Mick LaSalle

The latest Audrey Tautou film, Delicacy, is sensitive and well acted and fits under the general category of "good movie," and yet it would be hard to get excited about it.

Think of The FP as the occasion for a party. You need to find a room full of people who get the joke and see this movie there, because audiences will be laughing so hard they'll be screaming.

The Duplass brothers keep making miniatures that contain universes. They seem to be casual, but they're dead serious. They seem to be stumbling around finding stories by accident, but their movies are thematically rigorous. They seem to be presenting matters of little consequence, but the stakes are always huge and life-changing.

A handful of acting moments aside, Being Flynn is a drama without much in the way of rewards.

Silent House feels relentless, suffocatingly tense and almost unbearable. And that's a very good thing.

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

In Darkness is an extraordinary movie, and somehow good art creates its own uplift.

The documentary is not always fascinating, but Tuschi's ultimate thesis - that Khodorkovsky, who started out a shady businessman, ultimately emerged as a hero, willing to go to jail for his convictions - is a persuasive one. Clearly, the man is a political prisoner.

So this is a good comedy, as bad as it can be and still be good, but good.

The best thing Harrelson brings is his own sweetness of disposition, which somehow never goes completely into hiding.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

It plays like a string of cliches linked together to form a movie with not a single moment of surprise or originality.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

Whatever else W.E. may be (lousy, a waste of time, tin-eared, sleep-inducing, occasionally laughable, etc.), it's sincere and ambitious.

Safe House is an idea for a movie. It's a few blustery gestures in the direction of a story, with five good actors doing their best, trying to hold up the barest frame of an idea, while investing the surrounding emptiness with all the truth they can muster.

Big Miracle is not the most sophisticated adventure film, but compared with most family movies, it's practically something out of Noel Coward.

Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.

Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.

Man on a Ledge doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."

It's a far better thing to remember Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than to watch it. Looking back, much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie's virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here - just be prepared to blast for them.

Beautiful in a girl-from-the-neighborhood sort of way, Carano inhabits Soderbergh's elaborate frame with wit, physicality and just a hint of ironic distance, the suggestion of someone who's not overawed by the opportunity or taking herself too seriously.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Imagine a biopic about Ronald Reagan that leaves out Gorbachev but instead dramatizes his years with Alzheimer's, and you'll get an idea of this film's misplaced focus.

Unless you're a fan of Fishbone, Everyday Sunshine is probably just a documentary about a band you've never heard of, whose music you probably will not like. But there's a bigger and more interesting subject at work in this film. It's a movie about what it's like to almost make it in the music business, but not really, not quite. It's about coming close and watching it slip away.

A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins. The movie deals with a big subject that has received scant treatment in movies - the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s - giving voice and testimony to what happened there. But the ill-conceived fictional elements take the picture right off the rails.

You know how I realized I actually liked I Melt With You? I kept talking about it, and at one point, in the middle of mocking it, I accidentally referred to it as "a good picture." That's when I realized, yes, it really is good, albeit in ways that are different from other movies.

There are extraordinary and beautiful things in War Horse, enough of them to make the movie a pleasure and a worthwhile experience, though not enough to trick the eye or get you believing this movie hangs together.

The resulting film is neither better nor worse than the Swedish film, but it's more cinematic.

It's original and poetic, and if you see it you will probably remember scenes from it a year from now, because it's not really like anything else. It's very much its own thing.

Instead we get Knightley, who juts her chin, quakes, shakes and bugs her eyes, but nothing about her pain calls out to us, because nothing in it seems real.

There's nothing here but wreckage. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is so ineptly made that the story is advanced solely through announcements.

As Barkin's nemesis, Moore is evil, and that's a good thing - she doesn't back off. Kate Bosworth plays Barkin's fragile daughter and is a pleasant surprise: Who knew she was an actress?

Innocuous and dull.

