Owen Gleiberman

Scored to a disarmingly quaint array of fiddle-and-banjo tunes, The Newton Boys has so little in the way of blood or rancor that before long, you begin to notice that there's no real drama in it, either.

A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.

I didn't mind The Terminal, but I didn't really buy it, either. Spielberg has crafted the film with a proficiency as seamless, and impersonal, as the setting, and you may feel, after a while, that you're longing for your departure time.

As you watch the movie, its central idea — that Jeffrey Dahmer wasn’t just born, he was made; that he started off as an actual human being — has a shocking validity that never undercuts the extremity of his crimes.

This ''satire'' of triple-X raunch and ''Jerry Springer'' sleaze starts off at a pitch of preening dementia and just grows more hysterical from there.

Rendition certainly makes the case that torture, whatever name it goes under, is indefensible, yet one can agree with that view entirely and still feel that the movie is just a borderline exploitation of what anyone who reads the papers already knows.

The problem with the movie isn't that it sells out Rocky and Bullwinkle -- it's that it can't keep up with them.

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

Delectably caustic comedy.

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

The best thing about Revolutionary Road, a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple, is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there.

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.

The difference between The Prince of Tides and a movie like Ordinary People is that Streisand isn’t content with exploring human pain. She had to make it glamorous, too.

The Passenger isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors.

It was only with the advent of digital technology that the notion of an entire film done in a single take became possible. Mike Figgis got there first with ''Time Code,'' and now the Russian director Alexander Sokurov has brought off a comparably startling feat with Russian Ark.

Acting doesn't get more personal, or much greater.

God-awful?Gooding screams out lines like ''I'm about to get in yo' ass like last year's underwear!''

Gremlins 2 is a limited achievement — it’s nothing but the sum of its own whirring pop-culture mechanics. But that’s more than enough to keep you occupied, and occasionally exhilarated.

Like its two predecessors, Scary Movie 3 is a hit-or-miss affair, but the gags that connect really connect.

Presents Glass as a masterfully corrupt fabulist who convinced himself of the ultimate seductive lie, which is that there can't be anything wrong with telling people what they want to hear.

Too often, The Fourth Kind makes the paranormal look disappointingly normal.

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

An action-choked dud in which even the closing outtakes barely deserve to be left on the cutting-room floor?

Traffics in the coyly blasphemous, aren't-we-dysfunctional family-disaster chic that has become the single most annoying trend in independent filmmaking.

Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, an ebullient sliver of a movie, follows a group of men and women in their early 20s, and for once the un-dialogue dialogue doesn't come off as an affectation.

Too arty by half.

When the film version isn't assaulting you with gizmos, it's an awkward, depersonalized piece of hackwork.

Beneath The Corruptor's explosive body count is a rock-solid, visually slick crime thriller set in the squalid netherworld of Manhattan's Chinatown.

Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.

The nature of silent comedy was to elevate its heroes into myths, but after ''Charlie'' I can't wait to see Chaplin's movies again, this time to glimpse the man on the other side of the icon.

The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, the backwaters of showbiz, and true magic. It's a wee charmer that left me enchanted.

It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy.

I can't imagine what Dali or Buñuel would have made of such bourgeois sentimentality.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters.

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.

As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.

In this American remake of the spooky, more-atmospheric-than-coherent 2005 J-horror thriller, the ghosts blink and crackle into existence with an electromagnetic sputter, but really, they're not so different from the gauzy, see-through spirits of yesteryear.

Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes.

Vapid, cutesy, knockabout Western.

An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.

Bullock gives it her all; she's bristling and alive on screen in a way that she hasn't been since ''Speed.''

Atkinson's goofball grotesquerie never lets up -- right through to the inspired finale.

John August directs it briskly, as a gossip-era "Twilight Zone" of image and reality.

This time we expect to be played, but the twist is that we're also touched -- which, the film implies, is the cinema's own form of deception.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable.

Dare, a sweetly sexed-up high school triangle movie, is like a John Hughes comedy trying to pass itself off as ''transgressive.''

The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.

Well acted.

Moves along with a quietude, a scruffy direct plainness that has long gone out of style.

This high-concept update of It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Destiny, is pure formula treacle, but James Belushi, playing a schlub who learns what life would have been like had he become a big executive, is at his most immediate and appealing.

Tame and witless enough to make me long for the ancient, dusty fright kitsch of ''The Munsters.''

