Owen Gleiberman

If anything, the real surprise here is how affecting he makes the Grinch's ultimate big hearted turnaround, as Carrey the actor sneaks up on Carrey the wild man dervish. In whichever mode, he carreys the movie.

Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen.

The best thing about it is Peck, who shows you the sweet, virginal kid hiding inside the outlaw poseur.

Cyrus, an apple-cheeked dumpling, resembles Pia Zadora, but when she exhorts the crowd, it's with the martial efficiency of Hillary Clinton.

It's just a grindingly inert death-wish thriller.

One of those sanctifying docs that rambles when it should explore.

A smashingly effective documentary -- I found it more resonant than ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' -- yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted.

What lights Cinèvardaphoto is Varda's ageless ability to merge her spirit with that of the images she shows us.

Kicking & Screaming may be a prefab cartoon out of the "Bad News Bears" cookie cutter, but Ferrell doesn't just save this junk -- he rules it.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is too long, and it's ersatz magic, but at least it casts an ersatz spell.

So badly told that it ends up dissecting a corruption that exudes from nowhere but itself.

It's cleansing to see the facts laid out with intimacy and rigor, and the film earns the comparison it makes to the squelching of due process for some of today's terror suspects.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.

Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.

The trouble with Death Becomes Her isn’t that its comic vision is too dark but that it has no shadings, no acerbic glee. Zemeckis gives nastiness such a hard sell he forgets to take any delight in it.

Departures is tender and, at times, rather squishy. It's sure to squeeze the tear ducts of anyone who has lost a parent.

This Is It offers a raw and endearing sketch of a genius at work.

One more case of a winning ''SNL'' character tamed by the wan, fizzled farce around him.

One of the most indecently bad movies of the year.

Still, just about everything in Goldeneye, from its rote nuclear-weapon-in-space plot to the recitation of lines that sound like they're being read off stone tablets (''Shaken, not stirred!''), has been served up with a thirdhand generic competence that's more wearying than it is exhilarating.

Nothing more than a sort of dumb, sort of clever fish out of water comedy.

That Griffin tells some of the most intolerant jokes since Andrew Dice Clay should hardly obscure his talent, even if it does tarnish it.

The Two Jakes is competent and watchable.

The movie is a somber, smoothly crafted drama about a wily adolescent who senses there's something rotten going on in his country but can't quite put a finger on it.

It's a jerry-built kick-ass insult machine assembled entirely out of secondhand parts.

It's set at a beach house, but we see only gray skies, and though Efron has a wary and cutting intelligence (it matches that of the fine actor Ricardo Darin, who plays her father), the effect is tepid and damp.

As Nomi, Elizabeth Berkley has exactly two emotions -- hot and bothered -- but her party-doll blowsiness works for the picture.

Winfrey's performance is full of stoic anger, and individual moments have ferocity and pull, yet you're always aware of them as moments.

As bumbling and mindless, as naively misconceived, as that clapping-through-tears moniker.

It seems pompous and scattershot now -- a tweaking of privileged European smugness that unfolds with a playful daisy-chain logic but has the tone of a quaint, doddering lecture.

The murder as entertainment premise of Series 7 is proof that even the blackest of humor is no longer particularly outrageous.

It's a fearless and brilliant racial-historical satire, done in a meticulous re-creation of the Ken Burns mode, that chronicles the last 150 years of America as if the South had won the Civil War.

In its mingling of horniness and disgust, Tomcats attains a convoluted cleverness.

Double Team becomes an enjoyably decadent spectacle of gymnastic preposterousness.

One of the pleasures of The Bank Job is that it returns us to the days when robbing a bank was a gritty, hole-in-the-wall affair.

The Young Victoria has a subtler flow than you might expect, and at times it's calmer than you may like. Director Jean-Marc Vallée's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded? princess fantasy.

The comedy is nonexistent.

If The Bridesmaid is middle-drawer Chabrol, it's almost worth going to just to watch Laura Smet, a vamp of not-so-basic instinct.

Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.

Horton's attempt to authenticate the painting in the face of a hostile art establishment becomes a study in forensics, taste, money, and class warfare.

The gimmick in The Abandoned is that people battle their zombie doubles, whom they can't kill, since they'd be killing themselves. But the movie sinks so deep into deathly atmosphere that there's no life to it.

Half-baked Herzog, though it has twinkles of theatrical purity that remind you of when his vision was grand.

A solidly enjoyable formula thriller.

Hoffman and Thompson are each good enough to bring out a glow in the other.