A dark comedy that confirms Diablo Cody as a screenwriter of importance, eliminates the last shred of doubt that Jason Reitman is a major director and gives Charlize Theron her best showcase since "Monster."

Seducing Charlie Barker is a movie made by people who haven't been making movies, but should be. As in, often. As in, from now on.

In many ways - in all ways - The Artist is a profound achievement.

Less subtle than its predecessor, Tomboy is like a pint-size "Boys Don't Cry," and as such, it's practically unique.

Michelle Williams doesn't just survive. Called upon to glow, she glows. Her performance doesn't solve all the riddles of that personality; none could, and it's for the best that Williams doesn't try.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.

The movie is a mess.

So the situation is fraught, without being clear-cut; in other words, interesting.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another. Instead, Happy Feet Two is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie.

The movie itself is a worthy thing, too, but it's not as good as Clooney is here, which is to say, it's not great.

Kaurismäki stalwart Kati Outinen, as the old man's silent and ailing wife, is the key to the movie, even though she appears only sporadically. Something in her timid, understanding and impassive gaze, which is Kaurismäki's gaze as well, lets us know that she sees things in the old man that we don't see.

If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy Melancholia, rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary.

Though the Jill problem is too insurmountable to ignore, almost everything else in this comedy succeeds.

It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous.

The actors keep their clothes on, but everything else is naked in Like Crazy, a romantic drama that makes other romantic films look obvious and calculated in comparison.

A curious thing about "Revenge" is that auto executives who might have been portrayed as villains in Paine's earlier documentary are likable characters here.

Coming now, today, In Time is not just satisfying. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's important, because that would overstate it, but it certainly feels like part of the national conversation. It arrives in theaters at a time when people are camped out in New York saying the same things as the people in the movie. It's weird the way films often anticipate the near future.

That the movie is leisurely and unconventional is all part of its charm, too - until it isn't anymore. The movie is a tale of corruption, but then it's not. It's a love story, but no, not quite. Later, it flirts with becoming a great journalism tale, or at least a whimsical journalism tale, but that vein leads nowhere, too. Nor is it much of anything else.

Alas, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

Fabrice Luchini is one of the delights of world cinema, and in The Women on the 6th Floor he finds a role ideally suited to his odd mix of fussiness and sensitivity.

Mighty Macs further distinguishes itself by, for once, giving a fair shake to nuns, who are treated with respect both in the performance of Ellen Burstyn, as the mother superior, and of Marley Shelton, who plays the assistant coach. It's about time.

With The Way, writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure. What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness.

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the few filmmakers with the ability to infuse the screen with his own consciousness, and to see The Skin I Live In is to enter into his nightmare.

The laughs, including the big laughs, keep coming right up to the closing seconds.

Trespass never advances beyond being a grand manipulation.

Instead of concealing it, I'll just come out and say that I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about this well-acted and gracefully directed movie, but for reasons that might be called philosophical.

Blackthorn imagines a scenario for Butch's later years and gives us a different kind of Western - somber, reflective and set in the elevated plains and salt flats of Bolivia.

The new Footloose does everything it needs to do. It's a vibrant youth musical that will appeal to audiences who haven't seen the 1984 original. And it has enough charm and life to it to compete with the memory of the earlier version.

A half hour before the finish, Margaret loses altitude and starts looking for a place, any place, to land. Instead it crashes, in slow motion. But up until then, Margaret is committed and unusual.

Take Shelter has a problem, the simplest of all problems but no less serious for its being simple. It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.

There is no point in discounting smart, engrossing entertainment like The Ides of March, though it's hard not to notice when a film that could have been great falls short.

I've seen many films about Italy, but this one - possibly because it's so colorful and stylized and possibly because the songs are such economical distillations of a state of mind - feels like being there.

She's hopeless, he's hopeless, and this movie is just ghastly.

Is he a hero or a lunatic? He's possibly neither, or possibly a little of both, but this is the problem with making a movie about a real person.

