Rex Reed

Cheap, preposterous and mind-bendingly dreadful.

Has more charm and wit than most of its J.D. Salinger-inspired cousins in the same genre, and is undeniably engaging.

Even as a prime example of rotten summer silliness, this is a paralyzing experience.

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

The best thing about Super 8, by far, are the kids, all perfectly cast. The script does a much better job making them believable and real than the adults...The rest of the movie steals shamelessly from...

The best thing about Beginners is the way it accepts every character in a nonjudgmental way.

Too bleak and wrenching to recommend unconditionally. You need a strong constitution to watch it soberly, but it is a gripping experience that left me weak in the knees.

The movie knocks itself unconscious trying to be offbeat, but instead of cinematic heart, the director self-indulges in cinematic art, drowning the whole thing in freeze frames, slow-motion and color-coding, owing everything he knows to the worst of Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson.

Content to make movies for himself (Malick) that nobody else wants to see as long as he can find someone to foot the bill, he's also an iconoclast searching for significance. So am I, but not 138 minutes worth. Anyone seeking symmetry in this cinematic taffy pull risks emerging from it with a pretzel for a brain.

Hey, Boo solves the mystery of Boo, and also, to some degree, the mystery of Harper Lee. It's a fine film, well worth seeing.

In a film so ripe with temptations for posturing, exaggeration and satirical overacting, nobody is anything less than natural, unpretentious and funny as hell.

I'm sure there is much to be learned from Forks Over Knives (the title means fruits and veggies can be forked, but anything you cut with a knife is lethal), but what does it have to do with real life?

Everything Must Go is the one for the Gipper-the movie in which he steps out of character for his own sake and works hard to lose Will Ferrell. The results are mixed, but I admire the guy for making an effort.

Only the great Piper Laurie delivers dollar value. Otherwise, Hesher is to movies what graffiti is to a rotting fence.

With eyes closed and jaw firmly set, concentrating hard enough to break a blood vessel, I cannot think of a movie more incomprehensible, moronic, pointless or abominable than a load of trash called The Big Bang.

Whatever you think of Mr. Gibson, whatever he has lost, he still has talent, and here displays acting of power and resonance. It's a pleasure, for a change, to see the best side of his split personality at work.

Beautifully shot and reeking with style, Last Night is as slow as sorghum; nothing ever really happens.

Quite the most appalling piece of junk I have seen lately, Hobo With a Shotgun just lies there like an autopsy.

If you have already begun to suspect that Something Borrowed may be something less than the sum of its parts-all of which do indeed seem borrowed from other movies and TV rom-coms too numerous to mention-you are right.

Written and directed by Mike Pavone, with a fine, understated, atypical performance by Ed Harris, it may be a feel-good family picture centered on kids, but it offers talismans to live by for people of all ages.

An odd, confusing, ugly and mostly indigestible movie about religious hysteria and rock 'n' roll-two subjects I find about as interesting as opening a tattoo parlor. I wish I liked the movie half as much as I like the actor.

In the avalanche of junk about aliens, alternate universes, digital effects and comic-book superheroes, it is a rare treat to see a sweet, low-budget film about real people that is as ingratiating as Lebanon, Pa.

The actors are so exemplary that it is difficult to imagine this is not a documentary. They might not be household names, but they will be.

No matter where your political leanings lie, the great thing about The Conspirator is that Mr. Redford is wise enough to let the audience decide what the parallels are. See it, enjoy a ripping good yarn and learn something.

The movie is not great, but the star is not bad. This, in some quarters, is high praise indeed.

It's definitely worth seeing for Ms. Cattrall. This gal can really act.

Contrived, pretentious and not worth seeing even for the perverse pleasure of watching first-rate talents make second-rate fools of themselves.

Who goes to the movies for 104 minutes of punishment? Where is John Wayne, now that we need him?

Ms. Deneuve has been directed by everyone from François Truffaut to Roman Polanski, but she has gone on the record saying she has a special rapport with Mr. Ozon (the 2002 film "8 Women" remains a classic). He brings out such a loopy delicacy in her that she shines-a charming, witty centerpiece from start to finish.

A thoughtful coming-of-age story with bracing performances, solid writing and direction by John Gray and inescapable take-home values that give you a feel-good lift.

