Peter Rainer

At around the halfway point the film takes an intriguing swerve, as Kyle is canonized and Lance is unexpectedly launched into celebrityhood. Flashes of deadpan outrageousness occasionally redeem the dourness.

Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.

How does all this play out for those of us – i.e., me – who have not been staying up nights fretting over the origins of the X-Men and Women? The answer is: Fairly well.

The best reason to check the film out is Ejiofor's performance, which is packed with grace and wit and pathos.

It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

Species is a pretty good Boo! movie. It's not the kind of sci-fi film that's going to give Stanley Kubrick any sleepless nights, and it may not give the rest of us much sleeplessness either. Its primary purpose in life is to unleash a lot of gloppy morphing and mutating and make us go -- all together now -- eeeuuuh. [07 July 1995, p.F8]

Cory Yuen's So Close is a kind of Hong Kong martial-arts variation on the Charlie's Angels movies, only better.

There's a fundamental lack of human feeling in Beverly Hills Cop III that makes you want to avert your eyes from the people around you when the lights come up. Attending this movie makes you feel like an accomplice to the corruption. [25 May 1994, p.1]

Complexly intriguing documentary about psychedelic rock icon Roky Erickson.

The film is saying that, left to their own devices, all men would devolve into a morass of monastic grouches. Kitchen Stories is a prime piece of comic anthropology.

As a laughing-through-tears jokester tourist, Richard Dreyfuss provides the only moments of real acting, as opposed to overacting, mugging, and scenery chomping.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

Schepisi may have made the first truly and intelligently uplifting spy movie. His style here is magisterial yet playful: The melancholy grandeur of Russia, on view at last for the whole world to see, has turned him into an eye-popping enthusiast.

Directed by Alan Rudolph and co-scripted by him with Randy Sue Coburn, Mrs. Parker is a real odd duck of a movie. It seems to have been made both as tribute and put-down. The sporty conviviality of the Algonquin Round Table is celebrated, and yet there's a hollowness to the confabs.[21 Dec 1994, p.4]

Air America is far from a disgrace, but it's so rare to see a film with this much panoramic verve that you want it to deliver the real goods and not this cargo-load of tinkertoy war-is-heck ironies. [10 Aug 1990]

Next time out, more dwarfs, more Aslan, and definitely more Reepicheep.

If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.

Damon is an agile comic performer, and Soderbergh knows how to serve him up without losing sight of the ultimate seriousness behind it all.

Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.

There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.

Freddy Krueger fans will exult and horror movie mavens will not be surprised: Wes Craven's New Nightmare is much better than the usual run of scare pictures. [14 Oct 1994, p.F4]

David Mamet's Oleanna, adapted from his two-character play, is about sexual harassment, but it's the audience for this movie that gets harassed. Mamet must mean for this movie to be as enjoyable as fingernails scraping a blackboard. For both men and women, watching it is intended as an act of penance for all our sexist, elitist, feminist, patriarchal ills.

Perhaps the most cogent and straightforward dissection of the Bush Administration missteps leading up to the current Iraq nightmare.

Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.

Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian?

Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

Has a poignant undertone: We may feel we already know in our bones just how suffocating this culture is; but the people who made this movie seem to be discovering each fresh horror for the first time. It's like watching a virgin sacrifice.

It's a frisky, funny roundelay starring Stefania Sandrelli, and it features enough shouting and arm-waving to power a windmill.

The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.

It's a B-movie with A-accouterments.

A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.

With all the money expended on this movie, couldn’t anybody come up with a few good lines in between all the kabooms?

Maybe Hackford, and his screenwriter Mark Jacobson, were attempting to convey the dullness of vice. If so, they vastly overcorrected. But what about the dullness of the performances?

In addition to being a beloved author and illustrator, Beatrix is also presented as an early feminist and environmentalist who took control of her literary empire and saved vast acres of luscious farmland from greedy developers, eventually bequeathing property to Britain's National Trust.

Scattershot but rousing documentary.

Troell, at 78, continues to turn out films that will last for as long as there are movies. No wonder he feels such a deep connection to Maria in Everlasting Moments. The film is one hero's salute to another.

Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.

What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.

A bit too satisfied with its own sweet sensitivities.

What it's mainly about is movie stars skittering from locale to locale while bullets whiz by and the plot thickens – or, more to the point, curdles.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.

Art School Confidential mostly just makes you feel bad - period. It puts you in a foul mood and leaves you there.

It's all something of a stunt - "Speed" on a shoestring - but very well done.

Thank God for Barrymore: When Beverly's water breaks and she looks down at her feet and cries, "This is so gross," you know how good this actress can be, and how good this movie might have been.

Because Crowe is hamstrung by his role, he never strikes the requisite sparks with Cotillard. This is quite an achievement, since her beauty is on par with Provence's.

It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy posing as hard-edged realism.

Garrone's messy storytelling compounds an already messy history. He's a powerful filmmaker, though, and a fearless one.

Robert Towne's screenplay is less opportunistic than many of his efforts in recent years, although it still contains moments designed merely to shock or titillate.

This well-meaning drama was made with obvious passion.

Under Siege 2 isn't going to convince anyone that Seagal is Brando, though he often sounds a bit like him. But, taken strictly as an action sequel, the film is a lively show. It's a formula follow-up with formula dialogue and formula action but the director, Geoff Murphy, does extremely well within the sequel's narrow limits.

The well-staged opening sequence, which depicts the riot at the 1913 Paris première of "Le Sacre du Printemps," is, alas, the film's high point.

Things take several turns for the worse as the story plays out, and the film loses much of its charm. But it's a fascinating artifact, and never more so than when it features clips from Chinese and, of all things, Albanian propaganda films.

Penn has a real feeling for the stray moments in life that suddenly rush up and overwhelm us with emotion. He also has an eye for beauty in the wilds, of which this film has many. And he's very good with actors. What he lacks is a sharper eye for the wooziness of romanticism, and that wooziness, despite some truly breathtaking moments, infuses Into the Wild.

If this were a fictional Hollywood movie, it would be criticized for being too upbeat. But sometimes truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's also a whole lot better.

Without Davidson Stargate might seem clunky and routine, but he gives it a weirdo charge. It may be a lousy movie, but it's a more enjoyably lousy movie than most.

This is low-grade satire. The shocks to the system in Buffalo Soldiers are nothing more than cheap thrills.

On the plus side, this is probably the only film ever made that credits a “Moose Unit.” There are some great shoots of moose.

Hasburgh sets a shaggy, amiable tone for the first half hour or so and then sinks into the melodrama with a heavy thud. The mind begins to wander, particularly when we are shown the dewy lovers intercut with shots of flowers poking up through the ice.

Although nothing beats seeing and hearing the real story, Herzog has done a fairly compelling job of blending staged action with docudrama authenticity.

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

Sheen is startlingly good here, and so is Timothy Spall as Clough's trusted and much abused lieutenant.

Compounds the problems of its predecessor, "Analyze This," while duplicating almost none of its humor.

Far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.

Cronenberg has a distinctive style – deadpan absurdism laced with fright and all executed with slow deliberation. But too much of Eastern Promises is cultish and silly.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is in the scabrous mode, and I like it better than "Trainspotting" -- it doesn't pretend its shenanigans are revolutionary.

What he (Ball) intends as knife-edge realism instead comes across as another con job.

The only point of interest in New in Town is sociological. In the current economic climate, this comedy about workers whose livelihood is rescued by a benevolent boss represents the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Don't spend your hard-earned discretionary cash on it.

The film is deliberately old-fashioned in its approach; the story line is resolutely linear and the production values are deluxe. It all makes for a fairly enjoyable, if schematic, backstage extravaganza.

If Penn really lets these actors sing, his watchful camera also knows how to respect their silences.

As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.

If audiences are hesitant to believe that the fraternization in this film really happened, it will be because of the storytelling, not the story.

Best where it counts the most - in its recognition of how difficult it will be for Dan and Drey to turn their lives around.

At times, The Invasion comes across as a mishmash of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives."

