Owen Gleiberman

So overstuffed with random fireworks that despite its politics, it's easy to imagine the film getting a four-star rave from Bush or Saddam.

As a character, Austin Powers hasn't worn out his welcome, exactly, but he has outlived his novelty.

A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.

3-Iron is like a Raymond Carver story that slowly, inexorably takes on the dimensions of a ghostly fairy tale.

Admission, a likably breezy campus movie directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), is blissfully non-insulting.

The movie opens as borderline Hitchcock, echoing the tone of the filmmaker's bravura "Bad Education" (2004), and then turns into a kind of overly conceptualized Tennessee Williams.

It’s neorealist corn, but it gets to you.

Lays on the compassion a little thick, yet its heartfelt squalor stays with you.

In Happenstance, fortune doesn't just smile -- it schemes and tricks and zigzags, forming an urban road map of fate's detours.

Chong does his time (nine months) and has the last laugh, emerging as a born-again activist-survivor of the culture wars.

Too tightly made not to keep you watching, Holy Smoke is also too hokey and didactic to take seriously.

Splendidly crafted as it is, the new Disney is a luscious impasto of visual invention that never quite finds its heart.

The best thing about the movie, which is a very elegantly crafted piece of gothic snuff hokum, is the way it teases and intrigues us with the revelation of what's on that tape.

The cutting and camera work in Sign ‘O’ the Times are too intrusive, and the somewhat discordant songs worked better as a magnificent hodgepodge on the album. Still, this concert movie (which barely made it to theaters) is a feisty, engaging show.

There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.

Schrader seems to have found his way. In Light Sleeper, he attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece, a canny insider’s view of the life of a Manhattan drug dealer.

Moses was elevating mankind to a place closer to God, but when the Red Sea parts here, the feeling it gives you isn't awe; it's closer to deep impact.

The movie is a gently overstuffed cinematic piñata, crammed with tall tales -- with giants and circuses and fairy-tale woods, plus a huge squirmy catfish, all served up with a literal matter-of-fact fancy that is very pleasing.

An entertaining but also oddly naive documentary about American advertising.

A canny franchise escapade; it gets the job done. But it also leaves you hungry for something more, and I don't necessarily mean the next episode.

His (Gibson) slow-burn fury keeps the movie going, but not enough to invest us in any justice beyond payback.

Becoming Jane has a burnished feminine sadness, and the director, Julian Jarrold, gives it a creamy-dark visual flow.

Chapter 27 is far from flawless, but Leto disappears inside this angry, mouth-breathing psycho geek with a conviction that had me hanging on his every delusion.

Darwin's Nightmare points an all-purpose finger at globalization, yet the movie, as raw and vivid as it is, meanders terribly and - bigger problem - never hints at how the disasters it shows us are rooted in Africa's colonial past.

You can have a reasonably nice time at Salmon Fishing in the Yemen if you accept that it's the tidiest movie imaginable to ever say that falling in love is like swimming upstream.

Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.

A nice cookie-cutter comedy, no more and no less, but Dempsey, with his relaxed charm, and Monaghan, with her soft and peachy sensual spark, rise to the challenge of making friendship look like the wellspring of true love.

Darkman is a thrillingly demented pop spectacular: a grade-B movie made by a grade-A lunatic.

For All Mankind certainly succeeds at evoking the ironically serene aesthetics of space travel. What it never quite captures is the accompanying human drama. In all likelihood, the film will be shown in classrooms for years to come, but it’s just possible kids will watch it and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Nothing more than amiable fluff, yet Bettany infuses it with a brazen dash of reality. You believe in him, even when you don't quite believe in the movie.

Damon is a magical actor. His mind, as sharp and focused as a laser, beams out of the face of a vivacious choirboy, and, in nearly every scene, he invites you to share the jet-propelled pleasure of his precocious agility.

Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that's recommendation enough.

If Loach had given full voice to each side of this division, he could have made a great film -- maybe THE great film -- about the Irish struggle.

Spun is accomplished, but it's also numbing. It's hard to have much connection to people who never connect with each other.

The gimmicks, in the end, are too arbitrary to tie together in a memorably haunting fashion, though they do culminate in a Big Twist, a nifty one that almost -- but not quite -- makes you want to see the movie again.

As sociology, it's skin-deep, but if you're a parent or preparing to be one, you might see yourself in a few of these folks and have a good time doing so.

A marvelously designed piece of cartoon kinetics.

There’s a reason that it lacks the highs of "Wedding Crashers": The Internship puts us on the side of those who are trying to hold on to respectability, not tear it down.

