Changing Lanes, ultimately, is about nothing more profound than one foul day.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

A visionary sort of horror movie should ponder three words: "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

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

Rock Star neither touches a raw nerve nor garners any resonance as a period piece. You'd be better off renting "This is Spinal Tap."

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.

Poses as the story of a wild, eccentric love match but is really about a match made in limbo.

Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

Bright semi-adult entertainment.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

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.

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

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.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

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

Keeps its eye on the big picture even when focusing on the small scene.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

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.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

This turgid melodrama fast-breaks away from the heart of its own subject.

The second movie, Dead Man's Chest, is everything you feared the first would be: a theme-park spectacle lasting 2 1/2 hours.

Even at its most enjoyable, Eight Legged Freaks is disappointing -- it grazes your funny bone instead of tickling it like crazy.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

With Nicholson and Sandler aboard, we want to love it madly. But instead of a tickle, this big-name comedy just grates.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

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

As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing.

Watching The Gospel of John is like listening to a religious audiotape while working a picture flip-book of the Bible.

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

It's sad that with everything it has going for it, this movie plays like a tall tale -- something too good to be true.

If you haven't had enough of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan weepies like "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998), The Lake House gives us Mopey in Chicago and You've Got Snail Mail.

Maybe the best way to see Serendipity is to take a cue from the characters and wait a few years.

This fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

Enough flair and conviction to keep the movie buoyant even when its plot is abrupt and its emotionality conventional.

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

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.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.

Overall, though, the movie lacks the dash, wit, authority and character to become a first-class thinking-man's thriller.

Producers hits few wrong notes on the big screen.