Owen Gleiberman

The movie, a piece of luridly baroque metaphysical trash, is about a Vietnam veteran who keeps getting jolted by demonic visions.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

Marcia Gay Harden is an angry vulgarian who steals shampoo off the maids' carts and bribes a lawyer to get her baby. Sayles may not have planned it this way, but Harden makes crassness as powerful as any maternal instinct.

The Punisher is a moronically inept and tedious piece of death-wish trash.

Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.

It's been a while since we saw a bad John Hughes comedy, and Are We There Yet? more than fits the bill (even though Hughes had absolutely nothing to do with it).

Achieves the near-impossible: It turns the Marquis de Sade into a dullard.

Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

It's like Woodstock without the mud, and it leaves you feeling clean.

It doesn't take long to figure out that Shadowboxer 's Helen Mirren, as a cancer-ridden hitwoman, and Cuba Gooding Jr., as her doting stepson, are the most unconvincing team of hired assassins in movie history.

It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there.

Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

What makes Double Impact, for all its dull-witted theatrics, an energizing experience is the picture’s astonishing level of ballistic mayhem.

Most of The River Wild moves at an annoyingly maladroit, stop-and-go tempo — it feels too much like a camping trip — and almost nothing that happens is very believable.

Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.

It's not every comedy that can make you laugh with ridicule and cringe in empathetic horror at the same time.

Forget Devo, Nico, Bowie, or Beefheart: The most mesmerizing freak show in the history of rock & roll was Klaus Nomi.

If you want a whiff of how unironic the 1970s were, consider bowling, a sport that on any given weekend was broadcast (usually on ABC) with the hushed solemnity of a moon launch.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is an utterly depersonalized thrill machine, yet it’s exactly the film’s go-go relentlessness that is likely to make boys and girls eat it up.

Anthology films usually work better in theory than execution, but this feature parade of shorts is a blithe, worldly, and enchanting exception.

Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.

The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.

Has none of the crisp passion or suspense of the 1957 Sidney Lumet version; it's bloated, heavy-handed, and lugubrious.

The film is so brazen about its pandering, crumple-hearted silliness that it had me rooting for Vardalos to land her big fat Greek stud-muffin.

A derisively vicious show-off satire, a plastic exercise in authority bashing.

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.

It may be an accidental historical parallel that, at times, we seem to be watching a 19th-century version of ''The John Walker Lindh Story,'' but the fluke is only enhanced by the weird anonymity of Ledger's performance.

Sadly, the movie indicates that Polanski’s erotic narcissism may have consumed not just his life but, by all appearances, his art as well.

The Shadow, like 1991’s The Rocketeer, tries to pass off its retro thinness as a quasi joke, but it’s a desperate strategy. The filmmakers seem to be kidding everyone — the audience and themselves — and that just leaves us waiting for this particular flashback to fizzle away.

In a world ruled by process, is compassion still real? Or is it just another scam? In Ocean's Thirteen, it is deviously, and merrily, both.

After a rich, anecdotal first half, Fresh, inspired by the lessons of his derelict-chess-whiz father (Samuel L. Jackson), ends up setting his own human chess game in motion. You may not believe a minute of it, though you won’t forget Nelson’s face.

For a light comedy, The Nanny Diaries turns out to have an off-putting theme. It glorifies the romance of slumming.

He's a bombs-away provocateur, and in Religulous, Maher's blasphemous detonation of all things holy and scriptural, he doesn't really pretend to play fair. He's like Lenny Bruce with an inquiring mind and a video camera.

The movie is short on wisdom, but it might have gotten by if it had had better filth.

It's a dispirited, galumphing mess.

The film’s most distinctive, if obnoxious, feature is the coy, look-at-what- an-adorable-doofus-I-am clowning of Adam Sandler, who here, as on Saturday Night Live, parades his ironic infantilism.

So riddled with cultural stereotypes, woe-is-me neurotic mopiness, and glib therapeutic compassion that by the end all it leaves you with is a waxy buildup of falseness.