This makes for a modestly touching journey, but New York Doll, in its wafer-thin way, is an oxymoron: a hagiographic tribute to a rocker with more passion than talent.

The film's cumulative effect is as exhausting as it is exciting.

Gleeson and McAdams make a touching, lifelike couple, but by the time the movie starts telling us to live each day as if we were going back and doing it all over again, you may feel Curtis has mistaken hokum for wisdom.

A clever, by-the-numbers gothic thriller. Single White Female is entertaining claptrap.

Slow going, but I mean it as no insult when I say that it bored me, in the end, to tears.

The film can be rambling and glib, yet it's no mere crime drama. It captures a middle-class French society that looks more humane than ours, but is just as messed up.

Carlito’s Way is perfectly okay entertainment, yet this 2-hour-and-21-minute movie never convinced me it wouldn’t have been every bit as good (if not better) as a lean and mean Miami Vice episode.

At once scary and stirring.

Although the film's frenetic rhythm is reminiscent of an "Indiana Jones" picture, visually Schumacher directs it like a musical, turning each image into eye candy, weaving one lush set piece into the next, as if he were the Vincente Minnelli of blockbusters.

The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.

A bit of a tease itself. The movie keeps threatening to become amateur porn, like a risqué ''Candid Camera'' gone ''Dirty Debutantes,'' but it never quite gets there.

Fire, as this movie makes clear, is nothing if not photogenic, and Howard has done a beautiful job of conjuring both its danger and its deceptive, primal beauty.

A mild but charmingly off-kilter romantic comedy that gently satirizes love in an era of buy-now-pay-later brinkmanship.

As entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.

The way that Stallone directs, though, every machete thrust and relentless round of bullet spray is staged with a certain undeniable...conviction.

Ballard connects you to the beauteous inner calm of the wild, even if audiences today are looking for a lot less calm.

Director Ole Christian Madsen combines sharp scenes of moral inquiry with a few too many functional, oldfangled espionage twists.

Lusts for catharsis yet never quite gets there, because, for all of its bitter romantic anguish, it ultimately coalesces in your head rather than your heart.

The moral murk of Crónicas would be more effective if the story weren't so contrived, yet the movie is worth seeing for Leguizamo's sinewy urgency, Alcázar's desperate cleverness as the killer, and the squalid, frantic atmosphere of Latin American hunger.

The director, Bill Duke ("A Rage in Harlem"), stages all of this with proficient confidence, yet he never truly summons the operatic power of the genre -- the pulp tragedy of ambition built on (and drowned in) blood.

The film's crank-case snappishness doesn't break any molds, but it certainly gives you a lift.

The sequel, more successfully (if less innocently), injects you into a luminous technological wonderland and asks you to be happy with the ride.

Assayas can't resist turning Demonlover into an overcalculatedly irrational rabbit-hole-to-the-dark-side thriller. The movie morphs into a ''dream,'' all right, but I confess that all I wanted to do was wake up from it and return to the slithery intrigue of corporate depravity.

Benny & Joon turns out to be a whimsical (and not very well paced) heart tugger in which two nice couples spend 98 ever-so-slightly flaky minutes figuring out that they’re perfect for each other.

One of the rare movies from Israel that refuses to spell out its politics, and you may wind up grateful for the ambiguity.

Directed by Guillermo del Toro with a colorfully kinetic visual imagination that seldom lets up.

In Monster Theron undergoes one of the most startling transformations in the history of movies.

Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera.

It has a chillingly matter-of-fact cynicism that is very au courant.

The film's best trick is the way that it treats conspiracy as a kind of political ''Blair Witch,'' a monstrous murk that haunts us precisely because it can never be seen.

If you want to see the missing link between John Wayne's squint and Clint Eastwood's sneer, look no further than Charlton Heston in Major Dundee.

As an expose of the new wave of racist youth-gang violence, Romper Stomper lacks depth, psychology, a sense of social background. Yet Wright’s flagrant attempt to humanize his skinheads-to turn them into bona fide movie characters-is, in its way, dramatic and vaguely honorable.

This homicide thriller has a tantalizingly morbid atmosphere of unease.

The movie is also brisk and wholehearted and smarter than you expect.

Playing Mr. Perfect, Brendan Fraser — yes, Encino Man — proves a smart and likable actor, alive to what’s going on around him. Sidney Poitier proved you could keep your integrity even in a role like this, and Fraser does too.

Naked Gun 33 1/3 has a sluggish, one-gag-at-a- time rhythm, and it aims at too many soft targets. Aside from the Oscar sequence, the movie’s big satirical coup is a send-up of prison-escape pictures (yawn).

