Roger Ebert

Beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic. Its power is compromised only by an ending that sheepishly backs away from what the film is really about.

You can enjoy the way they create little flashes of wit in the dialogue, which enlivens what is, after all, a formula disaster movie.

The modern sequences lack realism or credibility. The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story. The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose “The Last Emperor” was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things.

Painful family issues are more likely to stay beneath the surface, known to everyone but not spoken of. Still Walking, a magnificent new film from Japan, is very wise about that, and very true.

There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.

The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don't strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers. They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.

Did I enjoy Ong-Bak? As brainless but skillful action choreography, yes. And I would have enjoyed it even more if I'd known going in that the stunts were being performed in the old-fashioned, pre-computer way.

The movie is pleasant enough, but never quite reaches critical mass as a comedy.

The race is more like a private poker game held upstairs in somebody's suite during the World Series of Poker.

They are, in fact, likable. That's why their comedy is so sad.

Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's Short Cuts captures that uneasiness perfectly.

What finally makes Miss Firecracker special is that it is not about who wins the contest, but about how all beauty contests are about the need to be loved and about how silly a beauty contest can seem if somebody really loves you.

The kind of movie you settle into. It's supple and sophisticated, and it's not about much. It has no message and some will say it has no point. But it is a demonstration of grace and wit.

Told with the frank simplicity of a classic well-made picture, it tells its story, nothing more, nothing less, with no fancy stuff. We relax as if we've found a good movie on cable. Story is everything here.

She's So Lovely does not depict choices most audiences will condone, or even understand, but the film is not boring, and has the dread hypnotic appeal of a slowly developing traffic accident (in which we think there will probably be no fatalities).

The movie isn't set up to tell a story about a boy who was young in the summer of 1942; it insists on presenting itself, instead, as an adult memory of that long-ago summer. We don't learn very much about the boy because the movie's adult point of view refuses to come to terms with him.

An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.

Author! Author! is never even able to establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos, between heart-rending family conferences and a ridiculous final scene.

At a time when so many American movies keep dialogue at a minimum so they can play better overseas, what a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music.

I had heard the music before. What the film gave me was an opportunity to see Thelonious Monk creating some of it, and, just as importantly, an opportunity to see how those who knew him loved him.

Trucker sets out on a difficult and tricky path, and doesn't put a foot wrong.

Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway. The movies have a love affair with cars, and at some dumb elemental level we enjoy seeing chases and crashes. In fact, under the right circumstances there is nothing quite so exhilarating as seeing a car crushed, and one of the best scenes in Christine is the one where the car forces itself into an alley that's too narrow for it.

Boorman's film is shot in wide-screen black and white, and as it often does, black and white emphasizes the characters and the story, instead of setting them awash in atmosphere. And Boorman's narrative style has a nice offhand feel about it.

The directness of The Seventh Seal is its strength: This is an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero.

The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it's a fair example of what it is.

This is not the story of a fugitive trying to sneak through enemy terrain and be rescued, but of a movie character magically transported from one photo opportunity to another.

MacLaine and Cage are really very good here.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a beautiful film to look at, and remarkably well-acted.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.

Some will find Dad's last big act in the movie too melodramatic. I think it follows from a certain logic, and leads to the very last shot, which is heartbreaking in its tenderness.

My own feeling is that the film is one more assault on the notion that young American audiences might be expected to enjoy films with at least some subtlety and depth and pacing and occasional quietness. The filmmakers apparently believe their audience suffers from ADD, and so they supply breakneck action and screaming sound volumes at all times.

The genius of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice is that it understands the peculiar nature of the moral crisis for Americans in this age group, and understands that the way to consider it is in a comedy.

This is a powerful film and a stark visual accomplishment, but no thanks to Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). The driving character is her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who does all the heavy lifting.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

Salvador is a movie about real events as seen through the eyes of characters who have set themselves adrift from reality. That's what makes it so interesting.

Doubt has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.

The movie never quite attains altitude. It has a great takeoff, levels nicely, and then seems to land on autopilot. Maybe it's the problem of resolving so much plot in a finite length of time, but it seems a little too facile toward the end.

My Stepmother Is an Alien is a great idea for a movie, but it seems to have stalled at the idea stage.

So breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver.

