Roger Ebert

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

The documentary shows what a tight-knit group the Chicks are.

The screenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seen characters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as the genre requires.

The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking, and Mad Max 2 is a movie like no other.

Firth plays George superbly, as a man who prepares a face to meet the faces that he meets.

Many of the scenes in this movie are almost formula, despite the energy of Scorsese's direction and the good performances. They come in the same places we would expect them to come in a movie by anybody else, and they contain the same events.

The characters aren’t consistent, and Cliff eventually becomes so unbelievable that we just stop caring. The movie’s ending is an exercise in plot; its beginning and its music deserve better than that.

This is a writer's picture, no less than a visual experience that approaches its subject as tactfully as the messengers do. No fancy camerawork. It happens, we absorb it.

Maybe the movie has too much coherence, and the plot is too predictable; that's a weakness of films based on well-made Broadway plays. Still, that's hardly a serious complaint about something as funny as Play It Again, Sam.

Watching the movie, I was reminded of the documentary "Crumb"...There is a line that sometimes runs between genius and madness, sometimes encircles them.

It contains risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, but most of all, it sees what danger and heartbreak are involved. It is riveting from start to finish.

Children of Heaven is very nearly a perfect movie for children, and of course that means adults will like it, too.

What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations. These are hard, violent men, risking their lives to save an animal species.

There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

Not an easy film and is for those few moviegoers who approach a serious movie almost in the attitude of prayer.

Both impressive and disappointing. From a technical and craft point of view it is first-rate; from its standing in the canon of the two directors, it is minor.

Body Heat is good enough to make film noir play like we hadn't seen it before.

Sandler works so hard at this, and so shamelessly, that he battered down my resistance. Like a Jerry Lewis out of control, he will do, and does, anything to get a laugh. No thinking adult should get within a mile of this film. I must not have been thinking. For my sins, I laughed.

The movie has a real bittersweet charm. The baseball sequences, we've seen before. What's fresh are the personalities of the players, the gradual unfolding of their coach and the way this early chapter of women's liberation fit into the hidebound traditions of professional baseball.

It was produced, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also wrote American Graffiti, and it has the same sharp memory for those specific moments when young people suspect they are doing certain things for the last times in their lives. So it is bittersweet, of course -- bittersweet, that indispensable street you travel through adolescence on.

There are a couple of moments in Jerry Maguire when you want to hug yourself with delight. Both of those moments involve the actress Renee Zellweger, whose lovability is one of the key elements in a movie that starts out looking cynical and quickly becomes a heartwarmer.

A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.

Ruby in Paradise is a breathtaking movie about a young woman who opens the book of her life to a fresh page, and begins to write.

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.

It's also interesting to see how little screen time the final disco competition really has, considering how large it looms in our memories.

The wonder is that it took Disney so long to get to the gods of Greek mythology. Hercules jumps into the ancient legends feet-first, cheerfully tossing out what won't fit and combining what's left into a new look and a lighthearted style.

Jarecki's film makes a shattering case against the War on Drugs.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

It's a movie about characters, primarily. It cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.

In the way it combines sports with human nature, it reminded me of another wonderful Indiana sports movie, "Breaking Away." It's a movie that is all heart.

I despised the character of Alan James so sincerely that I had to haul back at one point to remind myself that, hey, I've met Rip Torn and he's a nice guy and he's only acting.

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

If you see only one martial arts Western this year (and there is probably an excellent chance of that), this is the one.

The Interrupters is based on a much-acclaimed article in the New York Times Magazine by Alex Kotlowitz, who followed a period of intense violence in Chicago. He joined with James to co-produce the film. It is difficult to imagine the effort, day after day for a year, of following this laborious, heroic and so often fruitless volunteer work.

I like Bob Roberts - I like its audacity, its freedom to say the obvious things about how our political process has been debased - but if it had been only about campaign tactics and techniques, I would have liked it more.

Carnal Knowledge is clearly Mike Nichols' best film. It sets out to tell us certain things about these few characters and their sexual crucifixions, and it succeeds.

All of this is just plain enjoyable. I liked it, but please don't make me say it's deeply moving or redemptive and uplifting. It's a genre piece for character actors is what it is, and that's an honorable thing for it to be.

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder.

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

Katie Dellamaggiore's inspiring documentary covers two years in the history of the school chess team, during which one team member, Rochelle Ballantyn, approaches her dream of becoming the first female African-American grandmaster in U.S history.

Plays like a collision between a lot of half-baked visual ideas and a deep and urgent need. That makes it interesting…and the film contains an astonishing performance by Christina Ricci, who seems to have been assigned a portion of the screen where she can do whatever she wants.

