Robert Wilonsky

Starsky & Hutch is less homage to an old cop show than a tribute to the people who made the movie--a circle pat on the back. And no obvious joke goes untouched.

If Steven Soderbergh taught Clooney how to act in "Out of Sight," then Reitman has taught him how to stop acting. This is the most vulnerable, the most playful, the most human performance of his career.

Every movie Dugan releases looks like something made on accident--tosses yet another stink bomb into theaters for audiences to sniff over.

A remarkable movie, because, like "Crumb" or even "American Splendor," it adores the very people most of us might ignore if they passed us on the street. It's a love letter to someone who desperately needs one, even 10 years after his death.

Feels less like a brand-new movie than a greatest-hits compendium. It offers nothing new and instead makes do with presenting the warmed-over like something pulled fresh from the oven.

What could have been an engaging, maybe even enlightening story about the unfairly high price a woman pays for conducting herself like a man winds up as nothing more than a worthless, harmless and ultimately charmless piffle.

Though it does cheapen itself with some dreadful moments of product placement, it doesn't instantly date itself with cheap pop-culture gags; it will play to our kids' kids tomorrow just as it does today, like something made for children who don't know to expect more from their cartoons than just pleasant, nostalgic mediocrities.

The most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better.

An ugly-duckling tale so hideously and clumsily told it feels accidental. Surely, no one PLANNED something this disastrously unfunny.

The movie is stirringly, thrillingly animated; Stander, as some say around Johannesburg, lives.

A particularly painful event for those of us weaned on Brooks' earliest films, Saturday Night Live shorts and vintage clips of his deadpan standup appearances. It contains precisely two funny moments.

May be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see.

It succeeds where its recent predecessor miserably fails because it demands that you suffer the dreadfulness of war from both sides. That might not make it a milestone, but it's a hell of an improvement.

Just as you feel the numbing, clammy clench of paranoia on your neck, you realize, nope, the grip is just the director's attempt at tickling you to death. Demme's movie had no right to work. It does, and then some.

We have heard this song before, know it by heart (sadly, as film still can't keep pace with real-life headlines about fake drug busts and a shady LAPD), and still filmmakers can't resist its rhythms.

Nothing about Laws of Attraction is remotely original; even its title has the dull ring of the generic, like "Opposites Attract" or "He Said, She Said." See it or don't. You will never notice the difference.

This film is no "Usual Suspects," because there is no twist, no gotcha.

It will linger like a foul odor or the taste of tinfoil between the teeth.

Willis gives a remarkable, wrenching performance: He is the most fragile indestructible man ever created.

It ranks (indeed, it is rank) among the most soul-deadening movies ever made; it has no pulse and seeks to steal yours with a cynical vengeance.

An antiadvertisement for itself.

Banal sit-comedy masquerading as religious deepthink dolled up as boy-meets-goy love story.

The first Kill Bill was nothing but violence--swordfight upon swordfight, till the clanking of steel blades drowned out anything anyone said. The second is its emotional counterpart, the heart without all the blood drained from it.

After trying to prove himself a serious actor in deadly dull movies, Ledger lightens up and brightens up a movie that attempts the trick of bringing a new spin to an old story but can't pull off the stunt.

Yes, yes--The Incredibles is beautiful to look at, but even more lovely beneath the computer-generated surfaces.

The film strains for some kind of meaning, but asks you to do the work it can't and won't perform on its own.

A shame Johnson couldn't give the movie over to Bullseye, since Farrell displays more danger with a cocked brow and sharpened pencil than Affleck with pages of melodramatic mush he can't force out without sounding like a high-school drama student with a sore throat.

The love story, not to mention plot holes large enough to swallow entire platoons, so bogs down the story that whatever tension the Vassili-Konig confrontation creates disappears every time Weisz appears on-screen; she tears apart comrades--and the movie.

The actual finale, which so betrays what's come before it that it leaves one walking out of the theater holding a grudge against what was.

Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.