The teensploitation premise is like something a porn filmmaker from the '70s might have come up with. But Fired Up! has one added quirk: The script, credited to Freedom Jones, is a riot of tongue-twisting ironic sleaze -- it sounds like the first (and last) collaboration between Diablo Cody and Artie Lange.

Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have.

After too many ''Full Monty''s, it has come to look like nothing so much as a coy ritual of emasculation.

A breakneck inner-city odyssey of jump-cut shaky-cam suspense.

This modern slice of neorealism has been made with a skill, and humanity, that suggests Bahrani may have a "Bicycle Thief" in him yet.

Ends up blowing its own joke. Instead of making Joe blissfully arrogant in his Southern rock dude myopia, it turns him into a shuffling masochistic loser.

But Philadelphia turns out to be a scattershot liberal message movie, one that ties itself in knots trying to render its subject matter acceptable to a mass audience.

It's a cautionary tale about the excesses of jingoist paranoia, and the folly of it all is that the more the film descends into somber liberal chest thumping, the less engrossing it becomes.

For a while, The Last Exorcism shrewdly exploits our voyeurism, as it sustains the teasing question of whether there's actually anything supernatural going on. The payoff, however, isn't scary enough.

The funniest moments in Groundhog Day come when Phil takes sneaky advantage of his predicament-by, say, pumping a sexy woman in the local coffee shop for facts about her past and then, ''the next day,'' using the information to lure her into bed. What the movie lacks is the ingenious, lapidary comic structure that could have made these moments fuse into something tricky and wild.

At times, the movie could have been called "Me and You and Every One of the Bastards We Know," but Krasinski preserves Wallace's whooshing roller coasters of words, powered by the fuel of confession.

A far funnier movie than its predecessor.

Branagh, for all his craftsmanship, hasn’t succeeded in tapping the morbid core of the material, the feeling that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in creating ”life” is really a mask for his obsession with death (indeed, he can no longer tell the difference).

Our senses may be the stuff of drama, but not when they're treated as nice and neat as this.

The image of this kitchen-magician dream robot comes at us in little jolts and spasms that have the zappy, self-contained rhythm of a fast-food tie-in commercial.

Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.

It's basically a zombie movie with machines instead of the walking dead.

Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.

Not until the last 20 minutes does Gozu come fully alive. A man has sex with a seductive beauty, who then gives birth to...well, let's just say it's a sight that may take time to fight its way out of your head.

An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression. At the same time, it offers something we rarely encounter in a whirling martial-arts extravaganza: a romantic passion that's woven into the very fabric of the action.

Williams gives an inspired comic performance. Unfortunately, he outclasses the movie, which is basically a patchwork rip-off of Tootsie.

A big, square, rousing political thriller docudrama.

Sensational sex-and-its-consequences melodrama.

It's like a film-school thesis gone disastrously wrong.

What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.

Captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury.

A tale of ordinary Americans scraping bottom, yet there's a redemption in that. The film asks: If you were this desperate, wouldn't you do the same?

James Gray's Two Lovers really is a '70s movie, in the mode of such raw, unfiltered character studies as "The Panic in Needle Park," "Wanda," and "Fat City."

There’s a real spark to Connery’s performance, but except for that Kaufman has produced a middling contradiction, a thriller too polite to hit its target.

Dreamgirls is the rare movie musical with real rapture in it.

A modest vérité portrait of Wilco, the engagingly melodious, deeply unglam alt-folk rockers.

The Last Picture Show was a mood piece drenched in acrid despair. Texasville is two hours of flat, Southern Gothic whimsy. The movie has the form of a soaper without the juicy content.

What About Bob? is just funny enough to make you wish it had been wilder and less predictable.

It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall.

The old-world-meets-new mesh is incarnated in the movie's soundtrack, a joyful effusion of disco Bollywood that, by the end of Monsoon Wedding, sent my spirit soaring out of the theater.

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

The movie is sensationally exciting, but its hey-kids-let s-put-on-a-war! story line plays like Beverly Hills, 90210 recast as a military-recruitment film for the Third Reich.

Prelude to a Kiss is squishy yet blah. It teaches the characters a lesson they don’t need to learn.

In an age of Simpson-mania, George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy seem blander than ever.

This clumsy, cheesy, chintzy adaptation, with its F/X that look dated the moment you see them, is like something left over from the '60s.

The movie is a great big feast of wreckage. But that’s also what makes it a bit numbing.

Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.