Baratz doesn't ask any of the obvious questions, preferring to observe uncritically, and if you can do the same, you may find Unmistaken Child worth seeing. I could not, and grew restless.

Impressive, although not quite the film it could have been. It asks few hard questions.

A masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.

A well-assembled chase movie--a thriller, with a few existential notes left over from Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers the novel the movie's based on.

Monster-in-Law fails the Gene Siskel Test: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?"

The movie is almost always good to look at, thanks to Richard MacDonald's sets (he linked together two giant sound stages) and Sven Nykvist's photography. And Nolte and Winger are almost able to make their relationship work, if only it didn't seem scripted out of old country songs and lonely hearts columns.

To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like The Passion of Joan of Arc is an unsettling experience--so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire.

You don't guess the true horror of the place, which is that there are no secrets, because everyone here knows all about everyone else, inside and out, top to bottom, and has for years.

The Split is the first Hollywood film to deliberately, overtly exploit black-white tensions in American society. On another level, it's a first-rate piece of entertainment.

The texture of the film is enough to recommend it, even apart from the story.

The movie's big and expensive and filled with stars, but it's not an epic. It's the longest B-grade war movie ever made.

It is goofier than hell - you can't stop watching because nobody in the audience, and possibly nobody on the screen, has any idea what's going to happen next.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

Avalon is often a warm and funny film, but it is also a sad one, and the final sequence is heartbreaking. It shows the way in which our modern families, torn loose of their roots, have left old people alone and lonely--warehoused in retirement homes. The story of the movie is the story of how the warmth and closeness of an extended family is replaced by alienation and isolation.

The performances are often good, including Reno's; he has an interesting, poker-faced way of underplaying scenes that keeps him from being a stereotyped kid.

The great performances in the movie are, of course, at its center. Gary Oldman plays Orton and Alfred Molina plays Halliwell, and these are two of the best performances of the year.

The kind of film I more and more find myself seeking out, a film that seems alive in the sense that it appears to have free will; if, in the middle of a revenge tragedy, it feels like adding a suite for hoes and percussion, it does.

The movie seemed the stuff of anecdote, not drama, and as the alleged protagonist, Luca/Franco is too young much of the time to play more than a bystander's role.

Most of the time, though, Anchorman works, and a lot of the time it's very funny.

The Fog is encouraging because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish. This isn't a great movie but it does show great promise from Carpenter.

Lean on Me wants to be taken as a serious, even noble film about an admirable man. And yet it never honestly looks at Clark for what he really is: a grownup example of the very troublemakers he hates so much, still unable even in adulthood to doubt his right to do what he wants, when he wants, as he wants.

What is the use of a film like this? It inspires reflection... Mike Leigh's films realize that for most people, most days, life consists of the routine of earning a living, broken by fleeting thoughts of where our efforts will someday take us--financially, romantically, spiritually or even geographically. We never arrive in most of those places, but the mental images are what keep us trying.

A film like "Hoop Dreams" is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.

What sets Prefontaine aside from most sports movies is that it's not about winning the big race. It's about the life of a runner.

A few loopholes I can forgive. But when a plot is riddled with them -- I get distracted.

The movie crosses two formulas -- Fish Out of Water and Coming of Age -- fairly effectively. Because it isn't wall-to-wall action but actually bothers to develop its characters and take an interest in them, it was not at first considered commercial by its distributor, New Line, and languished on the shelf for two years.

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.

American teenage movies tidy things up by pairing off the right couples at the end. In Europe they know that summers end and life goes on.

Likely to entertain kids, who seem to like jokes about anatomical plumbing. For adults, there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the whole movie, which is just plain clever.

What makes the movie special is how it's made. Nolte and Murphy are good, and their dialogue is good, too - quirky and funny.

The machinery in this movie is so efficient that we don't know the answer until the very last shot.

There's little that's new in the material, and nobody seems to have asked whether the emotional charge of blatant racism belongs in a lightweight story like this - even if the racists are the villains.

This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time.

I can't really recommend the film, unless you admire Caine as much as I do, which is certainly possible.

If you've seen “The Karate Kid” (1984), the memories will come back during this 2010 remake. That's a compliment.

What they've done here is to recapture not only the look and the storylines of old horror comics, but also the peculiar feeling of poetic justice that permeated their pages. In an EC horror story, unspeakable things happened to people - but, for the most part, they deserved them.

