Peter Travers

Tsunashima is superb, and a never-better Collette (The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, The Hours) has a radiant intensity that hits you right in the heart. She burns this movie into your memory.

You watch The Wrestler (with a superb title song from Bruce Springsteen) in a state of pure exhilaration. A great actor in a great movie will do that to you.

Affleck may strike you as off-putting at first, hitting wrong emotional notes, but hang on. State of Play keeps the twists coming.

It’s sexy, suspenseful fun, and gorgeous-looking to boot.

Li is action poetry in motion. Damn them for spoiling our popcorn fun with salty tear-jerking.

With the exception of a battle scene with apes on all fours charging the humans, the film is monumentally silly.

Harron needed just the right actress to play Bettie. And she lucked out big time. Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) is hot stuff in every sense of the term. She delivers the first performance by an actress this year that deserves serious Oscar consideration.

Nolte brings a raspy authority to the role, and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) surrounds him with colorful characters.

There's something elemental about The Exorcist, even with the new hopeful ending that betrays the bleak original. [2000 re-release]

The Painted Veil has the power and intimacy of a timeless love story. By all means, let it sweep you away.

A brilliant chronicle of the life and twisted times of a most unlikely bad boy, a skinny, four-eyed, sex-obsessed misanthrope with no weapons to fire back at the society that rejected him save one: The nerd can draw.

No comedy this year can beat this dud for mealy-mouthed hypocrisy.

Artfully exciting and compulsively watchable even at a butt-numbing 152 minutes, the film makes good on the promise New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik showed with "Chopper" in 2000.

Writer-director David Michôd catches you in a vise and squeezes - hard.

A long sit in the shallows, the equivalent of five half-hour episodes strung together.

Where's Sandler in all this? Lost in gimmicks that smack of desperation. Damn it.

Peet does it with a twinkle, finding class among the crass.

A mesmerizing mood piece.

In this muddled but marvelous blend of documentary and concert film, director Lian Lunson takes you down to a place where it's possible to look closely at the life and art of cult troubadour Leonard Cohen.

The voice work is exceptional, with a special nod to Maggie Gyllenhaal as a toxic-tongued baby sitter and Jason Lee as her raunchy-to-the-point-of-depraved boyfriend. Kenan is a talent to watch, even in a flick that doesn't know when to quit.

The intensity of Leto and Hayek goes deeper than the script into revealing what makes these two sociopaths in heat impervious to bloody murder. When Hayek and Leto are onscreen, you do not look away.

Zemeckis springs so many pow 3-D surprises you'll think Beowulf is your own private fun house.

Now that the fanboy hype has cleared, we can see Cloverfield for what it is: borrowed inspiration, trite screenwriting and amateurish acting all in the service of a ballsy idea -- that a horror movie could maybe, just maybe, have a soul.

It's a major dud.

There's no sense to the scene in which the boys get together for a close-harmony rendition of "Afternoon Delight" -- just pure pleasure.

Short review of three little words: Way. Too. Long.

Clooney and company work it too hard this time. You can tell they're huffing and puffing to stay afloat. But all I hear is: glug glug glug.

Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.

Slick thrills and the star's blue eyes are enough to make Ransom the fall's monster hit. Instead, Howard and Gibson stake out a Moclock side in all of us that won't be banished, not even by a happy ending. I'll be damned.

Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative.

If you're looking to have your nerves fried and your pulse pounded, this is your ticket to ride.

A spine-tingler directed with fierce finesse.

Homer even jokes that it takes a sucker to pay for a show you can get for free on TV. D'oh! That hurts.

Down in the mud with the guys, Moore finds the heart of her character and a career beyond vanity and hype. She's never looked better.

Say what you will about the Runaways – they never played it safe. The movie does.

The only way to react is by bringing a barf bag or a strong sense of gallows humor.

Who needs iambic pentameter when you have Jet Li around?

A savage comedy of sexual extremes; the barbed laughs draw blood.

The laughs to be had in this deliciously awful sequel are all unintentional. A bummer for film buffs, but a ball for fans of the misbegotten.

