Owen Gleiberman

A feel-good movie that never stops feeling good. The film is based on a true story (it was adapted from a nonfiction best-seller by Michael Lewis), but you never feel that Hancock has honestly captured what's true about it.

Dishes up some very corny jokes, but the images have a brighter-than-life vivacity.

Are there surprises? A couple of big money ones, notably the ludicrous would-be jaw-dropper of a finale.

A movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it.

Flushed Away lacks the action-contraption dottiness of a Wallace and Gromit adventure, but it hits its own sweet spot of demented delight.

The producers of Nowhere to Run simply toss out the mousetrap. They make the dismal mistake of turning Van Damme into a softy, a sensitive lunk who puts up his dukes only because he wants to help his new family. The former kickboxer would do well to remember that the most heartfelt performance he was put on this earth to give revolves around the tender sound of snapping limbs.

And so even if you're held (as I was) by the acting, you may find yourself fighting the film's design. It reflects a certain lack of faith in your audience to take a performance as authentic as De Niro's and reduce it to the level of a glorified reach-out-and-touch-someone commercial.

There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as The Road seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.

Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.

The movie actually makes you long for the rockin’ entertainment value of a good catechism session.

There are many things wrong with Novocaine, but the film's most gnawing pain is its clodhopper farfetchedness.

Did Scott, too, get hooked by the 1998 Spanish film ''Open Your Eyes?'' Intentionally or not, he has made ''Overcast Vanilla Sky.''

The best thing in The Count of Monte Cristo is Guy Pearce's snot-nosed hauteur. He gives this scoundrel some wounded edges, and frills as well.

Powerful and searching documentary.

Little more than a lavish, art-directed slasher movie.

Blades of Glory has funny moves even when its characters can barely move, but the film seldom gets past its one basic laugh: that a real man figure-skating is a contradiction in terms.

If Microsoft and Nike ever merged into one corporate megalith (MicroNike?) and commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to direct its visionary new Super Bowl commercial, the result might look something like Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi.

Far and Away looks like an epic, but it lacks flavor and texture. It's so predigested there's nothing left to chew on.

A deft, funny, shrewdly unsettling tribute to such slasher-exploitation thrillers as "Terror Train," "New Year's Evil," and Craven's own "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of "Re-Animator," pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.

There's a glimmer of what the film might have been, though, in the performance of Mike Myers, who plays Studio co-owner Steve Rubell, with his sweaty thinning hair and look-at-me-I-got-class Lacoste shirts, as a vengeful gargoyle presiding over a kingdom of beauty he can rule but never join.

The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

It's hard to deny that Gallo has caught the freedom and melancholy, the intoxicating aimlessness, the lonely twilight beauty of a solo road trip in a way that no previous filmmaker quite has.

Imagine two movies...The first is a moody thriller about two brothers who pull off a bank job, take a family hostage, and head for Mexico. The second is a garish horror freak-out. The deranged hook of From Dusk Till Dawn is that it starts out as the first movie and turns, on a dime, into the second.

If An Affair to Remember worked for you, Love Affair may do the same. It resurrects the earlier film’s sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity, right down to the awful final scene, which always felt — and still feels — as if another 20 minutes of movie were yet to come. Then again, what moved viewers in the ’50s seems almost luridly manipulative and unconvincing now.

To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.

The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.

Norah Jones, making her big-screen debut as a wistful wanderer, is a beautiful blank, and the fragments barely add up to a movie.

The movie is merciless sending up "Juno's" self-satisfied hipster gobbledygook, and it's quite funny to see Hannah Montana still promoting her tie-in products as she lies crushed and dying under a meteor.

Paced a bit too glacially for my taste, yet it's worth sitting through for its trick ending, a twist of events as ominous as the landscape.

Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.

Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.

Might have been richer, tougher, more honestly liberal if it had revealed a few more shades of gray among the men.

Every actor registers...In a film of minor ambition, they're all worthy company.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.