The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like "Dr. Strangelove," it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder.

The movie is all about behavior, dialogue, star power and wiseass in-jokes. I really sort of liked it.

The movie is so sincere and confused in its values that it mirrors the goofy loyalties and violent pathology of its characters.

Marooned isn't very interesting from a stylistic point of view, and the actors tend to get buried beneath the technology, but it does tell an exciting story, And that, I imagine, was all Sturges (whose storytelling includes The Great Escape and Bad Day at Black Rock) was really trying to do.

House of Wax is not a good movie but it is an efficient one, and will deliver most of what anyone attending House of Wax could reasonably expect, assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much.

Donald Sutherland is perfectly cast and quietly effective as a man who will not be turned aside, who does not wish misfortune upon himself or his family, but cannot ignore what has happened to the family of his friend.

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

The purpose of the movie is perhaps to show us, in a quietly amusing way, that while we travel down our own lifelines, seeing everything from our own points of view, we hardly suspect the secrets of the lives we intersect with.

This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."

I don't know what I was expecting from Back to the Beach, but it certainly wasn't the funniest, quirkiest musical comedy since Little Shop of Horrors. Who would have thought Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello would make their best beach party movie 25 years after the others?

This is a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard.

Irreconcilable Differences is sometimes cute, and is about mean parents, but it also is one of the funnier and more intelligent movies of 1984, and if viewers can work their way past the ungainly title, they're likely to have a surprisingly good time.

The animation isn't vivid, the characters aren't very interesting, and the songs are routine.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

Have I mentioned A Serious Man is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny too.

What makes Atlantic City sweet -- and that's the word for it -- is the gentleness with which Lou handles his last chance at amounting to something, and the wisdom with which Sally handles Lou.

This is a good small movie, sweet and sentimental, about a kid who never really got a chance to show his stuff. The best things in it are the most unexpected things: the portraits of everyday life, of a loving mother, of a brother who loves and resents him, of a kid growing up and tasting fame and leaving everyone standing around at his funeral shocked that his life ended just as it seemed to be beginning.

This plot, recycled from Austen, is the clothesline for a series of dance numbers that, like Hong Kong action sequences, are set in unlikely locations and use props found there; how else to explain the sequence set in, yes, a Mexican restaurant?

Against the overarching facts of his personal magnetism and the blind loyalty of his lieutenants, the movie observes the workings of the world within the bunker. All power flowed from Hitler. He was evil, mad, ill, but long after Hitler's war was lost he continued to wage it in fantasy.

All very nice, sometimes we smile, but there's nothing compelling.

Sandler, at the center, is a distraction; he steals scenes, and we want him to give them back.

It is Inherit the Wind among all of Kramer's films that seems most relevant and still generates controversy.

Surprisingly insightful, as buddy comedies go, and it has a good heart and a lovable hero.

The Sterile Cuckoo is not as good as it should have been because it lacks consistency of tone. But parts of it are awfully good, and Miss Minnelli is one hell of an actress.

This is a great-looking movie, a triumph of set design and special effects, creating a fantasy world halfway between suburbia and a prehistoric cartoon.

Uusually satisfying in the way it unfolds.

It's surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material.

The film is punctuated by violence, a great deal of violence, although most of it is exaggerated comic-book style instead of being truly gruesome. Walking that fine line is a speciality of Hill, who once simulated the sound of a fist on a chin by making tape recordings of Ping-Pong paddles slapping leather sofas.

By the end of Capturing the Friedmans, we have more information, from both inside and outside the family, than we dreamed would be possible. We have many people telling us exactly what happened. And we have no idea of the truth. None.

So monumentally silly, yet so wondrous to look at, that only a churl could find fault.

The movie itself is surprisingly affecting, perhaps because Shepherd never goes for easy laughs but plays her character seriously.

The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.

Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years.

The final act of the film is extraordinary. How unusual it is to see kids this age in the movies seriously debating moral rights and wrongs and considering the consequences of their actions.

Here is a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town and its encounter with a giant oil company.

The film doesn't make us work, doesn't allow us to figure out things for ourselves, is afraid we'll miss things if they're not spelled out.

Warm-hearted and effective.

When politics do not create walls (as apartheid did), most people are primarily interested in their families, their romances, and their jobs. They hope to improve all three. The movie is about their hope.