We know about Anne Frank's diary and Paul Verhoeven's masterpiece "Black Book," but director Martin Koolhoven has shed new light on what happened in Holland with a powerful and touching film.

May not appeal to every taste, but it marks an arresting feature debut for Jordan Scott, a director who is well worth watching.

Directed with a pulsating fervor by Neil Burger, Limitless is absurd but entertaining action-adventure escapism. Bradley Cooper is versatile and virile, and a valiant leading man.

A stupid waste of time and talent, but it might be just what his (Damon) fans are waiting for.

Director Dolan gets the feeling of emptiness so right that anyone who has ever known the heartbreak of a crushing affair can easily identify, even with subtitles.

Not only disgusting and unendurable, but filthy and boring, too.

The actors work hard to convey terror-especially Mr. Christensen, who proved he could act when he played disgraced journalist Stephen Glass in the marvelous, underrated "Shattered Glass"-but the panic that overtakes the characters never quite grips the audience.

Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Kindergarten Cop," but better.

Unknown makes no sense at all, so you not only worry about Liam Neeson's judgment in movies, but you begin to wonder if he's forgotten how to read.

Too relentlessly depressing to recommend to the everyday audience. It seems to be on automatic pilot. Horrible, sad things keep happening, but it just goes on.

Burning Palms is too sick to attract the masses, but he's onto something subversively valid, and the film is never boring.

Blue Valentine is about real life, warts and all, over narrative conventions like action and plot mechanics. It is brutal, compassionate, beautiful in its ugliness and one of the bravest films of the year.

The original western won John Wayne a puzzling and undeserved Oscar for finally falling off his horse. Don't expect the same miracle for Jeff Bridges. In the numbing hands of pretentious filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, history does not repeat itself in any way whatsoever.

The latest calcified bore by Sofia Coppola is less pretentious than "Marie Antoinette" but every bit as inertly stupefying as "Lost in Translation."

A true masterpiece of visual enchantment. One of the most original and unique geniuses in cinema today, Mr. Chomet directed, wrote, illustrated and composed the music for this holiday jewel, an homage to the sweet, sad melancholia of the legendary French comic Jacques Tati.

This meticulously nuanced, sensitively acted film version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire gives Nicole Kidman her best role in years, and she chews it like raw steak.

You can't fault the theme that life's darkest moments brighten when two people need each other, but there's no drug strong enough to get me through another movie like Love and Other Drugs.

Lena Dunham makes a 98-minute home video seem like 98 days of hard labor.

As the actor of the year in the film of the year, I can't think of enough adjectives to praise Firth properly. The King's Speech has left me speechless.

Burlesque is the celluloid equivalent to a Big Mac attack, and any resemblance to a plot is purely coincidental.

Enhanced by superb writing and direction and nuanced performances by an ensemble of great actors, and enough take-home food for thought to keep the mind and senses totally focused from start to finish, The Company Men is pretty damn close to as good as it gets in a disappointing year at the movies.

These are characters so repulsive that it's hard to care what happens to them, but it's to the credit of a superb cast that you do end up caring.

You go away slack-jawed with shock and sated with the chilling bedtime-story elements of a great unsolved mystery novel you can't put down.

This is an oddball tale that is well worth telling, but Mr. Carrey simply cannot resist turning it into a Three Stooges routine in drag.

This exercise in hysteria is so over the top that you don't know whether to scream or laugh. Despite an emotionally gripping performance by Natalie Portman, it's nothing more than a lavishly staged "Repulsion" in toe shoes.

Some of the on-camera bitchery between Mr. Ford and Ms. Keaton is laugh-out-loud witty. For the most part, Morning Glory is a delicious movie that will make you jump for joy.

It's a Clint Eastwood role that only proves you can't send a boy to do a man's job.

For a story about a man who cannot move, the ordeal unfolds at a pace that keeps you breathless.

Fair Game is an important exposé of corrupt political power gone toxic. It's good enough that it deserves to be better.

You go away exhilarated. The movie has been through as many hurdles getting here as dear, sweet Jolene, but sometimes the most engaging movies are the ones worth waiting for.

Despite its good intentions, this earnest little film seems embalmed.

