Robert Horton

It's swell when a film really does capture a book in some exactitude.

Feels more like a backyard relaxation than a movie.

A difficult time rising above the level of a reasonably nice TV-movie.

Gibson's performance is robbed of his customary humor, and he flounders around in search of the character's core.

The film version of this civilized beauty, captures the amusing gloss of the story but not the sense that something grave is going on beneath it all.

Movie excitement from beginning to end.

A very silly film.

The heroism and the tigers and the epic grandeur all leave behind the flavor of cynicism.

A collection of movie situations, recognizable from the films of Coppola and Scorsese, with a less obvious debt to Kazan.

The movie itself gets scattered.

Little of this is plausible, but it is beguiling.

Furiously uncompromising, and therefore absolutely alive.

A dismal new serial-killer thing.

Sandler repeats his sweet-souled doofus routine, with nerdy Patricia Arquette as the object of his affections.

As executive producer of the film, he (Freeman) clearly sees something in Alex Cross, a man much more interesting than the cheesy plot surrounding him.

One of those hybrid projects: a major studio film, big star, homely storyline, but tempered by an indie director working in his own idiosyncratic style.

Until it backs itself into a narrative corner, Lisa Krueger's Committed is a delightfully unpredictable experience.

What keeps Stardom watchable is Arcand's droll humor.

There is a point in the movie when this mayhem crosses the line from wildly imaginative to downright insufferable.

I'm not sure how elaborately I could defend Pola X, but I loved watching it.

Once again writer-director Cameron Crowe has gotten all the little details just right.

The brainchild of English director Ben Hopkins, who takes his time getting going. Too much time, really, as the first hour passes rather antsily, without quite achieving forward motion.

The bleakness of the material ought to make Ratcatcher a depressing experience, yet Ramsay's power as an image-crafter transforms this grim universe.

When the writing is good, Go is good, and when the writing is flat, things fall apart.

Spending an autumn in New York is the simple part, but the rest of the year gets more complicated. Let's see a movie about that.

This movie has straight-to-video written all over it.

Mostly this film skims by on the surface, its conflict and climax visible from the opening five minutes.

As flat as the brim of a Mountie hat.

This impeccable ghost story is utterly old-fashioned, a straightforward suspenser with no twists.

The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.

For a good 40 minutes or so in the middle of this movie, De Palma is in his element.

There's something thin about the picture-both in its ideas and its visual texture.

A weirdly stillborn experience.

There's no way out of the excruciating melodrama, and the film withers in its trap.

Like other aspects of this film, the image may be a little too perfect, a little too careful.

Everything about the movie is fine and dandy and dull.

A lot of it works for two reasons: the situation allows for plenty of business with small-town eccentrics, and Jamie Foxx has been given a loose rein in the central role.

Doesn't have the purity, the sense of discovery, of the first Toy Story, but it's still an utter delight. Its images and gags keep replaying themselves in the mind well after the film is over.

Beginnings don't come much more lurid than this, and the rest of End of Days never quite reaches this level of flat-out wildness again.

For the most part, a delight.

Barrymore's sunny energy pushes the movie along, but halfway through you realize there just isn't that much to push.

Beautiful is a mess, but not without interest.

Nasty, regularly amusing black comedy.

Do not bring children to this movie unless you want them to have nightmares for weeks.

A generally dumb movie with a smart, appealing, gutsy leading lady.

Director Stephen Daldry gets it right.

It is thrilling to look at, and that's more than one can say for the majority of pictures out there.

This film, a remake of a hapless 1974 cheapie of the same title, can't even get the big chase right.

This relationship might be strong enough to carry an observational novel, but the movie feels like it's missing something.

Oddly enough, I'm enjoying the memory of these jokes more than I actually enjoyed watching the film.

This lightweight concoction can't justify a trip out to the multiplex, unless you're a girl between the ages of 12 and 17, but it does provide a launching pad for a group of attractive people.

Serves up the usual homilies, but it lacks the quirky density and cinematic snap.

A truly stunning technical experiment.

The movie is a mess.

A big disappointment.

I'm not even sure the movie makes sense at times, yet Campion's offbeat rhythms and eye for startling images always made me happy to be looking at the screen.

This director's (Winterbottom) reach is impressive, but this time it doesn't quite grasp.

Has even less directorial initiative than it has romantic spark.

A magnificent piece of movie-making.

Half vulgar and funny, half tedious and cloying; despite the shameless laughs, it's still a disappointment.

Like it or hate it, Titanic lives and breathes as a piece of pure cinema.

Looks like a very cheerful and imaginative accident.

When the film is sexy, it's truly sexy, assuming that you believe sexiness has something to do with the exploration of a connection between people.

Exemplifies the subpar state of movies today.

So wound up in its own bungee cords, it leaves itself hopelessly tied in knots.

Well-crafted scenes that carry a bracingly grown-up tang: unhurried, played in a low key, with plenty of time to savor the details of character and place.

Strangely enough, this movie provides a lot of the James Bond veneer that has been missing from recent James Bond movies.

It's great that this movie exists.

An amazing compendium of dumb behavior, bad dialogue, and incoherent direction.

This fantasy-tinged romance leaves a distinctly bitter aftertaste.

Enough well-conceived jokes that the whole thing works very nicely.

It's like a madly inventive hybrid of "Dr. Strangelove" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

If it is never really as profound as it seems to think it is, American Beauty is consistently entertaining, and it earns points simply for acknowledging that all may not be perfect in the current boom years.

It's got both the sweeping spectacle and the keen, tactile sense of human intimacy.

A smart, engaging movie.

Dumb and irritating.

The picture has an appropriately grungy sense of place.

Edward Norton, who created a buzz of excitement in his first year in movies, stubs his toe with Worm... It's the same guy we've seen in countless mean streets pictures, but Norton doesn't find anything new to do with him. He's Ratso Rizzo defanged.

Scott Thomas and Penn finally develop a bit of unlikely chemistry, aided by the Hitchcockian atmosphere. I found myself rooting for these foolish, pampered, naïve people, and rooting for the movie as well.

A small, scruffy, but agreeably energized comedy.

Highly enjoyable.

It's just another bad horror film with inadequate young actors chased around a big house by something.

The film is Travolta's baby, but indifference and boredom is everywhere.

There is no obvious reason for the film's meandering existence: it's a series of beautifully photographed postcards of Africa.

Forman imbues the material with exactly the right dry, satirical flavor, yet this story is still a Frank Capra little-guy-against-the-system picture.

Spacey and company deserve better.

There's something about The Woman Chaser that isn't quite thought through, in a basic way.

Hughley and Jones have an explosively comic chemistry together; her kooky, open-faced looks are a counterpoint to his whipcrack improvisations.

Eventually fizzles out badly.

Computer technology may be the actual phantom menace, after all.

A crowd pleaser, but there's something a bit prim and pre-determined about its conclusions.

She (Lopez) wipes away the unpleasant memories of "The Cell," and serves notice to Julia and Sandra that there's another girl out there who can do romantic comedy-even of the half-baked variety.

There isn't a sensible reason to recommend this movie, except that its melange of clichés and conventions is embarrassingly enjoyable.

This is a beautiful, surprisingly uplifting movie, made by someone who actually understands people.

A fitting tribute to an era, a writer, and an unapologetic eccentric.

One of the best films of the year, a polished, contained piece of provocation.

A pleasant surprise that The Crew offers up the charms it does.

The kind of college movie people will be quoting for years.