Owen Gleiberman

I kept wondering how Arcand could have chosen as his generational representative a man not just flawed in his hedonism but one so fundamentally lacking in tenderness for others.

Emperor explores the delicate postwar dance of revenge, justice, and realpolitik, yet its focus on the issue of Hirohito's guilt or innocence (did he order the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or did he, in fact, oppose the Japanese military machine?)

This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.

This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

Works cleverly because it emerges right out of the everyone's-an-exhibitionist YouTube age

A throwback to the age when Westerns were quaint.

The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.

Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.

Lonely Hearts never locates the key to the killers' bloody bond.

Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.

A film of droll and dry observational precision, its emotional minimalism is almost fetishistic -- and, by the end, a tad frustrating.

After all of its sadness, a tender redemptive glow.

The Bridge crosses a disquieting line.

Trash, but always just a little creepier than you expect.

The film, though sleek and easy to sit through, replaces genuine dramatic involvement with a superficial, rock & roll empathy-it's as though we were watching Cruise's character and playing air guitar to his emotions. There are plenty of soulless movies around. What's special about Days of Thunder is that it works overtime trying to convince you it's not one of them.

There are laughs to be had, yet the movie is, if anything, more strenuous than it is funny.

Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.

Basic Instinct 2 isn't bad, exactly, but it lacks the entertaining vulgarity of the first film; it's Basic Instinct redone with more ''class'' and less thrust.

This sweetly downtrodden, punch-drunk Rocky is often appealing to watch. Yet as a character, he doesn’t have much drive — and neither, I’m afraid, does the movie.

An eminently easy-to-watch piece of one-joke pop japery, is a movie that mimics the I'm-a-character-in-my-own-life metaphysical playfulness of "The Truman Show."

Minghella's adaptation of the 1997 Charles Frazier novel is emotionally detached and almost too studiously carpentered: a willed exercise in mythmaking.

The more I sat through it, the more it won me over in its very benign high-concept way. It's like "City Slickers" remade for the Discovery Channel.

Seth Green is uproarious as an Amish farmer who speaks in sentences so passive-aggressive, they're like tiny slaps.

A marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere.

Branagh did a nice job of directing "Thor," but all he can do here is try to energize the recycled pulp of the script.

It's a death-wish revenge thriller posing as a lavishly pastoral historical epic.

As a piece of escapism, this deluxe, action-heavy, 2-hour-and-21-minute Robin Hood gets the job done. You’re carried along by plot, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero. Costner doesn’t disgrace himself — he has the star presence the role demands. What he’s not is an impassioned Robin Hood. And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge.

The film hinges on too many conventional crises (a car accident, a divorce), but the fact that Burns is better at atmosphere than story isn't all bad.

Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.

We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.

It's just a camcorder soap opera of packaged hormonal fervor -- ''The Real World'' with extra tequila body shots.

Quills bleaches the danger -- and fascination -- out of De Sade, turning him into a kind of mad saint of ''Masterpiece Theatre'' porn.

The chintzy characters, hair-raising deaths, and one spectacular rocket-launcher joke aren't enough to give "Hostel" a run for its blood.

The movie, for all its sincerity, becomes clinical and repetitious, though its unsparing vision of the fragility of identity can give you a shudder.

It understands, in a way that speaks forcefully enough about the mechanisms of poverty to transcend the rather simplistic filmmaking.

The General, for all its panache, is ultimately an unsatisfying movie. The reason, I think, is that Boorman’s slightly puerile romanticization of Cahill keeps getting in the way of the reality he’s showing us.

Scott, working from a script by William Monahan, is so busy balancing our sympathies, making sure no one gets offended, that he has made a pageant of war that would have gotten a thumbs-up from Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.

The convolutions of Turow’s plot remain absorbing, and Presumed Innocent is certainly as watchable as a lot of other courtoom-investigative thrillers. Yet almost everything in the picture feels sterile and posed. Pakula is good at laying out an intricate, almost mathematical series of events (his best film remains All the President’s Men), but he’s not big on atmosphere. The movie could have used some of the bowels-of-the-city grit Sidney Lumet brought to Q & A.

