Richard Corliss

Painful, and not in a good way. A glimpse into the '60s should give us not just the warm bath of recognition but the shock of the new, as least as it felt in days of old. That doesn't happen, in a movie that evokes less empathy than apathy.

Deadfall, though, is a thing of pieces: splendidly efficient in its action sequences (car crash, knife fight, snowmobile chase), dawdling in dialogue scenes that should smolder with tension.

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.

There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment.

She's (Jolie) got what no other Hollywood woman even tries for, and which is embodied among recent international stars perhaps only by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh: feminismo.

Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.

This spectacle of strenuous improvising is more stunt than true experiment.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

In a brief review in Time magazine this week, I gave Dan a gentleman's B-. Let me try to remember why. Because the pressure of keeping his ardor secret turns Dan pleasingly cranky.

Shaggily amusing but familiar and way-too-long.

Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.

Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.

You get 45 minutes of awesome encased in 90 minutes of yawnsome.

Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.

The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.

The film's blithe misogyny soon becomes wearying; it refuses to see women as more than the sum of their private parts.

Conran hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.

Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.

The summer's zazziest action movie.

Van Damme has been known as a martial-arts legend, movie star and pain in the ass. But never an actor -- until now.

My advice to Scott and Lindelof is, Try harder - to bring the characters as well as the creatures alive; to extend the grandeur of that music-of-the-sphere scene to an entire movie; to devise new horror-film money shots; and to scare the crap out of me.

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."

But the carnage, like the sex scenes, is shot so pristinely that it becomes a nouvelle-cuisine feast; this is a splatter film Martha Stewart could love.

The real kick, however, is in the grandeur and detail of the production design, by Jim Dultz and David Rockwell.

Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance.

Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time.

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they're just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.

Though we still believe that Lawrence, who turned 25 in August, can do no wrong, she isn’t given much opportunity to do anything spectacularly right here. Her performance is a medley of sobs and gasps, in mournful or radiant closeup. This time, her Katniss is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as Peeta is. She and the movie are both victims of burnout.

It has the slapdash air of a movie that was a little more fun to shoot than to watch. To say that Blades is a little sharper than "Kicking and Screaming," but not nearly so smart as the best parts of "Talladega," is like taste-testing a Big Mac against a Whopper and a Wendy's Classic Double.

The film's director, Kevin Macdonald, who did "The Last King of Scotland," is not a flair fellow. The chase scenes interpolated into this version have no special oomph; the encounters no residual kick. Paging Ridley Scott? Oh, sorry, too late. So there it is: another film that can't compete with a TV show.

But it IS a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.

It's good to spend time with a movie that takes its time. Granted, Harris doesn't advance the genre; instead he burrows into it, finds a home there, as one might retreat to musty library stacks, where old pleasures and treasures await.

It parades a screen chemistry rarely seen since the original Butch and Sundance.

Like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.

So Twilight isn't a masterpiece -- no matter. It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss.

Proof is on the side of the lost, blessed souls. Paltrow, as alluring and reassuring as ever, emphasizes the blessedness in the isolation of genius, giving a new dimension to a complex role. New, true and thrilling--she is the Catherine that Proof was waiting for.

It’s as if von Trier shot the main scenes while in one of his famous depressive funks, then edited the film in a more cheerful, impish mood. At times, the tantalizing mixture of sexual neurosis and wayward humor in this memoir of a woman of pleasure suggests a collision between "Fanny Hill" and "Annie Hall."

Robots goes for a color scheme that is cool, muted, instantly aged. Director Chris Wedge wants the eye to concentrate on the gags he and his writers (including veteran comedy craftsmen Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) have stuffed into the film.

Agreeable but never compelling, Silverado proves it takes more than love of the western to make a good one. Maybe the dudes at K-Tell were a mite too slick for the job.

True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.

Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year.

Writer Shane Black mines his thriller premise while musing on issues of identity and redemption; he also shaped the itchy camaraderie of Davis and Jackson.

Pacino seems to recall, from his early Michael Corleone days, the power of whispered menace.

The battle skirmishes here mix sudden violence with slow-motion artistry. The attractive cast can sell an obsession or articulate a conundrum with equal fervor.

Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish woman who has never felt erotic love; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame. It's a nervy performance, acutely attuned to the volcanic changes a naive creature must enjoy and endure on her first leap into mad passion. She helps make Anna Karenina an operatic romance worth singing about.

Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. [9 December 1996, p.82]

Sensitive souls in search of wrenching emotion can be guaranteed their Kleenex moments; you will get wet. But aside from that opening scene, you will not be cinematically edified. This is a bad movie.

In its purposeful accumulation of depravities, both individual and institutional, the director's non-style has an honorable payoff that's rare in modern Hollywood cinema: the story's weight could come close to burying you in despair.

This is an original work in an antique mood. The actors and authors all have fun with the genre without making fun of it. Rather, they revive it.

An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.

When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.

"Trash Humpers" at least had the artistic courage of its own lunatic convictions, but Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it’s trash about humpers.

If you don't go in panting for a Pixar-level masterpiece, you should have a blast at this cartoon carnaval.

The movie isn't handsome or measured or seamless -- the very notion of a well-made film would offend the director's antiaesthetic -- but once it gets revved up, Cry-Baby is keen fun from the onetime Belial of Baltimore.

Here’s the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good — the summer’s most urgent, highest-IQ action picture.

For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life.

In ingenuity and charm, this DreamWorks offering isn't up there with "Kung Fu Panda," which remains the sharpest, fullest film from the studio. You may get the feeling that Megamind was made for, and possibly by, really smart six-year-olds. Nothing wrong with that; audiences of all ages can be tickled by the higher form of preadolescent humor.

Either the Coens failed, or I didn't figure out what they're attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid.

The problem is that this pot of intrigue takes ages to boil, and the cook refuses to turn up the heat. And if vitality is not an element Sayles cherishes, neither is nuance.

The film doesn't judge or prod its characters, just watches the long fuse of the plot dwindle, then explode.

As handsome and slack muscled as a surfer past his prime, the movie renounces ambiguity for confusion. In the end, like an old set of tires or a frayed friendship, Tequila Sunrise just wears out. [19 Dec 1988, p.79]

An easy charm, a cleverly unforced sense of humor and a benignity toward all its genially oddball characters. If moviegoers skip this one, they'll be missing a real treat.

It's a terrific movie. I love the look and the verve of the thing, the confidence of its epic design, its smart use of half a dozen noted British thesps, lending weight and wit to the supporting roles.

A decent entertainment -- not up there with the "Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings" sagas, but a notch above "The Golden Compass" and "Narnia."

Besides rehabbing a hero who overcomes anxiety to save the world and defeat the terror-industrial complex by the simple matter of cloning his body armor, the movie proves that there’s still intelligent life on Planet Marvel. As you’re propelled out of the theater on IM3′s hydraulic lift of pleasures, you’re likely to say, “That is how it’s done.”

A tortured testament from a true believer.

At 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate. [22 Dec 1997, p.80]

Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film... It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product.

McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role - more likely, they'd skip the opportunity - but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

The Keane story is a rich parable that deserves either a wilder or a more acute telling than Burton provides here.

She (Blanchett) seems the only guardian of sanity in this good-old-boy Bellevue.

It's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting.

Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.

This naive little movie hopes to prove itself the Flashdance of football.

The Woman in Black is a welcome addition to the old canon; renouncing innovation, embracing anachronism, it's almost "The Artist" of ghost movies. To anyone who fancies throwback stories of the supernatural, there's nothing so appealing as a well-preserved corpse.

Flouting all rules of the sea but honoring every war-epic cliche about guts under pressure.

Luhrmann, an Australian who pretty much let his camera go nuts in the egregiously overrated "Strictly Ballroom", here makes reasonable, imaginative decisions that are, arguably, true to Shakespeare.

Spielberg has energized each frame with allusive legerdemain and an intelligent density of images and emotions.

There's enough narrative for three fine films. But not enough for The Interpreter. The thriller pieces feel assembled rather than organic.

A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite.

The summer’s best, coolest, juiciest, smartest action movie.

Major League doesn't try too hard or aim too high, but it is pretty funny. With its stock characters, breezy dialogue, dense ambience and instinct for easy emotions, it could serve as the pilot for a pay-cable sitcom. The film's tone is acerb, but its climax is as predictably uplifting as Rocky's and as surefire effective as Damn Yankees'.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

It yearns for Pixar-style wit without quite earning it.

The movie has its political-parable aspect, with malevolent forces convincing both the 1% and the 99% that they have reasons to fear the other. But The Boxtrolls is mainly a delight for the sharp eye and the capricious mind.

