Michael Sragow

This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

Cut above this genre's usual industrial sludge, even when the chops and kicks are too fast to follow.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

The saving grace in an exuberantly graceless movie is Clive Owen. This actor is bulletproof. Even in a sick-joke jamboree like Shoot 'Em Up, he mows down the competition and gets his laughs without losing his composure.

The script is clever and would be brilliant if it worked.

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

Keeps its eye on the big picture even when focusing on the small scene.

This turgid melodrama fast-breaks away from the heart of its own subject.

This movie proves to be the year's most anti-romantic comedy.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

The casting in K-PAX is canny, but the picture as a whole is a clunky mix of the canny and the would-be uncanny.

Despite the dominant air of foolishness, the filmmaking is lush, lively and intelligent, but the gap between the direction and the script is appalling.

Angelina Jolie focuses her wild energy into outlandish heroics, and emerges with more attractiveness and credibility than all three of those silly Charlie's Angels combined.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

Light, engaging documentary.

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

Overflowing with comedy and drama, The Boys of Baraka unfolds on the mean streets of Baltimore and in the wide-open spaces of Kenya.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an uptight movie -- the opposite of his scintillating "Out of Sight."

Needs a story.