Robert Wilonsky

A fun and loving biopic

The movie's all flash and formula, as original as the letter A, especially when it collapses in a dung heap of gunfire and corpses.

One expects more from writer-director Wes Anderson (and his co-scribbler, Owen Wilson) than such frivolous fun that bears no lingering effect.

One of the most remarkable things about Murderball, which is easily among the year's best movies, is how little of its time is filled with the playing of the game.

A film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it's astonishing the entire thing doesn't collapse on itself.

As he did in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", Wright immerses his heroes in pop culture's detritus and diversions, but doesn't drown them in it. You don't have to be dazzled or tickled by the movie, or get every joke, to be touched by it, too.

Russell, a former student of Buddhist monk-philosopher Robert Thurman's, is reaching too far, straining too hard, saying too much that adds up to so little after all the mumbos and jumbos tallied up by film's end.

The movie's so hung up (pardon) on its gimmick it never transcends it; might have been better had Kiefer called Moviefone.

Whatever goodwill one harbored toward the first Pirates film is quickly dashed by its sneering successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is less a film than a two-and-a-half-hour trailer for the final installment in this accidental trilogy.

Has all the charm of a canceled CBS sitcom.

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.