Owen Gleiberman

It would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting.

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

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

The Ruins is lumpish, static, and obvious. It's a gringos-go-home cautionary fright flick done in the spirit of a cheap '50s horror movie, except that it leaves you longing for the competence of grade-Z studio-system trash.

The gruesomely unnecessary remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a smorgasbord of slimy grunge that to call the movie gross wouldn't do it justice -- it's downright sticky.

The Lucky Ones isn't dull, and the actors do quite nicely, especially McAdams, who's feisty, gorgeous, and as mercurial as a mood ring.

Cyrus, as always, is a professional charmer (it's hard to resist when she leads a hip-hop hoedown), and the crusty folkiness of Billy Ray Cyrus as her real-life dad is as welcome as ever.

Ma Mère, while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.

As an actor, Raymond is whiny and annoying, but not nearly so much as the film.

It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.

A bit of a clone itself, but it's got a crackerjack helicopter chase, a semblance of a script, and a sotto voce performance by Robert Duvall as a biotech genius who murmurs sweet nothings to his dying cloned wife.

You can feel director Lee Tamahori doing his best to get a rise out of you. Yet his work has fire and substance, too.

Is there anything more dull than an ineptly cynical fairy tale?

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

Never tickles your nasty bone, perhaps because, in an era when the gossip pages are dotted with news of celebrity prenups, the prospect of marriage as a route to instant fortune seems less scandalous than it does like business as usual.

Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.

I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity.

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters.

The Mask, a rattletrap Jekyll-and-Hyde farce, surrounds Carrey with a nothing plot and a cast of ciphers. Still, his scenes as the Mask are rowdy and enjoyable.

Feeling Minnesota suggests Sam Shepard trying to be Quentin Tarantino. It makes even gun battles seem pretentious.

Schrader, in Auto Focus, displayed a devious sense of sin, but in Dominion the Calvinist schoolboy in him insists on trumping sin with guilt.

The Fourth War is an old-soldiers-never-die movie — an ironic elegy — and though much of the story is contrived and second-rate, Scheider gives a richly felt performance.

Parades itself as an ''honest'' message movie, a call for troubled kids to choose life over street nihilism, but the picture is so earnest that it leaves out the easy, old-school pleasure conjured by the last few years of Disney sports flicks (Invincible, Miracle, The Rookie).

The wedding, which turns the very concept of ''Greek'' into the sort of hideous, pandering clichés that look rejected from bad Jewish and Italian sitcoms.

it's a synthetic, rather drab movie, one that seems linked less to experience, or even to fantasy, than to other movies - "Big," of course, and also "E.T.," "Mask," and "Phenomenon."

For all its modest charm, Dave is a true throwback to the Capra days, a political comedy just cockeyed enough to triumph over cynicism.

Freddie Prinze Jr. has a look in his eye that is equal parts self-infatuation and boyish flash of fear.

Director Jon Turteltaub has fun with Indian glyphs, giant stone pulleys, and an Indy Jones-worthy City of Gold located beneath the rocky shoals of Mount Rushmore.

Sometimes clever and enjoyable, even touching, yet too often the film makes you feel as if you're in Sunday school.

Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.

Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience.

The future-shock details are witty, the sets and skyscapes spectacular. Besson may not be a good director, exactly, but he's a wizard at retrofitting cliches.

The plot feels less like a realistic dilemma than it does a willed exercise in neorealist catharsis — a way of inviting Western audiences to bask in their materialist ”empathy.”

As computer-generated special effects have grown more advanced, they threaten to overwhelm such minor matters as story, character, and emotion. This, however, is not a problem in Flubber (Walt Disney), an agreeably unhinged slapstick jamboree.

It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.

A convoluted ''dweeb meets the Mob'' farce in which everyone is trying to kill everyone else, but it's the movie that's the real corpse -- albeit a busy, twitching one.

A comedy of the ridiculous in which the ridiculous turns unexpectedly sublime.

The hero remains such an exhibitionistically cocky, walled-off jerk that Flannel Pajamas' glib conversational ''candor'' yields no mystery. And that's a problem in two hours of talk.

For all the pitfalls it scrupulously avoids, Dogfight isn’t finally very interesting. It’s not just the movie’s plot that’s diminutive. The emotions seem small too.

At times, The Iron Giant is more serene than it needs to be, but it's a lovely and touching daydream.