The director finds poetry in the face of his lead actress, whose performance is as luminous and moving as the film itself.

Director and co-writer Christopher Smith, mischievously blending "The Office" with "Friday the 13th," keeps things fierce and funny enough to give Steve Carell ideas.

Escapism with a human touch -- it feels lived-in.

The ending -- a more devastating surprise than "The Village" could manage -- caps eighty sweat-job minutes of imaginative, jolting suspense.

It's tough to imagine a guy who won't squirm through this tale of 1950s housewife Evelyn Ryan.

Amateur is Hartley heaven, a sharp-witted thriller that takes off into dark and uncharted territory.

Reiner gets lucky with his two stars. Wilson has charm to spare, and Hudson brings humor and sexiness to playing Emma and four au pair girls from different countries. But even they can't float a balloon with lead in it.

Beware 2012, which works the dubious miracle of almost matching "Transformers 2" for sheer, cynical, mind-numbing, time-wasting, money-draining, soul-sucking stupidity.

Miyazaki works marvels. Sit back and behold.

It just plain sucks.

And Pfeiffer gives a funny, scrappy performance that makes you feel a committed teacher's fire to make a difference.

But for all its visionary brilliance, the movie version of Interview never lets us close enough to see ourselves in Louis. We're dazzled but unmoved.

Yang turns this heartwarmer into a feat of delicate magic.

It's not the trite talk that sends Cruel Intentions into a tailspin, it's the lightweight casting.

Even readers with reservations about the ways the film fails to measure up to the book should appreciate a smart, passionate, steadily engrossing thriller in a summer of mindless zap.

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.

Von Donnersmarck has crafted the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head.

In this steadily gripping hothouse of a thriller, it's Cooper -- funny, fierce and bug-wild -- who gives us a look into the abyss.

One of the best movies of the year--startling, innovative, hugely funny and powerfully, courageously moving.

Though Poison Ivy is more than whoopee, audiences may find the movie easier to get off on than to get into. But why settle for the usual walk around the exploitation block when Shea offers a wild ride with the top down into uncharted territory?

The comic screenplay...pivots on a toothless premise: Russ needs to get in touch with his inner child.

Geena Davis and her director and husband, Renny Harlin, recover from their "Cutthroat Island" fiasco in grand style, and screenwriter Shane Black ("The Last Boy Scout") juggles jolts and jokes with a mad fervor that almost earns him his $4 million salary.

A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.

The film has been clobbered with complaints: John Cassavetes, Rowlands and their frequent co-star Peter Falk would have played these roles better; the script is old hat; the improvisatorial style smacks of self-indulgence masked as raw truth. Blah, blah, blah. The detractors should shut up and drink their beer or at least accept She’s So Lovely for what it is: a gift.

Lukas Moodysson, a young Swedish director, crafts a stunner of a film out of familiar turf.

Starting at infantile and regressing hysterically from there, Step Brothers flies on the comic chemistry of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

Pure movie bliss.

Go with the whimsical flow that includes a hilariously morose robot named Marvin, voiced by the great Alan Rickman with the weight of the galaxy resonating in every bored, cynical syllable. Adams would be pleased.

It's visual magic, and director Barry Sonnenfeld, who followed his MIB high with the lows of "Wild Wild West" and "Big Trouble," revels in it. He doesn't so much direct MIBII as load it with cool stuff and flit around to whatever takes his fancy. As summer escapism goes, you could do worse.

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors.

Jolly good show.

It's hard to hate a movie, even one this droolingly crass, that knows how to laugh at itself.

Go Ahead And Scoff. But This cheap-jack sequel to the 1982 cult favorite about a hunky scientist (Dick Durock) turned talking plant delivers more tacky hit-and-miss hilarity than a Cineplex-ful of teen-sex comedies.

What we have here is a model for the paint-by-numbers, perfectly generic, proudly soulless summer action flick. An original idea would die for lack of oxygen in S.W.A.T.

Sadly, Howard blands out in the final third, using old-age makeup and tear-jerking to turn a tough true story into something easily digestible. Until then, you'll be riveted.

The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.

Critics and audiences should unite to KO this loser.