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is such an elaborate and satisfying structure of deceit and salaciousness that every attempt I have seen to adapt it on film -- "Dangerous Liaisons," "Cruel Intentions," even the trashy 1959 Roger Vadim version -- has resulted in an entertainment of agreeable nasty elegance. Until now.

Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.

Lands on an imaginative fault line somewhere between tackiness and awe.

Extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of that creaky, derivative, fly-infested, don't-go-in-the-attic boofest.

The plot, which features Lea Thompson as a gold digger scheming to marry Jed, is like something you’d catch on the USA Network at 4 a.m. But enough of beating a dead possum. After sitting through The Beverly Hillbillies, I now realize that the best tribute anyone can make to the pop detritus of our childhood is to let it rest in peace.

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.

Quite honestly, you could nap for an hour and not miss a thing, but when the crew finally makes it to the glowing piles of booty at Treasure Planet's core, the film unleashes some pleasing visual fireworks. That's where it should have started, not ended.

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

Battle of the Smithsonian has plenty of life. But it's Adams who gives it zing.

The movie doesn't so much extend Schwartzman's antic outsider persona from ''Rushmore'' as uglify it, reducing him to the ultimate Uncool Anti-WASP.

The backstories keep piling up, with nods to "The Shining," "The Ring," and a dozen other gothic supernatural chillers, yet the result doesn't remotely scare you.

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.

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made.

Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today.

Stuffed--indeed, overstuffed--with heart, soul, audacity, and blarney. You may not believe a minute of it, but you don't necessarily want to stop watching.

Ari Aster directs slowly, meditatively, purging the film of any of the usual horror-video razzmatazz. Instead, he creates scary coherent spaces for the audience to sink into.

In spirit, I Am Legend is caught in some abstractly doom-laden sci-fi past. For what it is, though, the film is well-done, a case of suspenseful competence trumping questionable relevance.

A dismayingly impersonal piece of anime, genial yet chaotic.

Propulsively outandish thriller.

Falls short of its source.

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?

Volatile yet fairly lunkheaded.

The Wizard of Oz remains the weirdest, scariest, kookiest, most haunting and indelible kid-flick-that's-really-for-adults ever made in Hollywood.

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary.

On the Outs parses the hopes and terrors of blasted lives with an empathy that never cheapens into pity. The movie wounds as much as it heals, and that's its true power.

Stephens stages Another Gay Movie in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny.

Bobby coasts along on a dread, and sorrow, it doesn't earn.

Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.

This strenuously dark biographical Western plays more like a choppy, self-important miniseries.

A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life.

The movie, which strains to be hip in a faux-1985 beat-the-system way, takes such a light view of cheating that it has the ironic effect of rendering the heist that follows utterly innocuous.

The Ugly Truth isn't fizzy and fun -- it's vacuously snappy.

By the end of the movie, you realize that these two have devised nothing less than a media-age alternative to the Nixon era’s dirty tricks. The War Room is a giddy celebration of clean tricks.

Just when you thought it was safe to go to the movies without sitting through another imitation of early Quentin Tarantino, along comes Suicide Kings.

Elegant yet surprisingly remote royal-court drama.

Makes you wish that Newell and company had had the gumption to finish what they so enticingly started.

It Could Happen to You is a syrupy-sweet package undiluted by wit, tartness, observation. It would be easier to enjoy the stars in Charlie and Yvonne’s eyes if the movie didn’t keep patting them on the back.

A fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy.

Through it all, Natalie Maines' decision to shirk humility, to stick by her guns, to the point that the group returns to that London concert venue in 2006 and she utters the same joke again, becomes a feisty and inspiring act of something there is only one word for: patriotism.

Agreeably skewed fun.

At this point, revenge thrillers have become so standardized that these films are really all the same film — a Mixmaster blend of Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon, and Rambo. A star with a personality would only gum up the works.

Bold and brilliant.

A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.

To see Gone With the Wind on a big screen again is to weep for the fearlessness with which Hollywood once believed the sublime was possible.

Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.

The Fugitive is hardly Hitchcock — it never taps our emotions in a way that threatens to transcend the action — but it’s a mainstream thriller made with conviction, intelligence, and heat. In Hollywood, that used to be called professionalism. These days, it’s rare enough to look like artistry.

