Peter Rainer

Despite its blunt characterizations and simplifications, City of Life and Death, through the inexorable pileup of gruesome detail, achieves an epic vision of horror.

The riders who appear in Buck seem almost uniformly exalted by their contact with Brannaman and his methods.

The good news is that, even though one must pace oneself through the dull parts, usually involving Mr. Popper's dullish family, he's in pretty good form whenever he's getting physical.

It's not only light, it's thin. It's self-deprecating to a fault. Reynolds is required to practically wink at the audience, as if to say,"I know this looks silly."

Says Lauro: "This is about as close as you can get to the way it sounded during slavery days." Lauro and McGlynn understand, too, that these clips must be experienced whole. They let the music unfold in real time, not snippets.

Switching between the 1950s, the '60s, and the present, it's compelling in a middling miniseries kind of way – expansive but not terribly deep.

The odyssey goes on a bit too long, and I suppose a taste for extra dry British comedy is a requirement, but this "Trip" is well worth one.

If Abrams had stuck with the kids and cut way back on all the sci-fi hoo-ha, his film might have stood a fighting chance of being charming. Big is not always better, even when it comes to fantasies.

In Beautiful Boy, Ku manages to take a new-to-movie subject and flatten it into something that, despite its harrowing contours, is often grindingly familiar.

It's also a mistake, I think, to have Oliver and Jordana be so emotionally flat. No doubt Ayoade was reaching for a hipper-than-thou vibe here, but their inexpressiveness is more annoying than cool.

All of this has its value, but Plummer, in rollicking good form, without a shred of sentimentality, is primed for greatness, and Mills keeps cutting away from him just when things are getting interesting.

At least Erik/Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender, is, well, magnetic.

If I had to give a two-word review of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, it would be: "Wow! Huh??"

It's the kind of movie that creeps up on you, and this is due almost entirely to its lead actress, María Onetto, who looks as though she actually could solve one of those 8,000-piece puzzles.

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

For a movie touting "inner peace," this 3-D sequel sure goes in for its share of battle scenes, but for the most part they are excitingly conceived.

It would have been wonderful if Lee had consented to an interview for this documentary, but at least we have, among many others, her 99-year-old sister Alice, until recently a practicing lawyer in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala.

A sweet, not altogether satisfying variation on the fantasy-becomes-reality conceit he (Allen) used in his Depression-era "The Purple Rose of Cairo."

An oddly discursive documentary that is, ultimately, more about Pierre Bergé, his companion and business partner of 50 years.

Even the "surprise" appearance of Keith Richards, as the scurvy father of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, has already been hyped to death in the advance press.

If there is a single image that we take away from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," it is of Willy Loman weighted down to his very soul by his suitcases. The image that holds in this modern-day salesman's serenade is Nick the salesman reduced to selling off his own life.

Isn't overwhelmingly good, but it's just nutty enough to keep you watching.

Better than bland but never quite rises above the level of a pretty good TV movie of the week.

It's certainly not a "breakthrough" comedy, unless the breakthrough is that women will flock to slobby, heartfelt romps starring Kristin Wiig instead of Seth Rogen. It's progress, sort of.

Writer-director Massy Tadjedin cuts back and forth between these twin temptations. Will Michael succumb and prove Joanna correct in her suspicions? Will Alex's French accent conquer all? Do you care? I didn't.

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

The flashback sequences sometimes come across like "'For Whom the Bell Tolls' for Dummies."

I prefer the goofier approach, which is why, even though Hemsworth isn't going to be cast in "King Lear" anytime soon, he's the best thing about Thor.

Rosen­thal serves up a hilarious documentary of his travails developing "The Voroniny," or, as it was known in development, "Everybody Loves Kostya."

These paintings speak to us; they both compress and elongate time. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog is reaching for ways to comprehend what he imagines to be the emblems of the birth of the modern soul.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

For a movie about hard-driving pioneers, there is nevertheless much existential ennui in the air.