Lorenzo’s Oil is at once harrowing and riveting. In the age of AIDS, it has telling observations to make about how the institutionalized complacency of the medical establishment actually works. As remarkable a job as Miller and the actors have done, though, the film begins to wear you down. At 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s far too long, and (more crucially) it has a flat, repetitive structure.

Vacancy is a schlock surprise: a no-frills motel-hell slasher film -- with a bit of soul.

The journey, however, is a hollow one, since Quaid and Stone, for all their efforts, never really do seem married. Perhaps that's because Stone, with her dry-ice charisma, does everything that an actress should except connect to whomever she happens to be facing on screen.

If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?

Depression is a fair subject for a movie, but this much moroseness shouldn't come to this little.

In this brilliantly sustained climax, Coppola unveils a vision of corruption that embraces the entire world, but he's also reveling in sheer theatrical magic in a way that only a master can.

Is it, you know, fun? At times. Yet there's a rote quality to the way this half-dumb, half-sly movie resolves itself into an intentional debauch, a pileup of villainy and heavy metal. The only California dream it leaves you with is one of wretched excess.

Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.

Narrow Margin, despite a sturdy turn by Gene Hackman as a cynical assistant DA, is a thinly scripted procession of train-movie clichés.

The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania.

The Upside of Anger is overly therapized, yet Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.

Titan A.E. is ''Star Wars'' pulped and mashed into flavorless kiddie corn.

There's precious little in Luc Besson's solemnly inflated, battle-weary historical epic.

Leaves you shaken and ecstatic at the same time, transported by the vision of a major film artist.

In the history of bad ideas, George Romero’s decision to produce a color remake of his disturbingly frenzied 1968 zombiefest Night of the Living Dead has to rank right up there with New Coke.

Linklater has hardly been a slacker this year. I'll take the tricky confrontational babble of Tape over some of the gauzier soliloquies in ''Waking Life,'' but either way, he's a filmmaker in love with the music of talk, and let's bless him for that.

Heartbreaker is like a caper comedy meets "The Bodyguard" - it's winsome and accomplished fluff.

Despite some splendid snowcapped vistas and one rather frightening grizzly-bear attack, White Fang, a loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel is dramatically inert. Nothing in the picture really takes hold — certainly not the relationship between young Jack (Ethan Hawke) and White Fang, who seem like near-strangers even at the final clinch.

It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of.

Isn't it time Steve Zahn grew up? Ever since the '90s, this walking quirk of an actor has pushed his dazed solipsistic zaniness (he's like Michael J. Fox’s hillbilly cousin), but he's 41 now, and it no longer looks cute on him.

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.

One of those raucous, hyperactive kiddie flicks that knocks you upside the head from its opening frame.

The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.

Both actresses are quite fine. The role of Odessa is somewhat underwritten, but Goldberg, playing her as a modest, God-fearing woman, acts with a deep-buried determination. If she’d been allowed to show some of her humor, the character might have soared. Spacek gives a beautifully modulated performance. 

A dawdling, myopic drama.

I wish I could say that Wattstax was an ecstatic soul celebration, but most of the performances, while enjoyable, fall short of memorable.

A self-righteous mishmash that can't decide whether to be a tribute to the fanatical leftist passion that thrives in college towns, an indictment of that very same fanaticism, or a ghoulishly didactic snuff-video thriller.

Displays no ambition to be anything more than a synthetic sense-jolt conveyor of the week.

In its wildly overwrought, burrito-Western way, is about as close to a home movie as you're likely to see in a megaplex.

This remake is merely vile (and dull).

She Hate Me manages to be at once racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious. This time, it's Spike Lee who's doing the bamboozling.

As a big-screen comedy, Coneheads isn’t all that funny either, yet it’s blithe and inventive and surprisingly light on its feet.

Lawrence makes you believe in the character you're watching. He does an amazing little piece of acting.

The movie is intelligent yet lifeless; it's all wisps and abstractions.

A spectacularly turbulent portrait of the chaos and bloodshed that have come to define Haiti.

Its pulpy violent excess will tip over...into slightly more excessive excess. That's its silly, scuzzball joy.