It's one of the weirdest achievements in film history: Temperamentally, Spielberg and Kubrick are such polar opposites that A.I. has the moment-to-moment effect of being completely at odds with itself.

Ratner, who has been accurately dubbed a "fauxteur," does an OK job keeping the action swirling, especially in the finale atop the Eiffel Tower.

Eminently disposable, but that's its charm. It stays with you just long enough to make you smile.

The derby sequences are just OK, and the conflict between Bliss and her uncomprehending parents, played by Marcia Gay Harden and (a fine) Daniel Stern, is so predictable that you wish someone had rolled onto the set to whip it into shape.

Pleasingly shaggy.

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

Too much of this film is attenuated and vague, but it has moments of deep melancholy.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

The Jackal isn't much--it certainly isn't up to the 1973 Fred Zinnemann Day of the Jackal it loosely adapts and updates--but it does offer the fascination of watching big-ticket actors attempt to spin their images.

Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?

It’s a bracing antidote to the usual “Beautiful Mind”–style Hollywoodization of mental illness.

What makes the claptrap in Starship Troopers so flabbergasting is that it's monumentally scaled.

As the doomed princess, Q’orianka Kilcher, who costarred as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s “The New World,” has imperially striking features but limited acting skills. If her performances should ever rise to the level of her looks, she’ll be great.

Kingsley is amusing to watch, however, even though he overdoses on strangeness. He's like a superannuated hippie crossed with the swami he just played in "The Love Guru."

Chen Shi-Zheng, well regarded as an opera and theater director, makes his feature film debut.

Canet has a good feeling for lowlife atmosphere and he works up a few fine Hitchcockian twirls. Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye round out the sleek cast.

Whereas the original, directed by Joseph Sargent, was essentially a well-oiled B movie, the new incarnation, directed by Tony ("Enemy of the State") Scott, is bristling with high-tech gimcrackery and over-the-top camera flourishes.

Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.

Movie actors are notoriously inarticulate about their craft, but what about movie directors? If the documentary Great Dir­ectors is any indication, the returns are a bit more promising.

Schlesinger doesn’t really have the low-down skills to pump up the pulp. He’s so concerned not to relinquish his credentials as a “serious” director that the film, instead of seeming serious, seems mostly silly--not scary enough to function as a crackerjack thriller and not complex enough to work as a psychological drama.

The audience for Hannibal is far more primed for a good time; if the film is a hit, it will be because Lecter has been cartoonized; his ghoulish panache, his double entendres about cannibalism, and his pet phrases like "goody-goody" and "okeydokey" all serve to make him a figure of fun.

At its best, Juno is about the messy things in life that are not so easily summarized.

At this late date there is little that is factually revelatory about his film, but as a human document of what people are capable of in wartime, it's indispensable.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.

del Toro blends agit-prop politics and ghoulishness without making the entire enterprise seem silly.

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage.

This is one of those stories that, on some primal level, goes straight to the heart. Be aware that the film features a child rape scene.

For all the glam and swank, the film is essentially a bright, shiny, empty puzzle. The puzzlemaking by writer-director Tony Gilroy is clever but most frequently an end in itself.

Brand can seem simultaneously randy and strung-out and is often very funny. Hill is surprisingly touching.

As one of Booker's supporters notes, it's a sad day when academic success is used to denigrate an African-American.

A true killing comedy would require a great deal more sophistication than first-time writer-director Peter Duncan brings to the party. He hasn't made a black comedy, really; it's more like a black spoof.

People who see Sinbad for its star power--a big selling point in the movie’s marketing campaign--are being oversold.

Easily the best in the series since the first one.

By skewing the film into a father-son inspirational saga, the filmmakers sell out the best possibilities in their material. Lurie clearly wants Resurrecting the Champ to be "more" than a sports movie, or a newspaper movie. Ironically, he ends up with less.

Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.

It's a movie about the warm feeling you get when you belong to a family, and, throughout, the thermostat is turned up high.

Jackson has a genuine epic gift: Few filmmakers have ever given gross-outs such resplendence.

I found myself staring at his new one, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'Amour), in a state of rapt annoyance and befuddlement. It's constructed in two sections, which are far more fractured and opaque than the simple description I will here try to set out.