Kind of meaningless--a thriller with delights that wear off before the credits even roll, a movie you might have watched on cable some Saturday afternoon and decided you didn't really waste that much time.

The Guys is less a tearing open of old wounds than a balm to be applied over them. It doesn't wallow. It doesn't weep.

The movie works because Berg never forgets to keep his heart in the game and not just his head.

Any goy, too, can fall for this tripe, especially if they've a fondness for mawkish cliché, sitcom pacing, popcorn psychology, and lousy cinematography.

Hoffman, though, is the real gas--the vet getting dopey and loopy and handsy because, hey, what the hell...The midnight cowboy rides again.

Feels like a quirky sitcom -- "Arrested Development" without the development.

It's a mess, absolutely, more a collage than a narrative.

Simply, the worst movie of a wretched year.

A stunning piece of work--stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable.

Full of conspiracies, all The Skulls lacks is a brain.

Welcome to Mooseport... is intended to be a comedy; that hypothesis is a generous leap of faith, given the fact that "House of Sand and Fog" contains more moments of mirth than this rather joyless exercise in waste and torpor.

A tenth of a movie masquerading as a full feature.

Rock Star takes itself so seriously it becomes full-on parody -- "This Is Spinal Tap" as a sanctimonious cautionary tale. And how rock 'n' roll is that?

A muddle—not amiably ambling, not affably shaggy, just a mess that gets messier till, at times, the whole thing looks improvised by amateurs more concerned with being clever than something resembling affectionate.

For all the affection Mangold feels for Cash and Carter, the movie feels oddly dispassionate.

The film has no form or function; at best, it's a 90-minute infomercial.

Its heart is in the right place, but it has no soul.

You're almost tempted to laugh at Birth by the end, but by then you're too busy cursing it to bother.

A football film made by a man who apparently has seen little of the game outside of movies, and not very good ones at that.

Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.

Instead of satire, we're treated to diarrhea jokes, dogs dangled from the windows of speeding SUVs and tasteless sobriquets bestowed upon anyone who looks vaguely ethnic.

Moore's likable and Goode's good. But . . . so what?

It's absolutely awful, and even Gene Hackman can't carry it across the goal line.

Among the several iterations of Jules Verne's novel about the inventor's adventures whilst traipsing through England, Asia and the Wild West, this new one is the least impressive and most depressive. Even the 1989 made-for-TV version starring Pierce Brosnan possessed more spark and steam than this lazy, lackluster take.

It's vibrant and verdant and heartbreakingly inviting, begging you to escape into a lovely tale in which children, through a simple act of faith, find their own heaven on earth.

A movie that leaves you wondering what the fuss was all about when its end credits appear; it's a mish-mash of a dozen other, better films ground up and watered down--Seven, Silence of the Lambs, and Manhunter, to name a few of the usual suspects.

Just another baseball movie hitting for average -- very average.

The film, from its deadpan start to its languorous finish, provides the most joyous moviegoing experience in years.

The result is something that feels very much like an overachieving made-for-TV movie--a history lesson dolled up like an action movie, with the action relegated to the final third, and even then, the battle is over before it really begins.

Were it not for the involvement of producer Bruckheimer, who has made billions by conning millions into believing they can't live without his celluloid crack, it's doubtful Kangaroo Jack would even exist. As it stands now, the "movie" barely exists anyway.

For the large-type crowd, one that prefers to have its "dirty" clean and silly.

The first half of Intolerable Cruelty is more than tolerable; it's a dopey kick full of goofy jokes tossed off so quickly you're reminded less of bickering-bantering Grant and Rosalind Russell than Groucho and Chico Marx.

The movie's so unfunny, it almost appears to be that way on purpose, kind of like an Ingmar Bergman film.

Scorsese's rockudrama withstands big-screen scrutiny some 24 years after its initial release.

The fanboy in me loves it, being wrapped in the warm projected glow of nostalgia for a movie I've memorized since age 9.

Like a half-remembered dream, the movie's often so overwhelming that even its dull, dead moments (of which there are many, unfortunately) leave you wondering what you're missing and what you've just forgotten.

