Owen Gleiberman

Foster, working from a patchy, meandering script by W.D. Richter, produces scene after scene of rudderless banter. The movie is all asides, all nattering; the actors seem lost in their busy, fractious shticks.

The scandal of McCarthyism is too daunting to shake off. But Guilty By Suspicion leaves you wishing that someone would finally make a decent movie about it.

There's no denying that Washington can play a rococo villain with flip ebullience, but I fervently wish he were doing it in a movie that paid more than lip service to the real world.

The movie is based on a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.

The rules of good screenwriting are mostly broken, though Jamie Foxx's smash-and-grab charisma remains intact.

As visual spectacle, Avatar is indelible, but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.

If the result is often as glib as the targets it's satirizing, it's also driven by a cruelly distilled joy. Wag the Dog is an ode to the thrill of deception, a thrill embodied in Hoffman's inspired performance.

Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity.

Brashly engaging.

If this is the sound of a new generation, then it may be the first generation cautious enough to embrace friendship as mightier than love.

Glum and preposterous -- an operatically stilted adolescent martyr fantasy -- and yet, as staged by Coppola, it's well worth seeing.

Has a voyeuristic tug, but all in all it's a lot less sensational than it wants to be.

Dunst, in her finest performance yet, has now transcended her fellow teen stars. She is arguably the first actress of her generation poised to take on Gwyneth and Julia.

Stops time, all right -- it stretches 94 minutes into something that begins to feel like infinity.

Europa, Europa isn’t the wrenching emotional saga it might have been.

Directed by the ingenious documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), A Brief History of Time held out the promise of being an audacious, brain-bending experience. Instead, it's plodding and disappointingly conventional.

Coppola, who has made clever music videos, including the one for Moby's ''Honey,'' clearly had a lot of fun detailing the mod cheesiness of this intergalactic period piece, though the satire would have been more ticklish if ''Austin Powers'' hadn't gotten there first.

The Aristocrats has a lot of laughs, but as it giggles and blasphemes its way into areas not so far removed from the scandalous landscape of the Marquis de Sade, the movie, funny as it is, becomes exhausting and a bit depressing.

More and more independent filmmakers seem to be cobbling together characters and scenes that have surface hook and flash without organic emotional logic.

It's an utterly fake nostalgia piece -- stupid and pandering, a bad-boy teen flick that plays less like a loving look at the late '70s than a terrible movie from the late '70s.

The only performer I enjoyed watching was Martin Short, who plays a bitch dandy music teacher with a smile so fake that the comedian seems to be acting with his gums.

Here, in paranoid, bad acid trip form, is the real birth of girl power. [2000 re-release]

There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.

White Sands, on the other hand, is a dud, the sort of movie that swathes its emptiness in layers of chic, swirling ”visuals.”

The filmmakers even manage to turn seamy Bangkok into the least exotic setting imaginable.

A number of scenes have been staged with satisfying kinetic flair, and Willis once again makes an appealing superhero. Yet without that great big booby-trapped skyscraper to hold the action together, the suspense dissipates.

Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.

If you've been longing to see the worst family entertainment of 1966, A Dog of Flanders may be the movie for you.

Rumble in the Bronx never quite achieves the smack-you-around zest of Chan's Hong Kong pictures. Still, it's hard to dislike a movie with such a friendly sense of the preposterous.

The only thing that makes this ludicrous botch even borderline watchable is Alec Baldwin’s enjoyably supercilious performance as a leering stud surgeon who thinks nothing of belting back shots of bourbon before going in to perform an operation.

From the get-go, The Recruit is one of those thrillers that delights in pulling the rug out from under you, only to find another rug below that.

Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.

Anyone who thinks that Josh Hartnett isn't a true movie star should see his riveting, high-wire performance in August.

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

Walker forged an out-of-time mystique that is vividly captured here.

Enjoyably dirty-minded sendup of when-ballet-met-hip-hop youth musicals.

Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.