The trouble with all this is that it's thin movie tinsel that, while lovingly polished, never becomes more than tinsel. The Good Thief has a glib stylishness (the rapid freeze-frames at the end of scenes signify...nothing), yet it lacks a blast of reality to balance its fable.

Sherlock Holmes is an odd amalgam, a top-heavy light entertainment that keeps throwing things at you and doesn't seem too concerned with whether they stick.

Sparkle is never more than an overheated mediocrity. The one thing it isn't, however, is dull.

Were women put on earth to be warriors? Demi Moore certainly was. The role of Jordan fits her as snugly as a new layer of muscle.

A chintzy melodrama gussied up as hair-trigger combat ''reality,'' but there's no denying the vividness with which the French cowriter-director Elie Chouraqui has visualized the chaos of Croatia.

There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as The Road seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.

Did Scott, too, get hooked by the 1998 Spanish film ''Open Your Eyes?'' Intentionally or not, he has made ''Overcast Vanilla Sky.''

The best thing in The Count of Monte Cristo is Guy Pearce's snot-nosed hauteur. He gives this scoundrel some wounded edges, and frills as well.

Little more than a lavish, art-directed slasher movie.

Blades of Glory has funny moves even when its characters can barely move, but the film seldom gets past its one basic laugh: that a real man figure-skating is a contradiction in terms.

If Microsoft and Nike ever merged into one corporate megalith (MicroNike?) and commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to direct its visionary new Super Bowl commercial, the result might look something like Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi.

Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut as a wistful wanderer, is a beautiful blank, and the fragments barely add up to a movie.

Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.

Is it, you know, fun? At times. Yet there's a rote quality to the way this half-dumb, half-sly movie resolves itself into an intentional debauch, a pileup of villainy and heavy metal. The only California dream it leaves you with is one of wretched excess.

As a big-screen comedy, Coneheads isn’t all that funny either, yet it’s blithe and inventive and surprisingly light on its feet.

What Salles doesn't conjure is the rapture of Kerouac's bohemian romanticism. Without it, On the Road is a remote experience, all reason and no rhyme.

By the end, you may marvel at the film's worldly-wise wink of maturity. You may also think, Is that all?

The movie should have been called Diary of a Wimpy Forrest Gump. It's genuinely soft-hearted (you're all but guaranteed to cry) but mush-brained, too.

Provides genial chuckles, but it's never excitingly rude.

At least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.

The film is more than a little in love with the corruption it finds under the floorboards -- and that, of course, is perfectly dandy. I wouldn't trust a film noir that wasn't enthralled by decadence.

This digitized update, with Jason Lee as a huskier, more generic Underdog, mostly drops the doggerel, but the endearing airborne-beagle effects help to offset the formula twists.

The plot, which spins around Allegra's lovers having just been an item, is awkward bedroom farce, but the tone is Woody Allen-meets-"The L Word," with a patina of literary cuteness that now seems like the sound of a vanished Manhattan.

An extended framing device set in the present day, with Kathy Bates as a put-upon housewife who becomes the fierce, confident, new-and-improved ”Tawanda,” is the sort of ghastly idea that gives feminism a bad name. The movie left me wishing its sterling cast — including a radiant Jessica Tandy — had been better served.

As a sinister ESP showman, Robert De Niro is corny and fun.

The War Within plays effectively off our voyeurism, yet it has such a cloistered, American-eyed view of the nightmare of terrorism that I kept searching for the profound explanation beneath its piecemeal ones.

There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.

I call Piranha 3D ''exploitation,'' rather than a quality scare movie, because it serves up well-timed gross-outs instead of genuine suspense and because the movie has no pretense of providing character, plot, acting, or dialogue that's anything more than boilerplate.