What's infectious about Groove is the friendly, almost innocent way that its brat pack of digital-age bohemians seek liberation in a world where there is nothing left to rebel against.

Little more than a plodding celebration of global television trumping everything in its midst.

Trekkies is hilarious, fascinating, and, at times, almost scary.

Each of these improv farceurs wins a few laughs. But not enough.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

The movie is MTV Kafka: Instead of dialogue, character, behavior, it has a look and a mood. And that's all it has.

Still the grandest of all science-fiction movies.

Snoop invests snarling meanness with as much authority as Clint Eastwood used to. As an actor, does this Dogg know any more tricks? At this point, he may not have to.

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.

Chabrol has fashioned a mystery that caves in on itself, but unfortunately, it caves in on the audience, too.

A few more films like Tears of the Black Tiger, and kitsch will be on its way to having a bad name.

Stone's latest penance is Gloria, the Sidney Lumet-directed dud that sprung from the singularly bad idea of remaking John Cassavetes' oddball 1980 character study. I mean, really, did anyone even like the original?

A movie's refusal to judge bad behavior can be a subtle way of trumping the audience -- a passive-aggressive form of one-upmanship.

Quick Change starts out fast and loose — it gets the audience primed for a ripsnorting caper comedy. Yet almost nothing that follows is as clever, as surprising, or as casually anarchic as that nifty opening sequence. Murray himself served as codirector, and though he doesn't do anything terribly wrong, the movie lacks comic zest.

The movie is so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that at times it appears to take in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese.

This documentary about the triumph of the New Hollywood employs a treasure trove of interviews and clips to create a rich understanding of the many forces -- cultural undertows, really -- that flowed together to fill the void left by the dying studio system.

A unintentionally funny fanzine-flavored documentary.

Even Watchmen fanatics may be doomed to a disappointment that results from trying to stay THIS faithful to a comic book.

Director Gaspar Noé proved a shock poet in "Irreversible" (2003). In Enter the Void, he's a shockingly tedious show-off.

If you see only one movie this year about a twisted, cuddly, courageous, fatally diseased, self-mutilating love slave, make sure that movie is Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.

U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.

Nothing but mood... it simply has too few surprises to justify its indulgent atmosphere of malignant revelation.

A world-detonation thriller, at once urgent and lazy, that benefits from its connection to current events and also, by the end, suffers from it.

Hurtling and impassioned, driven by some of the greatest popular music ever recorded, this wildly overripe and unkempt biopic is a true experience.

Devious and inspired enough to juice you past any weak spots. Thou shalt be amused.

Vantage Point starts to slide off the rails when it tracks a tourist (Forest Whitaker) and his trusty camcorder; instead of Zapruder-like intrigue, the episode has him running around like an agent in a rote thriller.

The movie is a Disneyfied contradiction: a lapsed-Catholic comedy without a whiff of true blasphemy. Still, on its own fluffy terms, it’s pleasant nunsense.

Wide-ranging and beautifully edited -- it's a vivid evocation of a moment when even the ugliest guitar feedback could be taken as a serious political statement.

Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.

Bilko is a weightless comic creation, and Steve Martin, perhaps sensing this, drifts through the movie with a misplaced balletic goofiness.

To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.

It's Alan Cumming who takes over the movie as the impish mastermind Fegan Floop.

I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever.

The movie walks the line of surreal vulgarity (you will not, repeat not, expect the penis), yet most of it, intentionally, is less nutzoid than your average megaplex genre parody.

Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.

There's nothing drab about the tormented place these men take each other to. You'll want to go along.

With all of that going for it, it's hard to see how In the Line of Fire could be anything less than rock-solid entertainment-and, indeed, it is. Yet it's never more than that.

Presents undercover law enforcement less as a profession than as an accessory, an excuse to pout and glower chicly, to stand around in nightclubs acting like a sullen version of the Last American Rebel.

The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ''simpler times'' gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II.

The dumbing down of low-IQ sentimentality.

Gas Food Lodging is really about the same thing Thelma & Louise was about: It’s a portrait of working-class women betrayed and abandoned by men. Yet I vastly preferred this movie’s generous and buoyant tone.

There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.

By the end, I was starting to ponder questions like, If a vampire mates with a lycan-vamp hybrid, which parent will have to convert?

The movie could have been a lot scarier.

In its hostile sitcom way, Christmas With the Kranks is a paranoid comic nightmare of conformity gone mad.