At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

What makes The Hunting Party an original, gonzo treat is the way that Shepard plants the movie's tone somewhere between hair-trigger investigative danger and the from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire glee of a Hope/Crosby picture.

The Farrelly brothers could burp out a movie funnier than The Hottie & the Nottie, a farce of corrupt stereotypes that's never more grotesque than when it pretends to be more than skin-deep.

It's not much fun to see these two reduced to "Mad TV" parodies of themselves.

As a satire of new-style collegiate types, this MTV production actually evinces a few germs of rancid wit.

Kiss the Girls is a fake psychological thriller that turns into a garishly schlocky and implausible bogeyman hunt.

On the level of a no-budget student film in which the shots barely match up into sequences. It's about as much fun as watching blood dry.

As Brier's comrade-in-lip-gloss, Ashlee Simpson, dressed to look like a teenybop girl version of Crispin Glover in "River's Edge," is the real deal -- in fake cred.

Rarely have two actresses been so effortless in their intimacy.

The enthralling spirit of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film.

The Craft should please teenage girls at malls everywhere. But the film ends up descending into moralizing blahness. Most of the special effects are routine (the girls levitate like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice), though there is one memorable bit: a nightmare featuring enough snakes, bugs, and slithery maggots to make Indiana Jones go gulp.

Switch leaves one feeling that Blake Edwards is more than a little confused.

As long as it showcases the art of krump, underscoring the dancers with ominous hip-hop beats, Rize is such a vibrant eruption of motion and attitude that you can forgive the film for being disorganized and too skimpy on street-dance history.

Messy and scattershot, with a plot that's little more than a dirty version of ''Flubber.''

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

Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.

Combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

The movie might almost be winking at the fact that any single one of these performers could easily be the featured star of his or her own upper-crust period piece.

A spooky, moving documentary.

An animated fairy tale made with simple, elegant conviction.

Schaeffer's howler of a romantic comedy, which presents itself as a valentine to Clayburgh even as it keeps dreaming up fresh ways to humiliate her.

Basically, it's "The A-Team" meets "Rambo" meets "Mission: Impossible," with a mission that's one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up.

Director Abel Ferrara stages the violence in electrifying spasms, and Walken, with his undead complexion, his jittery line readings, and his stare of cold rage, mesmerizes the camera.

Jarecki is no glib ideologue thumbing his nose at power.

Sensational and accomplished.

The results in Employee of the Month are toothless.

A madcap gem.

If there were truth in advertising, The People Under the Stairs would be called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House.

A fake street drama that keeps telling you things instead of showing them, though Mekhi Phifer, playing a hustler who loves the life, is electric and true.

In ''Ordinary People,'' at least one character -- Mary Tyler Moore's -- had to fall so that the others could survive. In Moonlight Mile, no one gets shut out of the hug cycle.

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

Paradoxically, a movie that loses power the more you perceive what's actually going on in it. Laid end to end, the story is, to put it mildly, overwrought, fusing several cataclysms too many.

A stillborn rendering of Michael Chabon's first novel.

A richer, stronger, and more moving piece of work [than Philomena], a historical detective story that carries the kick of a true-life “Da Vinci Code.”

A tawdry excuse for a movie, but it has a handful of shameless giggles.

Chris Evans is blithely likable despite a few faux-Cruise mannerisms, Basinger makes a vividly frightened yet resourceful woman in peril, and William H. Macy scores as a mild L.A. cop who lets out his inner macho.

The battles are grainy and ''existential,'' but what they aren't is thrilling. They're surging crowd scenes with streams of arrows and flecks of blood, and Crowe, slashing his way through them, is a glorified extra. He's so grimly possessed with purpose that he's a bore, and so is the movie.

Notre Musique is Godard's post-9/11 statement, a meditation on how war emerges from the eternal, and hypocritical, duality of human perception -- the sense that it's always ''the other'' who dies.

It's trash, all right, but perfectly skewed trash -- a comedy that knows just how smart to be about just how dumb it is.

A stunt masquerading as a statement.

Anastasia has the Disney house style down cold, yet the magic is missing. Perhaps that's because the story's somber emotional hook--Anastasia's thwarted desire for home--is asserted rather than dramatized.

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

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

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

The snappish domestic infighting is effectively staged, yet beneath its ''raw'' atmosphere Daybreak traffics in pop-sociological clichés.

