Robert Wilonsky

Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth.

It has but one thing going for it: a cast filled with Oscar nominees.

Why would the writers bother with narrative when the story is just something that kills time, and brain cells, between feats and fists of fury?

In one of the year's most woefully manipulative and oppressively pandering offerings: I Am Sam, a dolled-up TV movie-of-the-week masquerading as profound cinema.

The star's the thing, the only thing, and he's brilliant at playing a thinly veiled version of himself.

If this it supposed to be comedy, why isn't it ever, for one second, funny?

Wacky chaos ensues, as the film veers toward a subplot about industrial espionage, but director Clare Kilner's debut is never as daft as it should have been.

The more technically proficient Anderson gets as a filmmaker, the more emotionally barren his movies become, till at last The Life Aquatic drowns in a sea of self-indulgent touches that delight the filmmaker but distance the filmgoer who wants to love the director and his characters but just can't, not anymore.

Buried somewhere in here, about 6 feet deep, is an intriguing premise.

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.

My Kid Could Paint That's about art—and it IS art, among the best documentaries ever made about that elusive process of manufacturing something out of nothing. But it's also a must-see for every single parent who believes their children are special, when all they want to be is your children.

Cinematic flat-lining.

September Tapes, with its torturously high-minded narration and ludicrously low-road shenanigans, uses the terror attacks of 2001 as the setup for an infuriating gotcha finale.

A movie designed to wow winds up feeling cold, not, ya know, cool; the charm of the 2001 original has been decimated, its heart replaced with a microprocessor.

Co-directors and writers John Musker and Ron Clements doll it up so marvelously you're sucked into the screen and forced to confront the fact that at their best, these filmmakers can make the two-dimensional astonishingly warm and full-bodied.

One presumes the only thing worse than making this disaster is actually watching it; wouldn't wish either on anyone.

It's either the world's greatest infomercial for fame (and its omnipresent companion, notoriety) or the saddest eulogy of all.

It tries to be both camp and action film--send-up and kick-ass. But it delivers so little on both fronts.

Bernal can't decide if he's making a Tarantino homage or an Almodovar riff or an Albert Brooks tribute...and the wobbly sensibility finally knocks the movie's legs out from beneath it altogether.

The only thing The Missing isn't missing is a handful of climaxes, all of them of the anti- variety that leave you believing, then praying the movie's over a good 30 minutes before its actual and inevitable finale.

Freedomland manages a seemingly impossible feat: It's both turgid AND overwrought, eliciting the shriek that fades into a yawn without anyone ever noticing. It's a wholly dreary piece of work.

The Punisher would be almost offensive were it not so inconsequential. There's just something terribly off-putting about a movie in which every gruesome death is a punch line, where a villain's homosexuality is used to lure him to his death and dozens of innocents are gunned down just to launch a film franchise.

If only Condon kept up the Q&A format, because when he ditches it the movie turns flat and familiar.

It has just enough "comedy" to qualify as crowd-pleaser.

The X-Men franchise takes a giant leap backward and off a cliff with its fourth offering.

Renders it a cross between "Three Men and a Baby" and "Monsters, Inc." But it's bereft of the charisma of the former and the energy of the latter; stuck in a frozen wasteland, it possesses all the vigor of a Popsicle.

Plays like a greatest-hits remix; like "Die Another Day," it's bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants.

A spin-off of a sequel... It doesn't even try to be different, because it assumes the moviegoer wants only the same-ol' and then offers even less.

Like all films constructed out of pop-culture effluvia, Zoolander runs the risk of being so last month; this is a movie that treats Fabio as the ultimate punch line and regards David Bowie as the prince of style.

Bearable only because, unlike the recent spate of teen films, it's so breezy it barely even registers.

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.

Really, what women want is what all of us want: a decent movie, something vaguely insightful and occasionally funny. This isn't that movie.

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

Rodriguez clearly assumes Sin City to be his "Pulp Fiction," his rambling portmanteau--a blending of disparate tales to form a complete, overwhelming epic.