This is the kind of adventure picture the studios churned out in the Golden Age -- so traditional it almost feels new.

The kind of movie where you walk in, watch the first 10 minutes, know exactly where it's going, and hope devoutly that you're wrong.

I cannot imagine a Hollywood movie like this. Audiences would be baffled.

No one with the slightest knowledge of human nature will be able to find a single moment of this film to believe. It is all formula, every last miserable frame of it.

The performance and the character are fully realized, even in this movie that finds room for so many loose ends and dead ends.

Ron Howard's Parenthood is a delicate balancing act between comedy and truth, a movie that contains a lot of laughter and yet is more concerned with character than punch lines.

The actors assembled for Nicholas Nickleby are not only well cast, but well typecast. Each one by physical appearance alone replaces a page or more of Dickens' descriptions, allowing McGrath to move smoothly and swiftly through the story without laborious introductions.

It is a "thriller" without thrills, constructed in a meaningless jumble of flashbacks and flash-forwards and subtitles and mottos and messages and scenes that are deconstructed, reconstructed and self-destructed. I wanted to signal the projectionist to put a gun to it.

A diabolical and absorbing experience.

This is a very far from perfect movie, and it ends on an unsatisfactory note.

A funny movie, flat out, all the way through. Its setup is funny. Every situation is funny. Most of the dialogue is funny almost line by line.

Ridiculous -- yes. Comical at times -- yes. Silliest film seen in some time by the Animals Movies Critics' Team. BUT -- great special effects as men BECOME werewolves. WOMEN, too. Before your eyes. Done with -- says here -- HYDRAULICS! Sensational!

The movie never says so, but it's a practical parable about the debate between pro-choice and pro-life. If you're pro-life, you would require Anna to donate her kidney, although there is a chance she could die, and her sister doesn't have a good prognosis. If you're pro-choice, you would support Anna's lawsuit.

Black somehow feels reigned in; shaved and barbered, he's lost his anarchic passion and is merely playing a comic role instead of transforming it into a personal mission.

It's the kind of movie that provides diversion for the idle channel-surfer but isn't worth a trip to the theater. A lot of it seems cobbled together out of spare parts.

Here is a movie so absorbing, so atmospheric, so suspenseful and so dumb, that it proves my point: The subject matter doesn't matter in a movie nearly as much as mood, tone and style.

Its interest comes from Shannon's fierce and sadistic training scenes as Kim Fowley, and from the intrinsic qualities of the performances by Stewart and Fanning, who bring more to their characters than the script provides.

This is a fun movie, and a bright and intelligent one. It bears few signs of having been made on a low budget, and the special effects are reasonably slick.

The story is so interesting, and Bacon and the other actors are so capable, that if this movie had been two hours out of their lives, I would have found it compelling. What we get, though, is 35 minutes of their lives and a lot of recycled visual cliches.

The downward arc of the first two acts of the movie is made harrowing and yet perversely amusing by the performance of Paul Kaye.

This is a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

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

It's an overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

The movie is an ambitious experiment, but a long and tedious one, and our revels end long before Mazursky's.

The movie is a delight, in ways both expected and rare.

Dan Brown's novel is utterly preposterous; Ron Howard's movie is preposterously entertaining.

One of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made.

Fatal Attraction is a spellbinding psychological thriller that could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last minutes to give us their version of a grown-up "Friday the 13th."

How could they take this material and make it really original? Maybe by refusing to be seduced by the Screenwriter's stock Hollywood "originality" and probing more deeply into the real human lives of the characters. The people in Back Roads are so heavily laden with schtick that they never have a chance to develop personalities.

Until the plot becomes intolerably cornball, there's charm in the story.

Rod is played by Andy Samberg from "Saturday Night Live," who on the basis of this film, I think, could become a very big star.

With access to remarkable archival footage, old TV shows, home movies and the family photo album, Brown weaves together the story of the Seegers with testimony by admirers who represent his influence and legacy.

The movie wants to be good-hearted but is somehow sort of grudging. It should have gone all the way. I think Fred Claus should have been meaner if he was going to be funnier, and Santa should have been up to something nefarious, instead of the jolly old ho-ho-ho routine.

It has a charm based on its innocence, its conviction, its pre-Beatles soundtrack and the big 1950s cars the kids drive around in.