White Hunter, Black Heart emerges as little more than a plodding shadow of the great film it could have been. An actor making a stretch is one thing. As Huston, Eastwood is so out of his depth he seems to have lost his entertainer’s instinct, not to mention his modesty.

By the end, you may marvel at the film's worldly-wise wink of maturity. You may also think, Is that all?

A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.

Hudson's sunny, ringlet-tossing appeal fits snugly into the film's happy-homemaker ideology: She makes caring for three kids she barely knows look downright glamorous.

What in the Buddha's name is going on in I Heart Huckabees? Russell has come up with a grab bag of ideas that don't stick with you because they don't stick together.

Mostly a mess: toothless when it should be nasty, not so much madcap as merely frantic.

At once spectacular and inert -- a mosaic impersonating a movie; an empty-shell epic.

This trio is like a looser, funnier version of the family of wrecks in Woody Allen's ''Interiors.''

Tastefully embarrassing.

The Go-Getter travels, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Provides genial chuckles, but it's never excitingly rude.

A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.

Cloddish, unfunny dud.

In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle — it droops.

A skillful and winning piece of honest booster portraiture.

It appears to have been modeled on the worst revenge-of-the-nerds clichés the filmmakers could dredge up.

Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

Soderbergh, in essence, has come up with a plodding and far less psychologically arresting version of ''Ghost.''

A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.

One of those tepid, genteel biopics that's far too busy ennobling its hero to bother giving him any recklessly interesting personality traits.

What’s magical about Kane — the sheer transformative thrill of invention — is there in every shot, every performance, every narrative surge.

You still feel that every delirious allusion, every snidely on-the-mark observational quip, is tickling a different part of your cerebral cortex. Yet the movie lacks the manic highs of the show’s best episodes; it’s a bit too rote and becalmed.

Frequently silly, yet eminently more watchable than such leaden Schwarzenegger efforts as ''Eraser.''

The film is more than a little in love with the corruption it finds under the floorboards -- and that, of course, is perfectly dandy. I wouldn't trust a film noir that wasn't enthralled by decadence.

It's a beautiful contraption of a movie, a gothic backwoods fable that uses its naive yet murderous hero to walk a fine line between sentimentality and dread.

This digitized update, with Jason Lee as a huskier, more generic Underdog, mostly drops the doggerel, but the endearing airborne-beagle effects help to offset the formula twists.

A limp and sodden downer.

Here's what I can say for sure about the humanoid attackers in the new version of The Crazies: They're not very interesting.

There's always something to look at (an octopus holding his eyeballs aloft, the petulant Jane assaulted by pixie dust), but the story is weak tea.

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.

The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.

The plot, which spins around Allegra's lovers having just been an item, is awkward bedroom farce, but the tone is Woody Allen-meets-"The L Word," with a patina of literary cuteness that now seems like the sound of a vanished Manhattan.

Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin.

For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.

The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.

The makers of The Brady Bunch Movie have too much affection for the show simply to skewer it with satire. What they’ve done is closer to alchemy: turned this cheese into comic gold.

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

This is a high octane ride that starts to leak gas before it even gets going.

An extended framing device set in the present day, with Kathy Bates as a put-upon housewife who becomes the fierce, confident, new-and-improved ”Tawanda,” is the sort of ghastly idea that gives feminism a bad name. The movie left me wishing its sterling cast — including a radiant Jessica Tandy — had been better served.

In this year's lump of coal, Matthew Broderick is the control freak who lives for toasty yuletide cheer, and Danny DeVito is the vulgar pest who wants his holiday lights seen from space. The dueling-neighbor crankfest is blah.

The hokey, laborious Thunderheart would be little more than a leftover 1970s conspiracy thriller were it not for the novelty of its setting: a modern Indian reservation — which, as the movie reveals, is by now a fancy word for slum.

Graham is charming, but Miss Conception is a cloddish biological-clock bedroom farce.

In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.

There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. Last Days mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be.

All in all, Blood Simple looks better than ever.

The War Within plays effectively off our voyeurism, yet it has such a cloistered, American-eyed view of the nightmare of terrorism that I kept searching for the profound explanation beneath its piecemeal ones.