Enemy is an arid parable, in which actors are neutered, zombified; they signify themes rather than occupying personalities.

The audience gets as pulverizing a workout as the stars do. Or rather, the stars' stunt doubles, who deserve Oscars for best supporting masochism.

Anchorman 2 is more like SNL in the sharper years (1995–2002), when McKay was a writer and Ferrell one of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Expect no more and you should be satisfied. Wine connoisseurs would call this a new Burgundy with an old bouquet.

By buying the pitch that its central character’s escapades were the stuff of mesmerizing drama or comedy, Scorsese, Winter and DiCaprio reveal themselves as dupes — the latest in a long line of clever folks swindled by Jordan Belfort.

Belushi mines quick charm out of his surly role. And Arnold, starched tongue in cheek, is a doll: G.I. Joe in Soviet mufti. He could beat the stuffing out of a toy Rambo. [20 June 1988, p.88]

Fond, zippy new documentary about the Bruce who, on the Hollywood circuit, is the real Boss.

Lohman's pensive loveliness carries the film.

Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill—the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"—melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83.

Never to be mistaken for a Christmas classic - or even, strictly speaking, a good movie - H&K 3D Xmas obeys one other solid comedy rule: that after things are broken, they must be repaired and restored.

You watch these impossible stunts with fear and gratitude for the hardest-working man in show biz. To see your first Jackie Chan movie is to fall in love with what the movies once were: a comic ballet of bodies in motion.

Furious 6 is even cooler and more aerodynamically delirious than its predecessor, if such a thing is even theoretically possible.

At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in "Shawshank" is often forced here.

When Eastwood, who also directed the picture (from a Michael Butler-Dennis Shryack script), faces off against Russell's Maleficent Seven, viewers may get an old-fashioned western tingle. But Pale Rider does nothing to disprove the wisdom that this genre is best left to the revival houses. A double feature of Shane and Eastwood's High Plains Drifter will do just fine, thanks.

At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it.

A devious mind game, Trance is also the most entertaining smart movie so far this year.

The film has just enough collisions to be a crashing bore.

This agitated comedy could be called "The Big Chillin'" if it had a smidge of the 1983 film's wit and charm.

It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations.

The overall tone is familiar, refried, redundant.

The result is a grim and predictable adventure saga that is not nimble but leaden. Dystopia has rarely been so dysto-pointing.

Let all Marvel franchises have as long a life as Logan. But could Singer let Jackman sing a few numbers as the knife-fingered mutant? They could call it Les Scissorables.

Jaden may have to carry the burden of family celebrity, even as he carries his new film. Expertly.

That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia.

Cronenberg delivers.

Isn't an audience that was nurtured on the doomsday screeds of art-house cinema entitled to vacation in the warmth of a superior film about a boy with almost too many people to love?

It's pretty awful.

In Susan Minot's goofy script, Tyler ministers to ailing writer Jeremy Irons and other artsy layabouts while searching for the man on whom to bestow her virginity. The climactic deflowering scene provides the only giggles in an otherwise stodgy mess.

It's a clever idea that, around the mid-point, stumbles into absurdity as the movie itself makes too many lunatic choices.

Fast, witty, glamorous, with thrill piling on giggle atop gasp. [11 June 1990, p.85]

Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.

Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

This darkly seductive, flawlessly acted piece is worlds removed from most horror films. Here monsters have their grandeur, heroes their gravity. And when they collide, a dance of death ensues between two souls doomed to understand each other.

This Mafia tale doesn’t aspire to the heights of a "Godfather" or the epic sprawl of "The Sopranos." Vromen and cowriter Morgan Land are content to bring subtle shadings to the tale of a strange man in a dirty business.

With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark room, the silence surrounding the threats... The film is a slow fuse with a big bang. [24 Dec 1990, p.76]

Boldly and gaily sustained the madcap momentum for the whole of its eighty-few minutes.

You may salute Lone Survivor for its desperate intensity; but the film remains pinned down by its military and political dilemma: between gung-ho and F—, no.

Take a while to get their vehicle to sail and soar. But when it does, this Planet is a treasure.

This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.

What's true about The Perfect Storm is true of many effects epics: it's not a bad movie, except for the people.

It's got power and depth, and two kings whose greatness is diluted by hubris, and a thrilling dragon fight, and the demon Grendel as a tortured outcast, and a naked monster who looks a lot like Angelina Jolie.

Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.

If the Unbroken needle stops at Impressive and doesn’t quite rise to Enthralling, it’s because Jolie stints on exploring the doubts that tortured Louis nearly as much as Watanabe’s punishments did, and whose details so enriched Hillenbrand’s biography.

If The Hobbit doesn't equal the achievement of Jackson's earlier Middle-earth movies -- and, honestly, what could? -- it is still, in sum, a thrilling effort.

The movie is less to be experienced than to be appreciatively studied, like an insect, a stuffed bird, or the sketch by a gifted artist in the style of an Old Master — in this case, the Master of Suspense. It’s not pure Park or pure Hitchcock but a muted, mildly mesmerizing blend of the two. You might want to take a careful stroll in this Hitchpark.

The film doesn't scale Shakespearean heights, but it does give its star a nicely gnarled ogre to play.

The film manages to be both sensational and stodgy, like a guided tour that goes on until it drones.

With more sentiment and splash than the original’s sharp wit, Mr. Peabody & Sherman ends up teaching the same lesson as “Peabody’s Improbable History”: every dog should have a boy.

Because she also has a classical heroine's sense of quest, the picture's Pocahontas rises above stodgy old legend into the sky of myth... That's apt for a role model for any child, red or white. And it's perfect for a film romance that earns a place of honor among Disney's latter-day animated film stunners.

AP2 starts out bright and clever--shagnificent, we might almost say--before sinking into a swamp of shagnation.

By next semester, some grad student will be writing a thesis on the B-movie influences on this A+ film.

The film is full of sharp acting and home truths, but its ambition to be different finally surrenders to its need to be loved.

Savages isn't great cinema, but it's a very alive movie about people who probably ought to be dead.

In the end, I, Robot is just an assembly-line product of a not very advanced model.

No deep thoughts here; this is a product of shiny surfaces and glittering patter, the cinematic equivalent of a derivatives offering. Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up as a tickle.

The filmmakers throw in a few cheesy scares: mom in a monster mask, a baby sitter jumping in front of a camera. But the rest is pretty freaking cool.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

It’s Roberts’ deepest, strongest, liveliest film work.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

Vapid, claustrophobic drama.

Brewer must have convinced himself that a schlocky old movie would speak eloquently to today's teens. About half of the time, he pulls it off.

Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. The latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes -- brisk, needling, well shaped -- and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. [19 Dec 1994, p.75]

This being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces.

Orchestrating the efforts of a superb production team — and of the reluctant Mr. Chayefsky — Russell has devised a film experience that will astound some viewers, outrage others and bore nobody. Laugh with it, scream at it, think about it.

Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.

If the modest and moving Trouble With the Curve won't overwhelm anybody, it's still an engaging winner, like a junk-ball pitcher who stays in the bigs on grit and heart.

Defiance says that it took grit, desperation and courage under fire to say, "Not this time," and fire back. Beyond that, it's a pretty good movie -- a bold, uneasy mix of romance, political debate and vigorous action.

Fans of the nasty Baron Cohen may regret his being borderline nice in The Dictator. But we should welcome his decision to stop being the best at something few others dare try and instead to inhabit a more familiar comedy style--just going denser, wilder, better. He pulls it off.

Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, is a whiz at raising Quantum's temperature and gradually luring Bond out of his stolid shell.

So little wit is expended on the dialogue and so much on the imagination of disaster that you may as well sit back and enjoy the jolting ride.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

Lawless tries to be flawless; as a movie, it's often listless - lifeless.

Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama -- about a family at war with itself.

Slick, brutal and almost human, this is the team-spirit action movie Mission: Impossible should have been.

Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life.

The Bond women are pallid mannequins, and so is the misused Dalton -- a moving target in a Savile Row suit. For every plausible reason, he looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in his sixth.

The movie lacks majesty. Grand in parts, the movie is too often grandiose or grandiloquent; and the running time is indefensible.

Documentaries don't fly on figures, or even controversial arguments; they come to life with real, engaging people. And when this freakumentary hooks up with Urail King, it gets an A.

A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.

Crowe has made a meretricious weepie that rouges the facts and defeats the attempts of Matt Damon, with his considerable charm and skill, to breathe some emotional truth into it. There's a word for the strenuous, shameless plucking of an audience's emotions that this movie traffics in: cornography.