Manito sees an everyday tragedy with sadness and tenderness, and doesn't force it into the shape of a plot.

The movie presents the surfaces of Obermaier's life but never lets us understand who she was.

A good film in many ways, but its best achievement is the casting of Jamal Woolard, a rapper named Gravy, in the title role.

Now Wajda has brought some small measure of rest to their names, to Poland, and to history.

Very funny in an insidious way.

Hitchcock liked typecasting, he said, because if an actor was right for a role, that made less work for the director in getting the audience to accept the character. Here the casting is so wrong that nothing quite works.

The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman's longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist.

Begins rather awkwardly, but ends by making a statement that explains a great many things. One question left unasked: Why did we promise to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons but refuse to recognize it as a sovereign nation?

This is a good but not great Star Trek movie, a sort of compromise between the first two.

If I found it creepy beyond all reason, that is no doubt because I have been hopelessly corrupted by the decadent society I inhabit.

The actors cannot be faulted. They bring more to the story than it really deserves.

But when you think of the "Babe" pictures, and indeed even an animated cartoon like "Home on the Range," you realize Stripes is on autopilot with all of the usual elements: a heroine missing one parent, an animal missing both, an underdog (or underzebra), cute animals, the big race.

The movie was more of a revue than a narrative, more about moments than an organizing purpose, and cute to the point that I yearned for some corrosive wit from its second cousin, the Monty Python universe.

Is this a good movie? Not exactly; too much of it is on automatic pilot, as it must be, to satisfy the fans of the original Shaft. Is it better than I expected? Yes.

Avoids obvious sentiment and predictable emotion and shows this woman somehow holding it together year after year, entering goofy contests that for her family mean life and death.

The movie would have benefitted from a tight rewrite (it is too ambitious in including plot threads it doesn't have time to deal with), but Gibson's strong central performance speeds it along.

This is one of the funniest movies ever made. To see it now is to understand that. To see it for the first time in 1968, when I did, was to witness audacity so liberating that not even "There's Something About Mary" rivals it.

Emerges as an accurate memory of that time when the American melting pot, splendid as a theory, became a reality.

Shunning the tons of equipment ordinarily taken along on location, Brown used only what he could carry. The beautiful photography he brought home almost makes you wonder if Hollywood hasn't been trying too hard.

It is just as well that Last Crusade will indeed be Indy's last film. It would be too sad to see the series grow old and thin, like the James Bond movies.

This curious idea for a movie actually works.

The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful?

It's got a unique . . . well, I was about to say charm, but the movie's last scene doesn't quite let me get away with that.

It's one of the movies with a lot of smiles and laughter in it, and a good feeling all the way through. Just everyday life, warmly observed.

Outsourced is not a great movie, and maybe couldn't be this charming if it was. It is a film bursting with affection for its characters and for India.

It is as assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

Body-switch plots are a license for adults to act like kids; probably nobody has had more fun at it than Tom Hanks did in "Big," but Curtis comes close.

The Wizard is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place.

Romeo is Bleeding is an exercise in overwrought style and overwritten melodrama, and proof that a great cast cannot save a film from self-destruction.

Starts promisingly as an attack on modern commercialized sports, and then turns into just one more wheezy assembly-line story about slacker dudes vs. rich old guys.

The mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.

The sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke.

Dear John exists only to coddle the sentiments of undemanding dreamers, and plunge us into a world where the only evil is the interruption of the good.

It’s not a game anymore. In 1957, these kids were playing. And it was a perfect game.

This movie, like Boyz N the Hood, is uncompromising in its view of how things work in a neighborhood like South Central. It was made before the Los Angeles riots in April, 1992, but it provides a stark picture of the anger that was waiting to boil over.

A truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends.

Has the courage to work without a net, aware that when you're a teenager, your life is not a story so much as a million possible stories.

A screwball film noir with a lot of medium laughs and a few great big ones,

What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments.

The acting is effective, the direction by Alexandre Franchi is confident, and the cinematography by Claudine Sauve could hardly look more assured.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

What's most shocking about Death Wish II is the lack of artistry and skill in the filmmaking. The movie is underwritten and desperately underplotted, so that its witless action scenes alternate with lobotomized dialogue passages. The movie doesn't contain an ounce of life. It slinks onto the screen and squirms for a while, and is over.