Watching Bounce, you look at him (Affleck) and believe how much he's got at stake, and you look at Paltrow and know why.

There's no mirth, and precious little passion, left in this house.

Wahlberg, with shaggy hair and a pumped bod he wears more convincingly than any actor, plays Vince as a guy who truly doesn't expect to win. That makes his rib-bruising triumph all the more believable and touching.

It just makes you want to flip on the tube to see the real (fake) thing.

What it isn't is a believable relationship. Yet that may scarcely matter to LaBute, a gifted and corrosive wordsmith who appears intent, by now, on shoving all romantic couplings into the meat grinder of his misanthropic design.

The definition of aiming low is when the John Hughes film you're ripping off is ''Weird Science."

I call Piranha 3D ''exploitation,'' rather than a quality scare movie, because it serves up well-timed gross-outs instead of genuine suspense and because the movie has no pretense of providing character, plot, acting, or dialogue that's anything more than boilerplate.

A synthetic yet shrill sadomasochistic cartoon.

It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

Has moments of biting tenderness, yet the movie made me wish that Sheridan had let in more of America.

A tricky-bordering-on-gimmicky film noir with a glaze of soft-core kink.

The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose.

The film is like East of Eden replayed as a hyperbolic rock fever dream. There are a few sour, juvenile moments, but this is the rare pop movie that works the way a great rock & roll song does: It tells a simple, almost elemental tale and uses the music to set it aflame.

Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.

A send-up of rap personality in which no one actually has a personality. The joke, alas, is on the movie.

The new movie, for all its huffing and puffing, explores very little, even if some of it is sexy in a Howard Stern-meets-"9 1?2Weeks" way.

You know you're in the hands of a born filmmaker when he floods a scene with danger and excitement and, at the same time, tempers it with something more delicate -- a languor of the everyday.

A grisly one-note chase thriller.

The result isn't liberated from the stage; it's trapped, with waxworks literalness, onscreen.

The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.

Shrewd, tough, and lively -- a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

The movie keeps you occupied, but in a processed, unexciting way.

The movie is trash shot to look like art imitating trash.

True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.

As a novel, Lord of the Flies never was much more than a Brat Pack Heart of Darkness. It’s doubtful a screen version could be any better than this one.

It's "Bewitched" meets "Fatal Attraction," with one funny bedroom scene, but it was a miscalculation to make Thurman the antagonist.

A preposterous erotic thriller from the Basic Instinct fingernails-ripped-my-flesh school, Body of Evidence is shamelessly — and, on occasion, amusingly — unadulterated trash.

This is the sort of cloddish thriller in which characters keep putting themselves in dangerous situations because…the movie requires them to be in dangerous situations. The one true surprise has nothing at all to do with the plot: It’s Kevin Spacey’s hair. Dyed a glittering blond, it sets off his smirky, come-hither mug with maximum perversity.

The movie could have used a brain transplant. It doesn't explore injustice -- it just exploits it.

Friendly yet toothless, College musters little energy even as anarchic-party-movie nostalgia.

Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don't arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.

His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."

The fun of Role Models is that it's a high-concept movie executed with speed and finesse and the kind of brusquely tossed-off obscene banter that can get you laughing before you know what hit you.

Good has a stagy fustiness, but it's worth seeing for Mortensen, who makes this study of a "good German" look creepily contemporary.

A lot of good actors have gone to work for the Coens and ended up looking like puppets, but Hanks is too clever for that. He knows that he's playing a concoction rather than a human being.

This is one of those films in which the Act of Driving becomes a 10-minute statement of high emptiness; Dumont even manages to make sex in the desert boring.

It's hard to buy this relationship even for a moment. Adam is sweet, meticulous, and, at times, sort of clever, but it's also a not-quite-surprising-enough heartwarming trifle.

It's a movie of profoundly convoluted pop pleasures. Between dazzling suspense sequences, it invites the audience to work for a good time.

As it moves from the drizzly to the overly stormy, Rain freights a young girl's self-destructive eagerness to lose her virginity with so much danger and even horror that it's as if the events were trying to make up for the film's previous lack of drama.

