Michael Sragow

The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

Strangers With Candy -- a perfect title -- is filled with straight-faced loonies. It's a nutcake you actually want to eat.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Gripping footage about the controversial Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, which transmits news to 40 million Arabs. But the movie offers neither lucid analyses of the channel nor probing portraits of its journalists.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.

This film's playful visual language pulls you in rather than shuts you out; it isn't difficult to decipher, and it enables Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, to navigate the story's many realms with a directness and dexterity that are refreshing.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

You may find Va Savoir pleasant to sit through, but will it stay with you the next morning? Who knows?

A smart comedy about a smart blonde -- that would be a sensation. But a dumb comedy about a smart blonde turns out to be not bad.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

The movie does work, spectacularly.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

Combine the title with the image of a dazzling female and a frazzled male, and you've got the movie perfectly.

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.

You have to identify pretty strongly with suffering artistes to find anything to root for in The Science of Sleep.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

Best of all, Ponyo never ceases to be a genuine odyssey in short pants.

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."

With all the good will in the world, I couldn't warm up to Kit Kittredge. The movie is like a 1930s or 1940s short about Americans pulling together, stretched out to feature length.

You know the line about paying to hear a great actor read a phonebook? I'd pay to see Channing just leaf through one.

Mirrormask is a gorgeous psychedelic cameo of a movie.

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.

Plummer's performance is a miracle: In a movie as flat as a tablecloth, he suggests dimensions as wide, deep and curved as Cinerama.

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.

Barf-bag baroque.

Lasseter's inclusive, utterly distinctive sensibility makes Cars all that it can be. His embrace of the comic-dramatic friction between innovation and tradition infiltrates every aspect of the movie - the look, the characters, the story.

David Hyde Pierce is hilarious as Drix, a take-charge dose of medicine. No performer is better at wringing laughs from an unflappable --- make that semi-flappable - delivery.

The Breakfast Club meets Rear Window. The result should satisfy dating crowds from high school to night school.

It's hard to stomp on a movie that pulls together a rich lay-about, hippies, a punk girl and an Amnesty International worker in a sort of Peaceable Kingdom, but About a Boy shows the limits of affability.

It's lumpy, odd and tonally all over the place, but its vision gets to you, and its payoff delivers a tough kid's catharsis.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

Performances by Jim Caviezel and Richard Harris make this a great adventure.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

Though I love McCarthy's movie, The Edge of Heaven - with its virtuoso narrative and frames packed to bursting with unruly life - has the potency of "The Visitor" squared.

There's no innocence left in Shrek 2. The helter-skelter story and throwaway gags emerge from a sensibility that confuses gossipy knowingness and jadedness with wit.

Made is an amateur-hour buddy movie.

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

The filmmakers lack any visual sense of humor and any talent for sustaining long-form comedy; the stunts have less wallop than a TV bloopers show and the Oedipal family slapstick goes around in circles, in more ways than one.

Feisty and good-humored, and if it doesn't have deep characters, it is chock-full of personality.

All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

Without a single gunshot (and just one flick of a switchblade), it turns into an existential suspense film with the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the human spirit.

Reprehensible.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past displays nary a wisp of life, let alone an afterlife.

Part irritating, part inspired.

The offhand wit and casual self-revelation of Johnston's best words draw you deeper into the mysteries of his character. Feuerzeig is a music-lover to his bones.

By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.

Not enough to keep Clockstoppers from turning viewers into clock-watchers.

It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Has buoyancy to spare. It's filled with bumps and scratches. But in the manner of a nicked old LP, its gnarly surface and warps-and-all sound evokes real life.

At best it's a bit like Mel Brooks' "The History of the World Part I" (except Ramis stops somewhere in Genesis); at worst it's like a Scary Movie-type parody of John Huston's "The Bible."

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.

What's missing is what Pixar never fails to provide: The kind of storytelling heart that is inseparable from imagination.

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

Johansson bequeaths the welcome sight of a talent in full bloom to this wilted, dark whimsy of a movie.

Like "Hairspray," it's not just a spinoff but a wised-up family comedy that's spirited and inventive. It retains the farcical belligerence of the TV comedy but also heightens the series' oddball warmth and expands on its Hellzapoppin' slapstick.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

Gory but lifeless.

Quirky and enjoyable.

That's the problem of Downfall in a nutshell: It provokes insufficient emotional and intellectual responses to a grotesque and atrocious dictatorship. Instead of the banality of evil, it gives us the banality of banality.

The filmmakers capture kids and adolescents who haven't hardened their feelings into attitudes or molded their gestures into poses.

You don't want to look at anything else when Zeta-Jones is on-screen.

In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

For better and worse, the entire film goes by like a theme-park cyclone ride. It makes as much sense as it needs to when you're on it. All it leaves in its wake is a residue of vertigo and speed.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

It's the ideal capper for a cop comedy with a refreshingly wry, adult and humane attitude.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

It's so wispy that at the end you wonder: Exactly what runs in the family?

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

Full of wit, charm and wonder. It's so hilarious, you might blow a gasket.

Manipulates the audience.

The enthralling documentary Crazy Love is about how a high-flying lawyer's obsession with a young beauty blinded her, metaphorically and literally.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

A Mighty Heart has the surface tension of a first-rate docudrama but neither the passion nor the vision to encompass its powerhouse subject.