Any highfalutin interpretations of his new film only serve to camouflage what is, in essence, a scam about a scam.

The film's moral lesson – that violence begets violence – isn't exactly a showstopper, and the balm that is laid on Nawal and her riven family can't quite compensate for the poison that preceded it.

The film has a pleasing retro-ness that often mitigates the dullness.

Is there a moral objection to be raised about a movie that features a teenage girl as an assassin? I suppose there is, but I couldn't find it in me to object.

The openness of these people is often astonishing – and a sign of hope.

Essentially The Conspirator is a courtroom drama with occasional bulletins from the outside world. It plays out to its predictable end with the doggedness, if not the verve, of a "Law and Order" episode.

Capotondi keeps circling his movie in and out of dream states and waking states as the whodunit morphs into who-cares-who-dunit?

Courtly intrigue should be intriguing, and in that sense, The Princess of Montpensier – although it's somewhat wan and too cerebral for its own good – does a fairly keen job.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

It seems a bit cruel to cast Garner, who exudes charm, in such a charmless role.

Full disclosure: I have to say I did laugh during Your Highness. Twice, I think.

It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

In Source Code, the new thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, "Groundhog Day" goes metaphysical. Some people, I know, will argue that "Groundhog Day" was already metaphysical. Perhaps, but compared with "Source Code," it's "Caddyshack."

Despite the film's coy artiness and a lassitude that sometimes passes for soulfulness, Certified Copy is strangely haunting.

The movie, despite what you may have gathered from the goofy trailer, is more sweet than silly.

What would you do if you could take a pill and suddenly access 100 percent of your brain power? This is the premise behind Limitless, a sci-fi thriller that looks as if its makers utilized around 30 percent of theirs.

A moderately creepy, often garishly violent action horror film frontloaded with heretics, Christians, mercenaries, witches, witch-burners, and necromancers. There's something here for just about everyone.

Oldman makes a four-course dinner out of the scenery with enough slash and burn to leave you wondering if he is vying with Nicolas Cage for the title of filmdom's biggest hambone.

The latest cinematic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's novel, is like "Masterpiece Theater" without the masterpiece.

When the military brass warns that "we're about to be colonized," you wonder if they mean to shut down the borders. It's probably not coincidental that the film is replete with Latino actors, or that one of the prime subplots involves a Hispanic father trapped behind enemy lines with his young son.

The happy endings in "HTYMP," as sweet as they are to experience, seem more engineered than inevitable.

The best of Rango is a lot like the best of the first "Pirates" movie – crazily funny and rambunctious.

If the head of the bureau is God, then why is he played by Terence Stamp and not Morgan Freeman?

It's a transcendently uplifting tragedy.

A great way to go on a safari without ever leaving the multiplex.

Wilson has a gawky affability here that helps redeem much that might otherwise seem tasteless (as opposed to tasteless-but-funny).

It's an omnisexual variation on François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," although stylistically, with its emphases on hipper-than-thou attitudes and moody-blues visuals, it's much closer to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.

He was the Beatles of the hair business.

Essentially three movies in one: The staged reenactment of Columbus's expedition, the filming of that staged expedition, and the contemporary local uprising. It's a lot to bite off, especially since Bollaín's budget doesn't seem to be much larger than Sebastián's.

Framed as a cautionary thriller about the perils of high-stakes terrorism, but I took away a different message from it: Don't forget your briefcase at the airport.

Has an inordinate number of good laughs mixed in with the not-so-good ones.

Almost a textbook example of how to do more with less. It's about aimless people who suddenly find their aim.

A fumbling comedy directed by Dennis Dugan that could have benefitted from surgical reconstruction. How about some liposuction to siphon off all those lame jokes?

However you slice it, The Eagle is hokum, but modern-day Scots may get a kick out of the film's depiction of their ancestors as mud-caked hellions. Modern-day Romans will have to settle for less.