Where Broadcast News mourned the trivialization of the nightly news, Morning Glory asks you to learn to stop worrying and love the trivia.

The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose.

The movie keeps you occupied, but in a processed, unexciting way.

It's hard to buy this relationship even for a moment. Adam is sweet, meticulous, and, at times, sort of clever, but it's also a not-quite-surprising-enough heartwarming trifle.

The Crossing Guard is a work of talent and, on occasion, raw passion, but it's also a willed exercise in purgative alienation (imagine "Death Wish" remade by Michelangelo Antonioni).

Latifah coasts on grit and verve, and Holmes has a goggle-eyed sweetness, but it's Keaton who rules.

A fable of money as the root of jealousy, discord, violence, but the film's slippery fascination as sociological exposé is the flip side of its thinness as drama.

Wallace, unfortunately, writes lazy, anachronistic dialogue, and the picture is abysmally shot (by Peter Suschitzky), with a prosaic, low-budget look that never allows you to experience the enraptured majesty of a fairy-tale historical setting.

Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn't see him.

Displays a promise it doesn't, in the end, live up to. See it for Swinton's embodiment of unadulterated maternal will.

Evokes the intimacies of teenage girls with unusual delicacy, and Perabo's performance is a geyser of emotion.

A silly, amusing trifle.

What defines the slacker-geek twentysomething men and women who wander through Joe Swanberg's too-hip-to-be-romantic comedy Hannah Takes the Stairsis that they treat their libidos as minor accessories -- only to stammer through every casual conversation as if they were on a first Internet date.

It's an energetic stunt of a movie, and it wants to make us sweat like it's 1974.

Duke is out to blend the commercial, gut-wrenching pleasures of an inner- city shoot-’em-up with the complex moral rage that marked such black-cinema touchstones as Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971).

But now we're a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized, shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X-Men team. She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud.

Saw is a gristle-cut B psycho thriller that would like to tap the sickest corners of your imagination. It has a few moments of nightmare creepiness, but it's also derivative and messy and too nonsensical for its own good.

The movie has a hushed sensual resonance, but it turns faith into an endurance test.

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.

Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip.

To turn fondly remembered TV trash into a movie that knows it's cruddy -- and that isn't, therefore, quite as cruddy as it might have been -- takes a perverse pinch of talent, if not style.

Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone.

Too fragmented to be much more than a flip of the finger to history; the movie, with its mostly mute characters, is too content to plod.

Step Up 3D isn't, in dramatic terms, a very good movie, but it's the first film in a while to use 3-D as more than a marketing ploy; it points toward an original way of making a musical.

The story has more holes than the bodies do, but the shocks are efficient, and Party of Five's Jennifer Love Hewitt knows how to scream with soul.

Blue Steel lacks sustained storytelling craftsmanship, and it never approaches the saturnine intensity of the film it sometimes recalls, Michael Mann’s Manhunter (the greatest thriller of the past decade). But it makes you eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script.

Curse of the Golden Flower is a watchable soap opera, but its marching-band martial-arts scenes are little more than weakly staged retreads of the ones in Zhang's "Hero."

As long as it stays in the air, Red Tails is a compelling sky-war pageant of a movie. On the ground, it's a far shakier experience: dutiful and prosaic, with thinly scripted episodes that don't add up to a satisfying story.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the new cartoon of Curious George, featuring the voice of Will Ferrell as the Man in the Yellow Hat, doesn't veer all that far from the soothing tone of the books.

Zucker gives the Camelot legend a makeover and rediscovers its humanizing fire. He has made a true adult fairy tale, only with a heart of glass.

Left wing? Right wing? Center? Who cares, as long as Bruce Willis is saving the world.

Perry is of the spell-everything-in-capital-letters and act-it-out-loudly schools. Yet his sensitivity to women is a tonic.

Reilly, in his 70s, takes us through his hilariously awful childhood: Eugene O'Neill as toxic high camp.

Scene for scene, the duo are in good form. Yet this is one case where more turns out to be less.