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

By laying on disasters with a trowel, misses the chance to sweep us up into a more elegant fantasy of primitive mountaintop terror.

Has more atmosphere than it does coherence; it's a series of floating tricks and gambits in search of a resolution. Even so, Ye's ''Vertigo'' fever is contagious.

Munich, Steven Spielberg's spectacularly gripping and unsettling new movie, is a grave and haunted film, yet its power lies in its willingness to be a work of brutal excitement.

27 Dresses is a movie geared to a pitch of high matrimonial-princess fever.

A third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder.

Hamilton, in her movie debut, is a find: the kinkstress next door.

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

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

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

Living Out Loud is like "An Unmarried Woman" recast as a sitcom-cute update of Marty.

Andy Garcia reminds you of what a cunning, likable actor he can be.

A singular and haunting experience.

Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude.

The movie is far from perfect — it has the kind of clunky, episodic script that has bedeviled just about every musical biopic in history — yet it’s driven by an electrifying soundtrack and by two performances of staggering power.

With Poetic Justice, John Singleton has (at least temporarily) lost his way, but he may have found an actor [Shakur] who can help lead him back.

Angel-A shows how director Luc Besson can be French in a way that even the French might despise...Quel ick. And très tedious.

It's galvanizing to see it played out through the furious contradiction of Carter's personality. He is pious, stubborn, compassionate, testy, moral, unreasonable, and wise.

A marvelously designed piece of cartoon kinetics.

For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.

Even as a kid, I could see that Midnight Cowboy’s true subject isn’t decadence but loneliness...Midnight Cowboy’s peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.

Vincent & Theo looks and feels like a half-baked PBS drama, and at two hours and 20 minutes the movie is hopelessly plodding. Still, see it for Roth, whose warts-and-all portrait of Van Gogh is an offbeat triumph.

One of those desultory F/X and no script potboilers that seems to restart itself with every new scene.

Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.

The trouble with the movie is that there's nothing to Muriel but her false dreams: We never quite glimpse the woman they're hiding.

The stab at sublimity-by-proxy doesn't take.

Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was.

Is any of this, you know, fun? Just barely. But I'm sure I would have loved it at 6.

Téchiné has made a half-captivating, half-baffling tease of a movie in which one woman's destructive whim has the effect of making anti-Semitism look like a myth. It's a distortion that Téchiné, with a passivity bordering on perversity, does nothing to dispel.

If there were a scale for measuring how much of a movie’s substance was pure plastic, Nine Months, the new maternity comedy directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), would surely register dangerously high polymer levels.

Funny and ebullient look at a man in full confusion.

A romp of romantic larceny built out of spare parts we've seen in countless other films.

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

The dialogue has a perky synthetic sheen, and with the exception of Diaz, Meyers brings out the best in her actors.

As Factory Girl more than acknowledges, Edie Sedgwick's downward spiral was ultimately her own doing. Yet even as the film captures the silk-screen outline of her rise and fall, it never quite colors in who she was.

Ritchie made a movie that never pretends to be more than a guilty pleasure of soft-core kitsch, and Madonna and Giannini (son of Giancarlo, costar of the original) achieve a lively S&M chemistry.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.

As a movie, Hamlet 2 is lively, energetically daft, and very, very scrappy -- a broader, more loony-tunes knockoff of "Waiting for Guffman."

He squeezes a bit of suspenseful juice out of the old plot, and Douglas makes smarm a chewy pleasure, but this is a noir in search of a hero we can root for because we actually buy what he’s doing.

And when [Roberts is] on screen with Mulroney, who seems a frat-house jerk -- all dimples and a perma-tan -- we don't feel much of anything.

In My Country doesn't so much explore as use the tragedy of black South Africa to give its heroine a righteous slap of nobility.

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

The Avengers is too enervated to qualify as even a full-scale disaster.

This dank and rhythmless ''psychological'' potboiler was directed by Jamie Babbit, who made 2000's "But I'm a Cheerleader," and though she has shifted tones from shrill camp to moody angst in The Quiet, she still thinks in stereotypes so thin that they put you to sleep the moment they open their mouths.

Works just like a Tenacious D song. The movie feels giddy and eruptive, dopily enthralled with itself, and more or less made up on the spot.

Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.