With Malcolm X, Lee has created a galvanizing political tragedy, the story of a leader who, through his very perception and daring, recognized that death — and only death — would be his final evolution.

Fun, and believable, on the most important level: It convinces us that Jaden Smith has what it takes to fight his way to the top.

The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.

Fear of a Black Hat never achieves the dizzying cinema verite swirl that made Spinal Tap such a timeless satire. Many of the jokes are too literal (a goof on Vanilla Ice named Vanilla Sherbet). Still, Cundieff has what nearly every commentator on the rap scene has lacked: a first-class bull detector.

Little more than a rambling chain of combative buddy mishaps, but the interplay between Vaughn and Favreau, who does great double takes of thrusting chin frustration, spins you through the weak patches.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is undeniably disturbing, especially that video scene and when it shows us (however discreetly) a body being hacked up in a bathtub. Yet the critics who’ve hailed it as a landmark are going overboard. Henry is just a superior B-movie with an artsy-clinical title.

As a director, Mehta would do well to stop smothering her empathy in glibness (she uses the family's ancient mute grandmother as a sitcom prank), but her empathy pokes through nonetheless.

Jaglom's scruffy style doesn't carry it through. He puts enough toxic insincerity on screen to singe, though.

This is just cut-rate, generic daughter of Indy Jones hokum.

Spins a thorny tale of political corruption laced with personal sleaze.

To call Demon Knight a popcorn movie is to give it too much credit — I doubt it would raise the pulse of Orville Redenbacher.

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.

If you've always longed to see a Cold War satire done in the hit 'em over the head frantic camp mode of ''Love, American Style,'' then Company Man is the movie for you.

E.T. is ultimately a tale of love, and the film becomes a cathartic leap into pure feeling. [2002 re-release]

Graham makes the coming-out dithering bearable, but not before she has jumped through hoops of contrivance.

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

An ingratiatingly scrappy little movie. It's been cobbled together out of a great many conventional crises (drugs, abusive boyfriends, heartless girlfriends, a looming record deal), yet there's a tough and appealing vitality to the way that it embraces the petty ego-tripping and party-down squalor of the rock lifestyle and stands apart from it at the same time.

I kept wondering how Arcand could have chosen as his generational representative a man not just flawed in his hedonism but one so fundamentally lacking in tenderness for others.

This is very much a ''woman's picture,'' driven by a twin rudder of anxiety and empowerment.

But when it comes to that great puppy pilgrimage, the movie, which was written and produced by John Hughes, falls astoundingly flat.

A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.

This satire of empty-suit capitalism has scalding moments, but most of it suggests Being There meets The Office gibberized into theater of the absurd.

Living in Oblivion celebrates the very act of filmmaking as grand folly, a triumph of absurdist heroism.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

These are standard youth-movie dilemmas, but they're brought to life by the high-energy cast and the musical numbers, which Ortega shoots with electrifying pizzazz.

The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

Moving and eerily beautiful.

Deliberately quaint and old-fashioned, a once-over-slightly exercise in nostalgic wonder directed by the British-born great-grandson of H.G. Wells, who treats the spirit of his ancestor's novel with literal-minded fealty.

If only they’d trusted it more, they might have made a marvelous kids’ film instead of a merely charming one.

This nose-thumbing mock documentary is so prescient, so astonishingly up-to-the-minute, it creates the eerie effect of having been ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.

There's only one place that a movie like this one can possibly be heading, and that's to a demagogic blowout of violent, femme-power payback. Enough gets there by way of far too many tedious detours.

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

Works cleverly because it emerges right out of the everyone's-an-exhibitionist YouTube age

A throwback to the age when Westerns were quaint.

The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.

Hoop Dreams is an astonishing emotional experience — it has highs, lows, and everything in between.

May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.

Notorious makes the death of Biggie Smalls look like a tragic mistake, instead of the outgrowth of a culture devoted to selling the fantasy of who's the biggest man.

Overall it's more amusing than hilarious.

