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.

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

A clumsy and tone-deaf comedy.

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

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

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

A standard morality tale, and looks especially weak in the shadow of "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Fight Club," which it resembles.

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.

In this case, I have to say, the sense of boredom.

Not terribly enjoyable to watch.

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.

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.

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

Floating this material slightly above the assembly-line level is the energetic cast and the efforts of writer-director Kris Isacsson.

So very general in its characters and story that it actively keeps you from enjoying the simple pleasures of a movie like this.

Julia Roberts owns this sweet-natured film.

A reminder of why Bullock became a movie star in the first place.

An acerbically comic fable.

Works best as a free-flowing essay.

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

A dismal film, a flop as both 21st-century romantic comedy and gay "Kramer vs. Kramer."

One of the least endurable films of 1999.

There isn't a moment of wonder or poetry in its very long 69 minutes.

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

A gyno-phobic fantasy about the date who won't go away.

The plot is convoluted.

The story of Groove... provides an ingratiating road map to a cultural phenomenon. Just make sure you drink lots of water while you're there.

A piece of fluff that can be enjoyed without guilt.

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.

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

There is something especially irritating about whimsy done badly.

Slouches in as a weightless, instantly forgettable picture.

Something rare: a mess of a movie that is somehow infectious, and infectious not despite the mess, but because of it.

The result is fantasy that wafts away.

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

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.

Moss -- in her first big role since "The Matrix" -- is the main reason to see Red Planet, a badly written and visually scenic space opus.

Sometimes star power alone can keep you from walking out of a movie, and this is one of those times.

Does have its share of bona fide chuckles, but it falls shy of its possibilities.

(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.

This is basically a movie about one neurotic woman and her neurotic L.A. life. .

It does... apply Kitano's black-comic style to a different setting, and individual scenes sparkle with unexpected jokes, twists, and occasional cruelties.

It's a notch above average, but Whatever It Takes can't get too far above that notch.

Terrific idea, brilliantly worked out on a technical level.

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

Little entertainment value.

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

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

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

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

The scene doesn't amount to much more than a logical extension of its lightweight premise.

The opening reels here promise something big, but the movie settles for a sour, predetermined funk -- "Lord of the Flies" as imagined by a Nintendo junkie.

The storm is the reason to see the movie.

It may have a good liberal conscience, and genuine sympathy for the rare perspective of a homeless person, but this movie is a fundamentally sentimental exercise.

These are good people, yet the director has them carrying on like community theater actors playing to the balcony. It isn't fair to them, and it isn't fitting for Shakespeare.

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

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

There's very little here that rises above the level of a competent straight-to-video picture, except that whenever Paul Newman and Linda Fiorentino are onscreen together they create something special.

Carrey is an actor possessed. He's brilliant.

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

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.

I haven't got the slightest idea whether these characters are meant as satirical targets or as a reasonably fair cross-section of Today's Youth.

It all coalesces in a TV-level pleasantness, which isn't quite enough to fill a big screen.

Charlize Theron has charm and skill, but no actress could survive this role, which has the gravity and verisimilitude of a sketch from a late-sixties Nancy Sinatra TV special.

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

For me, Trixie finds its own peculiar groove, and-buoyed by a compulsively watchable actress-folds neatly into the off-center work of a distinctive American director.

It's only when you see the movie that you discover how completely the film misses opportunities to develop these ideas into anything like movie comedy.

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

It's like one of the baker's cakes, handsomely rendered on the outside but lacking flavor.

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

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.

You'll treasure this movie.

One wonders if the only original directors left are the obsessives and the freaks. This guy qualifies on both counts.

These film-making provocateurs are divided between sweet and sour, between the romance of classic screwball comedy and Mad magazine on acid.

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.

Even on its own terms, it stays sluggish.

This movie is a business decision, and about as diverting to watch as someone reading the Universal fiscal report.

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

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

A skim-milk version of a yuppie romance.

Absolutely, see the movie.

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

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

Does a lot of little stuff right, and it sparkles at times.

When it counts, this film is absolutely successful.

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

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

Destined to be remembered not for its laugh-per-minute ratio, but for breaking a barrier of crudeness in mainstream movies.

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