Michael Sragow

Has a vitality and novelty rare in any youth movie, let alone one that claps fresh eyes on a cliched vision of a model minority.

Equilibrium doesn't tread softly on our dreams; it tramples them.

Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.

Cheeky, brass-knuckles British crime film.

Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

Up against the wit and teamwork of the sparkling TV original, this lame vehicle sputters and fades.

Park's imagination is as fecund as the bunnies that bob up and down from their rabbit holes in every corner of the Tottington garden.

As a movie, Heist is merely an amiable time-killer. But it presents a terrific argument for federalizing airport security.

The story may be about cold-blooded murder, but Bullock's pulsating performance is about the getting of wisdom.

The fault isn't Clooney's alone. The Coen brothers contrive a few spectacularly funny bits and pieces but rarely get into a flow. Too often they mistake facetiousness for slapstick invention or wit, and they don't follow through on their best ideas.

Hawks weaves brawny romance and humor and a man’s-man sort of heartbreak into his tribute to the ideal of vocation.

Zellweger has a ticklish furriness reminiscent of Jean Arthur in her screwball comic prime.

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.

All Fey does is apply a smattering of wit to the story.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

We'll never know what might have been, as eye candy and food for thought replace real thrills in the cool but cold Minority Report.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

If this version had been called The Poseidon Adventure, audiences could have sued for truth in packaging.

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." When Woody Allen published his second collection, he called it Without Feathers. Guest is as sharp and original as Allen, but he hasn't lost hope. For Your Consideration -- disillusioned but also fresh and ticklish -- is a thing with feathers, too.

Drags on and on and could frighten little kids. But Kenneth Branaugh is one bright light in Chamber of Secrets.

The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

The movie's cinematography is sumptuous, in its own intimate way. But all that's glorious about this film is the flesh tones. There isn't enough flesh and blood.

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is.

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

Now we get a lazy Eddie in Norbit, a lackluster attempt to make a gross-out romantic comedy. When I say lazy Eddie, I mean imaginatively lazy.

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.

Jonze lets the magic ebb away in a sorry mesh of strained relationships.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

Enigma, named for the Nazi secret-coding machine, has everything going for it except a pulse.

Foster is strident, Vincent D'Onofrio has little to do but chain-smoke thoughtfully as an accessible priest, and the physical atmosphere is hazy.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

By the end, it doesn't even have the courage of its political incorrectness.

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

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.

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

It sheds the series' famous and influential pastel look and plunges its cast of villains and warriors into the 21st century.

Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.

You should have been able to treat this film as a grab-bag and pull out some plums. Instead it goes grabbing after you.

A one-joke movie. What makes it misfire is that its one joke clashes with its one idea.

So far in this year's cartoon feature sweepstakes, Shrek the Third rules.

With Joan Allen bringing a crisp intelligence to the sharp, unsentimental narration, it's both awful and fascinating to follow Hitler's warped growth from frustrated painter to self-appointed arbiter of Germanic art.

The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

Like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," The Island is the kind of suicidal high-concept movie increasingly prevalent these days: a film so thoroughly pre-conceived and pre-sold that most audiences know more about what's going on than the characters do for half the movie.

This compelling account of the explosive growth of Lyme disease grows to encompass all the peculiar politics, corruption and inertia of American medicine.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

Seinfeld is the perfect figure to center a documentary called, generically, Comedian.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

Even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

Lightning in a Bottle has breadth, both in its multitude of perspectives and its spectrum of performances.

Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

This film isn't the most awful comedy of the year (that would be Bride Wars or New in Town), but it may have the grossest antihero.

Unfortunately for Fox, the softer his movie gets, the more Ashkenazi and Berger grow to resemble Ben Stiller and Ashton Kutcher in some unreleased, homo-erotic comic romance.

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

Like Brian De Palma's 1981 masterpiece "Blow-Out," this movie contains cutting perceptions of obsession, institutional and professional myopia, misplaced loyalty in experts, misreadings of evidence and the kind of confusion that leads to conspiracy theories. But Fincher's movie falls short of masterpiece status.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

Superior family fare.

In the full-house ensemble of Henry Bromell's Panic, Neve Campbell is the wild card.

Jet Li and Bridget Fonda form a terrific bond in this action film. And the choreography adds a nice kick, too.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

Kung fu purists may scoff, but escapists with a sense of humor should romp through The Forbidden Kingdom.

Bomback's script is the worst thing a thriller can be - a flip-flopper, using quick character changes for plot twists. And Langenegger's direction rarely sustains a mood or tone, only a sleek veneer of luxury and knowingness.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adventure, from 1984, is a magnificent anomaly—a rousing vision of scorched earth.

Salma Hayek merrily struts off with most of Brett Ratner's wispy caper comedy.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

Touching and insightful.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

Modest, tasty, and it goes down easy, like home cooking.

A star is born in 8 Mile, all right, but his name is Mekhi Phifer.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

Passed my popcorn-movie test. Using the vast, expensive technology of a big studio production, it roused enough cheap energy to drive me to eat a bag of popcorn fit for a circus animal and wash it down with a quart of Diet Coke.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.

