Michael Sragow

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Has the grisly appetite, if not the execution of the original. What it also has are monstrously good Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton, plus a fine young Hannibal to save it.

This movie leaves 'em laughing - and gasping.

The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The problem with Allen's latest, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is "Not enough Double Indemnity."

The movie mostly proves that cutting-edge humiliations are best absorbed in 25-minute segments on HBO.

Perfume offers eau de crud.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

This movie has an aura of forced tragedy, like a fourth-generation version of "Requiem for a Heavyweight."

At its best, the movie combines the musical and psychological meanings of a fugue. Sons and daughters and mother take up themes of dislocation and identity loss, and deepen them at every turn.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

It's like Chekhov with a British accent.

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.

The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

No one has caught the pride, remorse and pain of an unloved and possibly unlovable husband better than Edward Norton in The Painted Veil.

It's not a comedy-drama, really. It's let's-all-share therapy in beautiful Boulder, Colo.

Despite the nice touches at the corners, the center does not hold. In I Think I Love My Wife, there's too much emphasis on the Think.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Wastes amusing beginnings.

Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.

Gory overkill.