Ritchie is all about the whooshing and headbanging, leaving no space between Holmes' words to savor their meaning. Downey is irresistible. The movie, not so much.

Expertly directed by Richard Eyre (Iris) from Jeffrey Hatcher's play, the film is bawdy fun.

If "Sideways" made you curious about vino, this fierce, funny and challenging doc opens up a world worth debating.

The movie, however, is a crock.

Elegant, funny and unexpectedly touching, this whodunit about a murder aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst represents a bracing comeback for Peter Bogdanovich.

In updating Shakespeare’s "The Tempest," writer-director Mike Cahill focuses on the magic worth finding between a father and daughter. That’s why the film sticks with you. It’s a gift.

Character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.

The specter of war haunts Cold Mountain, but you remember it for the heat of its romantic yearning and the mysteries that wrap themselves around you until you're lost in another world.

Troy lacks the focus of Gladiator, not to mention that Oscar winner's scrappy wit. But why kick a gift horse when you're in summer-movie heaven?

Comedian Patton Oswalt triumphantly nails every comic and dramatic nuance as Paul Aufiero, a New York Giants obsessive who has long ago moved from fan to fanatic.

Despite a shaky framework, the magic works. It's a chance to see Ledger one last time in the act of doing what he loved. Take it.

Never achieves liftoff.

What could have been a sentimental train wreck emerges as a funny and touching portrait of three bruised people.

This lumbering retread, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, is mostly old ground slavishly covered. There are wider gaps between the jokes this time, and the slick style of British director Paul Weiland, best known for commercials (Schweppes, Heineken), can't disguise the fact that he's selling stale goods.

It's unlikely audiences will be echoing a starving Oliver's most famous line: "Please, sir, I want some more."

For the 148 minutes it takes "The Messenger" to deliver its message, being John Malkovich or Milla Jovovich is really no fun at all.

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera?

This gut punch of a documentary will knock you for a loop. File it under "no good deed goes unpunished."

With this cast, you are guaranteed moments of inspired lunacy. It's still fun watching Cleese get caught with his pants down. But the material seems familiar and overworked.

It's the whooshing terror that fries your nerves to a frazzle. Antal's control never falters.

Odd as it is to say, Kingdom of Heaven loses its momentum the more Balian gets religion.

Scorches the screen with a badass bravado all its own. Smart, sexy, funny and dangerous this high-wire act is a movie and a half.

The new Count moves with the smooth, plastic efficiency of a TV miniseries. Inspiration and originality may be in short supply, but the movie gets the job done.

Gorgeous filmmaking that brims over with funhouse thrills and ravishing romance.

Relentless suspense allows The Girl Who Played With Fire to hold you in a viselike grip. But it's the performances of Nyqvist and especially Rapace that keep you coming back for more.

It's taut, tense and terrific.

In Mother and Child, he (Rodrigo Garcia) creates an emotional powerhouse.

Alex Cross has been neutered on film, deprived of his sexuality, his family, his friends.

Perhaps director Harold Becker thought flashy acting could distract us from the gaping plot holes. Becker gets so intent on confusing us, he forgets to give us characters to care about, the way he did in Sea of Love with Al Pacino. Malice is way out of that classy league. It’s got suspense but no staying power.

Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.

Eastwood's modest approach to these momentous events shames the usual Hollywood showboating. In a rare achievement, he's made a film that truly is good for the soul.

I could have done more with the edgy humor of "Diner" and "Tin Men" and less of the mythmaking of "Avalon."

There may be bigger, costlier, weighter films this year. There's none lovelier.

Gray says she hates fishermen who catch and release: Getting jerked around hurts the jaw. See this movie and you'll know the feeling.

Even at its hokiest, Far and Away is never less than heartfelt.

This flabby comedy deserves only one thing: to fall on its fat one.

It didn't grab me. Not at first. A documentary that tracks the winner of a reality show -- in this case Bravo's Project Runway -- after his victory. Huh? But Eleven Minutes busts a few fresh moves.

Fierce, funny and vividly moving.

It would be no country for movie lovers without the Coens. They still manage to run unmuzzled while the rest of Hollywood runs scared.

