Michael Sragow

A movie made at wits' end. There are four or five authentic laughs in the whole 170-minute extravaganza.

The movie goes awry from the opening shots.

This movie has a tone, look and mood all its own - it's a joyously bittersweet piece of visual music about isolation, melancholy and everyone's yearning for transcendence, through love, art or both.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

What's fatal to the film is that De Niro's character, though compelling, is so temperate and wise he gives no indication of why he was drawn to a life of crime.

The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metal ends up suffocating the senses.

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

Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.

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.

As Laura, Rueda hits sublime notes of confusion, grief and wrath. She's sympathetic enough to make you root for her and complex enough to get you arguing afterward about whether Laura did anything to deserve all this.

Even the great Lily Tomlin can't muster a funny reaction to a Polish joke. It's an everything-including-the kitchen-sink comedy -- and the sink has rusty pipes.

Remember mood rings? The Ring Two is a mood movie - a bad-mood movie.

With Tristan & Isolde, the core must be a passion that enlarges two outsize characters and seems as momentous as the rise and fall of a kingdom. Too bad this film's Achilles' heel is its heart.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

It's an experience that blows your mind, clears it and educates it.

It's the whole constellation of relationships that Winick and company create in and around the barn that brings the movie its kaleidoscopic charm.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

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

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

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

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.

Domino should have been a terrific anti-heroine, but the movie never gets deep enough inside this walking time bomb to reveal what makes her tick.

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.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

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.

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

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

I hope the producers bring Lin back for the fifth film and strip it down even more. They can lose all the human characters except Brian and Mia and simply call it F&F.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

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.

It gives you such an intense hit of creativity that afterward you may find yourself trying to jete out of the theater and into the street.

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.

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.

Venom isn't worth a critic's venom, but a brief condemnation is in order.

It may not tell us anything about terror in the new millennium, but the filmmakers' work is solid and affecting. In its own over-emphatic, sometimes clumsy way, it can move an audience to tears, cathartic laughs and cheers.

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

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

All Alexander proves in Punisher: War Movie is that a martial-arts-trained woman can make a film just as stupid, coarse and numbing as any muscle man.

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

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

Contains a dozen winning moments of humor, uplift or exhilaration. But are they enough to justify a 154-minute running time?

A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

Failed marital farce.

This flight of fancy stays aloft on the power of its acting and its atmosphere.

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.

Live-In Maid is a lived-in movie. Its cataclysms may be small in scale, but the movie brings us so far into these women's lives that a shattered cup creates an earthquake.

Too bad Kidron, Fielding and company pay only cafe lip service to satire.

You go to Good Night, and Good Luck expecting inspiration, and you get it. It's also unexpectedly subtle, tense, and challenging, complex both in its take on its subject and in its craftsmanship. So the movie brings you to your feet - and, at times, to tears.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

Lumumba revives the tradition of Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" and Costa-Gavras' "Z" and "State of Siege." In substance and excitement, it joins their ranks.

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

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

Brosnan turns his typical talent on its head. So does director Boorman, who forsakes his usual tingling virtuosity.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

A beautiful display of celluloid bungee-jumping.

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.

"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.

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

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

The word "yuppie" has fallen out of favor from overuse, but Closer's young urban professionals are so vain and superficial they may bring it back as the ultimate putdown. This movie is a yuppie nightmare.

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.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

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

You won't want to miss it if you care about movies that dare to chart intimacies in our age of spectacle, or about up-and-coming female performers and underused male veterans finding roles worthy of their gifts.

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.

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

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

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

You won't see a brighter, truer affirmation of the All-American messed-up improvisational family than Little Miss Sunshine.

Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

Collateral Damage isn't jingoistic; it also isn't exciting. It's a depressed rabble-rouser.

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

Thanks to Hallstrom's slaphappy artistry and a sparkling ensemble, Hoax is a hoot.

The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did "Springtime for Hitler": because it's so bad they think it's good.

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

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.

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

Even the title is off. I haven't heard an honest "Lucky You" since I was in sixth grade. For most people it registers as a sneer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.

The Son's Room is the anti-"In the Bedroom." I mean that as a compliment.

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

Most of the movie makes too much sense and is no fun at

When the cast and their director are really cooking, they conjure a bipolar sense of high school-age emotion -- and use it to fuel outrageous fantasy.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

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

Sahara doesn't waste time on introductions. It wastes time in other ways.