Soberly and responsibly, a small but significant film called Inhale, starring the underrated, charismatic and terrifically accomplished Dermot Mulroney, has arrived without fanfare or big-budget ad campaigns to capture some well-deserved attention.

Filled with nuance, intricate emotion and a refreshing absence of melodramatics, Conviction is a moving exploration of light and love shining through the darkness of despair. Its impact cannot easily be shaken.

There is plenty of excitement and pulse in Hereafter, as well as a reluctance to provide easy answers to life's great mysteries. I'm happy to see a great director take on the challenge of new and different material with his customary grace and impressive two-fisted technique intact.

After.Life, with a pretentious point between the two words in the title for no explainable reason, is a horror film with a macabre style but few of the creepy chills of cheaper, cliché-riddled thrillers that are a dime a dozen these days.

It still has a long way to go before the term Mumblecore (which sounds like a Harry Potter major at Hogwart's) can be confused with the term Class Act.

Some people might blindly and inaccurately accuse this movie of attacking family values, but it has exactly the opposite effect. Touching and funny in their upheaval, the people in The Kids Are All Right open the door to a brand new examination of family values that leaves you charged and cheering.

As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing.

The kids make stunning debuts, but their accents are thicker than porridge, rendering a good 90 percent of the dialogue so unintelligible that it might as well be in Swahili. Some subtitles are provided out of necessity, but not enough.

This film transcends its trendy, obvious limitations with enough vitality and vitriol to make it as informative and breathless as it is entertaining.

Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but technically polished, with inspired performances and enough suspense that by the time Mr. Hamm found the redemption that freed him from his own demons, I was so wired I needed a Valium.

The story behind Touching Home is more inspiring than the film itself, but don't let that deter you. It's the kind of can-do miracle that reminds us all that anything can happen and everything is possible.

La Mission, carefully directed by Peter Bratt and beautifully photographed by award-winning cinematographer Hiro Narita (Never Cry Wolf), explores the human side of a culture we know almost nothing about, in a world usually exploited on film to depict drugs and danger.

Kristin Scott Thomas breathes new life into a woman who was invented by Flaubert and copied by Francoise Sagan.

One thing that defies debate: Zac Efron is going places as an actor of value. But he deserves better movies than Charlie St. Cloud.

Resonating with warmth and sardonic wit and containing a majestic performance by Robert Duvall.

A flawless film of heartrending realism about the eternal chord that binds parents and children and the emptiness when they are separated.

The film knocks itself unconscious trying to be whimsical and offbeat, but is so contrived that it is as embarrassing as it is unfunny.

For the Edgerton brothers and for their protagonists, The Square works on several levels, as it shows how far two people will go for love and profit--in more ways than one.

Wonderful, honest and low-key performances inform and enhance The Yellow Handkerchief, an otherwise unexceptional little drama.

Young Mr. Eisenberg and a fine cast give Holy Rollers the ballast it otherwise lacks, but we've been down this road so often that there are times when I could only wonder why I was watching it at all.

One of the least likable characters (Cox) in recent memory--irascible, but with moments of real tenderness--he’s the reason this strange movie takes on a perverse charm that is uniquely its own.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

I Am Love fuses the past with the changing future in a marvelous traditional narrative without a shred of the sloppy trends of contemporary filmmaking.

Die Another Day is the most thrilling, lavishly designed and imaginative Bond picture in years. It is also the most preposterous.

There is no hope on the horizon for movies as leaden as The Exploding Girl.

Michael Caine is such a consummate actor that it's a major cause of concern to see him in Harry Brown, another hateful vigilante flick the wags in England have already labeled Dirty Harry Brown for reasons that are immediately obvious.

What some critics praise as astute and compelling, I find juvenile and fraught with hysteria. There's no arc here, no real pathos, and the direction is like watching snow melt on the side of a road.

It roars and ignites and hits the ground running.

A ludicrously pretentious train wreck masquerading as a movie.

Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult. It’s so noisy that you can hear it in the next town. Staying interested is something else entirely.

We all know how rotten today’s movies can be, but even at the bottom of the slag pit, you won’t find a load of garbage any smellier than From Paris With Love.

A film of maturity and courage, one that kept me consistently engaged. Quite an accomplishment, really, for a new filmmaker on her first date with a camera.