No list of the year's best performances should be made without her (Sally Hawkins).

Moore's fireball of a movie could change your life. It had me laughing with tears in my eyes.

Don't let anyone spoil the surprises of this thrashing, thrilling chunk of cinematic gold. It's one for the time capsule.

When a Spike Lee film doesn't fly, it sinks like a stone.

The callous inequity of what you see and hear will floor you. It can't happen here. But it did. It does.

A fiercely funny human comedy with jokes that sting and leave marks.

It's all part of the joke. Soderbergh may have created a bit of a mess with Full Frontal, but it's a playful and scrappy mess.

Ledger's comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless.

Vaughn and Favreau are so money, just like they were in "Swingers."

Mixing Rock with ooh-la-la turns out to be as appetizing as chalk and cheese.

The film is talky and often stilted. But Eastwood’s compassion for the character, warts and all, feels genuine. His performance, like the movie, is a high-wire act that remains fascinating even when it falters.

Director-writer Martin Hynes shapes his first movie into something emotionally truthful, painfully funny and vibrantly alive. It's a near-perfect road movie, since you don't want the ride to end.

The result, sadly, is a mess.

An artistic triumph.

Marston builds incredible tension. But it's the human drama etched on Moreno's young, weary face that gives Maria its potent punch.

What DePalma has never made is a dull movie. Until now.

The ending leans to soap opera, but Van Sant, revisiting the closet-genius theme of "Good Will Hunting" is too keen an observer of character to let this funny and touching film go soft.

No dice...But no apologies are needed for Shannon--she earns her star spot.

The idea of the boiler room as a Y2K gladiator ring for disenfranchised youth provides a proactive new twist.

Hamstrung by a script that seems determined to stop at all the big moments in Frida's life (she died in 1954 at age forty-seven) without giving anything time to resonate.

Of course, such Sixties films as Goodbye, Columbus and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice have trampled over similar terrain. But few can boast Roemer’s light touch, brisk pacing and anarchic comic spirit. The passing of time has given The Plot Against Harry a lost-and-found quality that is both innocent and seductive.

The script by William Goldman (Misery) is based on fact, and when the movie sticks to fact (in an unprecedented bout of man-eating, the lions took just a few months to slaughter 130 bridge builders), the result is a hypnotic spectacle. The natives fear that the lions are unkillable demons. The hunters — Douglas and Kilmer spar splendidly in their roles — aim to prove them wrong. Hopkins, unfortunately, won’t leave well enough alone.

The film itself occasionally plods, but Pacino, tackling a tough trap of a role, raises the bar in a mesmerizing acting triumph.

Carell's genius for loading a comic line with mirth and malice is on joyous display.

It's those dark visions of destruction that stick, even when Spielberg pushes the script to an unlikely happy ending. Great foreplay, failed orgasm.

Blethyn's solid-gold charm turns Saving Grace into a comic high.

Judd is slumming again in ths lame suspense yarn that could barely pass as a TV quickie without the bankable names of Judd, Tommy Lee Jones and director Bruce Beresford.

The script hits rough patches, especially when Phoebe and Wolf get it on, but the sisters cut to the heart.

Crossing "A Beautiful Mind" with "Sex Kittens Go to College," first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote Traffic) causes a head-on collision.

The scares are Hichcock hand-me-downs.

Clooney brings raw intensity to his role; his scenes with McElhone are rooted in a fierce romantic yearning.

I've seen A Mighty Wind only twice so far. Maybe it is less fresh than "Guffman," more strained than "Best in Show." Who cares? It's still a gift from comedy heaven.

It’s too bad the script never allows their ethical battle over human guinea pigs to rise above the level of plot device. With these actors, the debut film from Grant and Hurley should have soared above TV mediocrity. What the hell were they thinking?

Beach and Adams give remarkable performances that grow in feeling and intensity.

It's not just hard to believe any of this, it's impossible. And director Jon Turteltaub (Phenomenom) directs with robotic cheerlessness.

Quite a spectacle, but the movie falls flat.