A bittersweet joy. Its humor and romance are refreshing because the writer-director, Greg Mottola, realizes that maturity is a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process.

The film has a steady, hypnotic momentum; the director, Masaki Kobayashi, wrings as much drama out of facial twitches as he does out of sword fights. He’s helped immensely by Nakadai’s molten performance and Toru Takemitsu’s spare, disquieting music.

The movie doesn't complete itself, in the sense of filling in our knowledge of its people (who are more like passengers). It simply comes to a stop.

The movie doesn't add up to much, but it's an effervescent expression of an odd brute-hummingbird sensibility.

Queen Latifah, the star of Barbershop 2 and Beauty Shop, and thus our reigning monarch of big-screen beauty stylists, should fund and narrate a sequel. Because The Beauty Academy of Kabul is good enough to make you want to know how they do.

Kasi Lemmons' movie is called Talk to Me, but what it really does is sing to you, in the argot and cadences of soul, jazz, rock and rhythm and blues.

Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction - tart, funny and piercing - of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

The kind of joyless, over-calculated hit that may leave viewers feeling not haunted but headachy.

Too bad this movie is more tepid than the average Snipes potboiler and even rustier than his mindless Blade pictures.

This comedy of stereotypes pokes fun at poker buddies and coffee klatches only to make room for variations on more recent stereotypes. Some of the boldest 'types provide the funniest bits, such as Jon Favreau's embodiment of an upscale Stanley Kowalski who treats all-male card games as clan rites.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

Misplaced hero-worship and glibness get in the way of its amazing true story.

What's frustrating is that the movie should be so much better, or at least more entertaining. With Baldwin, Macy and Bello, director Kramer is holding three of a kind.

The whole thrust of the movie is to warn black women against emasculating their men.

Batman Begins is obvious from the get-go - and almost no fun.

Tautou's kind of talent: priceless.

The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

It's exhilarating in an authentic, pathos-streaked way to see Kearns, through Greg Kinnear's inspired characterization of a wary obsessive, representing himself during his trial against Ford Motor Co. for stealing his design.

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

Dramatically, it's a ghoul's parade of grieving folk finding solace and then danger through a tenuous connection to the after-life.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

As for the Ya-Yas: They're not as much fun as the First Wives' Club.

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.

The Wachowski Brothers once again they prove themselves our reigning masters of murk.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

Surprisingly moving and intellectually satisfying.

The film is so busy that every minute is exhausting. It's as if the filmmakers were idealistic teen-agers afflicted with a group case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town “Friends” with an unearned doctorate.

The impact is hypnotic.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

The picture is schmaltzy and phallus-shrivelling, too.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

It took guts to bring this story to the screen, but at its core it has the wrong stuff.

Most of the film simply wallows in gangsta hyperbole - it's all bling bling, bang bang.

This uninhibited and uproarious monster bash, directed by Joe Dante, is more quick-witted and ironic than the original; it sets forth a savvy, slaphappy agenda before the opening credits and follows it straight through to the end, and even beyond.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

At over two hours, Breakfast on Pluto is too much of a merely pretty and pretty good thing.

The real obstacle here is a lack of filmmaking imagination.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

Cronenberg’s movie was an early showcase for his tense formal style and intellectual Grand Guignol. He displays a true shock-meister’s instinct by saving the worst for last. The result is a cinematic bad dream that generates recurring nightmares.

The script gives the actors less of a chance than the dragons give to Homo sapiens.

Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.

The talented and quirky-pretty Sarah Jessica Parker gives an excruciating performance. It's a keenly self-conscious caricature - the bold, showy kind that often wins awards yet sends audiences running from the theater.

This may be Thornton's most arch, least persuasive performance. With Heder he's a vacant scowl. With Barrett he's a threatening yet toothless Cheshire Cat.

It has a premise that never stops percolating.

In real life, Bacon and Sedgwick are husband and wife. Their scenes mark one of the rare times an off-screen couple's intimacy enriches on-screen passion.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Solondz is still stuck in an adenoidal whine.

With Nicholson and Sandler aboard, we want to love it madly. But instead of a tickle, this big-name comedy just grates.

Its heart and head are in the right place, but its feet and hands aren't busy enough.

The Duchess of Langeais is a romantic dance of death.

Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.

A Big Sleep with underage bozos, a Maltese Falcon where the stuff that dreams are made of rests in the lockers of a well-worn high school, Brick is a remarkable oddity, audacious and engaging.

Its knockout success is a testament to Gore's eloquence and humanity and to the dexterity of his director, Davis Guggenheim.

Del Toro stuffs the film with wit and wonderments. Yet, coming out this superhero summer, it plays like a lovingly crafted synthesis of every fantasy saga we've seen in the past decade.

Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis.

It all comes off as a case of filmmakers wanting to have their communion wafer and eat it, too.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

This team has succeeded at making a film that opens a subculture without programming our responses to it.