Carries little in the way of passion or revelatory charge.

The Prophecy is an occult freakshow so inert it seems to have been pasted together out of stock footage.

Lonely Hearts never locates the key to the killers' bloody bond.

All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.

It's like "Deathtrap" crossed with "Cribs" as staged by Stanley Kubrick.

Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.

The Golden Compass is a snowbound mystical-whizbang kiddie ride that hovers somewhere between the loopy and the lugubrious.

An artful piece of exploitation vérité.

He's Just Not That Into You turns romantic sanity into something so sanitized that it starts to make delusion look good.

The result is a playful, elusive movie that isn't so much heartwarming as soul-cleansing.

The trouble with the movie, apart from its rather monotonous dourness of tone, is that everyone in the family, especially the reformed-delinquent high school son (Penn Badgley), comes off as tougher, smarter, and quicker on the draw than the stepfather who's supposed to be outfoxing them.

The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.

A film of droll and dry observational precision, its emotional minimalism is almost fetishistic -- and, by the end, a tad frustrating.

Whenever an actress takes on a gritty working-class role, the audience does a gut check of authenticity. Either the actress gets it, like Melissa Leo did in "Frozen River," or she doesn't, like Michelle Monaghan as the spoilin'-for-a-fight truck-driver heroine of the inert indie dud Trucker

Embarrassingly entertaining.

What's going on is: hunks on horsies.

As the killer, who plucks out his victims' eyeballs, Kane, the seven-foot bald WWE wrestler who's like a modern Tor Johnson, is so inept he's more cuddly than terrifying.

An extraordinary film; it may be the most haunting documentary since ''Crumb.''

Beowulf is a solemnly gorgeous, at times borderline stolid piece of Tolkien-with-a-joystick mythology.

The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous.

My Cousin Vinny is the definition of obvious, and it’s way too long (do films like this really need an hour’s worth of setup?). But Pesci and Tomei make a first-rate team — they’re Punch and Judy gone Brooklyn.

It has no twistiness or intrigue, and none of the juicy anthro-underworld detail that Koppelman and Levien brought to their screenplay for the tricky, enjoyable ''Rounders.''

Mostly comes down to rage fiends going at one another with baseball bats, knives, pesticide tanks, and power drills.

The audience gets the message (religious fanaticism: bad), but nothing we see is convincing on its own.

After all of its sadness, a tender redemptive glow.

This beautiful and urgent eco-doc takes a bite out of the shark mythology made indelible by "Jaws."

A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.

Has a fractured fairy-tale charm, even if it isn't a nonstop laugh riot.

Enchantingly witty.

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.

The Bridge crosses a disquieting line.

Trash, but always just a little creepier than you expect.

The film, though sleek and easy to sit through, replaces genuine dramatic involvement with a superficial, rock & roll empathy-it's as though we were watching Cruise's character and playing air guitar to his emotions. There are plenty of soulless movies around. What's special about Days of Thunder is that it works overtime trying to convince you it's not one of them.

The hilarious diminuendo of that title is such that the movie might as well have been called ''Wes Craven Presents: Not a Hell of a Lot.''

As the vamps, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson might be posing for a fashion spread with just one note to play -- gorgeous high-bitch mockery.

Overtones are about all there is to Poison Ivy. The movie isn’t smart, but it never achieves true sleaziness either.

Gliding from the physical to the metaphysical, Andersen reveals how films like ''Chinatown'' effectively remade the reality of Los Angeles, replacing history with myth in a way that now anchors the city more than that history itself does.

As riveting as its title.

The movie has been shot with a pleasingly overripe visual flair, and on its own terms it’s fairly entertaining. Yet it isn’t about anything so much as its own explosiveness.

There are laughs to be had, yet the movie is, if anything, more strenuous than it is funny.

Event Horizon could have used a decent script, but the director, Paul Anderson, is a stylist to watch.

It may be the first movie that mirrors, in its very syntax, the ''snap crackle and pop'' narcotic superficiality of the E! channel. I mean that as a compliment.