In the end, The Apostle feels like a con, a movie that embraces its contradictions only because it's not smart enough to reconcile them; everything feels complex, but, in fact, it's far too simple.

If the first movie played like a midseason TV pilot, its successor comes off like an extended episode of a generic sitcom.

Sandler and Spade continue their avid quest to dumb down America.

Craig, excellent in both art house endeavors (The Mother, Enduring Love) and blockbuster think pieces (Munich), has both a nasty streak and a soft side never before seen in the series; Fleming would recognize him as most like his literary creation: damaged goods in a tailored tux.

All Sinbad has going for it is Pfeiffer's Eris.

The most offensive movie of the year.

An utter drag, a tepid and sterilized telling of Susann's life.

It works for a good while--probably half of the movie.

An overlong compendium of Oprah moments meant to move and inspire, even if, by the end, it's too exhausted with itself to offer up a single authentic tear or revelation.

Morrow the actor tries too -- but he's a stylish director with a steady hand and a shaky eye (the scenes from Lyle's tortured point of view are dazzling, if not a bit unsettling). It'd make one hell of a TV movie.

It's not hard to see why actors love working with Penn, even in the smallest roles; he lets them speak monologues even when they're saying nothing at all.

A comic-book movie unashamed of its roots, meaning it's unabashed about being silly, overwrought nonsense, which works to its benefit--so much so that you're almost rooting for it by the end.

Seems to exist solely to prove there is something beneath the bottom of the barrel.

Serendipity already feels archaic, like some dusty relic that's been unearthed from an antique store's attic and polished off for display.

Adequately breezy and sleazy -- a movie about the horniest man in the universe looking for a little one-night stand.

The movie comes off as willfully eccentric when it should have been charmingly touching.

Somewhere between setup and punch line, American Pie 2 starts feeling less like a sequel and more like the second episode of a TV series, a case of fine-tuning after the pilot's been picked up by the network.

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.

Younger, for whatever reason, simply can't abide their happiness, and so he destructs the relationship from time to time for no reason, using plot devices that wouldn't have been out of place in episodes of "Three's Company."

It may have been the perfect storm, but this is the imperfect movie.

It's time to run, screaming.

The dumbest thing this side of a lobotomy.

A gentle, frank, and often hysterical love story about two people destined, and occasionally doomed, to be together forever. Some of us should be as lucky, as blessed, as Harvey Pekar.

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.

It wears out its welcome well before its halfway point, by which time you're either so tangled up in plot points you're strangling, or so bored you just wish you were being strangled.

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.

This innocuous, frothy fairy tale isn't so off-putting as you might imagine, thanks in large part to Andrews' ageless charm.

A torturous, mawkish, ill-conceived remake.

If there's a flaw with the film, it's that Justman doesn't trust his narrators enough; too often he'll stage a re-enactment while someone's talking, as if he's afraid the mere tales themselves won't hold our interest. But they will, as long as there's a kid slapping a bass, a sampler swiping a groove or some middle-aged couple slow dancing to Marvin Gaye or the Miracles.

"Meatballs" handled the sleep-away sex stuff better; here it feels like filler between the killer musical numbers that make even special guest Stephen Sondheim smile on his way out the door.

Funnier when high -- what isn't? -- Harold and Kumar may also serve as the first infomercial for weed and burgers.

It's just a familiar bore, offering chills and thrills only to those who have never seen a movie before.

Either a put-on or a straight shooter; that you can't tell the difference underscores its small but ultimately overwhelming flaws.

At its best, Cats & Dogs plays like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon, down to the exploding ACME dog bone; it's slapstick and slapdash, full of silly and violent nonsense worth a chuckle or two as dogs slam into glass doors and cats play dead on suburban streets.

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.

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

This Jay-Z documentary is too much of a good thing, really.

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.

Its execution is stultifying, laughable and ultimately a little offensive.

Not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton's best performance, and hairpiece, in years.

As stirring as it is slight, as effective as it is familiar.