So muted it disappears from your view even before it recedes from your memory.

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director.

The new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders.

Not bad, but certainly not good; classify the movie as lazy fun.

Accepting Pawlikowski's mood of poetic seriousness may be a chore for some. Others will find this creepy little sonata a dream or nightmare worth succumbing to, and believing in.

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

Its visual thrills are chilly and wearying compared with the other films' quirky humanity. It's not a megamovie; it's a Sega movie.

Not a great film but a warm one that pushes the viewer's emotional buttons so deftly it feels like a massage. My guess is that you will laugh and cry at all appropriate moments. Resistance is futile.

At its best moments, Thor weaves a spot of magic from the complex science of $150-million fantasy-film technology.

In all, Body of Lies is a mixed bag of treats and trials, but it should be seen by audiences, and emulated and improved upon by other top directors.

The movie could have been a gleaming showcase for cartoon wit. Instead it's an 87-minute commercial peddling sainthood for Michael Jordan.

Bad Words seems to be heading into the creepy realm of a sociopath’s case study, yet it’s presented as a breezy satire about a rebel against the system. It must be the Dictionary-Industrious Complex.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

The Secret Life of Bees may not be a "To Kill a Mockingbird" on page or screen, but Fanning is the center of its soul and intelligence. It's Hollywood's job to find strong parts for this precocious genius as she matures into womanhood.

Savvy family entertainment.

Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.

Vivid, relevant and of elevating scariness.

A banquet of creepy, gory or grotesque incidents is on display in Hannibal. but this superior sequel has romance in its dark heart.

He (Tony) could be a self-destructive hero out of a Dostoyevsky or Mailer novel. That portrait gives Iron Man 2 its fascination. The rest is a cluttered, clattering toy story.

Neither the acting nor the story matters much here; the movie is simply the sum of its 3D effects.

The cluttered climax, in a Mother Bates cellar, explains little of the killers’ psychology; for that you have to read the book. But it does let Neeson assert his primacy as the cinema’s most graven, grieving, grievous senior citizen — a figure who doesn’t so much star in his films as haunt them. This ghost of a movie star is never more at home than when walking among the tombstones.

Morning Glory is a cut above most other recent light fare, but not a prime cut.

An adoring tone and the familiar slo-mo, wide-angle baskebatics.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

If The Equalizer is the hit it should be, it will give this veteran action star his very first movie franchise. In the sequel, Denzel-McCall could make things right in Ukraine as Obama’s Secretary of Defense and one-man army.

A reboot of an A-level spy series seems too pretty-good to be true. Shadow Recruit occupies this weekend’s movie screens as familiarly and reassuringly as a Walther PPK fits in the hand of James Bond.

Cecil B. proves how a dose of smart bad taste can be jolly good fun.

Director Peter Berg cannily hypes the tension and the sentiment in the only one of the current Middle East political movies designed to appeal to the action crowd. Hard truths are absorbed while stuff blows up.

Chow Yun-fat, the epitome of swaggering suavity in John Woo's Hong Kong crime films, wears his role as a good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown.

The film, which had a troubled history and a humongous reported price tag of $120 million, could have been a fiasco; instead, it smartly remythologizes this indispensable Hollywood icon. [01 Jul 1996 Pg.65]

Knoxville and his team bring a defiant cheerfulness to their venture; the gang's idiocy is both self-aware and somehow innocent. Their gags have the anachronistic simplicity of pre-CGI stunts, when daredevils risked their lives to make an audience go "Wow!"

It's hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness. But it is occasionally the movies' job to plunge into the national psyche, root around in its chaotic darkness and return to the surface with some arresting fantasy that helps bring our uglier imaginings into focus. In that sense, this often vulgar and exploitative movie has some value. [1 March 1993, p63]

It's an efficient thriller, with scare weapons ranging from the primitive (a pitchfork) to the apocalyptic (an A bomb). The acting is only horror-film-functional, and you might wish that our trio of renegades knew a few basic laws of the genre.

The archivist's meticulousness with which this movie was assembled defeats the starving-hysterical-naked urgency of its source material. Could the old Hollywood pharisees have been right? Maybe On the Road is unfilmable.

Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.

Manages to make its point--that we are all impaired, short on that rarest quality, common sense--without being imprisoned by its complex format.