I do wish that Overnight caught in more precise detail what Duffy, who finally made his film on the cheap at an obscure studio, did to tick off the Miramax powers. Imagining it, though, is half the fun.

Lin works with a rhythmic observational flair that outweighs the movie's flaws. It's a long way from Long Duk Dong.

Wittier and more consistent than the first Addams Family movie. Paul Rudnick’s script offers sharp-edged variations on the topsy-turvy Addams worldview, and it’s much better at getting the Addamses out into the straight world, where they can really do some damage.

It's like seeing the birth of the '60s, with great moments (including Neal Cassady doing speed-freak monologues).

As a fix of pop iconography, V for Vendetta is eyeball grabbing, even if it lacks the relentless videogame bravura that sold the Matrix films. As a movie, however, it's merely okay, with a pivotal dramatic weakness: Evey, for all the attentions of her revolutionary Svengali, remains, in essence, a bystander, and Portman, her head shaved, plays her like Joan of Arc as a tremulous Girl Scout.

Do Hou's films deserve to be seen? Absolutely, if only to end the myth that they're too perfect for this world.

Meticulous and detailed, a drug-world epic that holds you from moment to moment, immersing you in the intricate and sleazy logistics of crime. Yet the movie isn't quite enthralling; it's more like the ghost version of a '70s classic.

Even those of us who find anti-homosexual ''deprogramming'' to be hideously intolerant and naive may find ourselves oddly relieved that Mark is there (in a Christian rehab center).

The film's charm ends up worn out by the very perfection of Frank's con. We look at this teen wizard of rotating identity, and we realize we know everything about him except who he is.

Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton.

In Superstar in a Housedress, Curtis remains frozen in his flamboyance. The most resonant parts of the movie are, oddly, the interviews with his fellow glam bohemians.

Maxed Out, while occasionally muddled in its financial details, presents a more-accurate-than-not vision of a nation that is starting to look like a candidate for rehab, on both an individual and a national level, for its addiction to debt.

Could have used more of the shimmering elegance of the Day-Hudson comedies. Those movies had a true sparkle. This one's a likable piece of costume jewelry.

The Great Debaters is like one of those sentimentally revved youth-sports-team crowd-pleasers. This time, though, the sport is debating, and the setting is an elite black college in Marshall, Tex., in 1935

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Rock School, Don Argott's amusing and spirited documentary, would seem a heck of a lot niftier if its fire hadn't already been stolen by "School of Rock."

An authentic real-world creep show -- better, if anything, than its predecessor.

Showcases a trio of terrific performances.

Shutter Island holds you, but it doesn't grip you. It's as if Scorsese had put his filmmaking fever on psychotropic drugs.

Holbrook makes Abner a shining-eyed, noble crank.

For everything it gets right, Ali, following its superb first hour, begins to lose the vision, clarity, and structure necessary to bring its hero into full focus.

Provokes a suspense halfway between comedy and horror. I'm not sure if I enjoyed myself, exactly, but I could hardly wait to see what I'd be appalled by next.

Modest and prosaic, with an unfortunate fairy-tale ending (yes, it features Tom Jones).

The Net is an efficient, workmanlike thriller that, at its best, does a canny job of exploiting the more fanciful edges of computer-age dread.

The House of Yes is knowingly overripe, a kitsch melodrama that dares to make incest sexy.

As stagy and awkward as some of the Warhol/Morrissey films of the early '70s.

It took gifted hucksters to make this movie, a funny and spirited - what to call it?

The film reveals, rather delectably, how potent the power of suggestion can be in a world gone madly groupie.

DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

The movie is red meat for anyone who thrives on a certain brand of punchy, in-your-face emotional shock value. Yet the pull of what happens on screen came, for me, with a major qualification: I went with it, but I didn't totally buy it. The film is a contraption that spreads its darkness like whipped butter on a roll.

The thrust of the movie is that even for Jerry, the quintessential scientist of stand-up, comedy is very, very hard to do. By the end, you're closer to knowing why.

There's no denying that Scott is a wizard of the narcotic-flash school. In The Fan, he uses his chromium-edged technique to evoke a dread-saturated consumerist America in which the most beloved institutions have grown mercenary and hard.

Breaking Dawn - Part 2 starts off slow but gathers momentum, and that's because, with Bella and Edward united against the Volturi, the picture has a real threat.

No one is going to confuse The Firm with art, but its high- cholesterol virtues-a story that keeps you guessing, a dozen meaty character turns-are enough to send you home sated.

On screen, Twilight is repetitive and a tad sodden, too prosaic to really soar. But Hardwicke stirs this teen pulp to a pleasing simmer.

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.

American Reunion is about the comedy of middle-class men who can't be satisfied with sex until it looks like porn.