A gripping documentary that uses voluminous period evidence — unedited news footage, tape recordings of SLA leader Cinque's rants — to brilliantly reconstruct the entire freak event.

This is a movie of fake conflict, fake heart, even fake doggy love.

If anyone steals the movie, though, it's Sylvie Testud, who never lets on whether the sexy French country maid she's playing is mournfully obtuse or embodies the wisdom of the ages.

Charlie's Angels is finally Cameron Diaz's movie. Her Natalie has a heart as insecure as her body is smokin'.

In Pink Flamingos, Waters did something subversive and, in its gross way, quite spectacular: He created his own hell-bent, sick-joke Oz, with Divine as its wicked-witch queen.

If anything, Strange Days belongs to the rotters hovering around its edges: Michael Wincott, a vision of Drano-throated malevolence; Tom Sizemore, who, as Lenny’s bikerish pal, suggests Judd Nelson if he’d let the corruption ooze a little further out of his pores; and the wonderfully weaselly Richard Edson as an underground software techie.

Writer-director John Herzfeld blends violence and top-heavy absurdism, creating a self-conscious muddle of indie-style hackery. Strip away the goofball nihilism, though, and what’s left is as formulaic as any straight-to-tape opus with a title like "Dangerous Instinct."

If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe.

Flubber was more edifying than My Favorite Martian — and more fun.

Let's not sell Tyler Perry short. As the vinegar-witted Madea, he's a drag performer of testy charm, but in his overlit patchwork way he's also making the most primal women's pictures since Joan Crawford flexed her shoulder pads.

At least Ribisi's fake-cojones histrionics are fun. The rest of this "Donnie Brasco" knockoff, with James Marsden as a Gulf War veteran who goes undercover, is a turgid, ketchup-spattered dud.

This is how a Western today tries to give us more bang for the buck. By working this hard to be a crowd-pleaser, though, it may please fewer crowds.

Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.

I wouldn't call Catwoman incompetent, yet it has no visual grandeur, and very little surprise; you can tick off the story beats as if they'd been graphed.

As a romantic comedy, The Back-up Plan is friendly but also a bit drab.

Crystal’s ordinariness — his utter lack of glamour — really works for him here. He’s far more pleasureful to watch in this sort of dramatic-comedy role than, say, Robin Williams, because his comfy, urban-shlemiel personality helps ground the jokes.

Ends up about as exotic as a straight-to-cable potboiler.

As Benny, a small- town Irish teenager in the '50s who goes off to university in Dublin, Minnie Driver has a touchingly awkward prettiness. Her jaw may be as square as a picture frame, but her smile lights her up from within.

A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".

The most gripping performers are on the sidelines: Eric Roberts, a master of hyperbolic sliminess (he’s like Cagney playing a pimp on steroids), and Uma Thurman, who brings her underwritten role a hundred shades of curiosity, brattishness, and hopeless romantic fervor. She couldn’t be a stand-in if she tried.

Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation.

The trouble with Scott’s movies is that they’re not just star vehicles. They’re about the aesthetics of celebrity, about the narcissism that’s going on offscreen. If Revenge ends up knocking Costner down a peg, it’ll be just what he needs — and deserves.

A domestic tragedy of lacerating vision.

With its lyrical vision of oppression, looks, if anything, milder now than it might have before the war.

First Snow is essentially a short story with a metaphysical twist, but Pearce puts his fears more up front than any actor I can think of.

White Squall is lovely to look at, but frustrating to behold.

It's been a while since we saw a demagogic feminist exploitation revenge drama, and Descent, while top-heavy with ''agenda,'' is shrewdly done.

Roberts, in her most forceful dramatic performance, allows us to take in every moment through fresh, impassioned eyes.

Voluptuously engrossing.

As a movie, Wayne's World isn't much more than an amiable goof, yet it's carried along by the flaked-out exuberance of its two stars.

Herzog's fascinating, rambling, love-hate documentary about their friendship and creative partnership, and in its discursive, anecdotal way it gets at the essence of one of cinema's indelible crackpots.

George Lucas is turning into the enemy of fun.

Chain Reaction, while crisply shot, unfolds in an action-suspense-thriller void. The movie’s emblem might be the terse, bureaucratically impersonal performance of Morgan Freeman, who, as the energy project’s chief government liaison, manages to play the film’s most ambiguous character without raising its dramatic temperature one degree.

