Robert Wilonsky

Statham's totally believable. He might yet become Bruce Willis.

Here's a tip: When Vaughn and Wilson are outed as impostors and forced to leave Walken's estate, grab your stuff and walk out. You'll think you just saw a comedy masterpiece.

The movie resonates precisely because it serves as documentary only pretending to be fiction: It's set in a real place recovering from real pain, which Lee makes tangible.

Though it's a blast to watch, it becomes tiresome over the long haul--25 minutes of Thurman hacking her way through the crowd to get to a woman whose fate we're informed of early on. It's the most climactic anti-climax in recent film history, a no-d'uh coda awaiting the ending it really deserves but never gets. Not this year, anyway.

Cinematic flat-lining.

Not only an exceptional thriller, but a transcendent summer movie: It assumes, for two hours, you've brain and heart enough to stick with a film that doesn't condescend, doesn't beat you up and doesn't dumb you to death.

Mostly dumb, no matter how desperately and even valiantly it aims for "thinky."

It's more like the déjà vu machine. But that does not negate this movie's copious pleasures, chief among them its prudent decision to act like it's never supposed to be more than good time, a thrilling test-drive in a car you love but can't afford to actually buy.

Love it or hate it, you won't be able to leave it alone.

The 3D, effective but not yet totally awesome, masks a world of sins: Ghosts can be an awfully tedious voyage-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea.

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.

Hard to watch, harder still to ignore.

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

Where "Silverado" swaggered, Open Range sulks; it's no fun at all.

Garden State charms with ease and moves with grace; it's warm but never mushy, languorous but never groggy, rueful but never despondent. It's like a perfect pop song--that thing that makes you smile and tear up at the same time.

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.

The film is ultimately so extraordinary because it deals with something so ordinary: the desire to be better than we are, without knowing how to do it.

This film about sex is so joyless, so astonishingly unsexy, it's like watching porn with your grandfather going tsk-tsk-tsk over your shoulder for two hours.

Who wants to pay to see a movie so bad the actors and writer-director feel the need to keep reminding us of how bad it is?

What makes Crash so gripping--so terrifying in spots, so moving in others, and even a little funny at times--is how nothing happens as we think it will.

It's far more than merely disappointing that Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams lacks the charm and wit -- and humanity --of its predecessor. It's dispiriting.

Elf may be no more than a pleasant, amusing trifle, a grin that fades well before Thanksgiving, but it also will endure in the way all decent Hollywood-made Christmas fairy tales last if they're rendered with good cheer and good will.

Scott and Olds' is an essential movie, and one of the year's very best.

It's a movie about discomfort and distance, like an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "The Larry Sanders Show" shot in deadpan black-and-white.

It's a wise and powerful tale of race and culture forcefully told, with superb performances throughout.

It's by turns poignant and cold, twisted and sweet, dreamy and drab, effortless and overwrought. In short, the movie is a stunning, ambitious mess that leaves you wondering how much better it might have been without Kubrick's specter peering over Spielberg's heavy shoulders.

A whole lot of something about nothing.

Disappointing only because its best moments are transcendent; its worst moments, sadly, are just so ordinary.