Leguizamo is all twitches and spasms; there's not a bit of subtlety in his high-wire performance. By the time you get past it, the film bogs down in dime-store potboiling.

Is it enough to make us like a thing we used to love? For most, that rekindling of an old flame will be good enough.

This all-star Euro-indie is stultifyingly torturous.

An ethereal, creepy, almost breathtaking meditation on the life of a mind snapped in two.

Travolta is stuck giving a remarkable performance in a film so trivial and offensive its mere existence is as loathsome as it is laughable.

It's too easy, but here goes: This movie's a Loser. Sorry.

Sometimes junk is junk, no matter how fancy the platter upon which it's served. Which isn't to say A History of Violence is useless junk. It provides a few pleasures and a few giggles; it's a comedy, after all, an action movie in which things unfold at a deadpan pace.

Smith used to make movies to make fun of movies like Jersey Girl; now he's just another guy working the assembly line, which won't make you a sell-out if no one buys it.

The only thing worse than second-generation Guy Ritchie is fourth-generation Quentin Tarantino, and this movie has the musty smell of 1995 all over it.

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

Its exquisiteness can overwhelm in a single sitting.

Never quite works, despite the wonderful performances or the decency in the screenplay's margins.

To say it's better than it has any right to be gives the original too much credit and the remake not enough.

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.

Clooney has become a movie star, and the Coens have given him his very own "It Happened One Night." The man, and the movie, are downright bona fide.

Capturing the Friedmans does not end after its credits roll; audiences will try the case over and over again in their heads. Jarecki does not judge, but leaves only tragic clues for us to ponder.

For all its kinetic energy, for all its camera tricks, for all its dark humor, there's still something a bit off about these Rules, and it's not really Avary's fault.

Worst movie of the year.

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.

Runs out of breath and collapses into a heap of feel-good endings that turn a soaring feeling into a sinking one. But by then, the audience that adores it will forgive it its sins.

It's easily the ugliest film Gilliam's ever made, a movie shot with a lens someone forgot to wipe. It's also his loudest: Every scene is amped up to 11, and every line of dialogue is delivered as though it's a cry for help from the bottom of the well.

The movie, which feels as amateurish as a student film made for cable access, doesn't deliver the goods; the gotcha moment never comes.

Aspires to be a "Beach Blanket Bingo" redux with a gangbang Grease finale, but it plays like junior high Neil LaBute filmed by an elementary school AV squad.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of About a Boy is how substantial it plays -- as a feel-good film with weight, a knowing comedy with dramatic depth.

It puts us in the shoes of men and women for whom the war is not something distant and intangible but a bloodbath in their own back yard, which makes them the very definition of embedded journalists.

It strains to be funny where the original's gags were efficiently deadpan, yet it's also so unbearably lazy, stooping to cliché and caricature when it backs itself into the shower.

Succeeds in scaring you and boring you at the same time; unlike Moore's movie, it's agitprop bereft of artistry, porn for Republicans.

As enormously entertaining as it is appalling.

Klein's the perfect actor to play Howard--a man so actory he probably signs his checks in that thin movie-poster type.

At its best it plays like modern-day Marx Brothers in which every single thing that happens makes no sense and serves no purpose and nothing happens for any reason at all. It exists solely to get a laugh, not to make a point.

What makes Silverman a truly gifted comic is her timing and delivery.

The film desperately wants to play like "Three Kings," a war film with a guilty conscience, but it's too pat and familiar to earn its high-minded stripes.

It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

This hackneyed, hapless and utterly useless redo of an overrated 1960s sitcom is excruciating to sit through for a dozen reasons.

A turgid, unfunny, out-of-time rockspolitation movie.

The droll has been made dull, a most inexplicable and unfortunate turn of events for so adored a genius, goofball work as this.

Obnoxiously dull.

Trite and silly, but, blast it, the movie has a good heart.

Warner Bros. is presumably aiming this movie not at children but at full-grown dopers with bad munchies glued to the Cartoon Network. Dude, pass the Scooby snacks.