Clear away the annoying avant-gardism and you have a powerful movie about a writer, Phillip, who undergoes a mental breakdown and is pulled halfway back to health by his girlfriend.

Monumentally unromantic.

Heartbreaking, exhilarating, baffling. In other words, it expresses the performer's persona in its purest form.

Somewhere along the way -- 'round about the Ghost of Christmas Past stuff -- the magic has fallen out of the story. The treacly score by Miles Goodman, with songs by Paul Williams, doesn't help. The Muppets are at their best when they're anarchic, without all this soggy whimsy. [11 Dec 1992, p.F12]

It would be a mistake to regard American Splendor as an anthem for the common man. It is the UNCOMMON that is being celebrated here.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

Anderson can't quite rise above his own quirkiness. It's not that he can't respond to the beauty he places before us – he can – but his jokiness keeps undercutting his own best efforts. The Darjeeling Limited is a transitional film for him: He's outgrown a comic style that can no longer accommodate his deeper feelings.

A marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever.

I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.

Spartan is a character study embedded in an action-hero scenario. Neither aspect ever really breaks loose.

Departures is sappy and wacky – not the best combination.

As fiercely unsentimental as Disgrace is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth.

It's a classic example of how a movie can be great without, strictly speaking, being good. But when something is this funny, who wants to speak strictly?

[Apted] also has an unfortunate penchant for bland stateliness, and never more so than in Amazing Grace, a well-intentioned piece of historical waxworks.

Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre (Thibault Vinçon), who is meant to be brilliant but, to me at least, seemed all too obviously a poseur. His betrayal of his friends deepens the movie.

Eddie Murphy is one of the most alarmingly gifted comic actors America has ever produced but he persists in making comedies that are beneath him.

It ranks high on the Cronenberg scale as one of his more disturbing forays into depravity.

Craig makes you aware of something that the Bond series, in its pursuit of steamy sex and cartoon action, quickly lost sight of: 007 is a killer. That's what he's licensed to do.

It's a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg's mulchy fixations-and probably for no one else. [27 Dec 1991]

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

Crossing Over is not a success but make no mistake: There is great drama to be found in these streets.

Spurlock's movie is an attack on our eating habits, but it's also a prime example of an all-American sport--making a spectacle of oneself for fun and profit. Spurlock, you'll be surprised to learn, is developing a TV spinoff, with himself as host.

Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.

The film is a deeply felt and beautifully acted hagiography.

She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.

Frankly, the most disturbing thing about Prime is that Uma Thurman is now officially an Older Woman.

Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.

The real passion here is the almost erotic thrill that acting still holds for Moreau.

Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is his companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers" and in almost every way is superior.

Isn't terrible exactly, but it's bland, and in some ways that's worse. It's a romance posing as a detective story in which the solution is obvious and not worth the fuss.

This is romanticism of a rather low order.

Eastwood has made an honorable movie about honor, but the naivete of the conception - which some will call purity - keeps "Flags" at arm's length from greatness.

Henry Fool finds Hartley assimilating Godard's ideas with far more assurance than in previous pictures like "Amateur" and "Flirt."

Gene Hackman is excellent when he isn't overdoing his patented nice-guy routine.

Melissa Leo is startlingly good...You feel like you're watching a life, not a performance.

Neil Young’s concept album turned concert tour turned movie, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen--at least not in an unaltered state.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

The pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film's frayed sleeve… Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it's a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows [12 Oct 1990]

I've never seen another movie that so clearly expresses the sensual sustenance that great folk culture provides its practitioners.

Alexandre Aja directs in full glop mode and the cast includes a few performers, including Ted Levine (from "Monk"), Robert Joy, and Kathleen Quinlan, who probably wish they were elsewhere.

The film is laced with lovely moments, from the leads and from Shelly as a waitress friend.

Nothing more than an efficient time-killer with the added bonus of being based on a real misadventure. But, unlike its benighted cast of characters, it gets the job done without a hitch.

The result is perhaps the most elegantly shot, and certainly the most disturbing, of the recent fantasy films.

