Owen Gleiberman

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

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.

The Cook, The Thief is so full of loathing it just about gags on its own bile.

The movie is slick and cartoonish but also extremely clever, and its unabashed conventionality is exactly what’s fun about it.

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.

In a sense, John Hughes doesn’t produce movies anymore. He produces entertainment machines, and Career Opportunities has been shamelessly patched together — like Frankenstein’s monster — from bits and pieces of Home Alone and The Breakfast Club.

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

There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.

Miracle isn't powerful, it's muddled and diffuse.

For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.

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

It's not enough for the film to show us a child's corpse wrapped in cardboard; we've got to step back to see Kiarostami himself shooting the sad sight, so that it becomes a Godardian ironic statement.

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.

Ready to Wear is messy and vaguely nasty -- a blur with attitude.

An embarrassment--a fairy-tale showbiz satire that seems to defang itself, scene by scene.

Just... bad. As in BAD bad.

Passionate and saucy comedy.

This homicide thriller has a tantalizingly morbid atmosphere of unease.

The rare movie that turns cruelty into art.

The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.

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

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

The upshot is that those who appear to be guilty may not be -- a muddled message for our time.

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).

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

French art thriller 13 Tzameti has a literal hair-trigger premise, yet it's so lacking in human dimensions that it creates virtually no suspense.

The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.

Never lets Grant develop his pidgin-Italian nice-guy-gone-sociopath routine.

Cowgirls, a flaky-surreal adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 feminist hipster road novel, finds the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho" lost in the ozone of his own private whimsies.

The movie is so busy turning the Sioux characters into photogenic saints that it never quite allows them the complications of human beings.

This Myers is more problem child than bogeyman.

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.

Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above.

The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.

Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''

This remains the one and only fusion of ''Deliverance'' and ''Hansel and Gretel'' that I ever hope to see.

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

There's something sweet about the way that Murphy throws himself into this piffle. Thomas Haden Church does too.

The trouble is, it's all too exhibitionistic to ring true. The impotent folly of Antichrist is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.

Homophobic, sex-phobic, maybe even human-phobic.

The film is Moore's story, and she acts the hell out of one sexy scene, but most of Chloe is plodding and drab.

But overall, this lazy, sweet trifle seems to express the banality of well-being.

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

Has a few viciously funny moments.

My Girl has some sweet, funny moments (the cast is uniformly appealing), yet it unfolds in a landscape of paralyzing, pop-psych banality.

The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.

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

Is less an end in itself than an excuse, a jumping off point for showy, contrived, borderline exploitation sequences that fail to tie together because they're not really there to do anything but sell themselves as money shot thrills.

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

Deeply rich and strange new romantic comedy.

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

This story of a 12-year-old boy who drops through the net of middle-class life invites us-in each shimmering frame-to gaze upon the world with a child's freshly awakening vision.

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

Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?

Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps Roll Bounce jumping.

Wearing a brush cut that never fits the role, Carrey doesn't do a lot here besides flash those vampire-nerd teeth, and I grew weary of seeing them.

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.

The baby-voiced costar of "Chasing Amy" proves an effortless filmmaker, turning Lucy’s journey into the awakening of a soul.

None of the faux icons comes close to being a character. Instead, they are contrasted with a group of nuns who skydive without parachutes. Could this possibly be a metaphor for Korine's filmmaking? It certainly goes splat.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

Serves up the sort of shrill ''satire'' of middle-class Jewish vulgarity in which the mere mention of words like ''brisket'' and ''klezmer'' is automatically presumed to be hilarious.

The trouble with Changeling is that it plays less like reality than like a bare-bones, moralistic rehash of other, better movies, such as "L.A. Confidential" or "Frances."

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

The Bodyguard is an outrageous piece of saccharine kitsch — or, at least, it might have been had the movie seemed fully awake. Instead, it’s glossy yet slack; it’s like Flashdance without the hyperkinetic musical numbers and with the romance padded out to a disastrously languid 2 hours and 10 minutes.

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

Selma Blair, the one vibrant actress in a cast of colorless screamers (including Tom Welling from Smallville and Maggie Grace from Lost), takes Adrienne Barbeau's old role.

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

Inert dud of a hitmen-are-people-too comedy.

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.

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

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).

By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.

Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut]

A grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple "Rashomon."

