Michael Sragow

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.

Notes on a Scandal isn't humorous or witty enough to sustain black comedy, and it isn't insightful or deep enough to suggest a contemporary tragedy. All it does is put an eloquent veneer on petty meanness.

It's like a breeze so slight it doesn't leave a tickle.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

Cotillard brings honesty to histrionics. She makes Piaf - "the little sparrow" - soar.

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

The triumph of American Hardcore is that it convinces general audiences that there were vast underground reservoirs of angst and anguish to be tapped.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.

The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.

It wouldn't stick in the memory were it not for Matt Damon's audacious, baggy-pants portrayal of corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, the antihero of this reality-based farce.

Voluptuous dance about love, pain and the whole damn thing.

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

It might sound intriguing to root the saying, "Physician, heal thyself," in the plight of a hypocritical self-help guru, but the romantic drama Love Happens suffers from acute irony deficiency.

The movie pays tribute to sexual equality and to each gender's agility and strength of character.

Critically lacks Highsmith's sixth sense for drawing you into the heart and soul of sociopaths, then jolting you with the realization that things are much worse even than they seem.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

One happy surprise after another, even when the content is bittersweet or sad.

Maybe this is a psychological thriller after all: Every thinking member of the audience will be driven insane.

But even those who succumb to his primitive, survivalist vision may resent the way he presents every kind of atrocity at least twice without illuminating any of the exotic details once.

A funny, touching mood piece.

Reading this book and watching this movie, as with "The Devil Wears Prada" a year earlier, I'm convinced that chick-lit books are formula - and chick-lit movies are baby formula.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.

A glorious medieval war movie. It's about war as the ultimate pitch of conflict that tries men's souls, and women's, too.

The movie is a marvel - bold, lucid and succinct (even at 123 minutes). It's also harrowing and moving in its depiction of noncombatant men, women and children caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

To call Death to Smoochy satire -- or parody, burlesque, or even lampoon -- would be too generous. The moviemakers merely glide on the thin ice of yesterday's cynicism.

Fresh, funny and unfailingly observant, Rocket Science is a mood-swinging movie about adolescence that lifts audiences' spirits even when its hero is down in the dumps.

It's a soaper with a high grade of imported soap.

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

Will have most audiences asking, "Can we leave now?"

Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.

Fantasy, not honesty, is the point of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

Pawlikowski's heart may be with Mona, but his art is closer to Tamsin. He luxuriates in his sensibility without delivering a movie that pays off in originality or insight.

Mirren brings intellect, humor and romance to the role of Elizabeth II.

A friendly movie, as scruffy and cozy as a woolen watch cap.

Sheila Bernette, as an aged pickpocket, is less a stereotype than an escapee from some provincial British comedy of the early 1950s. But she steals necklaces and knickknacks with such finesse and gusto that she also steals the movie.

It lacks even Tarantino-esque vitality. It moves more like a busted concertina.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

Thanks to Kerr's eloquent tremor of a performance, when the heroine witnesses apparitions, they're immediately credible to the audience. [29 May 2009, p.1C]

The sprawling canvas ultimately dwarfs the plucky title figure and makes him seem too small in every way.

This kind of fiasco turns movie critics into so many Night Stalkers.

Stripped of texture, even the sharpest comments come off as bromides.

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

By far the most purely entertaining of all his films to reach these shores, Roman de Gare is the rare trick film in which all the tricks reveal something amusing, involving or poignant about its characters.

In his first fiction feature, Zwigoff doesn't forget to bring the funny. But he doesn't bring enough poetry.

For much of its frolicsome, rambling running-time, Son of Rambow is like a guarana-spiked soft drink: It goes down easy and delivers a kick.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

There's great action moviemaking here: You learn what it means to "carve" a pool, as you learn what it means to "close off" the boxing ring in Ali.

The timing couldn't be better for a thriller that focuses on assassination, international war scandals and U.S. agencies of enormous influence and wildly varying competence.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

Willis musters a fine, beaten air as a love-struck schlub, and Hawn proves that a comedian can be infectiously funny even as a woefully depressed character. The best reason to see the film is Streep. She deliriously sends up the kind of show-biz narcissist who can turn a pelvic tilt into an expression of self-love.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

This picture evaporates midway through because the story itself is a one-liner. Yet it also has a cast that gets into the silliness.

Overall, though, the movie lacks the dash, wit, authority and character to become a first-class thinking-man's thriller.

The serial-killer thriller of the week, should have gotten a life of its own instead of trying to steal it from Michael Pye's novel of the same name and several other movies.

Fame has today's usual gritty form of slick to it, but in every other way it's an Amateur Hour and a half.