This circumcised "Shaft" plays half-awesome, half-aw-shit; it exists almost as if to prove you can cram every Jewish joke in the Old Testament into a single movie.

Cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents.

It's chatty when it wants to pretend it's deep and spiritual, messy when it's striving for chaotic and thrilling, and boring when it has no other options left.

It's too turgid and redundant to have any real impact. As a thriller, it barely thrills; as a lecture, it has nothing new to say.

No matter how well you think you know this tale, you do not know it at all. It offers the oldest clichés polished up like some brand-new thing by director Greg Whiteley.

Penn's lead performance is the main attraction here, and it's a fine piece of work--far superior to his overly showy Oscar-winning role last year.

Audiard keeps things shaky, grim, claustrophobic, doomed. His film has the feel of documentary, as he follows Clara through the daily grind that pulverizes her. We're in her head, literally.

Indeed, this is the very kind of lame-brained folly Levy and his SCTV cohorts used to mock on their old show; now it's how he makes rent.

What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives.

The jokes in Extract play almost like afterthoughts, the last-second add-ons of a former animator who, until now, has always treated his flesh-and-blood characters a bit like cartoon caricatures and vice versa.

Proof of Life kidnaps the audience, then tortures it to a slow death

For the first time, Burton seems comfortable walking around the real world.

This limp gender-bender-baller from a first-time director and rookie screenwriter steals wholesale from that 1982's "Tootsie," forgetting only to retain a single laugh.

It's an exceptionally dreary and overwrought bit of work, every bit as imperious as Katzenberg's "The Prince of Egypt" from 1998.

Yes, the "Taxi Driver" parallels are intentional: Hill spells them out in the press notes, all but branding Observe and Report a Scorsesefied remake that reeks of stale Cinnabon.

Hellboy is as much a wreck as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or "The Punisher," coming and going in two weeks, and as much a bore as "The Hulk."

Anderson and Sandler were meant for each other, and their romance is, unbelievably, our reward.

It's utterly frustrating: What could and should have been biting and droll is instead a tepid waste of time and talent.

Altman gladly admits there's not much of a story here; his movies are driven by characters.

School of Rock, populated by bright-shiny faces given a "Revenge of the Nerds" happy ending, is light and meaningless but never worthless. It merely aspires to be a good time and is just that and nothing more, a grin-worthy buzz that wears off in the parking lot.

Busch, responsible for the similarly hit-and-miss-that's-a-mister "Psycho Beach Party," has a good idea; two in one movie would make him absolutely fabulous.

There's something more REAL about this version, more human, more lived-in; though their words may have been penned 200 years ago, when Austen was a young woman writing about her idealized self, this cast and crew nudge the material into the now.

What's most astonishing is that a film populated by two madmen can grow so wearying and dull; the movie crawls toward its climax, which is so barmy it's almost surreal.

Keaton's so good you almost forget how wonderful Downey is as Steven Schwimmer.

Can barely move during its final half hour, which is a shame, because until then it's a frenetic, engaging ride -- a huge grin, not unlike the one Tom Cruise now hides behind his grownup's braces.

It almost plays like a darkly comic "Peanuts" special.

Treacherously funny and wrenchingly sad.

Jackson is merely indulging himself here, too, doing a thing not because he should but because he can. And maybe that's a good reason but not good enough. The girl still cries, the ape still dies and all you're left with is a ringing in your ears.

Aimed at the brain, when it should have been one for the heart.

As surreal as it is obscene, as clever as it is crude. It plays like some raw offspring of underground comix and the comedies of the 1920s.

Hunter's movies never condescended to the audience; they never winked, never pretended to be a mere Playboy party joke. Which is precisely why Down With Love, which strives to be to "Pillow Talk" what "Far From Heaven" was to "All That Heaven Allows," is such a disaster: It winks so hard it lapses right into a coma.

It's as light on its feet as a dead elephant. It's never clever or smart, nor is it terribly thrilling or engaging during its numerous fight sequences.