Just as essential is Seth Rogen, as Adam's best friend. Rogen isn't even 30 yet, but he is already an important actor - not just because he's popular but because he best embodies this particular comic moment.

Casadesus infuses Margueritte with a lilting quality, underscored by the sadness of someone who knows she is the last person standing and inhabits an alien world.

The goal of this review - why not just say it? - is to disclose as little about the story as possible while instilling a ravenous and even rabid desire to see Love Crime immediately.

A film for anyone who enjoys an intelligent thriller, but for illness phobes this movie is a special pleasure in that it presses all the right fear buttons even as it validates a very particular vision of reality.

There is no turning away from the screen.

The problem is that the story, as constituted, is of necessity against organized religion, but Farmiga, as director, pretends that it's ambiguous. So you get a movie slightly at cross-purposes with itself.

It is an exciting movie, full of crises and dramatic turns despite an aura of sadness that seems to pervade it.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

Easily could have been mildly funny and phony but instead is really funny and true to life.

July also narrates the film, in voiceover, as the cat, and every time she does, it's a white-knuckle thing. You have to hold on until she stops.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

One Day is a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies. Nothing is sudden or easy, either for the characters or for the audience, and there are no thunderbolts from the blue.

Clumsy and ineffective in its first half hour. But gradually, as her investigation deepens, and we see the true hideousness of what she is uncovering, the movie achieves urgency and clarity of purpose.

This one is dazzling.

30 Minutes or Less is a strange case. Either it goes for a particular tone and doesn't achieve it. Or it does achieve a tone that's not really worth striving for.

Final Destination 5 is irresistible, and the reason it's irresistible is that it speaks to us in the language we all understand, which is fear.

The period footage shows all the principals, including Neal Cassady, who was only 38 but looked 52. Ken Kesey emerges as the film's hero - he is presented as a great American adventurer, the psychological equivalent of Lewis and Clark. Maybe that's not as ridiculous as it sounds.

It does provide audiences with the satisfaction of seeing and hearing an important truth expressed, and that's better than making you feel good. That's making you feel something.

It is not what could be fairly called a bad movie, but neither is it fine enough to be a good one, with its lineup of dull characters and a limp story that functions like a conveyor belt.

I lost patience with a widow who is grieving one month and then making out with a guy in a bar the next. This is an emotional recovery even Hamlet's mother might have found unseemly.

Forestier's performance is a tour de force of comic acting, maintaining astonishing alertness and energy from shot to shot and scene to scene.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

Take a cowboy movie, add space aliens. That's a gimmick that could easily have exhausted itself after 20 minutes, but director Favreau, a team of screenwriters and some well-cast actors keep it alive, and the result is a crowd-pleasing summer movie with more wit than most.

Men will watch Crazy, Stupid, Love thinking they're finding out things about women, but if anything, this movie works the other way. Women will get a glimpse into the male mind.

Structurally, this becomes a little monotonous because there's just no denying that some kids are more interesting than others.

As thrillers go, Rapt is long on intellect and short on action, a virtue to some degree, though not entirely.

The takeaway on Friends With Benefits is that mores change, styles change, the rules change, and even humor changes. (There are two jokes involving apps, of all things, that are pretty funny.) But people's emotional needs remain the same from era to era.

This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.

The result is a nice little movie that does its job and doesn't spread misery under cover of spreading joy.

Morris is a storyteller of the highest order, and within seconds, he draws us into his subject, doling out details, making us wonder what will happen next and dropping bombs for maximum impact.

Wexler gets tired of his own movie near the end of it. The viewer will get tired in 15 minutes.

Horrible Bosses has a handful of hilarious moments, but it's not exactly funny and not exactly serious, either.

As far as complete wastes of time go, Zookeeper is not especially offensive. Yet it is surprising that everything you might expect to be charming in it just isn't - namely all the bits involving animals.