The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

It wants to be like no other movie you've ever seen. It's more like every movie you've ever seen.

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

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.

Could have been a contender, but it lacks the courage of its own ambivalence.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

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

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

It's one nutty holiday fruitcake that is appetizing and tasty.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

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

I found the sight of McAvoy as a piano player in jazzy-seedy duds a lot more disconcerting than Ricci's porcine prosthesis.

I love Rabbit-Proof Fence as drama, as protest, as moviemaking and as poetry.

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.

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]

As social commentary, Fun With Dick and Jane wears Leno-thin. As a big-screen sitcom, it's a procession of hit-or-miss touches that cancel each other out.

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

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.

Twisted is an unusual forensic crime film because it's witty and sophisticated as well as taut and creepy.

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

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

Spielberg's inchoate attempts at cultural observation stretch the movie out and dilute the giddiness instead of adding a pleasurable spike. When the movie doesn't feel inflated, it feels soggy.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

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.

What Phoenix and Witherspoon accomplish in this movie is transcendent. They act with every bone and inch of flesh and facial plane, and each tone and waver of their voice.

Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.

Deep Water is a movie that will connect to anyone whose private fantasies and creative plots have landed them in hot water.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

Unlike Nicolas Cage in "National Treasure," Hanks lacks the game for it. The surface seriousness of these Dan Brown movies obstructs his affability and easy, attentive way with romance.

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

The good news is that Schwarzenegger is more entertaining than ever as the Terminator T-101 cyborg.

This movie is as wrenching as it is eruptive. Hitchcock never went further beyond pop than he did with Sabotage.

Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

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

It flows like fast-moving lava to a climax filled with pyrotechnics. And for once in a summer blockbuster, the fireworks are both emotional and physical. The movie leaves you sated, yet wanting more -- just what you want from a series with two entries left to go.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

Since that gifted, attractive performer is Hayden Panettiere, who has already won a wide following for "Heroes," it's a wonder that the studio hasn't been more heavily promoting her appearance in this decent, genial youth comedy. After all, she does play, ah, Beth Cooper.

The compositions evoke a kind of open-air claustrophobia, whether in overhead shots that pin the characters in the landscape or in tableaux of men, women, and children staving off the chaos of the wide-open spaces with their weary fences and weathered towns.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

Director Gillian Armstrong drains all the emotional energy out of the people who dot her movie's lovely landscape.

By the end, Pootie Tang feels as long as Kevin Costner's "Wyatt Earp."

Few films even try to render the full range of emotions and sensations in female sexuality as the aptly titled Lady Chatterley, directed and co-written by a Frenchwoman, Pascale Ferran.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

The most refreshing thing about Man of the Year is its mingling of comedy and suspense with common decency. Levinson asks his countrymen not just to know their limits, but also to reach them.

The whole movie swings broadly from slapstick and mock suspense to song. But the film develops a strong amorous undertow; Kelly's script neatly allows for all the potential couples to get the fate or comeuppance they deserve.

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.

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

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Pearce makes you see why Edie found Warhol as irresistible as he found her. His otherworldly eyes focus on both who she is and what she represents. He sees her as a star.

Uneven and affecting movie.

The whole narrative is too hollow and rickety as well as gimmicky for Muccino to breathe much life into it.

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.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

With everything this film has going for it - humor, intelligence and a splendid ensemble - Richard Linklater's nightmare drug movie, A Scanner Darkly, should be continually compelling. But it loses its fizz after a strong series of pops.

Seabiscuit revives the sweeping pleasures of movies that address and respect the mass audience, raising the common denominator instead of pandering to it. This crowd-pleaser rouses honest and engulfing cheers.

A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you.

It's the pushiest film around - "in your face" is still in-your-face, even if the dancers are in white-face.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.

The movie, brief though it is, feels as padded as a travelogue.

On the plus side, the casting is superb - and the acting, too. Although the context is overwrought and the moviemaking over-the-top, Washington acts from the ticker out.

The movie is a monument to egomania - and I don't mean Alexander's.

When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.

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

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

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

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.

Himalaya does for yak caravans what "Red River" did for cattle drives: it sees them as the stuff of epic conquest.

The unearned air of moralism that wafts through 15 Minutes pollutes its entertainment value.

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

Les Mayfield doesn't know how to stage showdowns and chases so they're exciting or funny.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.

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

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.