All this gloomy masochism is made palatable because of the performers. And yet we must ask: Is this any way to show off two of our finest actors?

Not always believable, but the film has a moody expressiveness that stays with you.

There are many things wrong with Julie and Julia but, if you're looking to get hitched, you won't find a better booster.

The presentation has verve. But the story is confusingly told - everything is NOT illuminated - and, as the seeker, Elijah Wood is a big blank.

The young cast members, including Justin Long and Ryan Reynolds, are often spirited and funny, and restaurantgoers are left with a valuable lesson.

The film rapidly devolves into a lame buddy picture, part thriller, mostly goof.

The cast is terrific, the movie isn't... It all plays like the pilot for a series that wasn't picked up.

Most of the time, however, we are watching pathology without benefit of insight.

I suspect audiences will see Shyamalan's portentous doodle for what it is - the height of arrogance and a bad night out at the movies.

Excruciatingly vivid.

A couple of scenes directly reference the Iraq war and the Holocaust (where the humans are herded into cattle cars), and this is taking things much too seriously. This is a big blow-'em-up franchise movie. It should not under any circumstances be confused with a Statement.

Refreshingly uncategorizable: It’s somewhere between a marital-discord drama and a mystery thriller, but it also has its madcap moments.

The movie confirms what most of us have known all along: Electability is all about staying on message.

Without Hudson, Dreamgirls would be a whole lot less exciting. Knowles, the ostensible star, is rather bland, and Foxx, surprisingly, seems miscast. Murphy is wonderful, but that should be no surprise.

The Program tries to travel light and heavy, and the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-think doesn’t gel. Latham, who has previously bestowed upon us the ersatz pop reportage of “Urban Cowboy” and “Perfect,” doesn’t tunnel very deep into the world of college athletics. What he and Ward come up with is fairly standard stuff that seems derived mostly from old movies.

Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.

This one doesn't have enough zesty ideas to revive the breed.

See it after you've eaten dinner. And don't see if you've recently been to "Ratatouille."

What links all these characters is Myers's gift for antic, elfin burlesque. He's like a second-best Peter Sellers.

It's this year's "An Inconvenient Truth."

This final installment jettisons most of the Zen mumbo-jumbo from the first two movies in favor of lots of very loud explosions. Since I didn’t take the mumbo-jumbo seriously to begin with, my letdown was minor, but aficionados may feel like they’ve been played for suckers.

Even in a piffle like Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton reminds us of her uncanny ability to inhabit her characters' knockabout emotions.

Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.

It's the audience for this film that will require therapy.

While making his new film, he (McElwee) imagines that his boy is looking back at his screen image from some distant point in the future, when McElwee himself is gone. No child of a moviemaker could ask for a more beautiful bequest.

A lovely confection.

Walter Hill, who also directed the first film, surely recognizes the hollowness of what he's doing here. He tries to ram through the muddled exposition as quickly as possible; essentially, the film is wall-to-wall mayhem, with more shots of hurled bodies shattering windows than I've ever seen in a movie. [8 Jun 1990, p.1]

Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

The director of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" has muffled the rage and darkness of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. Master and Commander is a too-comfy classic.

Nastiness in a movie can sometimes be liberating and fun, but the nastiness in RoboCop 2 is no more authentic than its heart.

The new film Paris by writer-director Cédric Klapisch was originally supposed to carry the subtitle "An Ephemeral Portrait of an Eternal City." That kind of sums it up.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Blossoms of Fire fulfills the first criterion of any good ethnographic study: It's about an inherently interesting subject.

This may sound like an Oprah episode, but the outcome is far from predictable and carries the force of a tragedy in which everyone, and no one, is to blame.

If you've seen "To Sir, With Love," "Dead Poet's Society," "The Corn is Green," or "Stand and Deliver" - to take a random sample - you've already seen much of this movie. Swank is good, though, and so is Patrick Dempsey as her suffering husband.

A glossy, depthless melodrama.

Paris Hilton also turns up, still trying to be famous for more than being famous. She has a ways to go.

The performances are amazing.