Alive is an unsettling contradiction: a well-intentioned gross-out movie. It may be the first film in history to say that cannibalism is good for you.

Tells a moldy-oldie, not-nearly-as-nasty-as-it-thinks-it-is joke. Over and over again.

A canny, derivative, wildly gruesome portrait of a London sociopath who's the scariest of sadists, in part because he's also a very courtly one.

The quaint racial blinders are really on the eyes of the filmmaker, Peter Hedges, who shoves his characters into the narrowest of sitcom slots and seals them there.

Nearly four decades ago, Pontecorvo anatomized the very form of modern terrorist warfare: the hidden cells, the cultish leaders, the brutish cycle of attack and counterattack.

Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high.

Soapdish makes the tackiness of soap operas seem far more desperate than funny.

A shudder-by-numbers pseudo-J-horror gothic, full of supernatural stunts you feel as if you've seen before the movie even gets to them.

Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.

It's obligatory for a horror film to feature exploitative sex as an appetizer, but Roth, even as he fulfills the sleaze imperative, does something shrewder: He mocks his heroes, presenting them as cold-eyed horndog jerks who fail to see that they've wandered into an entire country of exploitation.

For This Boy's Life to work as ominous domestic drama, it's essential that we see Dwight as a flesh-and-blood monster. De Niro, unfortunately, just seems to be reveling in the chance to play another viciously demented freak, like Cape Fear's Max Cady.

Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama.

After ''Seven'' and three ''Hannibal'' hits, the audience tolerance for baroque serial-killer flourishes has been duly amped. We require sustained creativity in our sick violence, and Taking Lives, after a token bit of ghastly foreplay, loses its life.

We never get any sense of how the brothers build their empire, or of how the various supporting characters fit into their lives. Telling this story in a more straightforward fashion would have been far more satisfying. Still, the Kemps are something to see.

It's not just that Tony Soprano is richer, darker, cooler, and scarier. The dude gets more laughs.

Cronenberg directs this doomed romance in the same flat, claustrophobic, night-of-the-zombies style he employed in ''Naked Lunch''; as a dramatist, he's still stuck in Interzone.

Turns out to be a supple, intriguing, and beautifully staged movie. It features Dillon, in his most forceful performance since ''Drugstore Cowboy.''

This is the sort of incendiary role a lot of actors would kill for, yet the shock of Norton's performance isn't its showboat flamboyance. It's that he makes this sadistic junior sociopath rueful and intelligent.

Populated by ersatz versions of stars who, in this case, are fairly vanilla to begin with.

This is basically a nerd-loosening-his-tie romantic comedy done in the manic-compulsive mode of "Liar Liar."

May find an audience, but I found it to be a leftover John Hughes triangle.

Stuart Saves His Family is a hit-or-miss satire in which Stuart, for too many scenes, comes off simply as a goofy neurotic butterball.

Schlock weeper.

If there's such a thing as joyless competence, it's exemplified by the grimly sensational kidnap thriller Don't Say a Word.

A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.

The ultimate crime of this paranoid enemy-of-the-state pulp, directed with more style than brains by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), is how dull it is.

For today’s filmmakers, the addiction to kinetic overkill has become a disease in itself.

The truth is that Undertow is like a conventional Hollywood movie operating on half its cylinders.

Jackson, though, does lend this earnest formula flick a core of conviction.

As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

An agreeable mischievous romp.

It’s got some talented actors and a certain jagged inner-city atmosphere, yet this first feature directed by Mario Van Peebles (son of the veteran black director Melvin Van Peebles) is little more than a sketchy exploitation melodrama.

If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.

Brothers isn't badly acted, but as directed by the increasingly impersonal Jim Sheridan, it's lumbering and heavy-handed, a film that piles on overwrought dramatic twists until it begins to creak under the weight of its presumed significance.

Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns.

The movie is too cute to take itself too seriously, but it still feels like it was made by some very stoned college students.

Like Christina’s dance, the movie is a gorgeous tease, an artful promise of something that never quite arrives.