It's a deliciously perverse melodrama.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

Although the filmmakers try to avoid roteness, the conflicts tend to play out along circumscribed lines. This gives the film a seesaw sameness. It's all a bit too diagrammed.

The film isn't helped by Kline's cameo, although his comic timing is impeccable. The problem is that what he's timing – the role of an aging ego-swelled roué – is very tired stuff.

An odd amalgam of soap opera and street-level realism, with, alas, the former trumping the latter.

Too often the sequences in this movie play out like snatches from a terrific play that somehow got lost along the way.

Weir has an epic imagination but, unlike, say David Lean, he doesn't fill out the epic vision with epic characters. The result is a film that seems simultaneously grand and skimpy.

Such a feeble excuse for an action comedy that it's already taken pride of place in my upcoming worst-movies-of-2011 list.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

Despite its length, it is one of the most consistently engrossing and powerful movies ever made.

Many of the interviews in the film – conducted with everyone from family members to Christopher Hitchens and Tom Hayden – look to be 10, even 20, years old. Together they concoct a complex portrait of an ultimately unknowable man.

It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.

Country Strong is the latest and, in many ways, the least impressive entrant in the achy-breaky sweepstakes.

Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."

Gosling, as the Durst-like David Marks, is scarily effective before his performance turns opaque and horror-movie-ish.

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.

A movie of such stupendous uninspiration that, watching it, I didn't know whether to be affronted or hornswoggled. Movies this monumentally dreadful, after all, don't come along every day.

A breathtakingly beautiful achievement in every way.

Kevin Spacey gives a bravura performance as superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper's uneven but often loopily entertaining Casino Jack.

On its own conventional terms, the film succeeds – maybe not as a "Coen Brothers" movie, but as a tall tale well told.

Ought to have been state of the art. But there's not a whole lot of artistry to be found in this movie.

Best when it's morphing into seriousness. Too often the comic bits seem like sops to the audience.

No doubt some of it is charming enough to induce giggles in its preteen target audience.

It's slobby, goony, and gross, also occasionally funny, but not occasionally enough.

The real star here is the big, unmanned freight train sparking through Pennsylvania at 70 m.p.h. while carrying hazardous cargo. Best of all, the train doesn't have any dialogue.

Love & Other Drugs is a slick weepie made by smart guys who want you to know they're better than the schlockmeisters. They've outsmarted themselves.

Despite his street cred, Muniz comes across as way too effete for these laborerers, many of whom have harrowing life stories to tell. But his intention to have them re-create photographic images of themselves out of garbage, while it may not pass muster as high art, has the effect of raising their spirits.

Leo, in particular, seems poleaxed with good intentions. Her Lois wins the Most Understanding Wife award.

A remarkable movie about a remarkable friendship. It honors the audience's intelligence, which makes it a double rarity.

Only Amy Adams, playing Mickey's tough-tender girlfriend Char­lene, manages to be convincingly working-class without seeming either dopey or rabid or strung-out.

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

To see Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist is like watching a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong.

Michael Apted's direction veers into listlessness, but there is, at times, a pleasing elegance to the production, too. It doesn't assault you. Small favors are better than none.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.

Lena Dunham, the writer-director-star of the microbudget Tiny Furniture, has a distinctive comedic take on the world – a kind of haggard spiritedness.

The Bhutto family is often referred to as the "Pakistani Kennedys." After seeing this film, that designation doesn't sound so glib anymore.

An overstuffed odyssey that, while disappointing on many levels, has standout performances by Paul Giamatti.

The movie, at its best, is compellingly odd, which is also the most accurate description of Carrey's performance.

A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

I would rather have seen a documentary about the real women instead of this workmanlike dramatic rendition.

In its final half-hour, all the stops are pulled. The movie is still wildly implausible but at least it's hurtling forward. The only thing missing from the proceedings is a windmill for John to tilt at.