When a forty-four-year-old man makes a movie about his family and friends sitting around singing old tunes, you certainly don't expect an unforgettable amalgam of humor and heartbreak. But that is precisely what Terence Davies delivers.

Writer and first-time director Anthony Minghella lays on the whimsy a bit thick at times, but his wryly funny and heartfelt observations on sorrow go down much easier than the Hollywood brand of lump-in-the-throat histrionics.

Audiences looking for emotional resonance in Indy 4 are doomed to the temple of disappointment. Spielberg and Lucas aren't upping their creative game -- they're taking care of business.

Whether you regard Stella's getting her groove back as a feminist battle cry or as a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie delivers guilt-free escapism about pretty people having wicked-hot fun in pretty places.

Carrey knocks himself out trying to make The Cable Guy different, then neglects the quiet, telling moments that would make it real.

When it flies, it soars.

Cage, who gives a blazing, imposive performance, uses his haunted eyes to reveal the emotional scars that Frank can't heal.

Ed Harris, who plays Pollock and makes his debut as a director - doing both jobs superbly, by the way - is angst incarnate.

Nothing can detract from the film as a portrait of hell so shattering it's impossible to shake.

Dark secrets are unlocked, words draw more blood than punches, and Desplechin turns one family into a universe that resembles life as a startling work of art.

Formula mother-brat stuff...It's only the deft teamwork of Portman and Sarandon that keeps the triteness at bay.

Even a nice chianti couldn't help you wash down this lump of tear-jerking twaddle.

I can't believe that even the most rabid chick-flick masochists wouldn't gag on it.

A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.

Strands Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both named Gerry) in a desert with little to say and do except lose themselves in an existential wasteland of doomed beauty.

The villains, an incestuous brother and sister played by real-life marrieds Amy Poehler and Will Arnett are a hoot. And "Office" honey Jenna Fischer is welcome as Jimmy’s love.

By stooping low without selling out, this babes-and-bullets tour de force gets you high on movies again.

Everything sly and low-key about The In-Laws, a 1979 comedy...is supersized and coarsened in Andrew Fleming's remake.

Me, I just think it blows. What does it matter if you spend millions on a movie - love the talking, battling bears! - if the effects are cheesy, the story runs off on tangents and after watching the movie fail utterly to be the next Lord of the Rings, you just want to go home.

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

Nothing can save this repetitive bore. Dude, where's your memory?

You keep rooting for the team, mostly because director Gavin O’Connor (the terrific Tumbleweeds) cast real athletes instead of actors, a canny decision that pays major dividends when the big game is re-created.

This is vintage B-movie material, and if you really want to catch a vintage B movie that uses the material effectively, try the original 1952 version of the same name.

Audiences expecting more Bullock or more weighty import from A Time to Kill will have to adjust expectations and settle for the kick of a good yarn.

Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap-opera theatrics.

Bouchareb's film helped shame the French government into raising pensions for more than 80,000 of these veterans. Here's that rare movie that really did change things. I'll be damned.

The actors nail the comic sting in every line, punctuated by eleven prime Elvis Costello songs.

This wet dream for action junkies leaves out logic and motivation --you know, all the boring stuff.

Will Ferrell and Danny McBride can find the dumb fun in anything. Too bad that Land of the Lost is so much less than anything.

Every scare is telegraphed. Every surprise is recycled from a better thriller. Even the devil would send this one back.

For now, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is just one more walk on the mild sides for tweens who dream of being penetrated by cold flesh that will keep them young and cute forever.

Credit writer Robbie Fox for the fertile comic premise of equating marriage and death in the male mind. But the story, involving Charlie’s cop buddy (Anthony LaPaglia) and Harriet’s artist sister (Amanda Plummer), is too convoluted. Juggling mirth, romance and murder requires a deft touch — think of Hitchcock’s Trouble With Harry. Axe is a blunt instrument.

Hold on for a hell of a ride.

Alice may be a minor work in the Allen canon, but when its grace notes manage to be heard above the whimsy, they ring true.

It bristles with the brute force he brought to 1986's underrated "52 Pick-Up."

You don't want to miss Depp in this movie -- he knocks it out of the park.