Beneath its heavy-breathing fripperies, though, Basic Instinct is mechanical and routine, a muddle of Hitchcockian red herrings and standard cop-thriller ballistics.

Miss Potter, right to the end, is the definition of a "nice" movie, and that makes it a genuine oddball in a universe of increasingly distressed and uncivilized pop culture.

A movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease --gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching.

The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.

You can’t make a good thriller when the most pressing issue is whether the protagonists will have to default on their mortgage payments.

Cocaine Cowboys, which at times seems like it could have been edited by someone on coke, comes at you as a vast bloody river of underworld information.

Though it isn’t even trying to scare you, this is a very nifty black-comic horror movie, one of the rare entries in the genre with some genuine wit and affection.

It's like a series of cliches exploding in your face.

Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge. 

Hannibal lacks the rounded emotional elegance of ''The Silence of the Lambs'' (that was a great film; this one is merely good).

Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.

A trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal is mired in blood, cheap shocks, and a random network of improbability.

Dudsville.

About the only thing the movie kills with any decisiveness is your time.

The trouble is, he's preaching to the choir -- or, at least, to a culture, profoundly influenced by Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," that has already absorbed the lesson that ''the Good War,'' while it may have been noble, was never less than hell.

Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.

Mark Wahlberg, in a star-making performance, has the kind of electric ingenuousness that John Travolta did in "Saturday Night Fever."

Most of this just seems, you know, so three years ago, so "Bourne" again.

It all makes you want to see a Bollywood movie, all right -- a good one.

Sober and honorable, yet it's far from searching.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn't a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing).

The movie draws us into complicity with someone who may be on the verge of insanity, but only because he's living with the unbearable.

Viewers primed for a postapocalyptic blowout will be disappointed to learn that Universal Soldier is set in the boring old present day, and that until the climactic clash the film is slow-moving and short on firepower.

Why would filmmakers with this much talent work this hard to thumb their noses at everything they put on screen?

Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the Oscar-winning coproducer of Driving Miss Daisy (it’s her first time behind the camera), Rush has a raw surface authenticity. But that’s about all it has.

If the pleaures of Heavenly Creatures remain defiantly on the surface, on that level the movie is a dazzler.

It's a pleasure to encounter a confectionary love story in which a man and woman of age and experience discover feelings that youth, more and more, has a patent on in Hollywood.

Clyde is meant to be nuts, but too often it's Law Abiding Citizen that checks rationality at the door.

To watch Ryan O’Neal’s performance as the upwardly mobile Barry, part victim and part cad, is to see Kubrick’s perverse genius with actors. He cast a dullard only to jolt us, by the end, with the revelation of the bastard within.

She's a teller of hilarious gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor ever were. Yet while they were consumed by their demons, Rivers is just the opposite.

Night Falls on Manhattan makes you nostalgic for Lumet's truly first-rate corruption movies, like the great, underrated "Q&A" (1990).

Watching this film, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that Hitchens' obsession with Kissinger is, at bottom, a sophisticated flower child's desire to purge the world of the tooth and claw of human power. The movie isn't, finally, an argument. It's a long angry ''Boo!''

Total Eclipse is pretty unbearable: The movie is dour and patchy and stilted — it leaves you sitting glumly waiting for the next baroque bout of tormented misbehavior.

It will come as no surprise that the movie isn't scary. But here's the real damn: It isn't funny, either.

In the end, there’s something a little insulting about a contemporary movie that reduces women to either trashy bimbos or repressed virgins.

The events may be accurate, but Mesrine is so episodic that it's slightly maddening to watch.

Webber has a knack for bringing out actors at their showiest, but he palms off too much first-draft sketchiness as ''ambiguity.''

A routine Will Smith cop-on-the-hunt thriller at heart, I, Robot lacks imaginative excitement.

The film forgets that Bond's most dangerous actions have always been his quietest ones, in which he uses his charisma to turn his enemies against themselves.

You may roll your eyes a bit at the glib, transparent, indie-grunge romanticism.

It's a painstakingly correct update of what is, let's face it, one of the least culturally correct love stories ever to be mythologized by Hollywood.

Where Craven and his director, Alexandre Aja, may have miscalculated is in making the genetically damaged demons, with their flesh-potato foreheads and minimal verbal skills, into monster action figures who take vengeance on the world that created them. They're not scary because they're victims themselves.

A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

An enjoyable pop projection of post-9/11 anxiety.

A terrific, small, funny, sad movie.

This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.

Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

Just cryptic enough to keep you guessing, and for some viewers that may qualify as a night out. But Mamet's gamesmanship was more fun when it was less eager to look important.