Shot in grainy, unflattering closeups occasionally alleviated by flashily edited fight scenes, Non-Stop is no more or less than what it intends to be: the kind of midlevel brainless entertainment you might watch, between meals and naps, on an international flight. Try to enjoy the ride — and no texting, please.

It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers. [1 December 1997, p.84]

Most films today are afraid to try anything new. Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb. [29 August 1994, p.66]

The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze? The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

It is the rare conspiracy thriller that ripens as the villains' organization and motives are gradually revealed.

An agreeable time-waster for the onlookers and its star. The Rum Diary isn't a corrective to Johnny Depp's kid-centric career, more like a vacation from it, in a resort where the visitors are strange, the natives are restless and the flow of alcohol endless.

This one starts at the level of lunacy and keeps on escalating. Next to Filth, "Trainspotting" looks as sedate as "The Polar Express."

The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.

In this vigorous, stalwart epic, they blend martial breadth and emotional intimacy, honor and obsession, romance and machismo to show the glamour and folly of war.

Except for Angelina Jolie, exemplary as the fairy badmother who laid a narcotic curse on an infant princess, this pricey live-action drama is a dismaying botch.

Blane's snooty friend Steff (Spader) could be a tired stereotype, but with his all-year tan, his hip-blase voice and hs view of high school as a "career," Steff becomes a recognizable character of any age: upscale slime in embryo. [3 Mar 1996, p.83]

On the way to this predictable conclusion, the movie offers plenty of smart entertainment. You'd be a schmuck to miss it.

Theirs was a ruthless Cinema of Cruelty; this is whimsy with a coating of corrosion.

Another crowd-pleasing, expert-babysitting vaudeville turn.

The movie is an X-ray of an invisible man -- by the film's end, the W. still stands for Who?

Romantic comedies often make do on flimsy premises, but this one is thinner than Kate Moss and nuttier than an Almond Joy.

The action is plentiful and thumping; Marvel-size thrills await you and the generations of kids who still believe in Superman. I just mean that the movie finds its true, lofty footing not when it displays Kal-El’s extraordinary powers but when it dramatizes Clark Kent’s roiling humanity. The super part of Man of Steel is just O.K.; but the man part is super.

A ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises.

Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."

Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?

Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is on a mission to make you cry. Whether you oblige will depend on your fondness for, or immunity to, the gentler stereotypes of movie romance.

Left-wingers in the mainstream media - by which I mean me - are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie. Some organic life is needed. And the only crop Promised Land harvests is Capra Corn.

It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.

What's unusual about the sometimes screwy but mostly smart and always heartfelt Perfect Sense - is its search for a middle ground.

Heart and art can make a beguiling pair. Those are mostly missing in this strained hybrid, which is less Bollywood than Follywood.

Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

O.K., Ritchie mistakes flash for style. Perhaps that's the price you pay for storytelling exuberance. If he keeps making films as down and witty as Snatch, we may learn to forgive him.

This is a comedy with the old-time blend of wit and sentiment. Years from now, when you stumble across it on TV, you could persuade yourself that, back in the two-thousand-oughts, they made pretty good movies.

The actors emote up a summer storm. Maguire’s otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy’s magnetism and weakness.

It stands, soars on its own. It moves to a seductive rhythm and vision.

Nair sleekly manages the story’s thriller aspects, especially the kidnapping. But this is a character study, and she has found some superb actors to fill it.

Mitty is a lovely romantic comedy — the portrait of a man, nearly swallowed by the gulf between the world his lives in and the world he dreams of, who manages to bridge the two and to find Ms. Right in the workplace he cherishes.

The clutter makes your head feel like it's about to explode - and not in a good way, with wonders upon wonders. Instead it seems like arcana that might show up on the midterm final: the next Marvel movie.

It's an enjoyably old-fashioned shoot-out, if you can shake off the current headlines and sink in to a fantasy of hyper-violence that plays like an NRA vision of America the Beautiful.

In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy old men.

An exhilarating two hours of serious fun.

So why is the Jersey Boys film a turgid botch? Eastwood’s résumé hints at a reason. His affinity is for American standards as improvised on piano or guitar by indigenous artists in smoky nightclubs, not for the tightly wound, impeccably pounding songs that Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe wrote for the Four Seasons.

The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.