If you can watch Popper's most trusted penguin finally get to fly and feel like you're soaring right up there with her, then you may just let this likable trifle whisk you back to childhood.

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

The movie is like Doctor Dolittle remade as a therapeutic sudser. By the end, it got to me.

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

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.

The ironic thrust of the movie is that Jobs' humanity is there in that perfectionistic insanity. He pushes and pushes to make home computers more and more appealing, accessible, and user-friendly, and that's his great gift to the world.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An enjoyable piece of hokum – your basic doom-laden parable of metaphysical sci-fi mind control, only with a surprise romantic sparkle.

It does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

360 has a circular structure that's deftly pleasing, though the human drama is just facile enough to make it seem, in the end, a little too much like connect the dots played with people.

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

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

Project X, likewise, serves up the frat house/Spring Break/Snooki-and-Sitch-on-a-bender antics that many in the audience will have been staring at for years, and implies that it's breaking down bold new barriers of misbehavior. In the end, though, it ain't nothin' but a party.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An agreeable mischievous romp.

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.

Hardy, speaking in low, flat, almost musically macho tones, has the bruiser charisma of a caveman Kevin Costner. It's not the money he's clinging to - it's the freedom.

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.

Eckhart shows a new kind of foreboding anger. He's powerful as a man who will do anything to crack the ice.

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.

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.

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.

Yet if Bachelorette takes the form of a romantic ensemble comedy, it's purged of any true romantic feeling. You'll laugh, maybe a lot, but you won't feel great about it in the morning.

A deft Stephen King freak-out.

What Planes lacks in novelty, it makes up for with eye-popping aerial sequences and a high-flying comic spirit.

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.

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.

For a Good Time, Call... tells the tender tale of two roommates who team up to launch a phone-sex line. Whatever their virtues or flaws, each of these movies makes the dirtiest episode of "Sex and the City" look like Doris Day fluff.

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.

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.

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

Out from behind his Captain America shield, Chris Evans proves a quirky and compelling actor as Mike Weiss, a personal-injury lawyer who spends most of his time doing drugs.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A solidly enjoyable formula thriller.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.

Touchy Feely is minor, but these people are good company.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Does all it can not to dehumanize Chong.

Mostly, Warrior is a showcase for its up-and-coming stars. Edgerton, from last year's "Animal Kingdom," and Hardy, who stole scenes as the identity forger in "Inception."

Though a great deal of this material (e.g., Troopergate) seems like old news, Broomfield is so dogged that he makes 
 a case, in a deeper way than we've seen, that there's a 
 terrifying remorselessness to Palin's feuding nature.

Soul Surfer, while formulaic in design, is an authentic and heartfelt movie.

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

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

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.

Rarely has a movie captured the obscene violence of sex trafficking with such unvarnished grubbiness. In the end, though, The Whistleblower is a corporate thriller.

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.

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.''

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The camera loves Banderas -- a velvet stud -- as much as it did the young Clint Eastwood.

If you take the film on its own terms, as a kind of Elvis movie dipped in guacamole, it's quirkily engrossing. Ferrell is a good straight actor for the same reason that he's an inspired comedian: He commits himself to every moment.

What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.

It's a heartfelt movie that could have used a zigzaggier undercurrent, though Olyphant, in the sort of role that Paul Newman used to swagger through, has a star's easy command.

Roth, there's no denying, creates considerable suspense out of our desire to confront the forbidden.

Had ''Boogie Nights'' been the tale of a California dreamer with a really long skateboard, the movie's delirious first half would have been ''Dogtown and Z-Boys,'' and its downbeat conclusion would be Stoked.

When it stays in the classroom, Detachment is a scrappy testament - to the futility of even trying to reach students who are cut off from the possibilities of knowledge, and to the way that our teachers are slowly being driven nuts.

A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but no one does it better than Myers.

The movie, in its basic concept, is corny and contrived, but as written and directed by Justin Zackham, it's executed in a pleasantly wry and understated fashion.

The movie's freakazoid intensity gets to you, but there's something at once cramped and show-offy in Aronofsky's refusal to even slighty vary its atmosphere of shock-corridor burnout.

The movie, while heartfelt and vividly shot, takes too many rote genre turns.

A good movie? Hardly. But more than enough to pass a dog day afternoon.

It's the closest the movies have come in a while to the nudgy, knowing fairy-tale enchantment of "The Princess Bride."

Smart People, unlike "Sideways" or "The Savages," has a plot that's a little too rote.

The Holocaust scenes are wrenching, the past-meets-present dialectics less so.

Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.

It's a messy, entertaining documentary rooted in -- though not limited to -- the iconically indulgent years of Fellini's later career.

