Michael Sragow

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

The whole movie aspires to set an Annie Hall vibe, especially when Tom keeps trying to re-create, first with her and then with someone else.

A delirious surprise .

It's cathartic and exhilarating.

Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since "Cabaret."

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?

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

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

Enraging and enthralling.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

Man on the Train may be a modest film, but it offers privileged glimpses of transcendence.

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

Under the guidance of Jon Avnet, they're (De Niro/Pacino) both playing New York police detectives - partners, no less - in the cop-and-serial-killer tale Righteous Kill, and they're thunderously mediocre.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

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.

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

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.

A catastrophically messy action-movie mash-up.

In Hustle & Flow, a star is born playing a star who's born.

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

Despite its haphazard rhythms and longueurs, The New World achieves an emotional payoff unlike anything else in Malick's work. It's all you think his movies are, and more.

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.