The movie is about how he learns to show what's in his heart even when he can't find the spoken words to express his feelings aloud. Under the careful guidance of Mr. Nunez, Mr. Becker does both, in ways that reminded me of a Hispanic James Dean.

A grim, toxic, psychological British thriller, brimming with surprises, that always manages to be quite a bit more than it appears on the surface.

What emerges is time pleasantly spent with a slice of life that examines a romantic détente between two cultures. Like smoke from an Egyptian hookah, the melancholia lingers.

Solitary Man comes on the heels of last year's "A Serious Man" and "A Single Man," so it's small wonder that confusion reigns. But this film, co-directed by David Levien and Brian Koppelman (who also wrote the screenplay), is the best of the three.

The best kind of horror film, about innocent people plunged into mind-boggling circumstances beyond their control.

This first-cabin director returns to top form, with this revelatory film his best in years. More than that, Mao's Last Dancer is a masterpiece.

Don’t be misled by the title Leaves of Grass. Do not expect literacy, either. This stoner comedy has nothing whatsoever to do with Walt Whitman or poetry of any kind.

At a time when every penny counts, where do they come up with the money to finance a movie this boring?

This gruesome thriller set in a fogbound insane asylum is incomprehensible and fatally flawed, but having said all of that, I will also say this: It never seems anything less than the work of a skillful film buff. Mr. Scorsese may be a smart aleck, but he’s a professional smart aleck.

I found Howl a fascinating and imaginative evocation of mid-20th-century liberation, a mere and merciful 90 minutes long.

Saving Private Ryan is a masterpiece. It cements Steven Spielberg’s reputation as one of the seminal filmmakers of the era. It tells a gallant story of honor and duty and courage under fire. It shows you things about war that have never been seen on a motion picture screen.

A movie only a hedge fund manager could love.

Every complex member of the writer’s legacy has an agenda, with varying gains and losses, and the power of the film rests in the way it captures so many tangled lives as they cross and intersect at curious angles. The camera is literal, so the film sometimes fails to escape its roots of literary inspiration. This did not bother me. How many times do you get the chance to curl up with a good movie?

The effect is genuinely creepy, but do not even think of seeing Buried if you suffer from claustrophobia.

I'd like to tell you just how bad Inception really is, but since it is barely even remotely lucid, no sane description is possible.

Letters to Juliet comes off as just another movie that makes you long for a trip to Northern Italy-but not with any of these people.

But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

It’s a romantic piffle stuffed with so much candy that your skin could break out.

It's still worth seeing for its two dazzling centerpieces.

Instead of originality, The Romantics recycles the same material with a lot of noise masquerading as style, and no substance whatsoever, producing a grotesquerie of caricatures from central casting that are dead on arrival.

A vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.

Legendary is a soap opera with steroids.

The writing (by Todd Stephens) and direction (by David Moreton) are untidy, but the film gets along on its own sweetness and sincerity before everyone removes the masks and realizes it's O.K. to be who and what you are in life. [10 May 1999]

Everything works miraculously here, making Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky one of the most bountiful experiences of the year.

This is one terrific movie about one terrific horse. It enthralls on so many levels-emotional, cinematic, historic.

Even Helen Mirren on a bad day is better than nine out of ten American film queens polluting movie screens on any given Sunday, but really, this is one time she should have stayed in bed.

It’s rare to see a film directed by a woman who knows more about men than they themselves do. With Handsome Harry, the widely respected independent filmmaker Bette Gordon has hit a bull’s eye.

It's all about personality and Joan's inimitable style, which fills every second of its 84 minutes.

Instead of the feel-good comedy they intended, you are left with the suspicion that the movie is really about a man suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness for which there is no cure.

It's uneven, but its optimistic message-lost causes can find strength through friendship and bonding-is contagious.

Surprising, inventive and crisply, merrily written and directed by Derrick Borte, The Joneses is a brisk, captivating entertainment. Think Ozzie and Harriet on speed.

Shot by Barry Ackroyd, the same cinematographer who filmed "The Hurt Locker," and using the same camera techniques, this movie looks like outtakes from a much better film.

With so much junk littering the screen these days, the movie business looks like a garbage strike, and it’s beginning to smell, too. The latest pollution from the celluloid dumpster is sub-mental horror called Cop Out.