Jonathan Nossiter's second feature (after the intricate and haunting ''Sunday'') strikes unnerving chords of mystery and dismay as it fuses the sinister, jump cut dislocations of a metaphysical thriller like ''Don't Look Now'' with a pain soaked meditation on love, guilt, marriage, and adultery.

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness.

For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.

The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.

It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

The award for the most annoying character to appear in a movie so far this year turns out to be a tie: It goes to both of the oh-so-swankly tormented romantic mischief makers of Love Me if You Dare.

If you're hungry to see a romantic comedy about a genetically and culturally imbalanced geek-meets-babe relationship that makes the one in Knocked Up look like the quintessence of plausible human mating, then by all means subject yourself to the one-joke sub–Judd Apatow snark-athon that is She's Out of My League.

Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.

Sports betting is a great subject for a movie, but Two for the Money is short on the number-crunching nitty-gritty.

Hercules, like Aladdin, zips Disney’s house animation style past sentimentality and into an age of ironic media-wise overload. That’s not a bad place for it to be.

There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.

The movie is cranked up somewhere between stylish and proudly stupid, dusted with sunniness from Amy Smart (as Chev's sleepy girlfriend) -- and guaranteed to be out of your system by the time the lights come up.

The movie IS a provocation, but not a glib or ideologically myopic one.

A lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you.

The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding.

It has that vintage Polish pace, their signature arch pomposity and rhythmless weirdness, only this time the brothers had to go and make a cosmic allegory of American dreams.

Someone (Myers?) came up with the bright idea of turning the Cat in the Hat into the worst Vegas nightclub spritzer of 1958. He's become a furry version of Rip Taylor: a walking, talking vaudeville idiot box.

Rouses you in conventional ways, but it's also the rare animated film that uses 3-D for its breathtaking spatial and emotional possibilities.

The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.

It's a boisterous and amiable movie but not, in the end, a very funny one.

Zombie doesn't pretend to be on the side of the victims. He makes no bones about his identification with the sexy outlaw serial killers.

Perhaps the first sports movie ever made in which the characters talked as good a game as they played.

Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is watchable but also stiff and remote.

It's an academic meditation in underworld-thriller drag -- a movie that looks about as close to a straight-ahead, down-and-dirty genre entertainment as anything the director has made since his exploding-head horror days.

Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn’t be less obsessive. It’s cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.

A thriller of carefully cultivated murk. It's enigmatic in the worst sense, in that every explanation for what's going on holds less water than the last.

An exhilarating hall-of-mirrors look at what happens when global art fame turns anonymous, artists become objects, fans turn into artists, and the whole what's-sincere-and-what's-a-sham spectacle is more fun than art was ever supposed to be.

Beautifully edited, Go Tigers! is an enthralling look at the drama that can transpire in the autumn of one small town on any given Friday.

Rory O'Shea Was Here gazes at the physically afflicted and just about begs for our sympathy long after we've grown restless and eager to feel something else.

Hook is jam-packed with ''entertainment value,'' enough to give you your money's worth, and to guarantee (in all probability) that Spielberg earns his. Yet something has clouded this director's vision... The problem isn't that Spielberg has lost his gift for fantasy. It's that he no longer seems to know (or care) about anything else.

Has all the mood enhancing flavor of a tropical cocktail made with watered down rum and fake fruit juice.

The rare case in which a filmmaker's unadulterated worship of his subjects adds force and resonance--and not just luster--to the way that we see them.

Of the idiosyncratic ''little'' movies that Soderbergh has made to clear his head (Full Frontal, Schizopolis), this is the first that truly connects.

Lifting a concept isn't exactly foreign to the world of animation (what's "The Lion King" if not "Bambi" with manes?), but it isn't often a rip-off gets as blatant as The Wild, a flat-out regurgitation of "Madagascar."

How appealing is Muniz, taking a break from ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' a day job he should by no means let go of?

A bright, whirling pinwheel of a movie that tosses around special effects like confetti, but the techno magic is graced with a touch of sensuality.