The affair itself, in its genteel way, does catch fire, but it's the end of the affair that needs to move us to rapture, and the movie, instead, just drifts away.

Who Killed the Electric Car? makes you angry, and also sad, to live in a country where innovation could be contrived into an enemy.

Striptease lets down its own performers right along with the audience. It’s a Christmas tree someone forgot to string with ornaments.

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.

What's infectious in Soul Power is the almost shocking optimism of its America-meets-Africa '70s world-beat vibe.

It's a David-and-Goliath tale, full of anger and disturbing accusation, but it's also inspiring.

Whatever its melodramatic shortcomings, South Central offers a wrenching view of modern youth-gang violence by demonstrating, with desperate candor, that the civilized alternatives are fast disappearing.

A sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization.

The difference between "Pretty Woman" and Runaway Bride is that we can no longer buy Roberts in her tearful romantic-melancholy mode. It seems vaguely patronizing now.

The trouble with Whipped isn't that its characters are dirty mouthed horndog jerks -- it's that they're phony dirty mouthed horndog jerks.

The Flintstones is a big, shiny package of comic nostalgia, as much a theme park as a movie.

Basic Instinct 2 isn't bad, exactly, but it lacks the entertaining vulgarity of the first film; it's Basic Instinct redone with more ''class'' and less thrust.

I'm not generally a big fan of tribute concerts, but this is a glorious exception.

The Prestige isn't art, but it reaps a lot of fun out of the question, How did they do that?

Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.

This sweetly downtrodden, punch-drunk Rocky is often appealing to watch. Yet as a character, he doesn’t have much drive — and neither, I’m afraid, does the movie.

Does more than capture the excitement of marching bands; it gets their clockwork beauty as well.

Mesmerizing.

As a movie, Freakonomics is like Jujubes for the brain - it starts to get cloying halfway through the box.

It wants to be "Good Will Hunting" set in the land of "Entourage," but its bummed-out touchy-feeliness is every bit as concocted as its overly jaded showbiz corruption.

This lone, fallen Nazi's obsessive distance from his actions is enough to give The Specialist a lingering chill.

It’s disappointingly ho-hum, without the spectacular — and often very funny — special effects that have become the hallmark of this series.

An eminently easy-to-watch piece of one-joke pop japery, is a movie that mimics the I'm-a-character-in-my-own-life metaphysical playfulness of "The Truman Show."

Pauly Shore, the reptilian imp from MTV. Reeling off Valley Dude slang in a slurry monotone, as if he could barely be bothered to make his lips form words, he’s a fey sleazebag in hippie duds — a cross between Jim Morrison and Richard Simmons. The most interesting thing about watching Pauly Shore is wondering how long it will be before he has to take a day job.

Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.

There's a certain breed of annoying indie movie in which a character's shyness is portrayed in a manner so coy that it becomes a reverse form of exhibitionism. Jump Tomorrow is that kind of movie.

Romeo Is Bleeding just ends up flaunting its Grand Guignol outrageousness, rubbing our noses in its desire to be a gaudy hipster freak show. By the end, the film has become so mired in pointless sensation that it ceases to be any fun at all.

Minghella's adaptation of the 1997 Charles Frazier novel is emotionally detached and almost too studiously carpentered: a willed exercise in mythmaking.

Being Julia flirts too heavily with soap opera clichés, but it has enough surprises to keep you guessing, and for Annette Bening it's the liveliest of comebacks.

Unlike its obvious influence, the 1999 Japanese shocker "Audition," The Human Centipede has no real-world echoes. It's an only-in-the-movies sick goof.

Stupefyingly tedious and annoying.

Isn't coherent, exactly, but what dripping-ghoul horror movie is these days? The new rule is, It's not hip to make sense when you're raising hell.

Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.

The movie is a feminist lesson instead of what it should have been (and once was): a tough, synthetic, high-gloss entertainment that wears its heart on its lacquered fingernails.