Entertaining for what it does, and admirable for what it doesn't do. It gets us involved in band politics and strategy, gives us a lot of entertaining halftime music, and provides a portrait of a gifted young man who slowly learns to discipline himself and think of others. That's what it does. What it doesn't do is recycle all the tired old cliches.

It is an assault on all the senses, including common. Walking out, I had the impression I had just seen the video game and was still waiting for the movie.

The movie itself is genial and unfocused and tired.

We find we cannot take anything for face value in this story, that the motives of this woman and her husband are so deeply masked that even at the end of the film we are still uncertain about exactly what to believe, and why.

For Keeps is an intriguing movie that succeeds in creating believable characters, keeping them alive, and steering them more or less safely past the cliches that are inevitable with this kind of material. It’s a movie with heart, and that compensates for a lot of the predictability.

Koyaanisqatsi is an impressive visual and listening experience, that Reggio and Glass have made wonderful pictures and sounds, and that this film is a curious throwback to the 1960s, when it would have been a short subject to be viewed through a marijuana haze. Far out.

The movie sinks into contrived plot manipulation.

The Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment.

The appeal of You've Got Mail is as old as love and as new as the Web.

It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."

It's fun, it's slick and it's carefully put together, but it's more of an exercise than an accomplishment. Everyone does their schtick, the plot complications unfold like clockwork, but we find ourselves not really caring.

Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.

It is not inspired, but it's cheerful and hard-working and sometimes funny, and--here's the important thing--it's not mean.

Cannonball Run II is one of the laziest insults to the intelligence of moviegoers that I can remember. Sheer arrogance made this picture.

What am I looking for in a thriller? I think maybe a movie where people get into a situation, instead of one where an artificial and manipulative situation is imposed on people. "Fatal Attraction" convinced me it was about people who were in a believable situation. I cared about them. White Sands is all arbitrary melodrama, and so the considerable skills that went into it are essentially wasted. [24 Apr 1992, p.38]

In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.

This is one of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain and a wicked sense of humor, and it charms the socks right off the mantelpiece. Even the unexpected casting is on the money.

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.

The film may provide an introduction for some audience members to the Hitchcockian definition of suspense: It's the anticipation, not the happening, that's the fun.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

Who was this movie made for? Not for me, that's sure, but I have a hunch younger kids will find it satisfying.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

Burton's made a film that's respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that's not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.

It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.

It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy.

I liked it in the same way I might like an arcade game: It holds your attention until you run out of quarters, and then you wander away without giving it another thought.

Gretchen Mol is finally the key to the mysterious appeal of the film, to its sweetness and sadness.

The new version is just as satisfying, if not as dry and cynical, as the original.

The very embodiment of a star vehicle: a movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care.

What makes it special, apart from the Ephron screenplay, is the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan.

A featherweight comedy balanced between silliness and charm.

Swimming With Sharks was written and directed by George Huang, who was himself a personal assistant in Hollywood, and whose networking must have paid off, since he got a movie out of it. His plot may be overwritten and the ending may be less than satisfying, but his eye and ear are right.

Soderbergh's story, from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, cuts between these characters so smoothly that even a fairly complex scenario remains clear and charged with tension.

We are not looking at flesh-and-blood actors but special effects that look uncannily convincing, even though I am reasonably certain that Angelina Jolie does not have spike-heeled feet. That's right: feet, not shoes.

Has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.

I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you.

The training sequences are as they have to be: incredible rigors, survived by O'Neil. They are good cinema because Ridley Scott, the director, brings a documentary attention to them, and because Demi Moore, having bitten off a great deal here, proves she can chew it.

It is rousing and entertaining, and you get your money's worth.

it is a well-acted movie and for long stretches we're hoping it will work.

Some of the best moments in Downhill Racer are moments during which nothing special seems to be happening. They're moments devoted to capturing the angle of a glance, the curve of a smile, an embarrassed silence. Together they form a portrait of a man that is so complete, and so tragic, that "Downhill Racer" becomes the best movie ever made about sports -- without really being about sports at all.

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

Very nice. I like Borat very much. I think it is, as everybody has been saying, the funniest movie in years.

The new Japanese film Fireworks is like a Charles Bronson "Death Wish" movie so drained of story, cliche, convention and plot that nothing is left, except pure form and impulse. Not a frame, not a word, is excess.

