Roger Ebert

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is as violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises -- a real Grand Guignol of a movie. It’s also without any apparent purpose, unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose. And yet in its own way, the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it’s well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

There's a lot of potential charm here, but the director, Emma-Kate Croghan, is so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they're in.

Towelhead presents material that cries out to be handled with quiet empathy and hammers us with it. I understand what the film is trying to do, but not why it does it with such crude melodrama. The tone is all wrong for a story of child sexuality and had me cringing in my seat.

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

The shame is that more accessible Iranian directors are being neglected in the overpraise of Kiarostami.

This movie is all elbows. Nothing fits. It doesn't add up. It has some terrific free-standing scenes, but they need more to lean on.

Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: "Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext."

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie's air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling, De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie's obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls.

Never comes alive.

Brando doesn't so much walk through this movie as coast, in a gassy, self-indulgent performance no one else could have gotten away with.

Nothing heats up. The movie doesn't lead us, it simply stays in step.

An ungainly fit of three stories that have no business being shoehorned into the same movie.

I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that the new punk version of "Romeo & Juliet" makes of Shakespeare's tragedy.

The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.

The Little Drummer Girl lacks the two essential qualities it needs to work: It's not comprehensible, and it's not involving.

If the crime elements in K-9 are routine, the relationship between Belushi and the dog at least has the courage to be goofy.

The phrase "coming of age," when applied to movies, almost always implies sex, but Girls Can't Swim has nothing useful to say about sex (certainly not compared to Catherine Breillat's brilliant "Fat Girl" from last year), and is too jerky in structure to inspire much empathy from us.

A technically proficient horror movie and well acted.

The movie's not without charm. There's a fresh, sweet relationship between one of the girls (Phoebe Cates) and her boyfriend, in which she is permitted to have the normal fears, doubts and reservations of anyone her age. I'm not sure how that plot got into this smarmy-minded movie, but it was like a breath of fresh air.

Hal Hartley is on his way to creating a distinctive film world, and although Trust is not a successful film, you can see his vision at work, and it's intriguing.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

It makes little sense, fails as often as it succeeds, and yet is not hateful and is sometimes quite cheerfully original.

Watching this film I reflected that there are only so many Cracker Jacks you can eat before you decide to hell with the toy.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

Like many other cultural experiments (minimalist art, "Finnegan's Wake," the Chicago Tribune's new Friday section), it is more amusing to talk about than to experience.

I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.

The movie is probably ideal for those proverbial young girls who adore cats, and young boys, too. I can't recommend it for adults attending on their own, unless they really, really love cats.

The actors are splendid, especially Sarah Polley and Sean Penn, but we never feel confident that these two plots fit together, belong together, or work together.

The movie itself is good and shows promise, except for the ending, when Trier shouldn't have been so poetic. Not only does Reprise generate itself, it contains its own review.

Lacks some of the idiocy of your average teenage rom-com. But it doesn't bring much to the party. It sort of ambles along, with two nice people at the center of a human scavenger hunt. It's not much of a film, but it sort gets you halfway there, like a Yugo.

Not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience.

I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film's philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn't it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

An expensive, exhaustive, 150-mintue odyssey that doesn’t so much conclude as cross the finish line and collapse. It has been outfitted with expensive stars and a glossy production, but it doesn’t really make us care.

Each scene works within itself on its own terms. But there is no whole here. I've rarely seen a narrative film that seemed so reluctant to flow. Nor perhaps one with a more accurate title.

It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

There are two basic weaknesses. One is that the boy supplies the point of view, and yet the story is not about him, so instead of identifying with him, we are simply frustrated in our wish to see more than he can see. The other problem is that Gong Li's character is thoroughly unlikable.

Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly.

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

Everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.

Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we've seen the originals, and these aren't the originals.

So the movie is daring, and well-acted. Yet it isn't very satisfying, because the serious content keeps breaking through the soggy plot intended to contain it.

It is enormously ambitious -- maybe too much so, since it ranges so widely between styles and strategies that it distracts from its own flow.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

Because the film is well-acted and written with intelligence, it might be worth seeing, despite my objections. I suspect my own feelings.

All of this grows tiresome. We're given no particular reason at the outset of The Loneliest Planet to care about these people, our interest doesn't grow along the way, the landscape grows repetitive, the director's approach is aggressively minimalist, and if you ask me, this romance was not made in heaven.