The film is a sobering chronicle of the depressing circus of persecution and pseudo-scandal that was the Clinton years. But why did the President provoke such ire? A movie with insight into that might actually feel new.

Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since "Ed Wood": a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

In Die Hard With a Vengeance, McTiernan stages individual sequences with great finesse (there's a terrific bit with Willis and five thugs in an elevator), yet they don't add up to a taut, dread-ridden whole.

Spader and Sarandon make White Palace worth seeing, but too often they’re fighting the movie’s smugness.

Confined to just a few sets, the movie is like the pilot for a sitcom you never want to see. Yet Ephron seems to think she's making a feel-good holiday classic: She floods the soundtrack with old pop versions of Christmas standards, trying to render stale comedy appetizing by drenching it in syrup. [23 Dec 1994, p.50]

The movie itself, with the exception of a few scenes, doesn't really have the wit it's aiming for, and among Steve Martin vehicles it's middle-drawer, at best. Yet that mood of silly exuberance reigns through most of the picture.

Cadillac Man, like the recent I Love You to Death, starts out as comedy on a human scale and turns into canned farce. For an actor like Robin Williams, that’s the movie equivalent of being muzzled.

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.

As the movie goes on, these fleshy little beings turn into…well, people. And that's something to see. But Babies, without falsifying its subject, could have used a more soul-stirring sense of showbiz -- that is, a riper display of infantile special effects.

Beneath its exploration of fatherly distance, this is really a portrait of why cranks make better artists than earnest nice guys.

This may be the first talking-animal movie in which the critter hero seems to have been body-snatched by a commentator from C-SPAN.

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

Since Foster plays warming-up-for-a-straitjacket panic with a clenched intensity rare to behold in a Hollywood actress, I, for one, was rooting for the radical -- that is, nuthouse -- option.

The result is a wacked kiddie Rashomon in which the different versions dovetail with a logic as impeccable as it is flat-out buggy. So who do we root for? Everyone and no one. Hoodwinked's most radical feature is that it's a ride without heroes.

Selby’s book is considered a gutbucket classic of the post-Beat era, but its hellish vision was, in part, a reaction to the stifling postwar optimism of ’50s America. Now, it seems overdone — especially when recreated with this much hyperbolic showmanship. Last Exit to Brooklyn is so relentless it’s not of this world.

The film gets a little ''We can fix this!'' inspirational for a chronicle of such staggering darkness.

A clever rock-world satire, with some lively take-offs on the TMZ-gossip magazine circus, but it's also too long, and by the time of the inevitable Las Vegas sequence, it starts to grow repetitive.

The movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.

Its title aside, this slow, clunky omnibus film feels more like a TV show than a movie. It’s not very scary, and there isn’t much contrast among the episodes.

Jim Carrey's performance is an impersonation on the level of genius.

Spider-Man 3 has terrific moments, but after the danger and majesty and romantic brio of "Spider-Man 2," those adrenalized rooftop ballets feel, more than ever, like sequences.

As long as Nair follows the two characters’ romantic moves or details the lives of their families (whose contrasting status on the ethnic-minority ladder marks them as both rivals and uneasy comrades), the movie is funny, observant, and deeply humane.

The movie has no script, and even the better gags - like one in which a couple of the pilots scribble away at coloring books in the backseat of a plane - could have been staged more vividly.

A deft Stephen King freak-out.

If Crowe's eyes are open, he seems to have directed most of Vanilla Sky with his mind wide shut.

Watching Pecker, his rickety new comedy about a teenage Baltimore shutterbug, it becomes clear that Waters has grown color-blind to his own sleazo-shock aesthetic.

A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work.

Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale.

The entire movie has the meaninglessly burnished, sunglasses-at-midnight glow of an early-'90s car commercial -- a visual scheme guaranteed to leave the audience squinting between yawns.

The Zodiac has been made with the dunderheaded flatness of bad '70s TV.

A little bit obsessed with replication.