The film's argument against overly literal Bible readings may not preach to anyone but the converted, and when For the Bible Tells Me So strays from scripture, its ardent plea for sexual freedom within modern Christian life grows a bit too late-night PBS generic.

A highly conventional 2-D infomercial.

Epic Movie is just timely enough to conclude with a wink and a nod to Borat. I only wish that it had been bold enough to go Borat on HIM.

Sneakers is an agreeably lightweight caper thriller that has absolutely nothing to do with Reeboks or basketball.

The movie, after a while, drifts into an all too literal parable of the limits of never leaving the house.

The movie's got bounce. Spanked along by a soundtrack that has a surprising punky bite for something aimed at 13-year-olds.

The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!

Batman Returns offers many jolts of pleasure, yet it’s also a mess — a gilded sketchbook of a movie that keeps falling open to random pages.

I don’t think Apocalypse Now Redux is superior to the 1979 version. Quite the contrary, it’s draggier and more portentous, more inflated with its own importance.

It's an energetic, watchable mess.

The story is too patterned and too contrived.

By the end, the pieties of Nell fall into place all too neatly.

Clever and smooth, yet, like Angèle herself (or Nathalie Baye), the film is almost too placid for its own good.

A thriller that holds less interest - and less water - the more it reveals about what's actually going on.

As long as Revanche focuses on the relationship between Tamara (Irina Potapenko), an indentured Ukrainian prostitute, and Alex (Johannes Krisch), the ex-con gofer and would-be tough guy who wants to help her escape, it's riveting.

The film's fragmentary structure, though, is suspect. It says that the soldiers find no real meaning in their combat actions, yet Gunner Palace presents the operations we're seeing in so little context, reducing them to a random hash of ''sensational'' moments, that Tucker at times appears to be exploiting the war to create a didactic canvas of manic military unease.

Even those who may agree with Cho's agenda are never allowed to forget that it is an agenda.

Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter.

Payback is a thriller so mean and degraded it carries a low-down, vicious charge. Sadism is its only real subject, and its only real life as well.

Even as the director, Stephen Daldry, places his star front and center, he doesn't know how to highlight him.

Much of what happens in The Paperboy is so luridly bizarre you can't quite believe what you're seeing.

As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an exposé of how the new globalized industry of sex trafficking really works, it's a disquieting, eye-opening bulletin.

While I was watching Madea's Big Happy Family, I couldn't deny that it PLAYS. Madea, as always, is a figure of towering low-down wit.

Zookeeper (I can't believe I'm even writing this) is a dumbed-down "Paul Blart."

Much of Big Daddy looks like it was made up on the spot, but Sandler, with his bad-dog eagerness to get caught in the act of misbehaving, pulls you through it.

A lackluster affair — smooth and mildly pleasant, with some honest chuckles but without Brooks’ special, prosaic madness.

It’s a measure of the film’s middlebrow kitschiness that its centerpiece sequence turns out to be a tasteful soft-core version of the lesbian ravishment of Marilyn Chambers in "Behind the Green Door."

Told in Campion’s fancifully fractured style, An Angel at My Table is very accomplished, but it’s also an epic act of perversity: a 2-hour-and-38-minute movie about a wallflower.

Efficient, uninspired sequel.

Berlin is far from the lost masterpiece the movie wants it to be.

Eden lacks the technique to give its stifled domestic-erotic feelings their full power.

The movie is ''Rosemary's Suburban Baby'' without a witch in sight.

The characters in Memphis Belle may have ethnic names, but in spirit the actors are all playing WASPs — fresh-faced, pretty-boy WASPs, the kind that make the little girls swoon. It’s Dead Poets Society Goes to War.

A gilded entry in the cinema du quirk. It's a movie that invites you, all too often, to feel superior to the people on screen.

Leap Year could have used more pizzazz.

A truly titillating and truly convoluted tale of l'amour fou. Perhaps the American remake could be titled ''Hot Fudge Ripple Sky.''