The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.

As for the ladies who think any kind of chick flick is preferable to football, be careful what you wish for.

This emotional climax of the film, with its warring glints of despair and hope, typifies the stunning achievement of The Ice Storm and confirms Lee as a director of the first rank.

The film rambles, but rambling with the mischievous Roos is still a tricky and winning proposition.

The subplot involving a tragic romance between a soldier and one of the living statues (the lovely Kelly Reilly) is hell on the humor and on a movie that stays content to do the trite thing.

Hanks works like a sketch artist feeling his way before attempting a large canvas. His material is slight, but his writing and directing have an unforced humor and an unhurried grace that suggest he may be a natural.

Kirby Dick's indispensable guerrilla attack on the film-ratings system gives Hollywood a swift, smart and hilarious kick in its institutional, hypocritical ass.

Nolan directs the film exactly like a great trick, so you want to see it again the second it's over. I'd call that wicked clever.

Want to find the heart of rock & roll? You can hear it thundering in Anvil.

Herzog conducts his own expedition into knowing the unknowable -- the true task of any filmmaker. Herzog makes it an art.

The movie is full of possibilities. Frustratingly, only a few of them are realized.

The superbly crafted suspense thriller…slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.

Witherspoon has the class, the sass and the full-out talent to sustain a major career. Who else could turn the wimpy Sweet Home Alabama into a date-movie winner? She's one of that select group who is worth watching in anything. Even in this less-than-magic kingdom, Reese rules.

A lifetime in movies runs through this prime vintage Eastwood performance. You can't take your eyes off him. The no-frills, no-bull Gran Torino made my day.

Audiences with a brain cell left have only one choice: Look for the first exit on the right.

Timberlake walks off with the movie. Too bad it's not worth stealing.

21 drags itself to a climax that puts credulity in splints. So what? In a multiplex of dumb-luck hits, it's a kick to watch Spacey and a gifted young cast use smarts to deal audiences a winning hand.

It feels manufactured to be suitable for mass consumption.

Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.

Working from a deft script by Delia Ephron, director Ken Kwapis labors hard so that guys won't cringe (too much) as four teen girls, of different body types, pass along the same pair of lucky jeans during a summer of love and loss.

What started as cute becomes cloying and bloated. Charm should never feel like it weighs a ton.

The laughs come and go, but Ferrell makes NASCAR his bitch funny. Funnier. And more fun. And then the fun skids to a stop. You know how it goes: Plot gets in the way.

Maud and Roland's search for an unknowable past makes for a haunting literary detective story, but LaBute pulls off a neater trick in Possession: He makes language sexy.

You'll go limp from laughing.

Martin is a gifted physical comic. He deserves an original role tailored to his own talents. Watching something this borrowed just makes me blue.

A sharply observant and witty film that plumbs unexpected depths of feeling.

The performances are uncommonly fine...Lone Star isn't built to ride trends. It's built to last.

Howard lays off the manipulation to tell the true story of the near-fatal 1970 Apollo 13 mission in painstaking and lively detail. It's easily Howard's best film.

Enough Burns pungency remains for She’s the One to qualify as a setback, not a drop into quicksand.

Suffers from franchise fatigue. Its rote suspense is strictly a business proposition.

It's as if the brothers admired the Swiss-watch precision of the original and wanted to take it apart to see how the pieces would work in a new setting. As an experiment, it's fascinating. But damn if the fiddling doesn't suck the life out of the laughs.

Playwright Stephen Belber (Match), in his directing debut, comes close to the sweet spot. He's not there yet. But he'll be worth watching next time.

This one means well, a kiss-of-death review if there ever was one.

Best of all is Mark Wahlberg as Tommy, an angry post-9/11 firefighter so against Big Oil that he rides to fire scenes on his bike.

The Secret in Their Eyes has a decent shot at wearing down resistance to subtitled films. Don't be put off. This spellbinder from Argentina will sneak up and floor you. It's that good.

With the cast getting looser and the mind games kinkier, it's hard to resist.

An indigestible chunk of romantic marshmallow.

