Robert Horton

Conveys not just a joy in music and The Beatles, but a joy in cinema.

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

Good enough in spots to make you wish it could have sustained its campier inclinations.

A magnificent piece of movie-making.

Absolutely, see the movie.

You'll treasure this movie.

A smart, engaging movie.

Feels like a first draft, in need of toning, pruning, and a little old-fashioned discipline. As an outline, the picture is full of possibilities.

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.

Movie excitement from beginning to end.

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

It's great that this movie exists.

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

Worth a look, even if it doesn't quite find the internal logic it seems to be searching for.

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.

Has its dull spots, and is unintentionally laugh-out-loud funny at times -- but isn't that what we expect?

Furiously uncompromising, and therefore absolutely alive.

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

An unleashed Raimi may be a more exciting moviemaker, but there's something to be said for the virtues of a good story well told, which describes A Simple Plan down to its last shivery snowflake.

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

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

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.

The Taste of Others takes regular (but not ordinary) people and knocks them out of their usual zones of activity. The resulting collisions leave behind a very pleasing flavor.

Tight and quick-moving, the film scores its points and gets on with it.

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

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

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

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

May be Hitchcock on holiday, but that's a perfectly enjoyable vacation.

Part of the appeal of John Irving's writing is its sense of bounty, the way the world is offered up as a horn of plenty. The Cider House Rules movie, by contrast, feels narrowed down to small slices of experience.

Bulworth shoots along with great vigor, and its non-politically correct jabs are occasionally exhilarating.

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

Enough pep in this picture to make it rise above teen-movie expectations.

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

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.

I'll be damned if I can figure out how its various ingredients are supposed to blend together.

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

If it weren't so pushy about selling itself, The Dish might have been a very special movie.

Director Stephen Daldry gets it right.

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

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

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

While this movie is no great advance in cinema comedy, it is rewardingly silly.

Takes an easy target and turns it into something naggingly weird.

Julia Roberts owns this sweet-natured film.

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

Sometimes feels like an acting class gone berserk, with Penn indulging his high-powered cast

For the most part, a delight.

Quick and funny, and a refreshing break from period-film stuffiness.

Terrific idea, brilliantly worked out on a technical level.

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

Primary Colors is by turns hugely entertaining and resoundingly square, beginning as a raucous black comedy about political mechanics and ending as a sober-sided morality tale.

This fantasy-tinged romance leaves a distinctly bitter aftertaste.

It's Kubrick, for sure, and in often mesmerizing form.

All I can say is this particular excursion into screwball madness is often heavenly, and frankly leaves critical explication somewhat unnecessary. Go see it and laugh.

It probably helps to be loaded while you're watching this movie.

When it counts, this film is absolutely successful.

A piece of fluff that can be enjoyed without guilt.

A Mexican film that reaches for a very weird and risky tone, and, I think, fails.

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

This overdone project dissipates its energy in strange ways (sudden shifts to black-and-white, as though hailing the spirit of Oliver Stone and that other Costner JFK movie), and makes you wish its makers had shown the same restraint the government did during the crisis.

The picture has an appropriately grungy sense of place.

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.

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.

Never less than dazzling to look at, and the scorching humor keeps it alive from scene to scene.

Has a real sense of the wonder of the early years.

The movie gives us episodes from her life, and although some of them are charming and all of them well-played, I occasionally found myself wondering why I should want to be interested in this person.

A clumsy and tone-deaf comedy.

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

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

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

Kate Hudson's accent is spot-on, and she brings her megawattage to good use on the Gershwin standard, "The Man I Love."

Nearly the perfect balance between straight-faced pulp action and amused wonder at the outlandish world of comic books.

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

Re-adjust the levels of cinematic hell, because "Porky's" just got bumped up a notch.

The plot is convoluted.

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.

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

Highly enjoyable.

A big disappointment.

Not a crowd-pleasing, or even audience-oriented, movie; it's a two-hour-plus mood piece.

I still feel pushed around by Darabont's mysticism, and his overbearing sense of grandness; a little bit of the Mile goes a long way.

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

Little of this is plausible, but it is beguiling.

The storm is the reason to see the movie.

The problem is that the motion picture around these individual stunts is patently a committee-made artifact.

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

The film looks horrendous, poorly composed and staged, and the rhythm staggers.

(Tyler's) voice is still mall American, and Onegin's rejection of her is nowhere near as puzzling or as tragic as it's supposed to be.

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.

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

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.

An acerbically comic fable.

More complicated, more outrageous, less controlled in every way. But its owes its power to that earlier, greater film.

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

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.

This mild but amusing comedy wasn't written by Levinson, and the accents may be different, but the feel is similar.