Adam Sandler stars in a one-joke Caddyshack for the blitzed and jaded.

If any character steals Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, it's the Grim Reaper, who, as played by William Sadler, keeps smirking with pleasure at the chance to loosen up.

Agreeably mindless generation-next trash, but it leaves you hungry for a movie in which the characters are more than walking screenwriter index cards.

There's one moment that achieves the camp shiver of the original, when Damien's nanny hangs herself at his birthday party (''Damien, it's all for you!'').

With its lightweight hero and its random spray of ''high-powered'' action, Broken Arrow is like an underpopulated version of The A-Team. It's not just John Woo who gets swallowed up by the impersonal mechanics of big-budget mayhem. It's the audience, which pays for a sleek, dark thriller and gets recycled pulp instead.

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.

What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.

Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness.

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

It took long enough, but Disney has finally come up with an animated heroine who's a good role model and a funky, arresting personality at the same time.

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

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

Atrociously scripted and edited.

The bad acting — make that nonacting — of rappers DMX and Nas merges, all too well, with the shallow dehumanized vision of director Hype Williams.

It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.

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.

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

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

Goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical.

Unfortunately, most of the two-hour documentary is devoted to annotating what the Nazis stole for both their state and personal collections. The movie doesn't dramatize this crime -- it catalogs it. With deadening monotony.

The Last Boy Scout is a guilty pleasure by any standard, but I’ve seen plenty of guilt-free movies lately that aren’t this much fun.

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

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.

At times too movieish, yet Ashkenazi creates a memorable figure: a spy who operates - admirably - out of the most unyielding nationalist conviction, only to learn that he needs to let some of that conviction go.

Stella is never dull, but by the time it replays the famous Barbara Stanwyck-in-the-rain scene, it’s jerking camp laughter instead of tears.

Jordan lets slip virtually every rudiment of drama. He never deigns to develop his characters, he coats the movie in a wet blanket of whimsy, and he lets pop songs do his work for him more lavishly than Cameron Crowe did in "Elizabethtown."

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.

For all of Stone’s skill, there’s something naggingly remote about her. She has the beauty and confidence of Grace Kelly without the warmth that made Kelly’s sexiness seem at once playful and glamorous.

A conventionally heightened series of escapes and clashes and hide-and-seek gambits, yet the way the film has been made, nothing that happens seems inevitable -- which is to say, anything seems possible. There's a word for that sensation. It's called excitement.

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

From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.

It's hardly much of a thrill to see The One recycle, on a lower budget, the slo-mo bullet dodges from "The Matrix," along with unspectacular variations on several other of that film's time-bending demolition-ballet effects.

In Cobb, Jones seems trapped inside his own febrile personality. He’s so utterly, hyperbolically Tommy Lee Jones that his performance doesn’t begin to register as an imaginative look at who Ty Cobb was.

Isn't content to stick to the genre conventions it sets up. Instead, it sprawls and mutates into one of the Coens' elaborate gizmoid yarns.

It's a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let's-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen.

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

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

An exhausted epic, one that Stone has directed with an almost startling lack of personality or vision.

Lawrence is so ON that he appears to be gunning for clockwork bursts of audience approval.

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."

Turns the tricks of psychology into duplicitous high play.

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

Zenovich, the director of “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” offers just what you want from a documentary like this one: She brings us closer to events that have been covered many times, deepening — or overturning — what we think we know about them.

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

The movie also captures Thompson's tragedy: the haze of drugs and bad writing that consumed him for no less than his last 30 years.

The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic.

Orphan isn't scary -- it's garish and plodding.

Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news.

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

Raging ego aside, the penny-ante hucksterism of his I'm-going-on-dates-to-get-famous-making-a-movie-about-dates approach is too cloying and opportunistic to bear.

Trivial and charmless.

Petty, though, is the only reason to see this coy and scrappy comic-book adventure-a trash bin of sci-fi detritus.

Showcases a trio of terrific performances.

It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment.

Seems populated yet uninhabited; the only real star is the gloom.

Has my eye, seduced by the devious and tactile delights of ''Shrek,'' already evolved in tandem with the technological leaps in computer animation? Or is Atlantis simply a Disney dud?

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

The fusion of cheekiness and deliberately overscaled fantasy never jells.

A deliriously brain-dead erotic thriller...The patients (played by, among others, Lesley Ann Warren and Brad Dourif) are all nutjob cliches.