“American Woman” tries to give us a fresh angle on a familiar subject, but the film is listless and desultory. It sketches in the scuzzy power dynamics of these characters but fails, in most cases, to dramatize what made them tick.

Fast, convulsive, and densely exciting new British gangster thriller.

The only fun is in watching Stallone square off against Alan Cumming and Mickey Rourke.

The movie itself is convoluted and almost unbelievably lackluster.

It’s a serious blast, with a plot that zigs and zags (but only because it sticks, within reason, to the facts), and a cast of characters who are so eccentrically scuzzy that maybe no one could have dreamed them up.

It's all way too heavy-handed, though nicely acted by Hirsch, Culkin, and, especially, Jena Malone.

The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.

Neeson and Brosnan are supremely well-matched foils, though I do wish that the filmmaker, David Von Ancken, had lent his sparsely mythic tale just a twinge of something...new.

It’s Dead Poets Society meets Die Hard. The movie is competent, smoothly photographed, and pretty much free of false, baby-Rambo heroics. It’s so inoffensive that you can almost overlook its central drawback — that the students don’t have much personality.

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

You may want to dispute Ruppert, but more than that you'll want to hear him, because what he says -- right or wrong, prophecy or paranoia -- takes up residence in your mind.

Stonewall Uprising does an evocative job of coloring in the oppression of gay life before Stonewall, so that when the eruption happens, we feel its necessity in our bones.

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

Most of The Man is as awful as last year's debacle, "Taxi," yet Levy, stuck in a no-brainer variation on Billy Crystal's predicament in "Analyze This," shows just enough noodgy passive-aggression to suggest what the movie might have been were it not shackled to buddy-action clichés.

Kirkman is shrewd enough to coax a wistful performance out of pretty boy Kip Pardue.

Serial Mom has traces of Waters’ acid wit, but most of the movie is tame and overly conscious of its naughty felicities.

A blithe, funny, and engaging movie.

The sexy, scruffy, neo-Warriors pageantry of ghetto teen hunger would have been a lot more vital if Clark didn't have such a class-war chip on his shoulder.

It's a beautiful and understated performance, one that hums with a richer, quieter music than Smith has mustered before.

A bold, searching, wrenching experience. It may be the most complexly impassioned message movie Hollywood has ever made.

One of the happiest movies around.

Every time Housesitter seems about to turn wild, it gets waterlogged with heart.

David Gordon Green's captivating winter-chill tragedy, is a tale that encompasses murder, divorce, adultery, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, and the disappearance of a small child. In other words, it's downbeat enough to make the recent Oscar-nominated films look like party games.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it.

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

At once scary and stirring.

The Best Intentions is the most moving film I’ve seen this year.

Couldn't Mike Judge, with his acid wit, have come up with a better title for a suburban-schlub comedy than ?Extract?

Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.

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

A weakly scripted shambles.

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

A thriller primarily about the movement of Cindy Crawford's breasts beneath a succession of ever-smaller T-shirts.

The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.

A movie of staggering virtuosity and raw lyric power, a masterpiece of terror, chaos, blood, and courage.

The film says that the U.S. immigrant situation is untenable, but then it forces US to ask: What should be done?

Altogether too faithful to its source. The makers of this ponderously middlebrow Canadian production have re-created the Gospel of John in its pristine entirety -- word for word, miracle for miracle.

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

The new movie is a dusty piñata stuffed with omens and not much more.

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

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

Walker is supposed to be lured by the buried treasure, but the actor, wearing Brad Pitt's bristle cut, is like Pitt with his sexy appetite sucked out.

But the Lethal Weapon films, with their hyperbolic explosiveness, lurid repartee, and quasi-loco Mel Gibson hero, are already winking at the audience. (Last year’s spoofy, ragtag Lethal Weapon 3 practically turned its own slovenliness into a running gag.) The only way to make light of them is to exaggerate the cartoon funkiness that’s already at the center of their appeal. It’s no wonder this Weapon ends up shooting blanks.

Wiseman reveals the victims of domestic abuse in all of their pity and terror.

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

When the submarine has to dive 400 meters beneath the surface to avoid detection, you can practically feel the water pressure crushing in on the sailors.

Belushi certainly proves that he can play an uncharismatic lout with conviction, but the talented Shakur is — literally — wasted in his final screen performance.

