Michael Sragow

Borders on poppycock.

As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be.

At its best, Tropic Thunder wrings divine madness from wretched excess.

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Shallow and one-sided.

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

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

A sensational date movie.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

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

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

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.

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

Was the Swedish director, Mikael Hafstrom, taking revenge on the American star system?

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

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

It's one big miss.

In its own quiet, voluptuous way, Rivers and Tides, an unpretentiously brilliant documentary, uses the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to open up the hidden drama of the natural universe.

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

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways.

No great shakes as a documentary, but there are great shakes in the sight of 10- and 11-year-olds learning ballroom dancing in the New York City public school system.

Jane Fonda does an about-face on her persona and her talent, playing a teetotaler and, what's worse, a pious bore.

In America is the most unexpected and personal triumph yet from Jim Sheridan.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.

This movie is about the survival of the open-minded. As far as current American independents go, it's the fastest and the funniest.