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

I'm happy to report, though, that even a dud like Spy Hard can't completely douse the stumbling Zen charm of Leslie Nielsen, whose genius is that he never quite sheds the illusion that he isn't in on the joke.

Here's one case where it's no praise to say that a movie leaves you with more questions than answers.

This rusty jalopy of a movie, which is so ramshackle it's nearly enough to make you forget how tossed-together the 1976 ''Car Wash'' was.

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

Starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch.

Far too cloyingly pleased with its own humanity.

Too chicly depressive -- and, for the most part, too dull -- to bear.

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

By the end, you feel like a drill sergeant-you want to wipe that stupid grin off Sandler's face.

With an authenticity that is tender and merciless, the movie shows you what it looks like when youth rebellion becomes a form of fascism.

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

Doesn't contain a single scary or imaginative moment.

Inocent Blood is an unbelievably lethargic horror comedy directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London). Anne Parillaud, the French star of La Femme Nikita, is less sexy than morose in the role of a modern-day vampire who preys on mafiosi. Why mafiosi? For no good reason other than that it allows Landis to stage a lot of scenes in which cut-rate Italian hoodlums stand around yelling at each other.

This one is just murk.

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.

The Comfort of Strangers is luridly silly, yet it isn’t quite dull. Walken takes his usual glassy-eyed menace to new levels of high-camp refinement — he manages to be over the top and minimal at the same time — and the film has an extravagantly lush atmosphere, due in large part to the music of Twin Peaks‘ Angelo Badalamenti.

Blunt-witted, visually pedestrian, and overly long, with too many scenes of Blade and his cohorts standing around in darkened corridors, waiting for their enemies to show up. The action, however, is as throat-grabbing as you want it to be.

It's slow and pretentious, full of craggy Bavarian snowscapes and dour "mystical" portents that seem to circle back to nothing but themselves.

Starts out well, but it turns into an almost perversely undramatic legal thriller.

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

For the audience, it's like watching the dreckiest of teen puppy courtships trying to pass itself off as ''Annie Hall.'' La-de-blah.

The Golden Army dazzles like something out of "Jason and the Argonauts." To make a comic-book fantasy this derivative yet this dazzling requires more than technique. It takes a director in touch with his inner hellboy.

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.

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

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

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

By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts," featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle.

What’s depressing about the current Hollywood mania to literalize old cartoon series isn’t that a show like Casper is such bad source material. It’s that the movie version is like the cartoon without innocence — a fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.

Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.

The Handmaid’s Tale is watchable, but it’s also paranoid poppycock — just like the book.

The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.

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.

A mood of lush romantic decadence -- sleaze made enigmatic -- hovers over Where the Truth Lies, which has a score that works so hard to evoke "Vertigo" that it may leave you dizzy.

In the end, there’s something opportunistic and glib about the way that Medicine Man yokes together medical wish fulfillment and save-the-rain-forest agitprop into a neat, messagey package. Nothing takes the fun out of romance quite like liberal earnestness.

Allen is no more convincing than the writer-director, Chris Ver Wiel, who strings together faux-QT, faux-Elmore Leonard clichés like so many necklace beads and pretends that's the same thing as making a movie.

Rigid, airless, and browbeatingly repetitive, Das Experiment is an overly didactic piece of thesis hectoring; it's like ''Lord of the Flies'' set in a Skinner box.

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.

Potent and eye-opening documentary.

Just about unwatchable — a numbingly repetitive farce in which the cursed Short trips, walks into walls, trips, spills an entire saltshaker onto his breakfast, trips, sets people on fire, trips…

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

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

Neat as Joe looks, you do wish that someone had bothered to give him a personality.

Modine, as a morosely self-involved actor, looks as if he's about to strangle someone -- and the movie, an attack on superficiality, never quite makes it out of the shallow end.

There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology.

The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.

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.

Manderlay is turgid and hollow.

Antonio Banderas is a charming and talented man, but in Take the Lead he lays on the old-world panache so thick - the accent, the flowery courtliness, the romance of romance - that he comes off like Dracula's metrosexual cousin.

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

An Inconvenient Truth can't, of course, reveal a future that is still up to us, but by the time you're done watching, the real question is, Which way on God's green earth would you want to err?