It's all very sincere, but watching a dweebish depressive learn that Life Is Good is a lesson of diminishing returns.

Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.

Penn is a true talent, but there's just enough languid pretension to The Pledge to make you wonder if he's ultimately more interested in parading his promise as a director than in fulfilling it.

The film has flashes of psychedelic visual energy, but its story is limp.

Atarrabi and Mikelats isn’t a movie for everyone — in fact, by design, it’s probably a movie for very few. Yet it confirms the reverent audacity of Eugène Green’s talent. He’s 73 years young. He still has the chance to make a film that will blow the world away.

What makes all of this ''fun,'' instead of dark or threatening, is that the victim was an idiot who leered at the class teases with horny glee.

It makes sense that L'Enfant has been hailed as a masterpiece, since a masterpiece is what it's trying, in every unvarnished frame, to be. If you wandered unknowingly into the film, however, you would see this: a stark, fascinating, and naggingly detached character study.

Gripping in its intimacy.

A dazzlingly crafted documentary about the teenage surf punks of lower Los Angeles who singlehandedly transformed skateboarding into the extreme sport it has become.

This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like.

It doesn’t help that the special effects are second-rate; the squishy primal horror of Alien has been replaced by a kind of mechanized yuckiness. The team of B-movie scientists tracking the monster includes Ben Kingsley doing his over-deliberate American accent, Alfred Molina sporting a haircut that’s scarier than the creature, and Forest Whitaker as an empath so sensitive he can’t let anyone sneeze without making a dewy-eyed psychic pronouncement.

Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.

The film is proof that if you repackage the classics (in this case, Dickens) for the youth market in an era of MTV dislocation, what you get, in essence, is postmodern Cliffs Notes with an alt-rock soundtrack.

Frankie & Johnny does what any true romantic movie should: It makes the mysterious, push-and-pull alchemy of love seem, once again, worth the effort.

Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau makes the mistake of treating Cyrano de Bergerac as though it were some lost Shakespearean tragedy instead of the wonderfully gimmicky (and familiar) tearjerker it is.

Skillfully made, yet the film would have been better if it had tapped a bit of that Walken madness.

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is suffused with a rarefied emotional glow, and that's something contemporary audiences may be almost desperate to respond to. Yet the movie is also tentative, rambling, and maddeningly shapeless.

It’s the lead actors who give the movie its surprisingly emotional texture. Connery is masterly as the boozing, disheveled, sentimental Barley — a hipster gone to seed — and he and Pfeiffer have a touching chemistry.

Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.

Higher Learning starts out as a liberal message movie, but it turns into a demagogic rabble-rouser, a shrewdly incendiary exploitation of these wayward days of rage.

A movie overtly designed to win attention (and not to do much else).

Watching the movie, it's hard to imagine why anyone would dream of going back there.

The performers keep you watching (Candy, I’m convinced, could be a fine dramatic actor), yet the movie itself is a thin procession of clichés.

Wendy and Lucy is like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Antonioni. What's piercing about it, and also disturbing, is that Reichardt views the renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity -- as a lefty romantic dream.

Indecent Proposal starts out kinky and turns into a languid-and shockingly banal- domestic soap opera.

Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.

The plot is clever and absorbing, with one wild Hitchcockian twist (a comic variation on Vertigo). Manhattan Murder Mystery is both a genuine thriller and a cheeky goof on thrillers. It is also, in part, another Woody Allen relationship movie — and I’m afraid that’s the one way in which it falls flat.

Has the taint of exploitation.

The most desperate thing about Desperate Hours is Michael Cimino’s attempt to direct it coherently. In Cimino’s paws, the story of a merciless crook (Mickey Rourke) terrorizing a suburban family descends into lurid gibberish.

The title translates, roughly, as ''This & That,'' a confectionary shrug that pretty well sums up the blasé inconsequentiality of it all.

Braveheart features some of the most enthralling combat sequences in years, and the excessive ferocity of the violence is part of the thrill.

