Michael Sragow

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

This thoroughly modern movie pulls off a classical feat. It elicits the searing combination of pity and terror that leaves a viewer feeling purged.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Hammers away at the plot so relentlessly that you can feel the nails entering the back of your skull.

A friendly movie, as scruffy and cozy as a woolen watch cap.

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

Wastes amusing beginnings.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

A pop masterpiece.

A headlong pastiche of lower-depth melodrama and absurd black comedy.

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

It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.

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.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

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.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

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

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

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.

The impact is hypnotic.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

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

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.