The Crossing Guard is a work of talent and, on occasion, raw passion, but it's also a willed exercise in purgative alienation (imagine "Death Wish" remade by Michelangelo Antonioni).

Even Snow Day's winter wonderland looks fake.

Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.

Has a bright, dishy spirit.

The movie is altogether too infatuated with its ramshackle spirit. Most of the gags take after the characters -- they just sit there.

Latifah coasts on grit and verve, and Holmes has a goggle-eyed sweetness, but it's Keaton who rules.

The fun of 21 is the way that this sharp, hyperaware star in the making, his face as readable as a mood ring, pours us into an adrenalized cocktail of fear, desire, and mental buzz.

A big, fat, juicy spitball lobbed, with mostly dead-on aim, at the teen-smarm clichés that have accumulated like so much earwax over the last three years.

The Cockettes weren't talented, exactly, yet the bedazzled flakiness of their passion takes you closer than just about any movie has to what was once really meant by the term ''free-spirited.''

More potent than anything in Snakes on a Plane is the fantasy offscreen: that if enough people talk up their desire to see this film and, at the same time, take an overt delight in what an unabashed piece of junk it is, they will fuse with the hype, with the movie's mystique. They will not just watch Snakes on a Plane; they will own it.

The movie zips around without any true forward momentum. The stars carry you along, though.

Daredevil is the sort of half-assed, visually lackadaisical potboiler that makes you rue the day that comic-book franchises ever took over Hollywood.

Randall Miller (Bottle Shock), appears to be trying to cross a bad Elmore Leonard thriller with a bad indie-festival family-angst comedy. He gives us the worst of both worlds.

A fable of money as the root of jealousy, discord, violence, but the film's slippery fascination as sociological exposé is the flip side of its thinness as drama.

Wallace, unfortunately, writes lazy, anachronistic dialogue, and the picture is abysmally shot (by Peter Suschitzky), with a prosaic, low-budget look that never allows you to experience the enraptured majesty of a fairy-tale historical setting.

A richly intimate sports fable.

Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn't see him.

You could wander into this poetic documentary willing to be sympathetic toward its subject -- men who have sex with horses -- and still find Zoo cryptic and borderline bogus.

There's a slightness to Postcards From the Edge, and a little too much satirical self-help jargon (the story is all about how Suzanne learns to like herself). But the movie captures — and celebrates — how easy it is to turn your problems into show biz.

With its smooth skinned cast and demonized adults, doesn't feel very authentic.

It's a dismal mess...What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the guileless way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired.

In The Dreamers, Bertolucci wants to take us back to a more revolutionary time, but mostly he ends up recalling the faded revolution of his own glory days.

Displays a promise it doesn't, in the end, live up to. See it for Swinton's embodiment of unadulterated maternal will.

Pucci proves to be one of the most charismatic male ingenues since Johnny Depp.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

Evokes the intimacies of teenage girls with unusual delicacy, and Perabo's performance is a geyser of emotion.

A silly, amusing trifle.

What hooks you from the start is Dakota Fanning's unfussy passion as Fern.

The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]

Schwarzenegger’s willingness to flirt with femininity, to become truly radiant, is the most engaging aspect of Junior. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t portray his transformation to starry-eyed pregnant bliss with much comic ingenuity.

Being Human doesn't seem to be about anything: Its five astonishingly limp parables might have been spun by a depressed Aesop who forgot to take his Prozac.

More than ever, Johnny Knoxville and his boys belong to a very elite club of idiocy. They martyr themselves for our diversion, driven at every moment to ask: Are you not entertained?

So obsessed with wowing you, in every corner of every frame, that as a movie it doesn't quite breathe.

It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.

The War Tapes captures how the war in Iraq, for all its terrible carnage and death, is in a way too random in its destruction to even be called ''combat.''

The savviest and most exciting Bond adventure in years, and that's because there's actually something at stake in it.

The film completely misses what should have been its real target -- the filming of Game of Death, a martial-arts campfest worthy of Edward D. Wood Jr.