The film's style is so ''objective'' it's a bit subdued, yet this is a sports drama of total originality, as well as the most authentic inside view of the immigrant experience the movies have given us in quite a while.

A gratifyingly clever, booby-trapped thriller that has enough fun and imagination and dash to more than justify its existence.

Idlewild is a romp, a ticket to rowdy good times.

To me, the most potent dimension of The U.S. vs. John Lennon is the way that it captures the contradictory romanticism of Lennon the radical.

Ratatouille is a blithe concoction, as well as a miraculously textured piece of animated design.

If Sommersby is finally more pleasant than exciting, that may be because its post-Civil War setting robs the story of much of its exoticism.

Jean-Claude Van Damme's latest dud.

People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.

Daniels plays Arlen with a kind of cuddly crankiness; he makes him a jerk who just needs a hug.

With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please!

Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like "Chinatown" rewritten by Ralph Nader.

For a while, the movie looks like "Couples Retreat" or a Tyler Perry house party, only instead of cookie-cutter conflicts, everyone just grows happier and more relaxed.

The one figure in Revenge of the Sith who taps the true spirit of Star Wars is Ewan McGregor: With his beautiful light, clipped delivery, he plays Alec Guinness' playfulness, making Obi-Wan a marvel of benevolent moxie.

Lila, played by Vahina Giocante, who resembles a sexed-up young Emma Thompson, is a teasing, 16-year-old blond baby doll with a gleam of perception beyond her years.

The Rocketeer is mostly an example of pop moviemaking at its most derivative.

Has too many contrivances, but as an act of sinister staging, it proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker.

If Take My Eyes explored how a woman could still feel for a man who abused her, it might have gripped us with its difficult truths. But the movie presents Pilar and Antonio's marriage as a stale, neurotic dead end.

A crowd-pleaser in the deepest sense, mixes heartbreak and happiness together until you don't even want to see them apart.

Alien3 is a grimly seductive end-of-the-world thriller, with pop-tragic overtones that build in resonance as the movie goes on.

Her memories lack the quality of revelation -- that is, up until the remarkable final section, in which she describes the last weeks in the bunker with Hitler and Eva Braun.

A voyeur's delight.

Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years.

Awesome documentary.

The British director Ken Loach can be a master of working-class realism, but not in this cranky, rudderless shambles.

North is structured like a black-comic Wizard of Oz, but by the time North awakens from his dream, even home doesn’t seem like a place worth visiting.

Really, who needs a bad guy who's this guilty about being bad?

The dialogue is chintzy and rhythmless.

The Freshman has its moments — I enjoyed Paul Benedict’s performance as a pompously self-infatuated film professor — but mostly it plods along like that lizard. Still, whenever Brando shows up the screen just about twinkles.

Slipshod rather than sly. There's no fury to the movie, repressed or otherwise, which may be why when the Revolution arrives, it has all the impact of a guillotine with a deadly dull blade.

Going Shopping is sharp and funny about all the things that shopping can mean to the women who live to do it, and even to those who don't.

Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.

By the time Hard Target reaches its amazing climax, set in a warehouse stocked with surreal Mardi Gras floats, the film has become an incendiary action orgy, as joyously excessive as the grand finale in a fireworks show. Woo puts the thrill back into getting blown away.

Does all it can not to dehumanize Chong.

Graffiti Bridge is a sad fiasco — and except for Shake! the music (at least to my ears) is Prince at his most joyless, a collection of glorified rhythm tracks. For the first time, the revolutionary funkster seems to be preaching to a world that has left him behind.

A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.

Stealth, a dregs-of-summer knockoff, is too ponderous and inept to serve a comparable function now, yet the film's lack of thrust may be related to an absence of conviction about its own war-is-a-videogame clichés.

It hardly helps, of course, to have no characters to root for. What is it about Pierce Brosnan? He's got dimples, grace, charm; he's not a movie star, exactly -- he looks as if he should be hosting something.

The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making.

To explain a serial killer is to diminish his madness, but Dahmer does something quietly riveting. It lets you brush up against the humanity of a psycho, without making him any less psycho.

The film is consistently fun, and Tucker's comeuppance ? will leave you gasping (if not gagging) with laughter.

Starts high, gradually bogs down, then dies.

Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening, a movie that pulls into focus 30 years of porn in America. It also pulls no punches.

Gibson, in a disarmingly nimble, fast break performance, makes Nick's new hyperempathy look like the essence of virile panache.

Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".

Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis.

For all its music-trivia affection, High Fidelity is finally a pretty thin melody.

He now imparts so many life lessons via his Rube Goldberg thresher devices that he's starting to turn into the Rod Serling of severed body parts. Now that's torture.

As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins.

A bad movie so over-the-top that at moments it's almost good - or, at least, more arresting than it has any right to be.

Director John Maybury has a feel for shock rhythms, and he's skillful at keeping you guessing, but after a while you want your questions to cohere into compelling answers, and in The Jacket they don't, quite.

Pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful.

Hard Candy is extreme - a battle of the sexes that glides from tricky to angry to shockingly ugly.

A good satire that had the untimely bad luck to be about a U.S. soldier who will do anything it takes to party, except fight for the right.

Feels cramped and underimagined. I think Judge is capable of making an inspired live-action comedy, but next time he'll have to remember to do what he does in his animated ones--keep the madness popping.

Halloween: Resurrection comes closer to comatainment.

this unfairly maligned sci-fi comedy testifies that Eddie Murphy still has the gift of surprise.

It's a tale soggy with the kind of race/class lessons that Madea, the director-star's battle-ax alter ego, doles out far more handily (and entertainingly) in a single church-lady-from-hell zinger.

Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but Farewell My Concubine may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime.

A deliciously amusing socio-culinary prank.

Rock gives Good Hair a rousing message: Where African-Americans in the '60s adopted a ''natural'' look, they now feel free to coif their heads any way they want. That's cultural power.

Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide.

Despite its logy, red-herring structure, the film has enough enigma and weirdness that it gradually stirs to life.

Funny, pungent, and weirdly gripping.

It has been put together with just enough efficiency to qualify as an oddball labor of love.

Lust, Caution wants us to feel the erotic ping of buttoned-up people ripping open those buttons, but too often it's the film's drama that's under wraps.

A primer no one needed, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? should have been called "The Post-9/11 World for Dummies."

If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it.

I gave up making heads or tails of Synecdoche, New York, but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to THIS degree isn't the mechanism of art -- it's the structure of psychosis.

Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.

The movie is consistently entertaining; it sucks you in. James Spader is a little too recessive, yet he lends the action a core of wormy anxiety.

Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage inject tasty bits of personality into their roles.

Barton Fink has an atmosphere of languid comic anxiety (it's like a cross between "Eraserhead" and "Angel Heart"), and it's fun to watch, if only because you have no idea what's coming next.

Carrey isn't afraid to go happily psycho, like Peter Sellers or Eminem on his funniest tracks, and that's his edge.

Godard, as always, sounds full of insight, yet he uses the past to damn the present in a way that may be reflexively self-serving. In Praise of Love leaves a taste as bitter as poison ash.

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

Lee, as he did in ''Malcolm X'' and ''Clockers,'' makes his hero's dread palpable, and though 25th Hour lacks the glittering brilliance of those films, I was held by the toughness and pity of Lee's gaze.

The director, Paul Schrader, tries for cleansing audacity, but ends up too close to farce.

Hartley is trapped between sincerity and mock sincerity, and that all but dooms a filmmaker to slipping through the cracks.

For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.

Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.

Collapses into the most generic sort of teen movie-ville, just at the moment it's convinced you that its lightly appealing stars are capable of better.

Ryder, good as she was in The Age of Innocence, gives her first true star performance here. Beneath her crisp, postfeminist manner, Lelaina is bristling with confusion, and Ryder lets you read every crosscurrent of temptation and anxiety, the way her tentative search for love slowly grows into a restless hunger. Yearning, hilarious, lost within their precocious self-awareness, these slackers have soul.

Glazed over by its worship of Che Guevara.

The movie has a real kick to it. As Paul and Annie attempt to outsmart each other, Misery gets nastier and nastier. It turns into a psychotic cat-and-mouse game, and there are some genuine shocks.

Pictorial but oddly muffled three-hour saga of romance and capitalism, not necessarily in that order.

Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish.

Soft-core trash with a tent-show hook.

The Daytrippers has some of the wacky dysfunctional chic that made David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster such a grating experience, but writer-director Greg Mottola has a lighter, warmer touch; his characters don’t have to act like pigs in order to prove they’re human.

In Henry & June, Kaufman, trying to deepen the erotic explorations of Unbearable Lightness, ends up with a triangle movie that’s watchable but also arty and rather stilted.

In the Shadow of the Moon finds new resonance in the moment when America redefined progress -- but also when it heeded the siren song of a world so desolate it reminded you what a paradise ours truly is.