The movie ended just in time. Any more of it, and I'd have been crying uncle. Or maybe, given the grrrl-power of it all, crying aunt. This is one supposedly contrarian film that rouses the counter-contrarian in you.

The title captures this film's harrowing qualities, but not its energy, its limpid beauty or its spiritual grace.

Most of the film is one big blooper reel. There's not enough of a gap between the rejects and the finished movie.

This fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

This documentary (like the fact-based 2004 feature Miracle) demonstrates how powerful true sports stories can be when they delve into the mystery of leadership instead of falling back on nostalgia.

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

The highest compliment I can pay Pieces of April is that it brings to mind a Paul Simon lyric: "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."

It bears roughly the same resemblance to the Bennett Miller-Dan Futterman-Philip Seymour Hoffman masterpiece as the now-forgotten "Valmont" did to "Dangerous Liaisons."

The excitingly well-made Death of a President imagines the assassination of President Bush as a way of analyzing political violence. And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, sight unseen, has labeled it despicable.

This fourth "Terminator" film is the ultimate heavy-metal parody. Better make that travesty, because there are next to no moments of comedy.

It might be a solid hook if we thought their love was grand. Instead, it's kind of creepy.

Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote.

This movie doesn't pretend to be anything more than a cheerful night out, and on that count it scores.

The shows themselves are extraordinary, especially Japan's Ichigei group, which has the all-out fun and athleticism of a vitaminized Twyla Tharp troupe.

Director Martin Campbell and a quartet of screenwriters dump in everything from the rise of the Confederacy to the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. What escapes them is the cool, clear line of action that would enable Banderas and Zeta-Jones to flaunt their amorous charms without huffing and puffing and stretch their swashbuckling muscles with dash, not balderdash.

The movie comes together like a nihilistic jigsaw puzzle - with a few pieces removed for that special, indefinable dash of pseudo-density.

Despite all its talk of genetic engineering and its deliberately stupid characters, the unintended message of Jurassic Park III is that when it comes to art and entertainment, you can't beat human DNA.

The Last Mistress turns the melodramatic pieties of films like Fatal Attraction inside out. The anti-heroine acts like a vampire in reverse: Even when she drinks the anti-hero's blood, she makes him feel more alive.

As a comic fable for hard times, New in Town is irredeemably moronic.

Bubble is the moviemaking equivalent of the worst narrative journalism. Every bit of "human interest" is so painstakingly planted, so determined to be applauded for its observation and sensitivity, it ends up seeming as slick and bogus as the worst Hollywood blockbuster.

Near letter-perfect.

In an age when light-and-easy racial farces have become mainstream hits, he remains a tough-love comedian.

American movies are generally so skittish about sexuality that Adrian Lyne's appetite --and aptitude -- for exploring it in Unfaithful is a relief.

Be Cool proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles.

The Matrix Revolutions blends feather-brained, starry-eyed camp and rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle -- so it's at least more entertaining than the second Matrix film, which hung in the air like a noxious cloud.

For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic.

Deep Blue is pure bliss. This documentary about ocean life in all its forms achieves its own tidal pull with visual marvels that conjure a Darwinian delirium.

Stops your heart and keeps your belly jiggling with laughter. It's an improbably sunny tragicomedy.

Bright semi-adult entertainment.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

The film's strengths can't be separated from its shortcomings. Despite its heavyweight supporting cast, Stone Reader mostly pays tribute to the enthusiasm and purity of the amateur.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

Even at its most hyperactive, Peter Pan has a core of good and bad feeling that will hit home to kids and to adults with honest memories.

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

A flimsy, genial romp peopled with early-twentysomethings and targeted at teens and young adults.

Campbell Scott creates a new movie anti-hero -- the weak silent type -- and goes all the way with it in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

As magical as it is realistic.

Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

Unpretentious and brashly exploitative.

Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture.

Thanks to Daniel Craig, the most Byronic of 007s, who, with scarcely any help from the filmmakers, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too.

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

The film saddles Craig T. Nelson with the generally thankless role of Paxton's cold, distant dad. But when he feels like the only person who doesn't understand what's going on with Tate and his son, you feel like saying, "No, me too."

Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.

For those of us who wish that John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" had kept the cheeky tone of Hughes' "Sixteen Candles," what ensues is the best Hughes farce that Hughes never made about adolescent snobbery and heartbreak as well as adult obtuseness.

May be thin, but it's also sharp, like a stiletto.

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

The bulk of the film merely yearns for lucidity and magic. At its worst, Respiro resembles My Big Fat Italian Nervous Breakdown.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.

What kills Max Payne is that the characters think and feel in slow motion. Half the time, mentally, they're just running in place.