Seth Green is uproarious as an Amish farmer who speaks in sentences so passive-aggressive, they're like tiny slaps.

De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.

Some motion pictures portray ultimate passion; others create ultimate thrills. Men in Black II achieves ultimate insignificance -- it's the sci-fi comedy spectacle as Whiffle-Ball epic.

Branagh shows us the comedy of a man who is too clever to understand that in the guise of dreading fatherhood, he is really at war with how much he longs for it.

It barely boasts enough funny material to fill four minutes.

Younger, in his debut feature, is as canny as he is derivative.

A marvel of vérité nightmare atmosphere.

It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.

It's hard to say what's more excruciating: Alex's novel, which is like ''The Great Gatsby'' rewritten by Lizzie McGuire, or his quarrelsome flirtation with Emma, who has no existence as a character apart from her drive to reshape Alex into a specimen of respectable tamed manhood.

When Levinson leaves the older generation behind and concentrates on his immediate family, Avalon becomes suffused with the thrill and anxiety of young, postwar Americans approaching life in a way that’s so new it feels like science fiction.

How is Invictus as a sports movie? Let's just say that its lump-in-the-throat climax is predictable, but that doesn't mean it's less than earned.

It's a death-wish revenge thriller posing as a lavishly pastoral historical epic.

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.

An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.

If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.

An inert screwball cartoon, a celebration of monogamy as fashion statement.

On the Line would like to be ''Serendipity'' for the Oxy-and-Skechers set, but it feels more like the worst movie Michael J. Fox never made.

I found The Girl Who Played With Fire more gripping than "Dragon Tattoo," because this one doesn't just play with thriller conventions -- it puts them to work.

The premise is out of '70s porn, and so is the overbroad satire and almost total lack of conviction.

Instead of exploiting the mystery and dread, or even the comedy, of Billy’s condition, Thinner turns into an excruciatingly low-grade pursuit thriller, with Billy hunting down the old Gypsy sage (Michael Constantine) who put the curse on him.

When the children in Carpenter’s Village flash their glowing eyes, hypnotizing the hapless grown-ups into committing a series of increasingly lurid suicides, the kids don’t seem much more bizarre — or frightening — than your average 10-year-old Nintendo freak.

A yawn-by-numbers romper-room dud.

As a piece of escapism, this deluxe, action-heavy, 2-hour-and-21-minute Robin Hood gets the job done. You’re carried along by plot, production values, and some choice supporting actors. Yet it’s a rouser without a rousing hero. Costner doesn’t disgrace himself — he has the star presence the role demands. What he’s not is an impassioned Robin Hood. And without the sense that Robin is on a humanistic mission (one that’s a pleasure to fulfill), the story has no charge.

Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers.

The star hasn’t lost his gift for making sadism seem impish. After a while, however, you may notice that the film’s mayhem is accomplished almost entirely through editing.

A haunting and incandescent work of art.

Land of the Lost has stray amusing tidbits, but overall it leaves you feeling splattered.

One of the most revelatory rock portraits ever made.

Depp portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.

A fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study).

This makes for a friendly romp, and also a dull one.

A soporific dud, which should have been tossed out of Sundance.

Light and goofy, yet the fight scenes, which are the heart of the film, are lickety-split mad fun.

Duvall's acting turns magical: scary, touching, and full of grace. But Get Low, as directed by Aaron Schneider, forces you to sit through a lot of poky setup to reach that touching epiphany.

Body Snatchers is inky and somber, with some of the creeping bad-dream naturalism of George Romero’s Living Dead films.

After a lifetime of flogging the demons of cosmic despair, Ingmar Bergman, at 88, comes off as lean and vigorous in this fascinating memoir-interview.

A somber, draggy, deadweight, lugubrious, absurdly self serious version of ''American Beauty.''

We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.

It's just a camcorder soap opera of packaged hormonal fervor -- ''The Real World'' with extra tequila body shots.