As a romantic comedy, the picture is pleasant, predictable, and utterly weightless.

As it becomes clear that Ball, in essence, has just restaged American Beauty with a socially conscious paint job, the sensationalism of Towelhead looks more and more like a dramatic tic.

Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original.

Thérese unfolds with the sunlight-and-daffodils piety of a Sunday school slide show.

There’s every indication that director John Carpenter (Halloween) was trying for more than another rinky-dink Chevy Chase comedy. Except for the effects, though, Memoirs of an Invisible Man comes disappointingly close to being just that.

This rusted-future comic strip comes at you in shards -- exhaustingly derivative images of mayhem and titillation, with Lee, in her bad-girl bondage gear, as its blank vixen. If you didn't call her babe, she wouldn't exist.

All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.

I'm disappointed to report that Hudson and Watts have no chemistry as sisters, perhaps because Watts never seems like the expatriate artiste she's supposed to be playing.

Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, but all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging.

Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody.

The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.

The movie excoriates the hypocrisy of self-hating gay lawmakers (several of whom it outs), yet it also explores the burden of the public closet.

It's every bit as nonsensical and overitalicized a mess as ''The Whole Nine Yards.''

A black comedy in the form of vicarious serial punishment.

Even in her dullest vehicle, Lindsay Lohan exudes an unfakable shine.

The movie, which has the slightly glum perversity of early Chabrol, is a dream of betrayal, with the squirmiest attack-of-nature tableau since Willard.

Like Mike has the synthetically wrapped pseudo-charm of a perfunctory ''Flubber'' sequel.

By now, I’m not sure even Donald Trump could love a movie that asks us to get misty-eyed over real estate.

The film offers true insight into the patterns of war crimes, even if the songs sound disquietingly close to a call to violence.

Spielberg restages the Holocaust with an existential vividness unprecedented in any nondocumentary film: He makes us feel as if we're living right inside the 20th century's darkest-and most defining-episode.

Seems to have been given the comedy equivalent of blood thinner. It has the blazing satirical boldness to skewer the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man -- and, amazingly, not much else.

Though the movie is sometimes too mannered (during one unaccountable stretch, Penn suddenly turns into Diane Arbus and peppers the screen with small-town grotesques), it has an accomplished rhythmic flow, a sense of people’s destinies unfolding step by step.

Just because a scenario turns dark doesn't mean that it's convincing. House of Sand and Fog is artful until it lunges for Art.

Williams hasn't been this sympathetic in years.

Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.

The dance-film equivalent of a female impersonator: The movie is absurd and sincere at the same time-it offers an insolent facsimile of grand passion.

The real crime is the way that the movie turns Gael García Bernal, the hot-tempered, Roman-lipped costar of ''Y Tu Mamá También, into a backwater Freddie Prinze Jr.

There’s a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls.

Darkness was clearly tossed together like salad in the editing room, since it's little more than the sum of its unshocking shock cuts.

If Fathers’ Day really had been released in the mid-’80s, I’d have said it was so funny I forgot to laugh.

Fragmented and monotonous, without a semblance of the gymnastic cleverness that at least made the first Mortal Kombat film into watchable trash, Mortal Kombat Annihilation is as debased as movies come.

Bottom-of-the-garbage-barrel comedy.

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

The songs of the South African freedom fighters were a literal call to arms. The music succeeded -- magnificently. The movie, on the other hand, is only so-so.

In the ludicrous soft-core fantasia Wild Orchid, Mickey Rourke is so tan he looks as though he’d spent a week with his head in a microwave.

Has no pretentions to be anything more than a goose-bumpy fantasy theme-park ride for kids, but it's such a routine ride.

Along Came Polly is nothing if not a chick flick for guys.

It hooks you up, happily, to your inner top chef.

Full of splendidly shot wonders.

The director, Nora Ephron, displays her peerless gift for making everything seem snappy and mushy at the same time, and Travolta's performance has a slovenly, I-can-do-anything-and-you'll-still-love-me obnoxiousness.