You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by My Flesh and Blood, but the director, Jonathan Karsh, merges compassion with voyeurism until you can't tell the difference.

"Risky Business" had a great opening act and then descended into contrivances. This genial cardboard knockoff is contrived from the start but gets better as it goes along.

A documentary that digs deep inside this most revolutionary and tortured of punk quartets, it's hard not to feel that the Ramones, who never had a hit record, were the greatest band in 50 years to be stonewalled out of success.

Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.

It's nifty to behold, but about the only drama in Steamboy lies in waiting for this colossal hovering machine-monster to blow a gasket.

A cumbersome dud, grows draggier with each new revelation.

Just about the only way to make sense of the film is to view its Christian family the way that the director, James Marsh, does -- with a contempt masquerading as social criticism. William Hurt, for one, deserves better.

It's a schlockier ''Armageddon'' crossed with ''Fantastic Voyage,'' minus the fun.

A candy store for film buffs.

The scary culminating flashback, in which Stephanie gives birth -- in a public restroom, on a high school ski trip -- is a marvel of authentic disturbance.

An efficient, intense formula thriller.

Costner's surfer-bum affectlessness works here; he turns the Mariner into the world's most jaded lifeguard.

Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.

There are moments of lewd hilarity, like a game of footsie that turns genderifically confused. But Booty Call loses its dirty-minded, how-low-will-they-go-to-get-laid edge when the boys venture out into the New York night to buy condoms.

Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this oasis of romance amid the turmoil of Shanghai represents the way that Merchant and Ivory, for 40 years, saw themselves: as a sanctuary of calming, life-size taste in a movie culture grown coarse. It was often far from perfect, but I'll miss that sanctuary.

Boils down to a performance film with abysmal sound in which you rarely get to see a good, revealing close-up of the stars.

Life desperately wants to let Murphy and Lawrence be actors, but it can't imagine them as anything more than rowdy showmen. That's a kind of prison as well.

The idiocy of the plot is the tip-off that writer-director Roger Avary is really just interested in random displays of nihilistic decadence (e.g., heroin-shooting, prostitute-bashing, lotsa blood).

Who said that an environmental horror film couldn't be didactic and spooky at the same time?

There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.

The film is so committed to its view of Ezra as a pawn in the psychotic game of postcolonial Africa that he is never allowed, as a character, to become more than a pawn.

Journey is just the new version of a 1950s comin'-at-ya roller coaster, with a tape measure, trilobite antennae, and giant snapping piranha thrust at the audience.

At 2.5 hours, 1492 is even harder to sit through than last month’s schlock extravaganza Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. In each case the filmmakers have fallen into a similar trap. Out of some vague mixture of historical ”duty” and commercial myopia, they’ve presented Columbus as the same cardboard visionary we learned about in school.

The folly of Blue Chips is that the film makes this greased-palm corruption seem an even bigger sin than it is. (It's like a political drama made by someone who is shocked, shocked at the sleaze of campaign financing.)

There's something uniquely embarrassing about a rock & roll fable that is no more authentic (and no less coy) than an episode of ''The Monkees'' yet insists on presenting itself as the epitome of rebel-yell cool.

Harold and Kumar, fortunately, never lose their verbally relentless way of delivering raunch as pure common sense.

An experience you won't easily shake.

If any actor could reveal the squirmy soul of a war criminal, it's Caine, so it feels like a cheat when The Statement gives him nothing to portray but self-condemnation.

If you want to know how inept the movie is...well, it's so inept that you may wish you were watching an M. Night Shyamalan version of the very same premise.

The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer.

What holds The Eclipse together is Hinds' sorrowful and moving performance as a man haunted in more ways than one.

Might best be described as bereavement porn.

You could dismiss this swankily shot Latin American trifle as an upscale soap opera, but that would be an insult to soap operas.

At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature.

Stuart Townsend, Theron's reallife boyfriend, may have inner fires as an actor that have yet to be revealed, but in Head in the Clouds he's a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had.

The aerial-dogfight scenes, which are beautiful and shot through with jittery panic, are notable for not being staged for videogame kicks.

The plot is more confusing than clever, and the only actor who seems to be having any fun is Silver, who's at his best throwing masochistic hissy fits at his younger, not-quite-so-evil self.