Anxiety is a fair response to a midlife crisis, but that hardly means that we want to see the heroine of a movie spend scene after scene trapped in a nervous dither of indecision. That's exactly what happens in Lucia, Lucia.

The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.

Like all courtroom dramas, A Few Good Men is gimmicky and synthetic. It's also an irresistible throwback to the sort of sharp-edged entertainment Hollywood once provided with regularity.

The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.

The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.

Quills bleaches the danger -- and fascination -- out of De Sade, turning him into a kind of mad saint of ''Masterpiece Theatre'' porn.

Really, about all that unifies the movie is its inclination to turn little people's dreams into limply ''affectionate'' camp.

The unlikeliest enthralling movie to be released so far this year.

Swimming With Sharks swipes its basic design from Robert Altman’s The Player: It’s yet another black satirical morality play about a yuppie climber who learns to be a killer. But since Guy, for all his ass-kissing resentment, isn’t really filled in as a character, our attention — and, in a curious way, our sympathy — shifts to the monster himself. When Spacey goes ballistic, only to freeze the nitroglycerine in his veins a moment later, you don’t want to look anywhere else.

A joke of a title in search of a movie with a single good joke.

One of those feminist cries in the dark in which the heroine, a saintly sufferer, is more admirable than interesting.

The trouble is, nothing about this couple is particularly rooted in Los Angeles. The love affair has a bland, generic feel. What's more, the picture lacks verve.

At times too restrained, yet there are moments it captures the erotics of intimacy in a way that makes most American love stories look downright unfree.

The highest praise I can give to Mondovino is that it makes you want to sample every vintage it shows you.

Has the look of a great fairy tale -- all that's missing is the tale.

As long as Norton plays Harlan as a modern-day Joe Buck, a kind of four-in-the-afternoon cowboy, we're drawn by his waltz of innocence and vagueness. But Down in the Valley turns out to be one of those films with a thick, gummy overlay of Western ''mythology.''

The chintzy characters, hair-raising deaths, and one spectacular rocket-launcher joke aren't enough to give "Hostel" a run for its blood.

The trouble with low-rent science-fiction movies is that beneath all the futuristic gimcrackery — the video phones and laser guns and hyperspace leaps, the obligatory time-travel setups — you realize, at some point, that you’re watching a routine urban chase thriller: Lethal Weapon 2000. For most of its running time, Freejack bounces and sputters along atop the usual action- movie chassis.

You hardly need to be devoted to the ways of Buddhism to see when a gifted filmmaker, for the sake of multicultural niceness, has enthusiastically abandoned his mind.

Has the dubious distinction of being just about the mildest porno comedy ever made. It's like something the teenage Pedro Almodóvar might have written to shock his 10th-grade creative writing teacher.

The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss.

The movie is on some level a stunt, but it has the fervent, sun-dazed pull of an authentic experience unfolding in real time, with glints of drama, comedy, and terror mixed into the almost-but-not-quite tedium.

The movie, for all its sincerity, becomes clinical and repetitious, though its unsparing vision of the fragility of identity can give you a shudder.

The animation in Lilo & Stitch has an engaging retro-simple vivacity, and it's nice to see a movie for tots make use of Elvis Presley, but the story is witless and oddly defanged.

It understands, in a way that speaks forcefully enough about the mechanisms of poverty to transcend the rather simplistic filmmaking.

As is often the case with Lee, though, the film left me wishing for even more scenes of casual intimacy, still the most powerful way to carry any message.

Son Frère is hushed, clinical, grimly paced, and moving.

There are brutal scenes with razor blades and other impromptu devices of erotic torment, but what makes the movie a trial to sit through isn't just the heroine's pain-freak tastes.

The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.

At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

The General, for all its panache, is ultimately an unsatisfying movie. The reason, I think, is that Boorman’s slightly puerile romanticization of Cahill keeps getting in the way of the reality he’s showing us.

Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen.