The routines are charged, even between jokes, with anticipatory hilarity.

Bana and McAdams are sweet together, with matching dimples and starry eyes, and we grow eager to see them remain in the same place. In the end, that's all there is to the movie, really. It's a time-travel fantasy in search of a cozy love seat.

Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.

Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.

Nothing in Imaginary Heroes rings true, least of all a plot that lightly combines domestic abuse, adulterous pregnancy, teen bisexuality, job abandonment, and a possible case of Mysterious Movie Disease. These are not ordinary people. Or real ones.

More noteworthy for its intentions than its execution.

Personally, I'd say that it was about time Arquette was leashed.

A love poem to the New York City of the '50s and '60s, when Smith, the visionary of camp (Andy Warhol stole from him), more or less invented performance art.

It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.

Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.

The film is an inflammatory morality play shot through with rage and despair.

It's like a pastry that's been sitting on the shelf for 60 years.

Thanks to Vaughn, Favreau, and the stray sharp lines that pop out of everyone else, the film at least offers the lively sound of egos that still know how to swing.

I was amused more or less throughout by the ingeniously designed and executed stunt that is Team America.

In every way dreadful.

It takes the movie all of 15 minutes to descend into sub-Spielbergian banalities about poor Max's search for his absentee dad.

It's eye candy that detonates.

It’s a lyrical and rapturous film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking.

The boys-in-the-Italian-hood clichés were penned by "Sopranos" scribe Terence Winter, so they have snap, if not freshness.

The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he's running TO.

Morris, using a welter of photographs (many of which we haven't seen), constructs a day-to-day sense of how Abu Ghraib descended into a medieval hell.

Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.

The movie is a toxic dart aimed at the spangly new heart of American hypocrisy: our fake-tolerant, fake-charitable, fake-liberated-yet-still madly-closeted fame culture.

Petersen gives us monumental images of waves and rain and wind, but the editing is so choppy that the images don't build and crest.

It's Swank, however, who's the revelation. By the end, her Brandon/Teena is beyond male or female. It's as if we were simply glimpsing the character's soul, in all its yearning and conflicted beauty.

Set in the 1960s, Robert De Niro's directorial debut is a work of vitality and flair. [22 Oct 1993, p.58]

Bereft of any flesh-and-blood honesty, the last half of the movie plays like a ludicrous PBS version of "Mandingo."

Crooklyn has a warm, nostalgic, spilling-over-the-edges effusiveness that is new to Lee's work. At the same time, the movie often seems every bit as high-strung as the family it's about.

Jason Lee seems to have been bitten by a vampire who sucked out all his prickly charisma. You see the promise of stardom dribbling through his fingers.

The movie isn't terrible; it's just low-rent and reductive.

All staged as a harsh poem of survival, with no great psychological interest, yet the ending carries a surprise feminist tug that’s worth the wait.

Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.

It doesn't take long for the film to devolve into a ludicrously far-fetched Celebrity Death Wish.

The writer-director, Alice Wu, fudges a lot of the basics -- I never believed the heroine was really a physician -- but the final, proudly public girl-on-girl smooch still jerks a tear.

This very Canadian thriller (i.e., no humor, lots of literal-minded future-shock portentousness) certainly does a number on you, though not necessarily a pleasurable one.

True art is a journey to somewhere you've never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves.

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

Though not quite the fiasco of revved-up gunplay that Beverly Hills Cop II was, this new movie, directed by John ''Rock-'em Sock-'em'' Landis, is just a clunky action thriller, with occasional comic moments rationed out to the audience like stray crumbs.

Works hard to be exciting, but the movie scarcely lives up to its title. It could have used a bit of a fuel injection itself.

There's a fair amount of filler in The Italian Job, but it all boils down to the big heist, which has been staged as if it were Fort Knox being robbed by Evel Knievel.

Beautiful, wise, and poker-faced comedy of discombobulation.

Smart enough to hook us with the best thing it has going: Cedric the Entertainer's gruffly uproarious and lived-in performance as Eddie.