Michael Sragow

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."

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

The Hurt Locker redefines war-film electricity.

Look at Me is a virtuoso exercise in domestic tension - with the emphasis on "exercise."

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

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

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

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

Find Me Guilty flat-lines early.

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

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

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.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

Eagle Eye has half an idea in its head, but over two hours there's no time to complete or explore it, since the movie isn't just a chase but a combination steeplechase and destruction derby.

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

A vibrant emotional epic.

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

Divided We Fall has a lot going for it, but its Places in the Heart ending, sentimental and incongruous, helps ensure that it will not find a place in a demanding audience's heart or mind.

This documentary could have been a simple downer. Instead, it's a giddy, manic-depressive roller coaster - because it brings us eye to eye with Gilliam.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

The indisputably gifted Jim Carrey shows the side of him that just wants to be loved - the Riddler on Ritalin, the Mask unmasked. And it turns out to be stultifying.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

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

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.

Plunges into an imaginative landscape as large as all creation - and never slackens its barreling pace or shrinks its panoramic scope.

A marvelous picture and a highly unusual journey in and around the Holocaust.

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

The only way sober adults will keep awake is wondering how the lead mobsters on "The Sopranos" -- who also are amateur film critics -- will rank the movie next year on HBO.