Had the killer droid been conceived as a charismatic demon, Hardware might have delivered some B-movie kicks. As it is, there’s nothing particularly scary or awesome about this low-tech walking junk pile. It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set.

In the world according to Eurotrip, the Europeans may be a twisted, outdated, ridiculous lot, but what defines them is that unlike the Americans, they've never quite evolved to irony: They treat even the scuzziest habits with dire sincerity.

The film treats its audience like fidgety junior-high schoolers, piling on the sub-Koyaanisqatsi cityscapes and cheesy episodes with Marlee Matlin as a lonely photographer, plus bouncy cartoons of human cells who look as if they'd be happier chasing stains in bathroom-cleanser commercials.

The new film, which unfolds in real time over the course of 80 minutes, is a deeper, darker, altogether more memorable experience. It doesn't extend the characters so much as fulfill them.

In the scurrilously enjoyable documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, we get to know the man whom Al Goldstein dubbed ''the hedgehog of porn."

It's a shrill, stupid, brickbat-blatant piece of hackwork that practically sweats to be ''commercial.''

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

What defines the slacker-geek twentysomething men and women who wander through Joe Swanberg's too-hip-to-be-romantic comedy Hannah Takes the Stairsis that they treat their libidos as minor accessories -- only to stammer through every casual conversation as if they were on a first Internet date.

A classy romantic cocktail distinguished by its tart yet breezy bite.

It's an energetic stunt of a movie, and it wants to make us sweat like it's 1974.

It would all be worth getting mad over were the film not so plodding or so obvious in its tactics.

Firth plays him as a man of his time who is also mournfully ahead of his time. He's addicted to his own broken heart. A Single Man may break yours as well.

Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting.

Jim Carrey entertains himself mightily in Liar Liar, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

If there’s any shock value left to seeing a couple of matinee idols dressed up in women’s clothing, the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar gets it out of the way fast.

The latest reshuffling of "Chainsaw" tropes.

There have been far shoddier sequels, but City Slickers II remains a good example of why more is sometimes less.

You can see what the film was going for, but the jokes just sit there; you chuckle a few times, mostly out of lame hope, but you never bust a gut, never really get what you came for.

Sweet Land is a movie of extraordinary tenderness, in which Reaser and Guinee, using a language of looks, make you happy to think about what love once might have been.

Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.

Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.

Duke is out to blend the commercial, gut-wrenching pleasures of an inner- city shoot-’em-up with the complex moral rage that marked such black-cinema touchstones as Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971).

One of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be.

Zahedi is ruefully funny and savage in his self-exposure.

The relentless flow of manufactured scandal and over-the-top lies in Our New President, all packaged with “authentic” video footage and flash-cut techniques, is sometimes funny, and sometimes depressing.... But mostly it’s scary.

Turns into a grab-bag freak show as desperate as it is arbitrary.

The first thing to say about The Bucket List is that Rob Reiner is the rare director who can take all the wonder out of one of the seven wonders of the world.

The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.

It's so shameless, so psychotically nervous about keeping you ''thrilled,'' that the phrase over the top won't do it justice. It's like a drug designed for people who've done every drug and now want to be jet-propelled into numbness.

A horror film that consists of virtually nothing but don't-go-in-the-attic suspense scenes strung together with a reasonable degree of brooding mood and a minimum of logic.

At this point, there's something almost masochistic about the way animators in Japan use cheesy ''Westernized'' heroes to fuel their fantasies.

This is a B movie rooted in gut-level stirrings of power and retaliation.

it’s consistently funny and inventive.

Plays like an unusually ritzy festival circuit audition film, though McQuarrie, it must be said, aces the audition.

There’s a better, tighter, more emotionally focused movie hidden somewhere in the sprawl of “I Love You, Daddy.” It’s a movie that’s just as rude, funny, and observant as this one but that doesn’t tie itself in knots trying to “say” something.

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

The plot makes almost no sense, and Eastwood directs in his usual toneless fashion. But in this case, the fact that you can’t always tell the intentional comedy from the unintentional isn’t necessarily a drawback.