A long wallow in misery and, after a while, the pain morphs into polemic.

Tries mightily to make the case that Spitzer was brought down by his political enemies.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

As a testament to positive thinking, 127 Hours will probably stand as a ringing affirmation for reckless survivalists. For those of us not so affirmed, Boyle's paean to heroism – a better title for it might have been "A Farewell to Arm" – is merely the best gross-out music video ever made.

Described in the film's production notes as a "classic French comedy" – although I've never heard of it – and perhaps this is the core problem. French farce doesn't mix well with English gooniness.

For the most part, plays like a pretty good TV police procedural.

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

He is the least intrusive of great directors, and Boxing Gym, which is about a gym in Austin, Texas, is so offhandedly observant that, for a while, you may wonder if much of anything is really going on.

With scrupulous fairness, Ferguson meticulously lays out for us the whole sordid mess.

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.

There is one aspect of Conviction that is a real cheat. No mention is made that Kenny, six months after his release from prison, accidentally fell and fatally fractured his skull. Did the filmmakers think that our knowing this would wreck a happy ending? For a film that prides itself on its realism, this omission is unspeakably wimpy.

Erotic comedies are often attempted but rarely realized. Tamara Drewe is proof that sexy and funny need not be mutually exclusive.

By relying too much on snappy dialogue and by adhering to the philosophy that "steel should feel like steel and glass should feel like glass," the filmmakers have bridled their imaginations and created a movie about toys that are too blubbery and not rubbery enough.

The Good German is a prime example of a movie made by highly skilled and intelligent filmmakers that nevertheless seems misguided from the get-go.

Parker "opens up" a play that was perfectly wonderful closed down. Wilde subtitled his masterpiece "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." This movie seems intent on being a trivial comedy for trivial people.

Given the opportunities for gratuitous mayhem, director Stephen Hopkins, working from a script by Lewis Colick, is reasonably restrained. He’s aided by his cinematographer, Peter Levy, who gets some real variation out of what might have been undifferentiated darkness.

It's a highly enjoyable spree that doesn't add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don't necessarily want it to add up to anything -- that's part of its charm. [24 Sept 1993]

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

It's a heroic story, and Zwick frames it rather too strenuously as an antidote to the generic Holocaust stories of Jewish passivity and martyrdom. And yet, as a piece of historical redress, a great service has been done in bringing this narrative to the screen.

Throughout it all, however, I couldn't escape the feeling that this movie belonged on television instead. It has the immediacy, but also the shallowness, of an extended TV episode. Talking heads proliferate and pontificate.

A movie like Ben-Hur, while almost never stirring or imaginative in the way that the true epics of Griffith or Gance or Kurosawa are, nevertheless has a basic appeal.

Rhys-Meyers and Johansson work well together - they both know how to project glossiness and guile.

Haskins comes across as too pure. When he plays only his black athletes in the championship finals, his monomania is presented as a good thing. After all, he won, didn't he?

Rivette keeps the life-is-a-play metaphysics to a minimum, and the cast, including Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellitto, is attractive.

The bloody wrap-up isn't handled especially well, and I must confess that the most shocking thing about the movie was the casting of Carrie-Anne Moss as a suburban mom. I kept expecting her "Matrix" skills to show up in the final reel.

It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.

The relationship between Gilbert and Arnie has "Of Mice and Men" vibes, but it strikes a responsive chord in a way that the rest of the film doesn't. Most of the credit for that goes to DiCaprio's performance.

An art piece in which everything seems to be a metaphor for something else, and as pleasing as it is to watch, it's too pretentious by half.

Sophisticated and nuanced, and every character is bursting with emotional contradictions.

Channing's formidably good -- a career woman in extremis -- but the movie, which was written and directed by Patrick Stettner, otherwise unfortunately resembles a product of the Neil LaBute Finishing School.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Kenan never loses sight of the wonderment that children (and adults) experience when the inanimate becomes animate. Anthropomorphism is basic to the art of animation. So is a good story, and Kenan has that, too.