Jason Patric is the chief sleaze; Ben Stiller adds to his gallery of wormy guys; and Aaron Eckhart is the doleful husband who, when asked who his best lay was, unabashedly answers, "Me." [24 August 1998, p. 85]

The only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe.

Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness.

Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero -- because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved.

The problem with shock comedy is that it works in its purest form only the first time. Where do you go after you've gone too far? No artist can get heads to swivel and stomachs to turn indefinitely.

In space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one will see you yawn.

But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

To evaluate For Your Eyes Only and the other Bond movies, it helps to think of them not as, say, different vintages of a fine Bordeaux but as successive models off the Pontiac assembly line. In one vehicle there may be an annoying ping in the engine of narrative; in another the dialogue may be as sleek as Genuine Corinthian Leather. But all meet the same standards of speed, styling and emotion control. If there is no Rolls-Royce in the Bond series, there is also no Pinto.

A feel-good ending is mandatory, even in a comedy like this, which promises to be transgressive because it's the first major-studio job for a director with an underground reputation for being crazy-bold.

This is a good-natured retro romp that is truer to Golden Age movies than to golden oldies songs.

The differences between the two Assaults--the new one's pretty good, the old one near great--are of tone, style and perspective.

Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120]

I have the anachronistic notion that romantic comedies needn't be exclusively partial to one gender; they should be critical and loving and true to both. So I'll soldier on with my mixed, distant, defiantly ignorant review of this 142-minute trifle -- which comes close to being the longest non-musical romantic comedy in Hollywood history.

Wahlberg could be the actor that action movies have been looking for since Sly, Arnold, Harrison, Bruce, Jackie and Jean-Claude -- all in their 50s or 60s -- got too old to execute the leg lifts necessary to kick bad guys in the butt.

The main problem is that Ritchie keeps playing the same old song. It's a swell tune, and we don't mind hearing it every few years, but we'd welcome another subject in a transposed key. Even the Material Girl tries out fresh material.

An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work.

Dawn Treader, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened Yawn Treader. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two.

Frantic and rote by turns, mislaying the power of the central love story and piling on the mutant adversaries. For at least this installment, Spider-Man is Amazing no more.

Law, sexy and crafty as ever, and here with a flinty innocence, proves again he has the star-quality goods.

The result is a knockoff cinematic ceramic.

It's all mildly deplorable and instantly forgettable. Kevin James remains a potentially appealing movie star - if only he didn't have to be in Kevin James movies.

Why did these talented folks decide to take on Carrie when they had nothing innovative to bring to it and, by refrying the same blood sausage, risked invidious comparison to the original? To put it another way: If the most modest expectations cannot be met, indeed must be crushed, then What Is Life?

It's a great idea that Niccol can't translate into a great movie.

Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

It should make audiences happy. But then so did most of his earlier movies, and they were lame, gnat-brained pieces of demagogic doo-doo!

The warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. [24 Feb 1997, p. 67]

The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.

Keough is nearly worth risking life (Diane's) and limb (Martin's) for. The eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, she has a pale, dreamy lusciousness that puts as viewer in mind of Amanda Seyfried, though without the overt sexuality. Her not-quite-there appeal matches both the opacity of Martin's intentions and the entire underhanded, underwhelming experience that The Good Doctor offers.

The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed after The Little Mermaid, that the Disney studio has relocated the pure magic of the Pinocchio-Dumbo years.

A bad movie that a lot of people will like... Though director Jerry Zucker wants his necrophiliac romance to be sensitive, he pumps up its feelings fortissimo so the dimmest viewer will get the point. [16 July 1990, p.86]

When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.

The Iron Lady is a clever and oddly touching entertainment.

in a larger sense Be Kind Rewind declares that the riches of cinema history touch each of us personally. Films become so deep a part of us that we own them that our memories of them, whether faithful or fanciful, become their meanings. As a movie critic and, even before and above that, a movie lover, how can I disagree with that?

The first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent... What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. [20 Aug 1990, p.63]

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

Rather than juicing each element to blockbuster volume, Clooney has delivered it in the tone of a memorial lecture, warm and ambling, given by one of the distinguished academics he put in his movie.

If you take Tykwer's film even half-seriously, it will be like one of those horror movies that you leave, suspecting that the crazy, ingenious super-killer is waiting for you outside. A warning, then, to the susceptible: After seeing The International, don't dare go to an ATM.

Doesn't touch (Li's Hong Kong movies). But it is trying something clever.

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.