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

On Married With Children, the baby-faced Applegate has a slutty spark. Here, the role is too straight, and she’s blah — an apple pie that’s neither sweet nor tart enough.

Bird on a Wire is far from inept-every one of those car chases is masterfully staged. Still, for most of two hours you’re pummeled with formula; it would be hard to name another movie at once so proficient and so dull. When a director as talented as Badham reaches this state of empty craftsmanship, who can say whether he’s working out of boredom or cynicism? At this point, there may be very little difference.

Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement.

The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.

It says a lot for Joel Schumacher's Flawless that you can see the picture's high-concept heart a mile away and still be won over by it.

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

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

You wish that Malena's inner life had been given as much accent as her outer charms.

Its tone is stilted and mannered -- and most of it seems a bit loony.

A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.

Writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.''

The School of Rock was made by gifted veterans of the American indie scene, but it's still the most unlikely great movie of the year.

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

The director-cowriter, Brian Dannelly, has great fun tweaking the way American Christianity has been born again as a commodified, suburbanized, pop-saturated belief system.

Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to.

Leigh gives you such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. What holds Life Is Sweet together is his perception — at once funny and wise — that people, when they change at all, do so in small, nearly imperceptible ways, and that that may be enough.

As the naughty ghost pal of Phoebe Cates, an obnoxious British actor named Rik Mayall is like Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice without the juice. In Drop Dead Fred, all he does is smash and spill things and say many, many potty words.

Every chuckle feels engineered. Stallone is reduced to playing straight man to a gaggle of stock Damon Runyon hoods, though Tim Curry, looking like a stuffed cod, brings a prissy, nerdish glee to the role of a madly obsequious linguistics professor.

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

The film offers evidence that Vicious spent the entire night out cold on barbiturates. It plants resonant doubts.

You know you're in the hands of a true filmmaker when you feel invited, at every turn, to share his sense of entrancement. I got that feeling in just about every frame of American Beauty.

A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.

Mysterious Skin dawdles more than it flows, but it comes alive whenever Araki, hovering between tragedy and voyeurism, reveals how sex can tear lives to pieces.

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

Roth, a great actor, is reduced to a walking sneer, and the picture creeps along in a series of handsome but painfully languorous hazy-shade-of-winter tableaux.

A little too programmed in its despair, but it coasts along on the jagged music of the modern lothario's song.

The film, which has an overly complicated script (by Kevin Wade), is like Wall Street minus Gordon Gekko. It takes the fun out of back-room political sleaziness — and out of political integrity, too.

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

When C-Diddy (a.k.a. David Jung), in his samurai superman suit, does his note-perfect, lip-twisting, belly-jiggling manic mime of Extreme's ''Play With Me,'' it's hard not to grin and admit that, yes, this is almost an art form.

Isn't incompetent; it's just plodding and obvious. If anything holds it together, it's The Rock's ironic ability to tread lightly, which the movie is neither fast nor inventive enough to recognize as different from the spirit of Arnold.

Offers tricky fragmentation without mystery or mood; it's a mosaic of fear that grows less and less unsettling as it comes together.

Isn't up to much of anything besides pretending that swearwords and snot-nosed insults, served up by Santa with an almost institutional monotony, aren't just naughty. They're -- big joke! -- incorrect.

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

CB4 would like to be a savage hip-hop lampoon, but, in fact, the film strikes a cautious balance between satire and homage. It can’t decide whether it wants to ridicule CB4 or hold the group up as role models. What we’re left with is a soggy catalog of rap cliches.

Like a naive modernist hymn made by someone who doesn't, deep down, believe in hymns.

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

It's too bad that the film was directed by the Norwegian minimalist Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories), who makes a fetish of building scenes around silence.

The Medallion makes you long for Tucker -- and for Jackie Chan to fly without digital wings.

I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.

In Shine a Light, a crackling concert movie directed by Martin Scorsese, the Rolling Stones are now so old that they seem new again.

The nuttiest thing about Mercury Rising is that when Alec Baldwin, as the silky-voiced evil defense honcho, explains that he took his cutthroat actions to protect the lives of American undercover agents, he actually sounds quite reasonable. You can just about feel the imbecility rising.

Peter Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists, and it delves, with surprising force, into the hypocritical postures of corporate-era male bonding. The cast is terrific, especially Christian Slater.

Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.