It's an odd duck: a labor-intensive piece of light entertainment.

In Julie and Julia, Ephron, like her heroines, has finally found what suits her: a surprising comic and romantic realism.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

There are the gadgets and the effects. But Cats and Dogs definitely could have been more fetching.

From the start, this movie sets the bar high -- then, unfortunately, runs smack into it.

Apart from the movie's moments of flesh and fantasy, it lacks the lyric impulse that would make the swank fantasy take flight.

Casino Royale marks a shrewd relaunching of a franchise. But Campbell and company show too much of their sweat. If these movies continue to follow Fleming's profane pilgrim's progress, the next Bond movies should be more emotional and funny, with a bit of brass-knuckled charm.

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

In Robert Gordon's script, Handler's hilariously literate bouts of psychological torture develop no consistent tone, voice or momentum.

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

The low points in this movie aren't just catastrophic: they're bewildering.

Finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora.

A great adventure.

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

he Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

More palatable than "Norbit" but equally uninspired, Murphy's benign, pedestrian Meet Dave mostly gives us "Mr. Ed," with a bit of Crazy Eddie mixed in.

A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.

It's first-class entertainment for bookish lads and lasses of all ages - and for those who never have or never will crack a paperback's spine. And it might inspire today's nascent artists to open up their sketch-pads as well as their hearts and minds.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

In this movie, when the honeymoon is over it's really over.

Armed with few laughs, this clumsy sequel makes a sloppy mess of its plot ... and star Sandra Bullock.

Kung Fu Hustle is to "House of Flying Daggers" what "Blazing Saddles" is to "Unforgiven."

Intelligent and robust contempt has become so rare in movies that the first half of Art School Confidential is intermittently exhilarating.

The movie lives in its small details.

Freedom Writers is the rare inspirational-teacher film that is filled with genuine, jaw-dropping coups of real-life poetry.

It's actually surprising that Chan is as engaging as he is. He's a canny performer in a canned-goods movie.

This Christmas is the rare movie about a cozy household at holiday time that's as funny and dramatic and poignant as any seasonal family get-together should be.

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

Too often when actors portray complicated or enigmatic characters, they seem to be flirting with the audience, playing hard to get. Not Williams.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

A pop masterpiece.

It moves so confidently and brightly that it's ticklish as well as chilling - and, in its own dark way, enthralling.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

Norton is brilliant in Lee's so-so 'Hour.'

Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

What makes the movie potent, though, has nothing to do with metaphor or parable. It's that the story provides Connelly, Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife with all the tools they need to resurrect, flesh out, revamp and criticize outmoded male and female roles.

The action goes beyond conventional excitement to achieve a tragic grandeur.

There hasn't been so much pea soup spit onscreen since "The Exorcist."

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

The blend of chic histrionics and ultra-bright daylight imagery make much of the movie resemble a network soap opera with an on-location interlude. It looks as cheap as life is held in Medellin.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

Barbershop 2 makes you want to know what happens next. In its own way, it's the Ivory Soap of sequels: 99 and 44/100% pure.

The fascination, humor and poignancy of Departures, this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, rests in the Japanese ceremony of preparing bodies for their caskets.

Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

Supple, eloquent and enchanting.

Watching this movie, you can dream with open eyes.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

Memoirs of a Geisha was never primed to be a film that burns down the house.

Maybe the best way to see Serendipity is to take a cue from the characters and wait a few years.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.

The movie has been compared, with some reason, to the French New Wave. But it's like "Jules and Jim" or "Band of Outsiders" blended with "A Hard Day's Night."

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

By the end, Hamer's crisp, prickly compositions go soft.

The opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

The ovation that Hudson wins from the movie's audience is one of those miraculous moments when a performer's artistry breaks through the screen and makes you feel part of a live audience. I haven't experienced anything like it since Barbra Streisand sang "My Man" at the end of her astonishing debut in Funny Girl.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

The result is harrowing and inspiring. As escapist entertainment, it's the movie of the year.

In Spy Kids 2, Rodriguez tries to hold his family-spy saga together with the digital equal of rubber bands and chewing gum.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

Although the movie is unabashedly alarming, it's also intelligent fun.

As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing.

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

Fails to meld suspense and farce or to bring even the wildest pursuits and smash-ups any visual sense of comedy.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

Standard Operating Procedure says that human nature abhors moral vacuums - but sometimes humans get sucked into them.

It's a summery idyll: his most entertaining picture since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) or maybe "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999).

It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share.

In the end, the movie proves to be, like Brosnan's character, a tarted-up cliche: a whoremonger with a heart of gold.

The movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

Although the structure is clunky, the ensuing parliamentary machinations prove witty and fascinating.

Brad Pitt's sensitive performance helps make 'Benjamin Button' a timeless masterpiece.

Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

Overall, you're left wondering why every big novel needs to be a movie. White Oleander would work better as a four-part miniseries -- or at least as a less conventional screenplay.

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Dubowski's movie is an act of hope that the basic human needs of the gay Orthodox will someday be reconciled with their faith.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

If you're not a fan of M. Night Shyamalan's convoluted, teasing thrillers, you'll find that getting into this movie is like cracking a puzzle in which the constructor keeps breaking his own rules or grabbing new ones from ultra-thin air.

The movie is an inspired comedy-drama about artistic temperament.

A spellbinder of the rarest kind and quality. It opens audiences up to an infinite variety of emotional and intellectual nuances.

This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

A solid, satisfying movie.

Blessedly unimportant, Fantastic Four cruises along on modest yet genuine comic-book pleasures.

It's a mishmash of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Great Escape," with everything complex and entertaining siphoned off.

This movie is both sad and inspiring. It offers proof that Lennon's wit and art are everlasting.

Ratatouille is a sublime dish of a movie, and the company's piece de resistance.

Leonardo DiCaprio brings straight-razor reflexes and rooted emotion to the role of a deceptively rugged CIA man.

A film that climaxes in Shanghai shouldn't go down like a meal in Shanghai. But an hour after you see M:i:III, you may be hungry for a real movie.

A gorgeous flirt of a murder movie.

"Everybody loved him. One woman understood him," goes the ad line. But the movie makes you wonder how anyone could love this screw-up and why anyone would have a problem understanding him.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

A History of Violence is a hollow story from an empty graphic novel.

For most of its meandering running time Harsh Times is just a rough South Central L.A. buddy movie.

All it lacks are the crucial things an inspired director could have provided: spark, soul and magic.

This picture is absorbing -- and eye-filling -- whether the prose and the passion are connecting or running on parallel tracks.

What gives the film a haunting and sometimes droll poetic unity is the way co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen trace all their characters moving in a jellyfish-like fashion.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

May not make adults feel as if they're 10 again, but it will awaken their memories of Saturday matinees that upped children's adrenaline without blinding them with Day-Glo colors or insulting their intelligence.

Producers hits few wrong notes on the big screen.

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day -- That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit.

Generally, this writer-director is too sensitive for his own good. He never lets his boy-hero lose himself fully in his new world - or relinquish hope that his parents will return.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

In The History Boys, as in all of Bennett's work, irony is what the characters live and breathe - and I mean irony in its truest sense, of using language to present opposite and often sly alternatives to accepted wisdom.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

If you like hard bodies and hot engines, if you want to feel like you're inside a cockpit or a video game with someone else working the joystick, you'll find decent escape from the summer doldrums in Stealth.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

A colossal dud.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

For audiences, two things keep the tension from becoming too excruciating: the presence of the survivors in front of us and the knowledge that in the grip of Macdonald's humane, lucid filmmaking, we're in the best of hands.

The movie has dual strengths that silence most objections. Even more than "X-2" or "American Splendor," it is, in a good way, the most comic-booky movie of the year. It's also the human Winged Migration.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

Cabin Fever may not be a horror classic, but it's definitely an ideal midnight movie.

The one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.

It's hard to see Franklin's fingerprints on the material. It's as if he directed with his gloves on.

The movie is emotionally tumultuous and evenhanded and serene. It celebrates the odd pockets of imagination and individuality that can be nurtured in middle-class suburbia. [2002 re-release]

However you pronounce Bythewood -- I assume it's by-the-wood -- his work here is strictly by the numbers.

Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.

Rambles and sometimes wobbles like a runaway movie. But Schreiber's instincts keep the film frolicsome and vital.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

The movie's steady good humor and respect for character is pleasing - even energizing.

Soul Men isn't much of a movie, but it bubbles along and reaches its percolating high point at the very end.

It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

Under its leathery hide is a genuine compulsion to de-romanticize Western gunfighting. Every bullet in this movie matters, and by the end Munny's alcohol-fuelled, satanic purposefulness is shocking: in the climax, even his choice of victims has a crazy excess. [10 Aug 1992, p.70]

It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

It's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

Spurlock's movie is the real-life slapstick record of a kamikaze Mac attack. Schlosser's book is the contemporary equal of Upton Sinclair's classic meatpacking muckraker "The Jungle."

The giddy excitement of Startup.com comes from feeling as if you're inside the bubble as it soars into the stratosphere - and pops.

Avary has taken a pig's ear of a book and turned it into a pig's ear of a movie.