Of course, the hollow drama of The Lover might not matter so much if these two actually did something interesting in bed. As it is, they barely get out of the missionary position. With far more explicit (and inventive) erotic films available at almost any video store, one has to wonder: How much point is there to portraying sexual passion as serious and ”adult” if you only end up taking all the fun out of it?

When You're Strange, a documentary history of the Doors directed by Tom DiCillo, is for people like me who can stumble onto the scrappiest Doors video on VH1 at 3 a.m. and sit there, mesmerized.

It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.

This moving film explores the trauma of a Holocaust survivor with rare complexity.

Nothing more than a modest, streamlined ''making of...'' diary about a movie that never got made -- it's ''Project Greenlight'' with bigger stars and bigger disasters.

Studded with Lampoon/John Hughes anachronisms.

Knightley's Elizabeth becomes a pirate captain this time. You know a franchise has run its course when it has a buccaneer heroine who looks as if she'd hate to get her face smudged.

If The Matrix Reloaded is a trip through high-toned mediocrity, not nearly as suggestive or cohesive as ''The Matrix,'' it's one of the most wizardly mediocre movies I've seen in quite some time.

It's a comedy of manhood for the age of emasculation.

It's like "Schindler's List" crossed with "The Sound of Music," and Roger Spottiswoode directs it in a stiff, lifeless, utterly dated style of international squareness.

Describing Woodstock as a concert movie is a little like calling Notre Dame a house of worship. In its scope and grandeur, its feel for the paradoxical nature of an event in which half a million middle-class bohemians created their own scruffy, surging community — a metropolis of mud — Woodstock remains the one true rock-concert spectacle, a counterculture Triumph of the Will. [1994]

It's the die-hard camaraderie that undergirded this squad and lifted it to the top.

Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered

Bad Lieutenant doesn't go where you expect, but it has a stubborn, trippy logic.

Saw is a gristle-cut B psycho thriller that would like to tap the sickest corners of your imagination. It has a few moments of nightmare creepiness, but it's also derivative and messy and too nonsensical for its own good.

It's a veritable Greek chorus of wry therapeutic chatter, the touchy-feely pensées skittering over the stock dualities of adultery and fidelity, lust and devotion, narcissism and intimacy, blah, blah, blah.

Moncrieff pushes a view of women as victims that might create its own pornography of masochism if it didn't touch so many authentic shattered nerve endings.

The movie has a hushed sensual resonance, but it turns faith into an endurance test.

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.

A clunky family-therapy soaper.

Beatty and his team of collaborators have heightened the vibrantly tawdry urban night world of Chester Gould’s classic comic strip.

The 3-D visuals envelop you, majestically, and that effect fuses with the band's surround-sound rapture to create a full-scale sensory high. U2 3D makes you feel stoned on movies.

A Jekyll-and-Hyde teen comedy that sounds like a Pauly Shore reject, but Qualls moves his marionette body around with a true clown's effervescence, and he does rubber-faced parodies of youth cool that are just what youth cool deserves.

There are two sparks of light amid the trifling dialogue and bad faux-'80s love-on-the-beach montages in Havana Nights, and they are the film's costars.

To turn fondly remembered TV trash into a movie that knows it's cruddy -- and that isn't, therefore, quite as cruddy as it might have been -- takes a perverse pinch of talent, if not style.

The movie, for all its half-baked visual marvels, remains remarkably faithful to Lewis' story, and the innocence of his passion begins to shine through. It's there, most spectacularly, in Aslan, the lion-king messiah.

The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real.

A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.

The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is "Hostel" without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller.

Lee, I'm afraid, hasn't a clue. He has made half a movie, a phone-sex comedy in which the heroine has no real existence apart from the phone.

Too fragmented to be much more than a flip of the finger to history; the movie, with its mostly mute characters, is too content to plod.

There's an unconvincing last-act twist, but this is the movie "Little Children" wanted to be.

Step Up 3D isn't, in dramatic terms, a very good movie, but it's the first film in a while to use 3-D as more than a marketing ploy; it points toward an original way of making a musical.