It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.

Liman, for all his craft, doesn't have enough FUN with the premise.

Myers is trying for another of his endearingly hormonal imp-egomaniacs, but hidden behind a wavy beard, a wax-curled mustache, and an astoundingly ugly squashed fake nose, he's a little too grotesque.

There are too many secondhand characters roving through Paris.

Badly lit and at times, awkwardly inspirational, yet there's real feeling in it, especially when the movie suggests that Tourette's syndrome is every bit as pure an expression of the spirit as it is a ''disorder.''

What the film leaves unexplained is how this joyous musical outpouring, which predated the revolution, could fare under a system with a pathological distrust of beauty.

The surprise of The Ringer is that the movie is pretty damn funny.

Just when you thought you’d erased the memory of Adam Sandler in Billy Madison playing a slobbo idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business, along comes Chris Farley playing a slobbo ; idiot who must prove he’s worthy of taking over his father’s business. Yet this movie, unlike Sandler’s fiasco, does at least have a few scuzzy laughs.

If anything holds Dragon together, it’s Jason Scott Lee’s intensely likable performance.

Cool, assured, emotionally remote, Merchant Ivory's Surviving Picasso is never less than watchable, but it's also a cinematic paradox, a movie that works to capture Picasso from every angle yet somehow misses the fire in his belly.

Chatwin comes off as prickly and annoyed -- they should have called this "Perturbia."

Moore makes Halley's awakening organic and touching. In an age when most teenagers are up to their eyeballs in postmodern consumer glitz, her movies seem radical not just in their retro squareness but in their unfashionable embrace of faith over ironic flippancy.

Lyrical, stirring, and beautifully acted — a seamless adaptation of a novel many will recall with almost too much familiarity.

A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.

The writing is zippy, the story spins like a top, and Bardem turns out to be the wittiest of leading men.

In the course of City Hall, Calhoun doesn’t just get to the bottom of a scandal. He grows up, and watching Cusack enact the transformation, I thought I glimpsed this gifted young actor growing into a star.

A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.

The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

The director's famously over-deliberate, pause-laden style verges, for the first time, on amateurville, and that gives us too much time to linger on the movie's more bizarre details.

That's Trumbo's message -- that the true victim was America.

A big, dumb, crude, noisy, goose-the-audience bash and proud of it. It's not nearly as unsettling as ''28 Days Later.''

Wilson has a scene near the end with Marley that's the most wrenchingly tender acting of his career.

The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head?

Another racial cartoon buddy movie that eagerly flogs its best laugh -- indeed, its only laugh -- in the trailer.

The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no.

If you're going to say the unsayable and stay charming while doing so, it helps to look more like Sarah Silverman than Andrew Dice Clay.

Feels like an attempt to rebottle the postmodern fizz of Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket." I wish instead they'd put a stopper in it.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme.

As a fantasy, Orlando has been spun out of a rather glib idea: that the mere assertion of Androgyny As Destiny is automatically a brave, emotionally triumphant stance for our time. The truth is, when androgyny is shrouded in this much deadening ”art,” it becomes little more than a haughty exercise in academic chic.

The atmosphere of gentle communal chaos is authentic enough to become the movie's dramatic center.

This pleasantly rote movie will rouse you.

Most of the jokes are so lame that Chevy Chase can’t even be bothered to look nonchalant. A sadder excuse for a movie would be hard to imagine.

In the history of rock-star indulgence on film, I would rank it somewhere between Bob Dylan's epic carnival of pretension ''Renaldo & Clara'' and the overblown messianic doldrums of 1982's ''Pink Floyd The Wall.''

The cruddy, shot-in-a-warehouse settings are especially depressing, since the computer-generated special effects seem to be taking place in another movie entirely (a far livelier one). [9 Jan 1998, p. 47]

It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.

The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary.

One Missed Call is so unoriginal that the movie could almost be a parody of J-horror tropes, yet Miike, for a while at least, stages it with a dread-soaked visual flair that allows you to enjoy being manipulated.

The Australian actress Frances O'Connor is a true find. She's as beautiful as the young Barbara Hershey, with a stare that's pensive yet playful, and she puts us in touch with the quiet battle of emotions in Fanny.

Isn't a very funny movie (it preaches nonconformity in the rote style of an overlit sitcom), but Wilson, at least, keeps it afloat.

Soul Men could have done with less amped-up abrasiveness and more soft-shoe charm.

Gory but dramatically inert vampire schlocker.