In the end, the movie says that the President's private life matters, all right -- that Shepherd should get the girl and reestablish his leadership by giving in to the noble liberal he always was inside. Even for a modern Capra fable, that's a bit much to swallow.

Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power -- a design but not a vision.

As anyone who has peered in on the actual WNBA for five minutes knows, professional women basketball players are as tough as men. That the film treats this as a joke isn't funny -- it's the height of lame condescension.

Bruce Willis is at his most morose in this flat, dankly lit, grindingly inept thriller about a serial killer whose victims all turn out to have been acquaintances of Willis’ rumpled, alcoholic cop hero. As his by-the-book partner, Sarah Jessica Parker is the only one in the movie who doesn’t look sleep-deprived.

Hannibal Rising reduces this great creature of the pop imagination to a Eurotrash Boy Scout throwing a homicidal snit fit.

No belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.

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

What’s missing from Jungle Fever, I think, is a vision of the positive. By that, I don’t mean some shallow ”optimistic” message but, rather, an organic and casual sense of pleasure as one of the sustaining currents of everyday life — even in a country as mired in racism as this one.

A witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.

Hilary Duff makes me long for the comparatively Dostoyevskian depths of Sandra Dee.

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

It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

A premise masquerading as a movie.

He rarely allowed himself to be interviewed, but Henri Cartier-Bresson, here nearing 100, comes off as a marvelous, spritely, and companionable figure.

This morphing of "The Bad News Bears" and a "Three Stooges" episode parades its dumbness with such zip that it almost passes for clever.

Bacon instinctively pushes Loverboy toward surreal domestic satire. It's fascinating to watch Sedgwick try to make Emily into a luminous wack job.

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

Last Action Hero makes such a strenuous show of winking at the audience (and itself) that it seems to be celebrating nothing so much as its own awfulness. In a sense, the movie's incipient commercial failure completes it aesthetically.

Dano, it’s immediately clear, is a natural-born filmmaker, with an eye for elegant spare compositions that refrain from being too showy; they rarely get in the way of the story he’s telling. The tale itself is resonant and absorbing, though in a highly deliberate way.

Grodin always seems like a real guy, whereas Stiller, even working it, is just the designated loser-clown of the megaplex era. He's too harmless to break any hearts.

He does an okay imitation of his father's languidly matter-of-fact dreamscapes, but it's hard to deny that a certain vitality is missing in Tales From Earthsea.

De Niro seems to be reacting to nothing so much as the lame movie he's stuck in.

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

Up through its first half, The Age of Innocence is a masterfully orchestrated tale of romantic yearning.

Murphy speaks in a breathy lisp, as if his mouth had been partially buttoned shut, and he doesn't give himself the nerd's traditional redeeming feature of a geeky, slide-rule intellect. Norbit, all frozen gawk, is just a very dim bulb.

The Zatoichi films are amusing comic-strip spectaculars — the blood spurts like something out of a Hawaiian Punch commercial. The action in Blind Fury, on the other hand, is resolutely earthbound and heavy-duty. The fact that Hauer kicks, slashes, and punches without the benefit of sight just makes you acutely aware of how ludicrous this stuff always is.

Soderbergh is able to execute his games without pigeonholing his characters. He has made that rare thing, a modern-day noir with feeling.

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

It evokes the spirit of Hitchcock and Highsmith.

A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream.

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

Shouldering a laconic-good-guy, neo- Gary Cooper role, Robbins never quite makes emotional contact with the audience.

The result is a musical that substitutes irony for pop passion, misanthropic disjointedness for lyrical flow.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still had a paranoid poetry that lifted the audience up even as it warned the world to come together. This one is so dour it just comes off as a scolding.

Breathless and petite yet powerfully in-your-face, Fisher combines dizzy femininity and no-nonsense verve in the manner of a classic screwball heroine. She's like Carole Lombard reborn as a tiny angel-faced dynamo.

The Negotiator, once it gets going (there's a rather lengthy prosaic setup), is a satisfyingly tense and booby-trapped thriller about the meeting of two relentless minds.

Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.

The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.

The (mild) intrigue of Travellers & Magicians is that its central figure, Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), rolls his eyes at Buddhist karma.

Second Best might have made a good stage monologue, but as a film it's overstated and barely baked.

A turgid muddle of romance, espionage, and geek valor, despite intimations that it might have turned into ''A Reasonably Dapper-Looking Mind.''