This Filthy World does many things, including transform tabloid commentary into comic art. But at its best, it shows that the child is father to the wild man.

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

The movie is best when everything is up in the air.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

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.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.

Rather than providing flashes of one-of-a-kind humor, Allen has reached the point where his critical and movie-going fans are humoring him.

Rampling's authority over splintered emotions has the force of revelation.

The one actor I wanted more of was Williams, who imbues Jack's dad with a robust, sometimes domineering wiliness that suggests a real person. Of course, these silly, inept filmmakers probably cast him because he plays a good guy and his first name is Treat.

Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.

But by the end, you're only watching to see how far Wilmot's pustules will spread, or whether his various diseases will really make his nose fall off.

Handsome and well-acted, yet it can't hold a pawn to Nabokov's harrowing and moving character study.

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

The original French title is "La Doublure," but The Valet fits Veber. He has become a one-man service industry when it comes to spreading Gallic barbed humor and good cheer.

Costner succumbs to terminal self-seriousness when he makes a movie of his own either as the director or, in this case, a producer.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

Because this Four Feathers is an utter botch, it might make savvy viewers feel that the subject matter is hopeless.

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.

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.

A visual masterpiece about a scared little girl's breathtaking journey of self-discovery. All of the fun is getting there.

The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

It's affable entertainment -- a road movie with a smart map and characters who are unpredictable human beings, not just billboard attractions.

Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

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

The movie may not be perfect, but it's jam-packed with goodies -- like a breakfast cereal fun-pack with a prize on every box-top.

As a documentary, the film is woefully underdeveloped.

Kingsley dims divine Elegy.

Unfortunately, it lacks emotional lift or folkloric fervor.

This movie registers like a pop song that enters the mind only in fragments because, as a whole, it lacks the style or substance to be memorable.

You'll never see a more tactile expression of the intimacy between artists and their instruments than in Davis Guggenheim's elating It Might Get Loud.

The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

Knowing offers mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.

It's a gimcrack assemblage of gags, action scenes, favorite moments from the first hit and diorama-like views of high and low Victorian culture.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

Kevin Spacey delivers his least-mannered, most effective big-screen performance in years as the voice of the nearly omniscient computer-robot, GERTY, whose silky ambiguity resembles HAL's in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

Infuriating and funny, the film forges a disturbing diagram from the avarice and chaos of a slapdash, heartless system.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

Painfully boring.

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

Remarkable documentary.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura...Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

The Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

It's absolutely the classiest big-screen version of chick lit we're ever likely to see. But it still has all the lasting flavor of a Chiclet.

Sokurov, for all his accomplishment, is less a bold innovator than a raider of lost art.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

So minimalist that you wouldn't miss much if you watched semi-awake and listened to a friend's running commentary.

Confetti overdraws on an audience's generosity.

Has been designed to make gentle hearts soar beneath neo-grunge exteriors. It's a mixture of high-SAT humor and high-jinks so crude they're really low-jinks.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

Like "Anais," the only surprises Breillat has in store for us are bad ones. In the willfully perverse final act, she delivers a sadistic blow to the audience -- with a sledgehammer.

Despite the tenderness between them, Rose and her perfect younger man have the sickest mother-son relationship since Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" - and Mikey seems just as brainwashed.

The movie bobbles along on a weird, soft-edged sarcasm.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

The documentary American Teen is the most realistic movie you will see all summer.

Sadly, most of the fun and all the magic derive from the location. The most enthralling fantasy of Just Like Heaven is that an unemployed landscape architect and a fledgling doctor can afford a sprawling apartment with a rooftop view in San Francisco.

Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare.

The surprise behind Town and Country isn't that the director started filming without a finished script, but that he ever thought he had the start of one.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

Bad Company is about an undercover brother, but it will never be confused with "Undercover Brother."

They put the material on lifts - and end up tripping into TV dramedy land.

What proves the validity of Kandahar is that, by the end, all these scenes are human ruins of the same nightmare world.

In Head of State, Rock may be verging on becoming a heart-warmer.

Stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.

The Summer Olympics may offer more intricate, arduous and high-stakes spectacles, but nothing will top the last half-hour of Gunnin' for That #1 Spot for adrenalized high spirits.

A masterpiece.

The Dixie Chicks may never regain their prolonged eminence on the country charts. However, the art and entertainment value of this movie (and of their latest album) is off the charts in the best way.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous.

Jerry Seinfeld's foray into feature animation will delight young kids and leave their elders alternately amused and bemused.

This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Secret Window leaves you unsatisfied and frustrated. Depp's performance both makes the film and undercuts it. He's a poet caught in a machine.

It's not another rah-rah football film. Thanks to Nolte, it has its own form of true grit.

Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

The movie grows richer as it goes along and contrasting pieces click together.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

Ice Age snaps with visual wit whenever director Wedge breaks the stale story to pieces and pumps in some bracing fresh air. So it's fitting to find, when the final credits roll, that he played Scrat.