There's good bad taste and then there's just plain bad bad, which is what describes most of Brüno.

A promising premise and some very good actors are smothered in goo in The Answer Man.

If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for Just Cause will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater.

I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.

The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.

Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, Ang Lee's uneven new film is a bit like a Chinese variant on Paul Verhoeven's "The Black Book." The sex scenes in this otherwise overly prim period piece are extremely graphic.

Sprawling yet cramped, There Will Be Blood may not be the best movie of the year, but it's certainly the strangest. It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.

With all this going for it, Vicky Cristina Barcelona should be better than it is. But there's something intriguing going on here. It's a movie about the sacrifices that people make to be happy.

The rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory is shopworn, but the sibling rivalries are cantankerous and goofy and Bernal's Tato, who fancies himself a pop singing star, wouldn't make the first cut on "American Idol."

It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

Blunt and Friend strike a few flinty sparks, and Julian Fellowes’s script has its share of dry-as-dust witticisms. Most of the time, though, it’s a stiff pageant.

What's remarkable is how often the photographer's subjects allow themselves to be caught on film; it's as if they understood implicitly that Nachtwey was there not only to agitate for reform but to memorialize their agony. He does both.

If the literacy of The History Boys is deemed uncinematic, then give me uncinema anytime.

As was also true of Pixar's last movie, "Cars," Ratatouille is better at pleasing the eye than the other senses.

Anthony doesn't have a large emotional range as an actor, and neither does Lopez. Still, the musical numbers, which constitute a hefty portion of screen time, are thrilling.

The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That’s a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.

This time around, though, the Coens' usual arch deliberateness isn't quite as deliberate, and there's an appealing shagginess to some of the episodes and performances.... This is the Coen brothers' most emotionally felt movie, and that's not meant as faint praise.

By the end, 10 Items Or Less has the obnoxiousness of a vanity project. Freeman is having a better time than we are.

Henry and June is so gentle it almost floats away--but it’s a movie that can’t just be dismissed. It may be a failure but it’s a one-of-a-kind-failure.

The film is a so-so slog through a torrent of tired jokes.

After seeing this film, try reading Norman Mailer's "Of A Fire on the Moon," its perfect companion piece.

A little of this movie's preppy, whiny expostulation goes a long way.

As a piece of inspirationalism about human stamina, Touching the Void is peerless, but what it doesn't--perhaps can't--explain is why people place themselves in such peril.

My favorite voice/animation combo, however, is Stephen Colbert's very terrestrial president of the United States.

Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations.

There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."

It's disconcerting to see Virginia Madsen, who was so marvelous in her 2004 comeback role in "Sideways" reduced to playing the terrified wife here.

It's an expertly engineered popcorn movie - hold the butter substitute - but it also tries (and fails) to be a love story for the ages.

Fan's camera moves sinuously through these people's lives and gives a human face to a national panorama.

Von Trier is undeniably talented, but Zentropa, which won the 1991 Jury Prize at Cannes, comes across mostly as an exercise in pseudo-profundity. It’s got more metaphors than it knows what to do with.

Although Junge had consulted with a few historians and moviemakers over the years, she had never really unburdened herself, and this 90-minute documentary is a devastating act of personal confession.

Writer-director Cao Hamburger works well with child actors and has a spare, unforced style. But too much of this film is desultory and thin.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

It’s powerful, all right, and Downey’s performance is lacerating, but missing is any sense of lyricism in Dark’s hallucinatory yearnings. Without that leap of transcendence, this new Singing Detective doesn’t sing.

Maybe the whole project should have been junked from the get-go.

Was Paper Man worth making? Captain Excellent and I would probably differ on that one.

A first-rate crime thriller from 1960.

This enjoyable Dreamworks animated comedy is well timed.

Sordid Thelma & Louise-ish spree, which also has certain affinities with Breathless but would be better termed Affectless.

Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.

His (Aoyama) existential odyssey is so attenuated and aloof that he turns suffering into an art thing.

It's plotless. It fits no category -- "docudrama tone poem" probably comes closest.

Throughout the film there are small, rapturous moments.