Those of you who don't work for a newspaper may also be interested in what it's like on the inside - how stories are generated, how editors and writers interact, etc. For what it's worth, it's an accurate portrait.

Rhys Ifans is an engaging protagonist, playing Marks as a passive and seemingly unflappable character whose iron nerve and ability to keep cool in a crisis get him out of more than one desperate situation.

It's unpleasant where it should be pleasant, convoluted where it should be streamlined, anxiety provoking where it should be easy, and long, long, long - at least 20 minutes longer than it has a right to be.

I had a migraine when I started watching Larry Crowne, and by the end, it went away. None of this quite adds up to a recommendation, but it's close. Very close.

Seeing his life from the inside, the impulse to judge him fades. You would not want to trade places.

The documentary shows Buck over the course of a year, as he travels and teaches. Along the way, Robert Redford is interviewed about Buck's contribution to "The Horse Whisperer" (1998). Redford likes him, so he can't be a phony.

In terms of story and atmosphere and overall feeling, Cars 2 is a brand-new experience - and a distinct improvement.

Though it's only 72 minutes, by the time it's over, you'll be ready for it to end. Still, as a glimpse of the Arab world right before the Arab Spring, this documentary may be of some lasting interest.

So it's two guys traveling, eating and talking. Doesn't sound like much. But it's terrific.

Everything about the idea of Mr. Popper's Penguins sounds lovely, and everything about the actual movie is ugly.

Bride Flight gives a panoramic sweep of lives as they're lived, as there is a lot of beauty in it.

As for Plummer, I don't know how he does it, but he somehow radiates gayness. It's nothing overt, just some internal shift, but if you saw only 10 seconds of Plummer in this film, you would know he was playing a gay man. You just might not know how you know it.

The pacing is superb, quick and agile without being frenzied, and the special effects are jaw-dropping.

At times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

Epic in sweep and scale and packs in enough incident to cover two "Godfather" movies.

Mainly Blank City shows a succession of engaging, intelligent, middle-aged people showing some very bad home movies that they once hoped were something more.

A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

Bottaro finds ways to dramatize chess, and the environments are fascinating throughout.

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

It's a movie for audiences who think exuberance in movies is more important than sense or logic and who can laugh at a movie and like it at the same time.

The result is a movie that one watches with the sense of pushing it up a hill.

Features some of Clive Owen's best work and a startling movie debut by the 15-year-old Liana Liberato.

In Water for Elephants, Waltz plays a circus owner and ringleader during the Great Depression, and when he's onscreen, every eye is on him, no matter who is talking.

The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.

Henry's Crime has three charismatic actors - Reeves, Vera Farmiga and James Caan - in search of a decent script, and what they find, instead, are a handful of good scenes and lots of room to build their respective characters.

A strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern.

It's precisely that fear that Redford sets out to explore. The Conspirator is all about the un-American things Americans can do when feeling collectively threatened.

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

It's funny, broad and never stops moving. It's made to please, and succeeds.

The movie is hampered throughout by little inconsistencies.

The most notable thing about Hop is its technical perfection. It puts live action and animation into the same frame so seamlessly that the filmmakers might easily not get credit for it.

Director Duncan Jones achieves a strange and winning amalgam, a gripping action film that also works as poetry.

What makes this film special and memorable is the character of Danny Green, who is not the usual neighborhood hoodlum you see in movies.

Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director, he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, Sucker Punch - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time.

This latest adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel is careful, respectful and even enjoyable, and yet dry, singularly humorless and played without the lavishness of spirit that makes sense of Gothic melodrama.

Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.

This is a well-made, well-plotted and sensitive movie.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

It's an observant and heartfelt film, with turns of dialogue that show that writer-director Josh Radnor really can write.

The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds.

I liked this movie, maybe more than I should have, and would be happy to see anything this director wants to do next.

This is a beautiful film, full of gray-and white-haired men who grow in stature before our eyes.