If the script for this comic spin on Fatal Attraction were only a tenth as hot as Uma Thurman, director Ivan Reitman might have had something here.

The Dreamers may go slack when you most want it to soar, but it also seduces with eroticism and resonates with ideas.

Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked.

Toothless satire relatively inoffensive and relentlessly mediocre.

Dissenters who see this film as a wallow in self-absorption aren't paying attention. Baumbach is acutely attuned to the droll mind games of smart people who only think they're impervious to feeling.

There is something uniquely unforgettable in the way Linklater, Hawke and Delpy (equal collaborators on the script) find nuance, art and eroticism in words, spoken and unspoken. The actors shine.

Less like "Shrek," meaning hilarious and heartfelt, and more like "Shark Tale," meaning manic and exhausting, Madagascar will keep kids distracted without transporting them to wonderland.

Pucci is an actor to watch: He rides this spellbinder without softening the truths that plague the thumbsucker in all of us.

The film is shockingly light on music and heavy on crime scenes that play as bogus.

Demme can't sustain the fizz, but seeing a real filmmaker try and fall short is still more fun than watching a hack hit the mark.

Harmless girlie trifle. Or at least it means to be.

Con Air has all the signs of a hit. That's depressing.

Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo.

Piranha 3D ends the summer on a note of shamelessly entertaining B movie bottomfeeding.

Even director Carl Franklin, an artful purveyor of sterner stuff in "One False Move" and "Devil in a Blue Dress," can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

The film belongs to Firth. Uncanny at showing the heart crumbling under George's elegant exterior, he gives the performance of his career.

The plot is too implausible to rank with "Unforgiven," but, oh, what a fun ride.

I am really sick of people going easy on this dud remake...Instead of the luminous Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina, the awkward chauffeur's daughter who goes to Paris and comes back a swan, we have Julia Ormond, a decent actress without an ounce of the movie-star glamour the part demands. Instead of Humphrey Bogart as Linus, the elder boss-man brother on the Long Island, N.Y., estate where Sabrina's father works, we have Harrison Ford at his most dour.

An uneven blend of mirth and malice.

Miss Firecracker is a spirited lark that happily survives most missteps; it’s shot through with enchantment.

There are funny scenes, nicely directed by Barry Levinson. Other stuff, involving De Niro's ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) and their daughter (Kristen Stewart), are not much of anything. It's a tossup. Your call.

A heartfelt human drama that sneaks up and floors you.

You have to admire Nakata's skill at letting the dead run free while hinting that we may have more to fear from the living. With a braver step in that direction, this middling movie would ring more than box-office bells.

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.

The strapping Owen as a guy who can't handle himself and cutie-pie Aniston as a witchy woman? I don't think so. Talk about derailed.

The suspense crackles, the acting sizzles and the script, by promising first-timer Russell Gewirtz, keeps tossing surprises like grenades.

Lively is an odd word for something called Dead Man's Chest, but lively it is. You won't find hotter action, wilder thrills or loopier laughs this summer.

Amid the clamor from outraged purists and Shakespeare spinning in his Stratford-on-Avon, England, grave, you should notice that Luhrmann and his two bright angels have shaken up a 400-year-old play without losing its touching, poetic innocence.

Mixing comedy and corn with surprising savvy, Dave is the first political fable of the Clinton era. It’s a winner.

Lethal Weapon 3 offers mediocrity wielded by experts. It's not a movie, it's a machine.

Brother's Keeper has the texture, emotion and raw urgency of a Woody Guthrie anthem -- it keeps coming back to haunt you.

Farrell is a dynamo. And Kiefer Sutherland, whose sniper role is essentially a voice on the phone, matches Farrell subtle shift for subtle shift.

It's rare that a a movie leaves you pinned to your seat, wanting to see it again -- right now, this minute -- to work out the pieces of the puzzle. Unbreakable is one of those movies.

It's less an expose of junk-food culture than a human drama, sprinkled with sly, provoking wit, about how that culture defines how we live.

An uncommonly good movie - a thriller that transcends thrills to become a heartfelt and heart-stopping personal drama.

Just a "Rambo" rehash.