Scott, working from a script by William Monahan, is so busy balancing our sympathies, making sure no one gets offended, that he has made a pageant of war that would have gotten a thumbs-up from Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ransom has some clever and exciting moments, but in scene after scene it teases you with gamesmanship only to pummel you with contrivance.

Theron is an arresting image, but, like everything else in Aeon Flux, she's stranded in a trashy and derivative glum zone of fashion-runway fascism.

The convolutions of Turow’s plot remain absorbing, and Presumed Innocent is certainly as watchable as a lot of other courtoom-investigative thrillers. Yet almost everything in the picture feels sterile and posed. Pakula is good at laying out an intricate, almost mathematical series of events (his best film remains All the President’s Men), but he’s not big on atmosphere. The movie could have used some of the bowels-of-the-city grit Sidney Lumet brought to Q & A.

Huppert has never been this cheerful, or lethal, and the movie itself is like Hitchcock's ''Rebecca'' reshot for House & Garden, with all the ghosts pulled out of the closet.

It's the rare portrait of a happy marriage that is honest about the complex currents of desire, and the drama is beautifully played by Bale, who gawks with soulful sweetness, and Watson, who does her most piercing work since "Breaking the Waves."

So diaphanous it practically dissolves as you watch it.

A bland, pious yet touching faith-based tearjerker.

A genially cruddy B movie can sometimes go places - sort of - that bigger movies won't.

Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male.

The races are scorchingly shot, and they lend the movie a zest.

The trouble with all this is that it's thin movie tinsel that, while lovingly polished, never becomes more than tinsel. The Good Thief has a glib stylishness (the rapid freeze-frames at the end of scenes signify...nothing), yet it lacks a blast of reality to balance its fable.

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

Pride doesn't have much surprise, but it's a formula picture of genuine feeling.

For all its garishness, though, the film is punchy and fast, and it has an engagingly preposterous cheeseball climax, with Schwarzenegger, in full Turbo Man regalia, zooming through the skies like a consumer-king Rocketeer.

Peter Bogdanovich taps deep into the Hearst mystique, entertainingly reenacting a historic scandal.

As compelling as it is bizarre.

A lively, disposable hybrid of the sincere and the synthetic.

Director Kathryn Bigelow is one of the new-style action wizards who’ve never quite mastered the nuts and bolts of telling a story.

Sherlock Holmes is an odd amalgam, a top-heavy light entertainment that keeps throwing things at you and doesn't seem too concerned with whether they stick.

Disciplined script -- bitingly funny.

Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.

For all the praise that has been heaped upon it, is a quasisatisfying, half realized vision.

A glimpse into a society that has grown more open, more free, and also more casually selfish in its interpersonal aggression.

Chicago 10 is well worth seeing, if only because a good half of the film is devoted to extraordinary footage of the four days of rage that spawned the trial.

Ryan radiates neither desire nor terror. She's freeze-dried in a world of lifelessly abstract feminine fear, and so is the movie.

Were women put on earth to be warriors? Demi Moore certainly was. The role of Jordan fits her as snugly as a new layer of muscle.

In the end, Scent of a Woman offers little more than lumbering simulation of Rain Man's nimble magic. But Pacino's performance-scabrous, tender, ripely theatrical-is a master showman's trick.

Yet despite its promising pedigree, Dangerous Minds has a slick, syrupy fraudulence -- it's like an Afterschool Special made for MTV.

The one truly thrilling movie I've seen so far this year.

Few comedies have worked this hard to make everyone on screen look this dumb.

The trouble with The Truth About Charlie is that it really is after the truth about Charlie, a character we could hardly give a damn about. The only charade is the illusion that we might actually be entertained.

Would like to be a Halloween treat, but it's more like a nightmare of blandness.

A chintzy melodrama gussied up as hair-trigger combat ''reality,'' but there's no denying the vividness with which the French cowriter-director Elie Chouraqui has visualized the chaos of Croatia.

Just about the only documentary that works like a novel, inviting you to read between the lines of Baker's personality until you touch the secret sadness at the heart of his beauty.