What's exciting about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is that, in Jason Scott Lee, the movies have created a new star out of an old star. The film is a tribute to Bruce Lee but it's also a tribute to the transforming powers of performance. Lee does justice to Bruce Lee while, at the same time, creating a character out of his own fierce resources. He is, quite literally, smashing.

Oliver Stone's film paints a reasonably complex portrait of Morrison's life and times. [01 Mar 1991]

The movie is an idyllic view of life as it ought to be, rather than the way it is.

Hollywood movies are once again taking on the job that Andy Griffith–era TV sitcoms used to fill, touting homespun values in Never Land.

Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.

Directed by Kevin Lima and produced by Dan Rounds, it moves briskly, and, if it doesn’t make a star out of Goofy, it doesn’t trash him either. It lets Goofy be Goofy.

As the film plays out its melancholy story, we realize that what we are watching is far rarer than the usual sports flick.

The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]

The Last Station isn’t all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it’s like a great night at the theater.

French Kiss tries to be a glass of pink champagne, but some of the fizz has gone out of the bottle. But director Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter Adam Brooks cram so many potshots into the piece that, after a while, it makes you laugh anyway.

The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.

If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.

What Looking For Eric demonstrates is that drama, not comedy, is how Loach makes sense of things. On the other hand, I often find his dramas unremittingly bleak. I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not a big fan of Ken Loach.

Not everything in this ambitious comic escapade works, but Coppola, along with his sister, Sofia, is a real filmmaker. It must be in the genes.

There's something a bit condescending about how the movie devolves into a falling-out-between-friends scenario, as if the only way our attention could be held by this subculture were if it was presented to us sentimentally.

I don't mean to imply that this film is any good or that it contains an ounce of genuine insight. But as a template for the big-baby genre, it's invaluable.

Borderline unwatchable, although, as is true of all Gilliam movies, it certainly is different.

Jeunet wants us to know that times are hard for dreamers and that one shouldn't pass up a chance for true love. He means it, no doubt, but he doesn't have the simplicity of soul to quite bring off the sentiment. Still, we're charmed by the attempt.

Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?

Parts of this film are as blandly lulling as a mood tape, but at best it’s a literally soaring experience.

Based flimsily on a minor F. Scott Fitzgerald story, it's an anecdote stretched to would-be epic proportions.

By the end of the movie, the characters are numbed, while the audience is sensitized to the mayhem to an almost unbearable degree.

Is there enough reason for Gary Sinise to have remade Of Mice and Men? You can respond to Steinbeck’s qualities of feeling in the movie, but Sinise, who directed as well as stars as the itinerant ranch hand George opposite John Malkovich’s hulking, feeble-minded Lennie, doesn’t really make the material his own. It’s a “distinguished” piece of filmmaking in that somewhat lifeless, classical tradition where all the actors seem a bit too posed to be believable and all the colors seem too bright and varnished.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

At its most basic level, Cast Away is a graceful and powerfully rendered survivalist saga.... And yet there's something generic about Chuck's plight. The filmmakers don't opt for the usual happy-face Hollywood ending, but even the half-smile they provide smacks of inspirationalism.

Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.

This camp farce has its moments of high hilarity, and Sedaris is a spark plug, but it's wildly uneven.

Inspires the requisite shock and awe, but a little goes a long way. About the fifth time I saw someone slip-sliding away from a 60-foot wave, I longed to hear someone on the soundtrack say, “That guy is really nuts.”

Very difficult to characterize and that's why I like it. The best I can do is to call it a sunny tragedy.

In tone, Pan's Labyrinth resembles a cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and H.P. Lovecraft, with some Buñuel thrown in for good measure. It is a tribute to - as well as a prime example of - the disturbing power of imagination.

First-time director and co-writer George Ratliff skirts, but never quite crosses, the line into absurdity.

At some point in their careers, most male actors want to play (a) Hamlet, and (b) a hit man. I hope that Clooney has gotten "b" out of his system.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

Montgomery Clift is at his very best as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a career soldier stationed in Honolulu just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, in this 1953 adaptation of James Jones's classic novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann with the utmost grace. [3 March 2006, p.12]