It’s too much of the same material, spun out into a wearying series of sword fights and romances.

The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.

The movie cuts back and forth between two preposterous plot lines and uses the man on the ledge as a device to pump up the tension.

The most curious thing about Hiding Out is that the plot continued to intrigue me even after I'd more or less given up on the movie's ability to find anything interesting in its material. What would it really be like to be in high school again? To revisit your past, knowing what you know now? Hollywood ought to make a good movie about that idea. In fact, Hollywood has: Peggy Sue Got Married. This one fails by comparison.

Somehow isn't as exciting as a duel over a woman should be.

The story touches many themes, lingers with some of them, moves on and arrives at nowhere in particular. It's not a story so much as a reverie about possible stories.

The Crucible is a drama of ideas, but they seem laid on top of the material, not organically part of it.

There is nothing to complain about except the film's deadening predictability and the bland, shallow characters.

Love is blind, and movies about that blindness can be maddening.

A film that depends on deceiving us has got to play by its own rules. If we are going to be deceived in general, fine, but then we can't be cheated on particulars.

A strange mutant beast, half Nickelodeon movie, half R-rated comedy. It's like kids with potty-mouth playing grownup.

The basic idea of Uncommon Valor is so interesting that it's all they can do to make a routine formula movie out of it. But they do.

The same material, filmed in America, might seem thin and contrived; the adventures are arbitrary, the cuteness of the men grows wearing, and when Nino has an accident with a chainsaw, we can see contrivance shading off into desperation.

As an achievement, Computer Chess is laudable. As a film, it's missable.

This is a movie that has its commercial concept written all over it; it's so painstakingly crafted as a product that the messy spontaneity of life is rarely allowed to interrupt.

Strangely enough, the long-awaited meeting between Connery and Miss Bardot is a flop. They look yearningly at each other a lot, and once he puts his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise no sparks are struck.

The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

It has some of the simplicity and starkness of classical tragedy, but what made me impatient was its fascination with the macho bloodlust of the two families.

So enigmatic, oblique and meandering that it's like coded religious texts that requires monks to decipher.

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. The Iron Lady fails in both of these categories.

Too much self-pity.

The outcome of this journey is going to be predictable and disappointing. Mottola does his best to make the trip itself enjoyable.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

A screenplay with the depth and insight of a cable-TV docudrama.

Alfred Hitchcock called Rope an “experiment that didn’t work out,” and he was happy to see it kept out of release for most of three decades. He was correct that it didn’t work out, but Rope remains one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names.

All of the materials are in place for a film that might have pleased Orwell. But somehow they never come together.

A big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

This is Spielberg's weakest film since "1941."

As a movie, it knows little about men, women or television shows, but has studied movie formulas so carefully that we can see each new twist and turn as it creeps ever so slowly into view.

Pfeiffer looks, acts and sounds wonderful throughout all of this, and George Clooney is perfectly serviceable as a romantic lead, sort of a Mel Gibson lite. I liked them. I wanted them to get together. I wanted them to live happily ever after. The sooner the better.

When the hero, his alter ego, his girlfriend and the villain all seem to lack any joy in being themselves, why should we feel joy at watching them?

By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

On a technical level, there's a lot to be said for Die Hard. It's when we get to some of the unnecessary adornments of the script that the movie shoots itself in the foot.

Comforting, even soothing, to those who like the old songs best. It may confuse those who, because they like the characters, think it is good. It is not good. It is skillful.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

Gets off to a start that's so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it's going to be about gimmicks, not characters.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.

Eight Men Out is an oddly unfocused movie made of earth tones, sidelong glances and eliptic conversations. It tells the story of how the stars of the 1919 Chicago White Sox team took payoffs from gamblers to throw the World Series, but if you are not already familiar with that story you’re unlikely to understand it after seeing this film.

Slight and sometimes wearisome.

Assembled from the debris of countless worn-out images of the Deep South and is indeed beautifully photographed. But the writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, has become inflamed by the imagery and trusts it as the material for a story, which seems grotesque and lurid.

The movie's problem is that it loads the casting in a way that tilts the movie in the direction of a Harlequin romance.

I believe it is as cruel and senseless as the killings in "Elephant," but while that film was chillingly objective, this one seems to be on everybody's side. It's a moral muddle.