The film isn't just bad; it's a barely coherent, inert mess -- a heart-tugger for voidoids.

There is much to look at--it's like spending two hours in Michael Jackson's Undead Neverland--but not a lot at stake.

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

One of those terminally annoying, depressive-yet-coy Sundance faves in which the tale of a mopey teen misfit unfolds behind a hard candy shell of irony.

A richly tender and moving experience.

Whenever Sin Nombre turns violent, it seizes you with its convulsive skill, but the film's images vastly outstrip its imagination.

Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.

The movie recapitulates the absurdist tabloid-redneck comedy of the great, original Chainsaw without a hint of its primal terror.

Keeps teasing you with intimations of the libidinous animal within.

Demagogic shallowness has its appeal, and Falling Down could turn out to be the Network of the '90s. By the end, you may wish he'd just gone home and popped a couple of Excedrin instead.

Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.

As the school drama teacher who tries to unlock ''the real,'' Patricia Clarkson makes high theatrical solemnity funny.

A fascinating film -- more docudrama than biopic.

This is a movie so devoted to metal that it couldn't care less about the flesh it destroys.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

The characters twirl around like mini tornadoes, but between random brash moments of technological eye-tickling, Son of the Mask sags more than it spins.

With Mr. Magoo, it’s the filmmakers who seem blind.

While a good deal funnier than ''Deuce Bigelow,'' is still destined to get branded, if not condemned, as ''dumb.''

An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.

Takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.

A glumly serious British mock rock doc: You could forgive the paucity of jokes if Brothers of the Head had anything to say, or if the '70s-vérité surface were remotely convincing.

Best to experience Shaker Heights for what it is: not a movie, exactly, but the true season capper of ''Project Greenlight,'' a series that finds its very drama on the road to mediocrity.

Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards.

The strange thing about Kindergarten Cop is how quickly it abandons its own concept. No sooner has Arnold gotten into class than he's yanked back into the mechanics of the movie's generic thriller plot. Perhaps this wouldn't be as noticeable if there were a few more sparks between Schwarzenegger and the kids.

Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.

In total effect, Prince Caspian feels a lot more earthbound than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

Told in a tricky flashback mode that's vivid even with a few too many temporal kinks, Don't Move is the sort of thing that Claude Chabrol was once praised for making with more pretension and a lot less less juice.

[Sluizer's] original, pitch-black ending would have sent people out of the theater giddy with shock; it’s doubtful anyone will remember his new one long enough to tell their friends.

Funny? Yes, but in its slapdash way, it sounds nuttier than it plays.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is such a miracle of an actress that she makes you respond to the innocence of Sherry's desperate, selfish destruction.

There are some clever and exciting sequences, but this $120 million epic of reconstituted Atomic Age trash lumbers more than it thrills.

The film satirizes, and celebrates, an idea pivotal to both Hollywood and love: that in a world of impostors, the pretender with the most conviction can become exactly what he pretends to be.

Lee's images of black and white stereotypes are agreeably silly yet altogether too thin and vanilla safe.

A kinder, gentler teensploitation comedy, but Hartnett's Matt, at least, invites the audience to graduate to something better.

An act of nose-thumbing that never quite figures out how, or even where, to position its thumb.

It's ''The Matrix'' meets ''TRON'' meets ''Jimmy Neutron,'' with all the cheery (if not cheesy) evanescence of a Jolly Rancher commercial. I mean that as a compliment.

A feel-good movie that doesn't give you enough to feel good about.

If you think it all adds up to a bald-faced rip off of ''The Shining,'' you'd be right, with a crucial difference: Wendigo trades the puffed-up metaphysics of middle-class murder for the no-budget spectacle of...an incredibly fake-looking monster deer.

The picture itself is only mechanically breezy.

Yet S21, unlike many documentaries about the Nazi era, isn't a sickening panorama of brutality. Shot on video, it's quiet and intimate.

The numbers, while lively, remain cluttered and stage-bound. The women, however, are spirited and sexy.

Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear.

It's not every day you get to see a movie that begins in satire and ends in reverence, but then, for Kevin Smith, they may ultimately be the same thing.

Moore doesn't just act. She goes on the attack, embracing the kind of lower-rung-of-the-middle-class role that actresses from Jodie Foster to Meryl Streep have long savored. Her performance is an achievement of sorts, yet, like the movie itself, it's also strenuous and joyless.