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

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

Just a lumbering, poorly photographed piece of derivative sci-fi drivel, full of grunting extras scampering around in animal pelts and more dank, trash-strewn sets than I ever care to see again.

Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.

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

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

What's really needed is a story with some sizzle, but Bigelow, in K-19, can't seem to decide whether she's making a shoot-the-works underwater rouser, like ''U-571'' or ''Crimson Tide,'' or a lofty historical message movie that hits us with the breaking news that the arms race was, in every sense, a poisonous game.

It's no insult to Melville to say that he wrote, in effect, the original ''Dilbert.'' This movie, unfortunately, makes ''Dilbert'' look like Melville.

Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.

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

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.

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

A pulsating snapshot of America caught in a mad, liberating identity crisis.

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

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

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

A splattery futuristic zombie thriller, designed as a jolt-a-minute freakout for young audiences who were numbed into submission long ago.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

The creepy-faced robot twin babies are funny (for a while); the rest of the film is not. It's like "Meet the Parents" with Dr. Phil as the officiant from hell.

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

A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.

An inept low-budget thriller.

A grisly piece of torture porn.

It has a few whispers of intrigue, but at the heart of The Bourne Identity lies a dispiriting paradox: The more that Jason Bourne learns about himself, the less arresting he seems.

Rails & Ties is like one bad TV movie that slammed into another.

The first animated feature produced entirely on computer is a magically witty and humane entertainment, a hellzapoppin fairy tale about a roomful of suburban toys who come to life when humans aren't around.

With its waxy color scheme and nonexistent pace, the movie is like an homage to Hitchcock’s worst period.

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

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

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.

The movie, a shoddy mess, is a bargain-basement rip-off of ''Ronin."

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.

Mr. Brooks begins promisingly, but it grows steadily more preposterous as it goes along, becoming the first feel-good serial-killer movie.

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

Crassly enjoyable.

If only director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo) knew how to do something with cliches other than throw them into the pot and stir. A preposterously inflated 135 minutes long, Tombstone plays like a three-hour rough cut that’s been trimmed down to a slightly shorter rough cut.

A ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as "The Road Warrior" without car chases, or "The Road" without humanity.

The film takes off from formula elements-it's yet another variation on "Die Hard"-but it manipulates those elements so skillfully, with such a canny mixture of delirium and restraint, that I walked out of the picture with the rare sensation that every gaudy thrill had been earned.

A delicate yet haunting movie, a meditation on friendship, on the roots of bohemianism, on the sad comedy of madness.

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

A cheaply made piece of ''psychological'' occult schlock, subjects you to that depressing stop-and-go rhythm that defines inept fantasy thrillers.

A Dirty Shame isn't dirty fun. It's the perv "Footloose."

Samuel L. Jackson, call your agent — and fire him.

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

You'd think that the film would ask you to be appalled at this scenario of forced servitude -- but no, it's treated as harmless and cute, like an Israeli ''Chico and the Man.''

It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art.

Welcome to the brave new world of slut-chic cosmetic feminism.

Wind sometimes dawdles, but it’s a sports movie with soul.

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

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

If Kids is simultaneously engrossing and detached, observant and just plain showy, that may be because the film is so caught up in trying to be a statement that it never develops its characters beyond their rowdy, bellicose facades.

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

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

The Libertine is such a torturous mess that it winds up doing something I hadn't thought possible: It renders Johnny Depp charmless.

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.

Critics tend to fawn over the Japanese director-star Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi), but am I the only one who finds his films impossible to make heads or tails of?

The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.

The prospect of a teacher driven to his students’ level of sociopathic vengeance might have packed a ghoulish wallop had the film viewed it as tragic. Reynolds, however, is just grinding out exploitation thrills.

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

"Species" at least had the benefit of Henstridge's glazed porn-doll perversity, but this time any glimmers of sexual ominousness are buried in a lame, desultory chase plot and in the woefully underimagined special effects.

A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride.

Be wary of any movie in which the hero is monosyllabic and a stutterer at the same time.

This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.

It’s engagingly junky entertainment with a healthy sense of its own ludicrousness.

A concrete slab of science-fiction melodrama that, for all its obvious limitations as a movie, plays on zeitgeist fantasies of an alien visitation as surely as Spielberg’s blissed-out fable did.

The film's chief novelty turns out to be its drab ''literary'' approach to horror.

It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.

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