Some first-rate animation and some second-rate storytelling.

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

The movie is moderately enjoyable, but it also makes you feel conned: It offers up a disturbing protagonist and then substitutes cuteness for character.

I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.

Connery and Zeta-Jones not only look great together, they work well together.

As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

Quaid and Church are funny, but too much of this film is not half as smart as it thinks it is.

For most of this movie, things are exactly what they seem--mediocre.

There is something sneakily gratifying about all this: Not since the days of "Earthquake" have Hollywood producers so indulged their fantasies of trashing the town.

Free speech isn't merely a shibboleth in The Agronomist. As embodied by Dominique, it's a fire-breathing force.

Hands down the funniest movie I've seen all year and also the smartest.

Gretchen Mol is unrelentingly charming in the role and she almost - almost - makes you believe that someone as unclouded as this could actually exist. This film would go well on a double bill with "The Stepford Wives."

Has an appealing rawness.

Stone may think he's made a movie about the toxicity of the Bush presidency, but what we have instead is a cautionary tale of a decidedly lower order. As far as I can make out, the real message of W. is: Don't vote for anybody who talks with his mouth full of food.

Director Henry Selick is all too effective at conjuring grody ghastliness. He's less effective at giving that ghastliness a human dimension, a resonance, a reason for being beyond cheap thrills.

By continually interrupting the sequences of the adult couple with scenes of the young pair, Eyre shatters the emotional power of Dench and Broadbent.

The rap music we hear, which is produced outside Cuba's state-run music industry, is politically audacious and charged with personal expression and uplift. The film was produced by Charlize Theron's socially conscious company, Denver and Delilah films.

Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.

Clumsy, obvious, preposterous, the movie will likely set the cause of woman warriors back decades.

Showcases some of the world’s finest and funniest actors having a high old time. It’s best enjoyed as a kind of traveling music-hall revue.

The New Wave of Romanian cinema is the most exciting in the world right now. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is its latest masterpiece.

I'll say this much for Jumper – it's got a great premise. Or at least the beginnings of a premise.

The story line for WALL-E is probably too convoluted for small kids, and sometimes it suffers from techie overload, but it's more heartfelt than anything on the screens these days featuring humans.

Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.

Overwritten and overcooked, Remember Me still manages a few explosive sequences between Pattinson and Pierce Brosnan.

But at its highest level of ambition, Proof fails to deliver. The film becomes a psychological whodunit where Catherine is shown to be either a martyr to her father or else his intellectual equal. None of it is terribly convincing.

Wilkinson artfully deepens a character who in Wilde's original play was rather boobish. It's a marvelous performance in a pretty good film.

As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.

The ad campaign for the sci-fi thriller District 9, with mysterious billboards touting aliens among us, is highly creative and amusing. So, in patches, is the movie, which is a thinking man's, or man-boy's, "Transformers."

What gives Los Angeles Plays Itself its extraordinary density is the way Andersen transforms a cliché into a metaphysical truth that encompasses far more than L.A.

There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.

It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.

Something happens to Robin Williams in serious roles. He becomes so drab that it's almost as if he's trying to efface himself from the screen.

What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.

It's an inescapable fact that Gould's singular musical insights – the way he brought out in Bach a mesmeric unity of sound – could only have arisen from a singular personality.

The entire remake has been dumb-dumbed by John Hughes, who wrote the script and produced.

Plowright's performance as a genteel widow in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a small-scale gem, deeply felt without being in the least bit showy.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

Predictable, not so much from his (Zhang Yimou) previous movies as from the work of the many sentimentalists who have already plowed this well-tilled turf.

A frustrating blend of the sharply funny and the ploddingly generic. Although he does them well enough, we don’t really need Ron Shelton to give us the same old skidding-U-turn cop-thriller theatrics. He’s a much more distinctive talent than this crass spree allows for.