As a lissome art restorer, Asia Argento (the director's daughter) comes off as the sanest human on screen, which is pretty scary.

It's a romantic noir chase thriller made in the violently schlocky spirit of Sam Peckinpah's "The Getaway."

Gracious, if meandering.

In his curdled-butterball way, Jiminy Glick may be the most acidic showbiz send-up since Andy Kaufman's Tony Clifton. This movie, though it has its moments, is a pedestal he didn't need.

The best reason to see Melinda and Melinda is Radha Mitchell, who has her grabbiest role (or two of them) since she broke through with "High Art."

Del Toro lays on the operatic head-trip gore, but his heavy-handed embrace of the ''Blade'' mythology allows Wesley Snipes to give more of a performance than he did in the first film.

Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.

Ritter, who's like the young Ethan Hawke on a bender of violence, is an actor to watch.

It’s a pensive and heartfelt movie, assuming that you let yourself get caught up in its moody-minimalist, more-visual-than-verbal style.

With its cowlike Cinderella heroine pining for forbidden love while she slaves over her bewitching recipes (and knits a shawl as long as a city block), Like Water for Chocolate offers old-fashioned romantic masochism-Harlequin pulp-dressed up in a magical-realist veneer. It makes being a happy homemaker seem wondrous again.

Madea is still a witty character, but the gutter wisdom of her tossed-off verbal hand grenades can’t shock us anymore; even the outtakes that play through the closing credits feel like reruns.

The Lucky Ones isn't dull, and the actors do quite nicely, especially McAdams, who's feisty, gorgeous, and as mercurial as a mood ring.

Cyrus, as always, is a professional charmer (it's hard to resist when she leads a hip-hop hoedown), and the crusty folkiness of Billy Ray Cyrus as her real-life dad is as welcome as ever.

The film has lots of energized mayhem, and Murphy's unraveling of the conspiracy against him isn't dumbed down, yet it's as if the comic-book action poetry of the original has been encased in a suit of generic armor.

A bit of a clone itself, but it's got a crackerjack helicopter chase, a semblance of a script, and a sotto voce performance by Robert Duvall as a biotech genius who murmurs sweet nothings to his dying cloned wife.

For a movie like Wrath of the Titans, which is basically "Gladiator" crossed with "Lord of the Rings" crossed with a special-effects demo reel (call it Lord of the Rinky-Dink), he's (Worthington) the perfect actor.

Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.

I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.

The Fourth War is an old-soldiers-never-die movie — an ironic elegy — and though much of the story is contrived and second-rate, Scheider gives a richly felt performance.

Donovan, acting with ironic reserve, hands the movie to Morse, who makes his character the kind of crank you can care about just because he's so abysmally lost.

Director Jon Turteltaub has fun with Indian glyphs, giant stone pulleys, and an Indy Jones-worthy City of Gold located beneath the rocky shoals of Mount Rushmore.

Sometimes clever and enjoyable, even touching, yet too often the film makes you feel as if you're in Sunday school.

The future-shock details are witty, the sets and skyscapes spectacular. Besson may not be a good director, exactly, but he's a wizard at retrofitting cliches.

As computer-generated special effects have grown more advanced, they threaten to overwhelm such minor matters as story, character, and emotion. This, however, is not a problem in Flubber (Walt Disney), an agreeably unhinged slapstick jamboree.

The hero remains such an exhibitionistically cocky, walled-off jerk that Flannel Pajamas' glib conversational ''candor'' yields no mystery. And that's a problem in two hours of talk.

The movie's musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful.

The Craft should please teenage girls at malls everywhere. But the film ends up descending into moralizing blahness. Most of the special effects are routine (the girls levitate like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice), though there is one memorable bit: a nightmare featuring enough snakes, bugs, and slithery maggots to make Indiana Jones go gulp.

Messy and scattershot, with a plot that's little more than a dirty version of ''Flubber.''