The main thing that keeps audiences glued throughout its running time is that it's a love story, easily one of the best American love stories of the past year.

Hall Pass attempts to take the Farrellys' harsh humor and bring it into harmony with what has become the modern comic style, which is to be coarse but not absurd, to be brutally honest but real.

That irresistible thing - a movie about the making of a movie - combined with a bit of a history and a political message.

For the most part, it's fairly pleasant and interesting enough to be there.

Neeson has a way of getting upset - a frantic purposefulness - that fills viewers with both empathy and anticipation: He's so miserable that we care.

In addition to being funny and endearing and having a lively script and lots of nicely observed performances - is something of an education.

A very funny romantic comedy that nicely combines Adam Sandler's acerbic sweetness with Aniston's down-to-earth warmth.

Sanctum is by no means a badly made movie, but it has the feel of one of those dramatic re-enactments made exclusively for Imax theaters.

Biutiful exists, at its best and beautifully, in that space that's hard to define, between the outside and the interior, action and thought, body and soul.

To the extent that it's original, The Mechanic is insane, bordering on gloriously insane.

Giamatti and Pike are backed by a strong cast, including Minnie Driver, lots of fun as Barney's Jewish princess second wife.

As Russell Boyd's remarkable cinematography emphasizes the dwarfing grandeur of the surrounding topography, Weir shows how the corresponding smallness of individuals is compensated for by the grandeur of their aspiration.

The movie is just good enough to make us want more and to understand what's missing.

A gutsy movie, in that Leigh says something about life that nobody really wants to believe, and he says it forcefully: There is such a thing as "too late."

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

Dumont makes movies that almost nobody wants to see. That doesn't make him a great filmmaker, but he's a great filmmaker all the same.

Extraordinary and beautiful.

It's not bad. It's cute.

As a viewing experience, the film is by turns heartrending and stultifying, but mostly stultifying.

Whatever the intention, Somewhere, in its odd, detached way, is compelling viewing.

If there's one big difference between this version and the old, it's in the attitude toward violence. The new version may be more graphic, but it doesn't present violence as inevitable or necessary, just ugly.

Dunst is not the only person doing quality work in All Good Things, but she is the only one worth watching.

This is a cute movie, a kid's movie, and a rather good one.

Ultimately, The Fighter loses its courage and betrays the terms of its own story by fashioning an interpretation designed to please the people it portrays. It does a switch on us, by changing its focus from Micky's character to Micky's career and then pretending it was really about the career all along.

The comedy never really takes off because it's phony.

As is appropriate in a well-crafted and meticulous movie, the acting is strong down the line.

No matter how guilty our knucklehead-protagonist's victims supposedly are, it's difficult to maintain a rooting interest.

There are many things to admire about this movie, but the main one is that it doesn't compromise.

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

It's big, perfectly cast and entertaining in every way, but more than that it feels like a generous public event.

There are all kinds of bad movies in the world, but it's really only stardom that can create the exact variety of cinematic abortion we find in The Tourist.

Not a mediocre film. It is, by turns, a great and awful film.

Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.

It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for.

The film is engaging but also has a certain creaking familiarity.

If The Next Three Days were just a little more mindless, it might have been more joyful.

127 Hours, about an unimaginably unbearable experience, is pretty much an unbearable experience of its own. And yet, it must be said, it's exceptionally well made.

Roger Michell directs it as though it were an uproarious comedy, but the laughs are light, and the story's real appeal lies in its behind-the-scenes look at the manners and politics of morning television.

Watts is the movie's soul, thoughtful and deep-revolving.

The effect is like watching an opera without music. Or a musical drama in which no one sings. These departures from a realistic convention never feel like static set pieces - that's the great success of the film and of the poems themselves.

Aselton gets a lot said in 78 minutes. I think the main thing she says is something never overtly spoken, that life is essentially a lonely experience - even when we're surrounded by activity, and even if we never shut up.