Anyone who could read Munro’s original story and think they could make a film of it, and then make a great film, deserves a certain awe.

A messy but hungry film like this is more interesting than cool technical perfection.

Just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.

Against the Ropes meanders until it gets to the final third of its running time, and then it catches fire.

Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.

A sweet, entertaining retread of an ancient formula, in which opposites attract despite all the forces arrayed to push them apart.

Moonraker is a movie by gadgeteers, for gadgeteers, about gadgeteers. Our age may be losing its faith in technology, but James Bond sure hasn't.

Here is a film that uses very good actors and gives them a lot of improvisational freedom to talk their way into, around and out of social discomfort. And it's not snarky. It doesn't mock these characters. It understand they have their difficulties and hopes they find a way to work things out.

Sleepless in Seattle and Only You and now Love Affair, all movies about nice people getting into goofy misunderstandings because they love one another so much.You have to be in the right mood to enjoy movies like this. Or maybe they put you in the mood.

An inept assembly of ill-matched plot points, meandering through a production that has attractive art direction (despite the immobile mouths).

There is a whole genre of films about childhood friends still living in the old neighborhood and going down the drain of crime and drugs. Few of them capture the fatigue and depression, and the futility, as well as this one, in which the characters hold on to their self-respect by obeying the very rules that are grinding them down.

Presumed Innocent has at its core one of the most fundamental fears of civilized man: the fear of being found guilty of a crime one did not commit. That fear is at the heart of more than half of Hitchcock's films, and it is one reason they work for all kinds of audiences. Everybody knows that fear.

Elegantly, even languorously, photographed by Jose Luis Alcaine, who doesn't punch into things but regards them, so that we are invited to think about them. That doesn't mean the movie is slow; it moves with a compelling intensity toward its conclusion.

After seeing Awakenings, I read it, to know more about what happened in that Bronx hospital. What both the movie and the book convey is the immense courage of the patients and the profound experience of their doctors, as in a small way they reexperienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your astonishment that "you" are alive.

What is best about A Mighty Heart is that it doesn't reduce the Daniel Pearl story to a plot, but elevates it to a tragedy. A tragedy that illuminates and grieves for the hatred that runs loose in our world, hatred as a mad dog that attacks everyone. Attacks them for what seems, to the dog, the best of reasons.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is very good, but a step down from "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," if only because that film and its casting were so fresh and unexpected.

The central weakness of Cocoon: the Return is that the film lacks any compelling reason to exist. Yes, it is a heartwarming film.

A well-crafted family thriller that is truly scary and doesn't wimp out.

The Last Starfighter is a well-made movie. The special effects are competent. The acting is good, and I enjoyed Robert Preston's fast-talking The Music Man reprise (we've got trouble, right here in the galaxy) and the gentle wit of Dan O'Herlihy's extraterrestrial. But the final spark was missing, the final burst of inspiration that might have pulled all these concepts and inspirations and retreads together into a good movie.

When you wind a plot up as tightly as this one, it runs along nicely for awhile, but then the last half-hour has to be spent simply resolving everything.

Miracle Mile has the logic of one of those nightmares in which you’re sure something is terrible, hopeless and dangerous, but you can’t get anyone to listen to you.

Cats Don't Dance is not compelling and it's not a breakthrough, but on its own terms, it works well. Whether this will appeal to kids is debatable; the story involves a time and a subject they're not much interested in. But the songs by Randy Newman are catchy, the look is bright, the spirits are high and fans of Hollywood's golden age might find it engaging.

Clash of the Titans is a grand and glorious romantic adventure, filled with grave heroes, beautiful heroines, fearsome monsters, and awe-inspiring duels to the death. It is a lot of fun.

Barthes takes her notion and runs with it, and Giamatti and Strathairn follow fearlessly.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything.

Entertaining if you understand exactly what it is: if you see it as a film made by friends out of the materials presented by their lives and with the freedom to not push too hard.

The movie has three tones: overwrought, boring, laughable.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, makes the mistake of thinking we care more about the gold than about the city slickers. Like too many sequels, it has forgotten what the first film was really about. Slickers II is about the MacGuffin instead of the characters.

An extraordinary thriller... The film centers on two remarkable performances, by Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis.

Not the macabre horror story the title suggests, but a sweet and visually lovely tale of love lost.