Director Abel Ferrara stages the violence in electrifying spasms, and Walken, with his undead complexion, his jittery line readings, and his stare of cold rage, mesmerizes the camera.

Chris Evans is blithely likable despite a few faux-Cruise mannerisms, Basinger makes a vividly frightened yet resourceful woman in peril, and William H. Macy scores as a mild L.A. cop who lets out his inner macho.

Anastasia has the Disney house style down cold, yet the magic is missing. Perhaps that's because the story's somber emotional hook--Anastasia's thwarted desire for home--is asserted rather than dramatized.

The snappish domestic infighting is effectively staged, yet beneath its ''raw'' atmosphere Daybreak traffics in pop-sociological clichés.

By laying on disasters with a trowel, misses the chance to sweep us up into a more elegant fantasy of primitive mountaintop terror.

It was an effective choice to shoot these majestic creatures vérité-style, with a jittery camera, but Trollhunter, unfortunately, is such an under-imagined knockoff of The Blair Witch Project that whenever the trolls aren't on screen, it verges on tedium.

Has more atmosphere than it does coherence; it's a series of floating tricks and gambits in search of a resolution. Even so, Ye's ''Vertigo'' fever is contagious.

New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening.

Vincent & Theo looks and feels like a half-baked PBS drama, and at two hours and 20 minutes the movie is hopelessly plodding. Still, see it for Roth, whose warts-and-all portrait of Van Gogh is an offbeat triumph.

Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

Is any of this, you know, fun? Just barely. But I'm sure I would have loved it at 6.

Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel.

He can barely skate, but it hardly matters: As a goon, he's a genius.

If there were a scale for measuring how much of a movie’s substance was pure plastic, Nine Months, the new maternity comedy directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), would surely register dangerously high polymer levels.

The dialogue has a perky synthetic sheen, and with the exception of Diaz, Meyers brings out the best in her actors.

As Factory Girl more than acknowledges, Edie Sedgwick's downward spiral was ultimately her own doing. Yet even as the film captures the silk-screen outline of her rise and fall, it never quite colors in who she was.

Ritchie made a movie that never pretends to be more than a guilty pleasure of soft-core kitsch, and Madonna and Giannini (son of Giancarlo, costar of the original) achieve a lively S&M chemistry.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.

Works just like a Tenacious D song. The movie feels giddy and eruptive, dopily enthralled with itself, and more or less made up on the spot.

Neeson and Brosnan are supremely well-matched foils, though I do wish that the filmmaker, David Von Ancken, had lent his sparsely mythic tale just a twinge of something...new.

The movie is never dull, though, and Cage acts every moment as if he means it. As the cult's leader, Guy Pearce, looking deeply creepy with a shaved head, has a cruel playfulness.

You wish that Malena's inner life had been given as much accent as her outer charms.

The director-cowriter, Brian Dannelly, has great fun tweaking the way American Christianity has been born again as a commodified, suburbanized, pop-saturated belief system.

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

The movie is creepy, but it has no texture or depth. It's like "The Omen" directed by Miranda July.

In the end, the movie says that the President's private life matters, all right -- that Shepherd should get the girl and reestablish his leadership by giving in to the noble liberal he always was inside. Even for a modern Capra fable, that's a bit much to swallow.

Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power -- a design but not a vision.

Klown, a comedy from Denmark about two men on a canoe trip who descend into all sorts of desperate debauchery, demonstrates how the semi-improv, jitter-cam mode of filmmaking has gone from being a style to a tic - a way to disguise how unreal a movie can be.

What’s missing from Jungle Fever, I think, is a vision of the positive. By that, I don’t mean some shallow ”optimistic” message but, rather, an organic and casual sense of pleasure as one of the sustaining currents of everyday life — even in a country as mired in racism as this one.

This morphing of "The Bad News Bears" and a "Three Stooges" episode parades its dumbness with such zip that it almost passes for clever.