There have been many adultery movies over the years, but Leaving has some aspects that make it different and interesting.

What's much more fascinating and enriching is Eastwood's Olympian vision, the sympathetic and all-encompassing understanding of the pain and grandeur of life on earth.

It's an amazing story, one that would seem too far-fetched if it weren't true.

There's such a thing as smart angry, and such a thing as stupid angry, and after seeing Inside Job, audiences will be smart angry.

The tone is both satiric and serious, zany but heartfelt, and for a while - maybe 20 minutes - all seems well.

Ultimately, Stone is a haunting film about what it feels like to be really and truly lost.

Obviously, Barrymore is not ideally cast outside modern times, but her presence is so good-natured that she makes an audience want to work with her.

It's one of those self-consciously cute pictures, about as hard to take as a person who stands in front of a mirror and preens all day. [23 Mar 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Breaks the formula for teen romances. Martin Short, as the vain and zany drama teacher, does not disappoint.

So what's wrong with Joshua? Two things: The audience is ahead of the movie, and the movie never catches up.

Big as it is, Blade' is meticulous and subtle, not just in its camera technique but in the way it works its themes and creates a mood.

An unforgettable examination of a host of dark impulses.

In a way, Misery is a ghoul comedy. But it's more than that, because it's genuinely, consistently scary. With his enthusiastic direction -- the cutting, the odd angles, the unexpected timing -- Rob Reiner takes what might have been a static set-up, a couple of people talking in a room, and makes it harrowing. [30 Nov 1990, p.E1]

The Ref, not just about a premise but about people, is the rare good comedy that actually gets better as it goes along. [11 Mar 1994, p.C1]

A boxing movie that exists in that gray area between prototypical and typical, the quintessential and run-of-the-mill.

Entrapment is an adventure movie without two brain cells to rub together.

It's just off, odd and joyless.

The result is a frustrating, boring mess.

Talk about disturbing.

Unlike "Pirates," Stardust is anything but a wretched mess. It's a charming and smartly plotted fantasy.

In thematic terms, Cassandra's Dream could be looked at as a rebuttal to "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

The musical numbers are the only real drag on this otherwise odd and appealing picture.

As for Williams, he's a warm actor in an oddly cold movie, and his presence certainly doesn't make things worse. But Toys doesn't call for anything new from him. [18 Dec 1992, p.C1]

The film is bleak, not particularly compelling, and the characters are frustrating, the enemies of their own happiness.

Captures the flavor of putting on a show on Broadway.

A gentle comedy, offbeat but never cute, never lewd and never going for shortcut laughs that might diminish character.

An action blockbuster extravaganza that's sadder than sad and never pretends otherwise.

Admiring The Singing Detective is easy, and so is appreciating the originality of the story's conceit, the artistry of the actors and the directorial intelligence of Keith Gordon. But loving it would take an act of will.

Red Rock West' is filled with delightful twists of plot, and the twists start coming early -- so we'll leave off talking about the story. [28 Jan 1994, p.C3]

The language is brilliant, and the laugh lines come so quickly that you'd probably have to watch the movie twice to get them all.

It's fascinating.

Most viewers will have no more fun watching this story than the characters do living it.

The kind of horror movie that's not a bit scary and quite a bit gross.

Homicide is a haunting picture that nags at you, days later. It provides no neat answers to the questions it raises about the merits of assimilation vs. maintaining one's ethnic, racial or religious identity, but rather captures something of the times. It might not be the most satisfying movie out there, yet there's a sense about it that, years from now, Homicide will seem even better than it does today.[18 Oct 1991, p.D1]

The movie is long, and here and there it seems to meander. But when it arrives at its anguished last scene, there's no doubt that Eustache knew where he was heading all along.

While Showgirls was funny the whole way through, Striptease has long, dreary stretches, where you're forced to watch Demi Moore undressing.