The whole film is about innocence and experience, and if it isn't a Blakean song, it is a sturdy and vibrant piece of prose.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

A wholesome, headlong extravaganza - a sort of North by Northeast sans high style and erotic innuendo.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

High School Musical 3 wore me out, but I'm not the target audience. My favorite high school musical was "Hamlet 2."

As a documentary, The Agronomist, in its excitingly fractured, modern manner, does what Lawrence of Arabia and The Leopard do: It traces the upheaval of a civilization in the profile of a magnificent individual. It's a 90-minute nonfiction film with the impact and the greatness of an epic.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Too soft on its lead character and too willing to chalk up America's drug appetites to the times-that-were-a-changin' in the '60s.

A lovely, mischievous Casanova that will sweep you off your feet.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you feel that no good idea, let alone good deed, goes unpunished. Only the exuberance of the moviemaking keeps your spirits high.

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

A bit like a real-world horror film with "heart," right down to the trick ending.

You never believe that Paltrow's character is insane, even when she herself does. She has too sturdy a core.

This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol.

If you haven't had enough of Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan weepies like "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998), The Lake House gives us Mopey in Chicago and You've Got Snail Mail.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

Here's my nomination for future grindhouse double-bill from hell: Pathfinder and "Apocalypto."

What gives Notorious its staying power is what happens before AND after its hero's death.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

The movie's triumph is that we experience the ending, in which the three girls go mostly separate ways, not as a defeat but as a transition still open to possibilities.

The most refreshing thing about the original Men in Black was that it was relatively small - a modest, slapdash, 98-minute special-effects farce. The most refreshing thing about Men in Black II is that it is 10 minutes shorter.

Here's hoping Allen's static Hennessey is due to an extreme acting choice and not plastic surgery. It would be tragic to lose a natural smile to star in garbage like Death Race.

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

What makes the "Dolittle" movies stand out from this menagerie is the superb casting and matching of the animals and their human voices.

New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

Terrence Howard has stolen 50 Cent's thunder - and his lightning, and his storm clouds, too - twice in one year.

The sensuousness of Lemon Tree is its glory.

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

In a feat of performing imagination, Ferrell turns his usual extroversion inside out and his usual zaniness into precision, and makes it all work for him.

There's something junior varsity about the whole sensibility that makes the new version seem more dated than the old one.

Despite its adrenalized actors, Tape is a tired return to the roots of the American indie movement's popular surge a dozen years ago. It could have been called "sex, lies and audiotape."

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Weitz doesn't manage Pullman's feat of being rational and magical simultaneously. But he rapidly and intelligently opens up Pullman's world.

The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.

If only the director, or his deus, could have delivered us from the inevitable shock ending, which blends Darwin and Einstein with purest P.T. Barnum.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

Instead of being supple and expansive like the book, this Little Children is heavy-handed and snarky.

There isn't an earned moment of uplift or laughter in the movie. Everything in it is prefab.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

This movie's biggest contribution to film history will be resurrecting Davies' reputation as a natural comedian stuck in deadly costume pictures because her lover wanted her placed on a pedestal.

In Schumacher's relentlessly arrhythmic and tone-deaf film, Gerard Butler plays the title role as if he were just plucked out of Monty Python's lumberjack chorus.

In Stay, the director, Marc Forster, fresh from "Finding Neverland," turns Manhattan into a nightmarish dreamscape and his characters into self-destructive ghosts.

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Takes a literary milestone of ambiguity and makes everything about it blisteringly obvious.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

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.

Peaceful Warrior fails pitifully at being transcendent. This New Age movie about living in the moment gets you looking at your watch and squirming in your seat.

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

Siegel takes us to the brink of operatic melodrama, then lands us in a tragicomic spot: a psychological landscape of alternate life and make-believe death.

Ragged and frenetic.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

Dark Blue is one of those totally happy surprises that moves so quickly and curves so sharply that it leaves this era's hyped critical hits looking like beached whales.

The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?

No one could seethe better than Mifune, but what gives the movie equal shares of exhilaration and heartbreak is the feeling that pours out of him when his son finds happiness in his own marriage.

The performers are tremendous, particularly Deschanel, who can travel to the end of an emotional tether and then suggest the mysteries of change and growth that lie beyond.

We don't experience the drama from the inside out because everything is on the surface. Redford is the only one who supplies internal life to Spy Game.

Scrambled space-time comedy that's as light and silly as it is erratic.

What sucks the wind out of the movie's sails is the vacuum at its core.

Both handmade and souped-up, it beautifully renders two types of camaraderie: the bonds among eccentrics and the fellowship of speed.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

The movie conveys the drama of the moment but eschews context. The result is an arresting yet frustrating experience.

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

The symmetry doesn't work. Capitalism is an economic system; democracy, a political system. Perhaps Moore should have come out and said what he really wants to see us adopt: a democratic socialism.

Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

Will Ferrell does chicken-fried comedy right: with crackpot discipline and stripped-to-the-beer-belly courage.

For a movie with such a vibrant real-life base, An American Rhapsody is surprisingly low-impact.

It makes for quite a rumpus, but the material never catches fire.

Overdoes it and falls on its farce.

A movie masterpiece -- thrilling, passionate and wise.

Thanks to Suvari, audiences laugh nervously at the mortification of soul and flesh, but she doesn't really do them much of a favor. She simply keeps them watching as a would-be gross-out comedy turns into would-be gross-out tragedy.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

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.