This man whose family was almost entirely wiped out must feel like he's the recipient of a great cosmic joke, with his survival as the punch line. Europa Europa does justice to the joke.

The Japanese love affair with insects takes many forms, but most of them are, by Western standards, exotic. To Oreck's credit, she doesn't attempt to play down the exoticism by pretending to go native.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

The movie is best when it just riffs on our compacted memories of the past 18 years of episodes. Fortunately, that's most of the time.

The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.

Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.

The staging of the physical comedy in The Pink Panther is not always adept - director Shawn Levy is no Blake Edwards - but Martin, who co-wrote the screenplay, keeps spinning in his own orbit anyway. And what an orbit it is.

Having written a book about being fired, Annabelle Gurwitch has now made a documentary as well, and it's something of a mess.

In addition to the marvelous lead cast, all sorts of funny performers show up in cameo roles, including Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Dalton.

The honey runs thick in The Secret Life of Bees, and so does the treacle. The cloying dullness sets in early, although not from the first frame.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.

Stunning.

The performances, especially by Hugh Dancy as a sexually confused rich kid, are overwrought, and the script, which Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") wrote in collaboration with Minot, is slack.

This comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.

Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.

The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

Green Zone wraps up with a wish-fulfillment fantasy that is about as believable as watching reinforcements riding in to save Custer.

Given the temptations to goof it up, Pesci's performance in My Cousin Vinny is something of a triumph. As Vincent Gambini, a swaggering pint-sized New York lawyer who only recently passed the bar on his sixth try, Pesci modulates his usual psycho-nuttiness and gives it some recognizably human, even melancholy, undertones. The movie is a very mixed bag, but it's not quite the dumb fest that the TV spots make it out to be. Pesci gives Vinny's ultimate vindication a note of bittersweet triumph.

What's weird about subUrbia is that Linklater's zoned-out technique is wedded to Bogosian's in-your-face power-rant oratory. The result is like local anesthesia--you can see the incisions, but you can't feel them.

The Ice Harvest isn't a subversive piece of work; it's not making some grand statement about the dark side of the holiday spirit. But what it IS saying in its grimly funny way is that we can't always control the timing of our disasters.

A first-rate zombie movie. The best tribute I can offer is that it makes you want to go out directly afterward and down some expensive single-malt scotch.

Simon Pegg, of "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," is onscreen almost constantly in Run Fatboy Run, and his mugging and smirking and preening wear out their welcome fast.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

The hang-loose grodiness of these films has its charms, and the Ray-Banned team of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, at its best, is good vaudeville.

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

Travolta gives a hangdog performance as the world-weary cop obsessed with rooting out the killers. Hayek and Leto share a few tart black comic moments as the film spirals into a bloodbath.

The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."

It's a pleasant time-killer, nothing more. But nothing less, either.

Achingly funny movie...Guest has cultivated a stock company of players whose work together is so intuitively sharp that it seems to redefine the boundaries of acting.

I guarantee you, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he might well be writing movies but he sure as shootin' wouldn't have written "Ghosts."

Godard brought to the screen the jagged, intuitive temperament of youth in a way that nobody else had ever done before.

Suggests a cross between "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve." The suggestion, alas, doesn't go very far, but Bening's performance approaches the pantheon.

O'Neill and Curry, both heretofore nonactors, can't put across much more than a single emotion at a time, but their amateurishness isn't as annoying as it might have been in a movie with higher aspirations and artistry.

By turns jokey, portentous, and pretentious, the movie immediately sizes up each of its protagonists and never budges from that assessment.

Trashy and lurid as this movie is, it’s certainly not boring, and it keeps its star in hog heaven throughout.

On a purely visceral level, Training Day is easily the most exciting movie out there right now, but as a morality tale with anything large on its mind, it's a cop-out.