RocknRolla attempts to depict a world of ever-expanding chaos. But the chaos is only in the way the story is told. The actual vision Ritchie offers is pedestrian and tame.

Feels forgettable, even though, in the moment, it's often very funny.

Has some faults, but it manages to keep its audience either angry or jumpy from start to finish.

It's a one-of-a-kind experience -- dark, bleak, twisted carnival noir.

With a movie like this, we know what has to happen. The fun is in seeing how it happens. Ryback is an explosives expert, so there are some delightful bomb interludes. He makes a bomb for the microwave, takes a missile apart and puts it back together and comes up with original ideas, such as rigging a hand grenade to a door so it will explode when the door is opened. Under Siege is a lot like Die Hard moved to a battleship. [09 Oct 1992, p.C3]

Open Range veers wildly. It's a movie of beauty and sensitivity, and tedium and absurdity.

Stanley Donen's spouse-swapping comedy is not as naughty as it might have been, but it showcases Mitchum in a good comic role. [11 Jul 1997, p.D1]

For the first 20 minutes or so, Crazy People is lightweight but fun. Then the movie defies its own logic and falls apart. [11 Apr 1990, p.E1]

An impressive and imaginative fantasy.

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

It's hard not to come away in awe of a director in complete control of every frame.

Feels more like an earnest commercial for music education than successful entertainment.

While it's possible to have a great time with the movie without having any interest in Kiss, it should be noted that the band does make an appearance.

It's not just for people who like rap or the rap atmosphere. It's a well-paced, light comedy that can appeal to anybody. [05 Jun 1992, p.D1]

Murphy seems committed to pushing his hostile vision, and that in itself is interesting. [01 Jul 1992]

Movie magic.

These are good moments, and there are a few others, that prevent Tomb Raider from being one of the worst films of the year. But they're not enough to make it worth seeing.

First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed.

What makes The White Ribbon a big movie, an important movie, is that Haneke's point extends beyond pre-Nazi Germany.

Director Curtis Hanson gives the film a slow, European pace and a cold, slick look. The sound-track is made up almost entirely of internal noises -- a buzzing fluorescent bulb, music from a record player. Everything contributes to an ominous atmosphere. [09 Mar 1990, p.E1]

A lot of frivolous but genuine laughs.

Hardly perfect or fully successful, but it's strange and strangely beautiful -- a unique work of art.

Its impression lingers in the mind, giving the film a longer half-life than it would otherwise deserve.

An awkward comedy made surprisingly bearable, most of the way, by one actress' ability to turn on the charm and sparkle.

Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.

The film's overall construction is faulty. Its dramatic situations ring consistently false, and the story is phony as anything off the Hollywood assembly line. And yet, it's sincere phony.

Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.

At its best, Ajami shows you things you never would have considered or imagined.

This simple premise -- a killer truck stalks a driver -- becomes the basis for an exceptionally fraught and well- made suspense film.

A delightful, witty picture that's short and sweet and presents one of the most accurate depictions of the behavior of teenage boys you're ever going to see on screen. [22 Mar 1991, p.E1]

uUninspired, unnecessary and formulaic.

Sometimes excessiveness and implausibility are virtues in disguise. Movies this enjoyable don't come about by accident.

It starts exploring different facets of its premise and transforms itself into a fairly competent suspense thriller. That's enough to make it respectable, but a few things keep Next from being lovable or memorable.

Does a number of sly things.

In addition to being a smart comedy and an excellent showcase for Grant, it's an honest movie about childhood that avoids sappiness and sentiment and goes in unexpected directions.

The best thing in the movie is Peter MacNicol as Dana's boss at the museum, a slippery character with an incomprehensible accent. [16 Jun 1989, p. E1]

Bogdanovich takes a tale of old Hollywood and infuses it with velocity and enthusiasm.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.

One of the pleasures of Deterrence is that it does not tell the audience what to think.

A formulaic, predictable and yet reasonably likable picture.