Grodin always seems like a real guy, whereas Stiller, even working it, is just the designated loser-clown of the megaplex era. He's too harmless to break any hearts.

After a while, you truly start to see the formula gears churning, but given that, it helps to have an actress like Mary Steenburgen, who at 60 still possesses an amazing glow, as well as a snappier comic timing than ever.

Shouldering a laconic-good-guy, neo- Gary Cooper role, Robbins never quite makes emotional contact with the audience.

The result is a musical that substitutes irony for pop passion, misanthropic disjointedness for lyrical flow.

The (mild) intrigue of Travellers & Magicians is that its central figure, Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), rolls his eyes at Buddhist karma.

Delpy wrote and directed this study of a relationship heading (it would seem) for the rocks. She stages it with a funny and diverting improv-y flow.

A fun-in-the-sun heist caper that director Brett Ratner stages as if he were the activities director of a cruise ship.

Busch, looking like a depressed Stockard Channing, throws his tantrums with breathy ''aristocratic'' hauteur. Yet the movie winds up walking a line between put-on pastiche and kitsch passion, and Jason Priestley is perfect as a brooding lunkhead of Tab Hunter gigolo-osity.

This Myers is more problem child than bogeyman.

I do wish that Evans were a better storyteller. When he isn't turning mad-dog violence into visual rock & roll, The Raid shreds narrative coherence to ribbons.

Worth seeing.

I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.

God Grew Tired of Us never brings us half as close to its subjects as the far more penetrating "Lost Boys of Sudan" did in 2004.

The movie is a veritable scrapbook of tropes from the heyday of art film. Maybe that's why it feels gauzy and quaint. Yet time passes pleasantly.

It may seem harmless, to some, that our movies have never entirely abandoned the land of Poitier-ville, but as Hart's War demonstrates, it's an insult that they haven't.

The past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.

An insider nostalgia trip for graying art punks. It could have been called ''When We Were Cool,'' and it's finally so cool that it freezes you out.

Has so little fire that Welles himself would have wondered out loud what he was doing stuck in the middle of it.

Emily Bergl plays the misfit heroine -- pale Goth grrrl Rachel Lang -- with a nicely sulky empathy, equal parts hurt and hope.

Bay, at heart, isn't a fantasist; he's a literal-minded maestro of demolition.

As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly.

Worth seeing for Bacon's lived-in minimalist purgatory, but the movie soft-pedals the nature of the desires he's at war with: the fact that they will never go away.

The new Alfie is so irresistible that he hardly requires contempt. Without it, the movie is little more than a feature-length roll in the hay.

Bad Boys II proves that it's possible to pack a movie with so much popcorn that it leaves the audience overdosed.

Despite the don't-look-down Olympian settings, Cliffhanger's spirit is brutal and earthbound.

The Incredible Hulk is just a luridly reductive and violent B movie -- one that clears a bar that hadn't been set very high.

There’s no denying the movie gets a rise out of us, but it does so by mining the fears within our hokiest prejudices.

Mad Dog and Glory turns out to be a light-spirited urban fairy tale. Despite occasional flashes of violence, its atmosphere is one of moonstruck romanticism.

Starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch.

Has an appealing modesty, but director Juan José Campanella works so hard to keep everything soft and winsome and charming that he cushions the understatement into blandness.

What the movie needed was the kind of dark explosion of star temperament that Sean Penn brought to 1983’s Bad Boys. Still, give Hackford this: He does a vivid job of taking you places you may not think you’d want to go.

It's doubtful you'll ever see a combat documentary that channels the chaos of war as thoroughly as this one.

It would be tempting to describe the Up movies as a miracle in the history of nonfiction filmmaking, if they didn't also represent one of the cinema's most singularly squandered opportunities.

It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

The fact that Ed's life has been channeled into entertainment never achieves much tension or comic zest. That's because Howard thinks in cookie-cutter ''situations'' to begin with.