A highly calculated act of mischief that sounds like a stunt cooked up for Howard Stern's radio show.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a fable of ''redemption,'' and it's too tidy by half, but it is also very sweetly told.

Shepard's charisma has always reached back to an earlier time, so it's easy to accept him as a kind of pre-counterculture hero - Eastwood without the sneer - who aged into the era of tabloid scandal.

A hit-or-miss affair that starts out wobbly and then gathers comic momentum.

A gory, pulpy wink of an action thriller, was spun out of a parody trailer Rodriguez directed for the '70s-trash homage "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was sublime. As a feature, Machete is more fun than it isn't, but its deadpan mockery of exploitation clichés often slips a bit too close to being the real, schlocky thing.

As enjoyable as most of Unforgiven is, Eastwood's shades-of-gray moralism feels like a whitewash.

The movie, quite simply, goes to sleep whenever Zatoichi isn't fighting. When he is, it's a pulp dazzler.

If I respect Downfall more than I was enthralled by it, that's because its portayal stops short of revelation. Once you witness Hitler's denial, the film has little more to say about him.

There's nothing corny, however, about the climactic shoot-out, which Costner has staged superbly as an extended logistical mini-war that surges and rifle-cracks with bloody abandon through what feels like every building in town. Call it dances with guns.

A blatant re-spin of ''The Fast and the Furious'' that also happens to be a far better movie.

Hill knows how to zing the audience, and his ”existential” approach to action remains edgy and enjoyable. But it also seems guided, more than ever, by a blockbuster imperative: Whatever happens, don’t let that roller coaster stop.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is wired-up synthetic fun. It’s a trivial kiddie flick that moves at the speed of your mind playing video games.

Cretton ... finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch.

The new Scream is about as good as “Scream 2” was — it keeps the thrill of the original “Scream” bouncing in the air like a blood-drenched balloon — but the film is basically a set of variations on a very old sleight-of-hand fear blueprint. Except that it’s now old enough to seem new again.

Hayek’s performance, by the end, grows unexpectedly moving. Yet Beatriz at Dinner is a little tidy. It seizes and charms without soaring.

Kubrick by Kubrick is most interesting for the ways that it undercuts the Kubrick mythology.

If you go into the movie wanting to be shocked and appalled, you won’t be disappointed.

"American Heretics" is eye-opening, but it's never explosive.

Mamet has a quick, spry reaction time and a gently forlorn focus that holds the screen, and she holds this movie together.

Plane is fodder, but the picture brazens through its own implausibilities, carried along — and occasionally aloft — by Gerard Butler’s squinty dynamo resolve.

While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the jumping-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.

It’s a good movie: tense, bold, angry, empathetic, provocative, observant, morally engaged. And also, to be honest, a trifle gimmicky.

While it’s not as if the film comes up with some smoking gun that Robert Mueller hasn’t yet, it fills in the Trump-Russia connection in a dogged, rigorously reported, eyebrow-raising way.

In Joe’s College Road Trip, Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s wildly, deliriously profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon.

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bring their A game; they never let us feel as if they’re going through the motions. The marks may be standard issue, but they hit them with fury and flair.

A lively and appealing analog-nostalgia documentary.

As a big-screen thriller, The Girl on a Train is just so-so, but taken as 112 minutes of upscale psychodramatic confessional bad-behavior porn, it generates a voyeuristic zing that’s sure to carry audiences along.

Golda is a good drama about Israel. But it will take a great drama about Israel to dig into the nation’s long-simmering moral ambiguities.

It’s an incendiary prank of a movie that begs our indulgence at times yet also invites us to get high on what a playful provocation it is.

The movie is a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn — a serviceable epic of brutal warfare, Colosseum duels featuring lavish decapitations and beasts both animal and human, along with the middlebrow “decadence” of palace intrigue.

A Worthy Companion is a lacerating snapshot of what abuse really does: how it can tear away someone’s identity.

The Accountant 2 is an agreeably loopy hyperviolent good time.

Good cartoon characters tend to be ageless, and Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is just clever enough not to feel like an anachronism. The duo’s creator and forever naughty guiding light, the writer-director Mike Judge (who also does their voices), flows the characters into the present day without a hitch in style or a stitch in time.

The movie won’t disturb your dreams, but it grabs hold of you and keeps tugging.

At its best, Back to Black, the forthright and compelling movie that’s been made of Winehouse’s life, takes that light/dark balance and digs into the drama of it, making it sing.

Thanksgiving follows the rules of the slasher genre, but it’s got a more charged and entertainingly hyperbolic atmosphere than these movies used to have.