Robert Wilonsky

It has its moments, but they never add up to a record you'd want to play again and again in its entirety.

Redundant to the point of being absolutely pointless, a sequel that's almost a note-for-note, beat-for-beat redo of its predecessor, only with all the entertaining stuff left out.

As the movie enters its final chapter, you will come to the sad, sickening realization that the filmmakers have played you for a chump. What seemed so smart, so well crafted and finely tuned, falls apart into a flaming heap of c---, and all goodwill is dashed.

Cinema has done a fine job of documenting the anti-apartheid movement, even if too often the spotlight shone brightest on the white man through whom the black man's story was being told.

A spastic, indecipherable, unholy, and altogether unwatchable mess.

What the books suggest, the movie reveals and revels in--the songs, in other words, those brilliant, backbreakingly fast anthems.

Ultimately only Moore, with her eyes always half-damp and voice half-cracked and body language half-mad, keeps the movie on the ground, when it too often threatens to fly into the thin air, where the audience would laugh it off the screen.

The heroes are villains, the villains are heroes, and in between are the innocents who become casualties in their wars waged in the names of morality and righteousness.

Before things have even begun we know how they will end; this is pure Hollywood product, slicker than the insides of an oilcan.

A little too loud, and a lot too boring.

It's this moralizing, this slamming down of a stop sign every time the movie wants to rev its engines, that keeps Lord of War from being great. But it's three-fourths of a great movie, if nothing else, it has more brains and balls than most studio releases, for which it's to be commended and recommended.

The Kingdom is essentially "C.S.I.: Riyadh," starring Jamie Foxx in yet another movie his Oscar statue will watch with shame.

How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece?

Overstuffed (three villains), overlong (at more than two hours and 20 minutes) and undercooked (plot points include amnesia and alien goo).

Gaghan's a filmmaker for the gamer who doesn't need to have the plot follow a neat, linear path. Besides, you don't need to know precisely what's going on; no one else in the film does either. Which is Gaghan's point.

Certainly it exists solely to sell a soundtrack; the movie, like most made for teens, is well beside the point.

Miyazaki's movies are as stunning as they are confounding.

It's a plot more worn out than the tinsel boxed up in the attic. In the end, they've given us a Christmas gift barely worth returning.

Plays like something Dr. Phil and "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw might have written during a commercial break, a feel-good fantasy that sounds deep but has no more depth than a kiddie pool drained for winter.

Turns out some folks just don't know Philip K. Dick about making movies.

I liked when they had the paint fights and the pillow fights.

The first relevant film about rock and roll and the music industry, the first film that lets you in on the secret.

It just feels like the real thing, which is a trick few writers can muster and even fewer directors can master.

Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.

It should be said that Travolta delivers a wonderful performance that's lost in a mediocre -- and, at times, rather misogynistic and homophobic -- film.

A bland, obnoxious 88-minute infomercial for Universal Studios.

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.

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.