With Ethan and Janie sharing folkie duets, it has a certain small, wan charm, like a father-daughter gloss on "Once." Breslin is a clear-eyed delight.

Almost everything that frames the drug dealer's tale is facile and second-rate. Simply put, you don't believe it. What you do believe is DMX's cruel charisma.

Star Trek VI is just pleasantly diverting, business-as-usual hokum.

In Date Movie, the hormones, anxiety, and princess jealousy that fuel the majority of Hollywood love stories are made so excessive that the romance itself is revealed to be...every bit as big a crock as it usually is.

The writers act shocked at how low they are stooping, but given their desire to write sitcoms, you have to wonder.

Fails to recapture the elemental magic of Star Wars, and that, ironically, is because it represents the coarse culmination of the original film's adrenaline aesthetic.

In essence, this is an indie Adam Sandler comedy, and when its heroes are psyching themselves up for the big event, it's kind of funny. But the orgy doesn't make you laugh - it makes you cringe.

For all its promising elements, Night and the City confronts us, yet again, with one of the most dismaying paradoxes in contemporary movies: that the actor who once seemed the heir to Brando, Clift, and, yes, Widmark — the actor who once got so far inside his roles that he just about detonated the screen — now plays characters who don’t seem to have any inner life at all.

At once overly episodic and playfully arty, like a TV movie made by Fellini.

Crassly enjoyable.

I'm not exactly sure this is a situation that a lot of people are going to identify with. More to the point, it gives the movie a faulty design. Dylan and Jamie sleep together and get along famously. Where's the dramatic motor?

The movie settles into a mode of nice, sweet, safe, and -- sorry, I have to say it -- slightly dull family fun.

Kutcher, who gives his most energized performance to date, and Diaz, darting between the caustic and shrill, look as if they're warming up to groovy hate sex, not love, which may be why the film goes flat the moment it turns friendly.

The fight scenes are vicious, demagogic, and thoroughly exciting.

The double role suits Rockwell perfectly -- in fact, it suits him a little too well.

Yet here, as before, part of the movie's perversely cheeky design is that it throws away its own cleverness.

The surprise -- and intermittent delight -- of Connie and Carla is the way that it taps into the everybody-is-a-star passion of the new sing-along culture.

The film never conveys that something larger is at work - like, say, the hand of fate. And without that, there's more busyness than beauty to Brontë.

Has a loosey-goosey, what-the-hell spirit that's easy and fun to hook into.

I've seen far worse thrillers than A Perfect Murder, but the movie is ultimately more competent than pleasurable.

In the lurid and gonzo Raising Cain, writer-director Brian De Palma doesn’t just rip off Alfred Hitchcock. He rips off himself ripping off Hitchcock: He rides over the top of self-parody into a kind of loony-tunes reflexivity.

Parenthood seems only half aware of Eliza's REAL problem: that she thinks she's superior to the choices she's made.

It gradually loses wattage. Robertson, however, is a real sparkler.

A lot of thrillers have asked us to identify with assassins -- but I'd be hard-pressed to name one that makes a hitman as sympathetic, if not sentimental, as The Memory of a Killer.

Well acted.

Wolf Creek, an unusually crisp and boldly shot "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" knockoff, looks as ancient and patterned as a druidic ritual.

A trashy teen derivative of The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and every other retro-future fantasy that director Mark L. Lester could cram into the compactor.

Austenland is kind of a one-joke movie, and the film's rhythm is a bit flaccid, but the joke, at least, has a twinge of wit.

If Point of No Return is trash, it’s slick, diverting trash.

The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.

Sin, more stylized than the director’s previous work, is also more detached.

Beautiful Creatures, more than the "Twilight" films, lacks danger and momentum. The audience, like Ethan, spends way too much time waiting around for Lena to learn whether she's a good girl or a bad girl.

As someone who has warmed up to Anderson's work only gradually, I'd call this a step back for him, but I also can't help but wonder: Will he ever take that crucial step forward and stop saying, Isn't it ironic?