Rick Kisonak

This is one of those "Crash"-style pictures with interwoven narrative strands. The problem here is that most of the strands wind up little more than loose ends.

Who's responsible for this comedy proving such a disappointment- Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler or director Peter Segal? Nope. The correct answer: screenwriter David Dorfman.

Anyone who loves rock music will appreciate the script's insights into the form and its history.

The role is ill-suited for Kinnear's talents. Abraham's pacing is glacial, the cinematography is flat, the score by Jill Savitt is suited better to a supermarket and then there's the fact that the climax can be seen coming a mile away. Maybe the biggest, though, is its failure to play fair with the audience.

Jenkins' film ranks as one of the past year's very best. Like "In Cold Blood," "The Onion Field" and "Dead Man Walking" before it, her picture provides a mesmerizing portrait of the human side of evil.

The film has brief flashes of believability and humor. By and large, though, the script is uninspired, the picture's characters are stick figures, its dialogue is lackluster and the star's performance seldom rises above the adequate.

Over all, though, the picture fires on all pistons. The globetrotting's a good time-I can't think of another spy film that's featured as delightful an assortment of seamy international undersides.

To put it in the best light possible, I recommend thinking of Four Christmases not so much as a really short movie but as a very special holiday episode of a sitcom.

Over all though, this is a first rate caper piece elevated by Caine’s effortlessly elegant portrayal. The movie is wall to wall with pompous, sexist, greedy backstabbers and it’s a hoot to watch Hobbs mop the floor with the lot of them.

Recycles a great many motifs from "Truman" but never comes close to putting on as good a show.

The pacing is brisk-something wacky happens every couple of minutes, the editing crisp and the effects promising. Then disaster strikes: the first act gives way to the relative witlessness of the second and third.

Elegy's last act is a mournful smorgasbord of bathos in which major and supporting characters alike drop like flies. The body count is practically Shakespearean. The same, regrettably, can't be said for Coixet's touch when it comes to tragedy.

The combination of pen, ink and geopolitical strife have yet to yield anything quite like it.

There isn't another American screen actor who could have given this performance, not one who so deftly could have navigated the razor's edge separating the wiseacre and the wise.

Her beauty, independence, and stock portfolio notwithstanding, Chelsea’s tale is a timely, tragic one told with typical Soderbergh finesse, a sly, sleek merger of sex, lies and hi def video.

Eastwood tells the story at a pace well under the Hollywood speed limit, tosses in details so beguiling they seem about to sprout into motion pictures of their own and bathes his subjects in shadows as lovely as those in any Rembrandt.

It may not be great but you're guaranteed to feel great walking out the theater door.

Even by Hollywood sequel standards, this is lazily conceived, cynically recycled stuff.

Rare is the motion picture which grapples with issues this provocative and profound. Rarer still is one which does so this well.

The amazing thing about Venus is that it's brutally honest about all this but at the same time funny as hell.

Simultaneously offers priceless insight into the nation's past and a worrisome take on the future.

If my moviegoing experience was magical in any way, it was only in that I once or twice nodded off for a spell.

This is a film which resonates on a surprising number of levels. But the level on which it undoubtedly works best is the victim-goes-postal-and-takes-the-law-into-his-own-hands level.

As an affecting work of compassionate craftsmanship, The Letter delivers.

Not bad for a mainstream suspensefest. Gere's good, Lane, as I said, is amazing in places and Lyne does some of his most assured work in years.

Has its rollicking moments and snappy lines but even Pacino can't elevate them into more than a fleetingly juicy treat. This is a movie that desperately wishes it had been written by David Mamet.

A competently calibrated feel-good machine. It's as effective as anything on The Lifetime Channel. Which is likely where this project would have wound up were it not for the involvement of Washington.

No End In Sight is the most important film of the year thus far and, more significantly, the most comprehensive, clear-eyed account of the Iraq debacle and the arrogance behind it that we have.