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

There's an original comic temperament at work here, and that's rare.

There is a germ of a good idea in the notion that an imaginary suitor can be more powerful than a real one. But director Alejandro Agresti isn't the man to pull it off.

Costner is always at his best when he’s a little ornery, and Duvall is the same way. His grizzled performance is so thoroughly in character that he even chews as if it were 1882.

Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.

Cold Mountain has some marvelous, intimate moments and a real feeling, at times, for the loss that war engenders, but it also has more than its share of hokum--which would be more entertaining if the hokum were juicier.

The people who made Year One seem to think that all you have to do to make a hit comedy is get a bunch of jokesters together. But where are the jokes?

Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.

Granik filmed in actual locations and enlisted many locals as actors. They blend unobtrusively with the professionals in the cast.

Beresford, can't bring this saga to life because Alma herself never fully comes to life; her contradictoriness, like the way she embraces Mahler only to rail against his "Jewish music," doesn't add up to a whole and complex human being.

The Da Vinci Code is so transparently pitched as pulp entertainment that, in the end, it's about as subversive as "Starsky and Hutch."

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

Nolan sustains an arty note of existential dread that probably will work better for noir-steeped film critics and overserious philosophy grad students than for general audiences, but he brings off a few brisk bravura moments.

The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.

He's (Giamatti) terrific throughout, although the movie, which is more clever than funny, sometimes resembles second-tier Charlie Kaufman stuff.

Ask the Dust does manage to cast a spell. The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.

Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game. He employs the same motion-capture technology that he first used in "The Polar Express," to slightly better effect.

For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.

The action is nonstop and often harrowing and well staged. But van Houten, while a charmer, doesn't adequately convey the disgust (and connivance) that her character would inevitably feel in such a situation.

The Grisham-esque murder-mystery plot got so scrambled that, finally, it’s anybody’s guess what the filmmakers intended.

Winkler is so interested in making Merrill admirable that he neglects to make him interesting. That's true of the movie too. In the ethics department, it's commendable. In the drama department, it's bland. [15 Mar 1991, p.F1]

Harrowingly straightforward.

Has its moments.

Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.

The emotional honesty of this movie rescues it from sentimentality. To Be and to Have is about more than a dedicated teacher and his pupils; it’s about how difficult and exhilarating it is to grow into an adult.

Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.

Like Jim Carrey, Ferrell seems to think that the way to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor is to drain himself of everything that audiences love about him.

The ending is a set-up for yet another sequel: Can "28 Months Later" be very far away?

If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching "Gone With the Wind" without ever having seen a Hollywood movie.

Dan Klores's astonishing film is about a subject so bizarre it could only work as a documentary – as a drama, it would be dismissed as being too far-fetched.

Comedy that seems designed to be as bad as it can be.

Swimming With Sharks, the latest Tinseltown dig at Tinseltown, is being advertised as a jokey spoof, but it's something quite different: a dark slice of retribution that recalls Stephen King in his Misery mode.

Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.

Zhang is working in a popular sentimental mode here, but his connection to the material -- and to us -- is heartfelt and without a trace of condescension. As a filmmaker, he's the opposite of a con artist, and his new movie is a gentle marvel.

The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It's insufferably silly.

The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

If Avalon doesn't succeed in its family-of-man approach, it triumphs on a more theatrical level, as a family-of-actors movie. What Avalon is really about is the magic of performing. [18 Oct 1990, p.F1]

Rappoport is a powerhouse performer but the movie is an unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.

A marvel.

Toy Story 3, has more emotional power than either of its predecessors. Come to think of it, it also has more emotional power than most of the live-action movies out there.

iIsn't really much more than a funny, touching little squiggle, but it has a bracing honesty and pays particular heed to the betweenness in people's lives, to how much goes on when nothing seems to be going on at all.

Blethyn, as Frank's wife, is less high-strung than usual, which is a boon.