Some cases should never come to trial, because no verdict would be adequate. You are likely to be discussing this film long into the night.

The best elements of Water involve the young girl and the experiences seen through her eyes. I would have been content if the entire film had been her story.

A startling documentary.

The film only wants to amuse. It's a reminder that Dogma films need not involve pathetic characters tormented by the misuse of their genitalia, but can simply want to have a little fun.

How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much.

This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be. To quote another ancient proverb, "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.

One of those joyous films that leaps over national boundaries and celebrates universal human nature.

Tells the kind of story that would feel right at home in a silent film, and I suppose I mean that as a compliment.

Siskel and Jacobs focus on the performances, which are inspiring and electrifying.

This time capsule from 1970 feels, in 1990, like a jolt of fresh air.

The Big Easy is one of the richest American films of the year. It also happens to be a great thriller.

In films of this sort, too often the camera records the fun instead of joining in it. However, that is certainly not the case in this magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film.

So heavy on incident, contrivance, coincidence, improbability, sudden reversals and dizzying flash-forwards (sometimes years at a time) that it seems a wonder the characters don't crash into each other in the confusion.

I'm glad I saw the film. It challenged me.

Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.

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.

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

This is not a film most people will enjoy. Its qualities are apparent only if appreciates cinematic style for itself.

A voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot.

The film has an odd subterranean power. It doesn't strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic.

Kandahar does not provide deeply drawn characters, memorable dialogue or an exciting climax. Its traffic is in images.

A movie like this lives or dies with its performances, and the actors in My Beautiful Laundrette are a fascinating group of unknowns.

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 Sure Thing is a small miracle. Although the hero of this movie is promised by his buddy that he'll be fixed up with a "guaranteed sure thing," the film is not about the sure thing but about how this kid falls genuinely and touchingly into love.

What surprised me was how much I admired Kristen Stewart, who in "Twilight," was playing below her grade level. Here is an actress ready to do important things. Together, and with the others, they make Adventureland more real and more touching than it may sound.

What we sense in the film is the camaraderie among these hopeful dancers. They've all been through the process before, all been disappointed before, all know better than anyone else what it takes, all believe the best candidates don't always win the jobs.

Why should anyone care about a movie about two scabrous vulgarians? Because the subject of a really good movie is sometimes not that important. It's the acting, writing, and direction that count.

The whole plot smells fishy. It's not that the movie is hiding something, but that when it's revealed, it's been left sitting too long at room temperature. Inside Man goes to much difficulty to arrive at too little.

This story is unthinkable in a Hollywood movie, but there is something about the matter-of-fact way Saeko explains her problem, and the surprised but not stunned way that Yosuke hears her, that takes the edge off.

The music is terrific. Idania Valdes dubs Rita's sensuous, smoky singing voice, and the film is essentially constructed as a musical.

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.

This is a parable about modern Iran, and like many recent Iranian films it leaves its meaning to the viewer. One of the wise decisions by Rafi Pitts, its writer, director and star, is to include no dialogue that ever actually states the politics of its hero.

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

Jesus' Son surprises me with moments of wry humor, poignancy, sorrow and wildness. It has a sequence as funny as any I've seen this year.

In America is not unsentimental about its new arrivals (the movie has a warm heart and frankly wants to move us), but it is perceptive about the countless ways in which it is hard to be poor and a stranger in a new land.

This is a movie that surprises you. The setup is such familiar material that you think the story is going to be flat and fast. But the screenplay by John Lee Hancock goes deep. And the direction by Clint Eastwood finds strange, quiet moments of perfect truth in the story.

For almost all of its length, Escape from Alcatraz is a taut and toughly wrought portrait of life in a prison. It is also a masterful piece of storytelling, in which the characters say little and the camera explains the action. It's one of those very difficult exercises in which large emotions, like the compulsion to be free, are reflected in minute actions, like the chipping away at stone with a pocket nail clipper.

The film takes the form but not the feel of a comic thriller. It's quirkier than that.

Has maturity and emotional depth: There are no cheap shots, nothing is thrown in for effect, realism is placed ahead of easy dramatic payoffs, and the audience grows deeply involved.

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.

Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk INTO the theater humming the songs.

There is hardly a moment in the whole film when I knew for sure what was going to happen next, yet I didn’t feel manipulated; I felt as if the movie were giving itself the freedom to be completely spontaneous.

James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence.

He's (Fukunaga) a director with a sure visual sense, here expressed in voluptuous visuals and ambitious art direction.

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

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

What I was left with was the goodness of Buck Brannaman as a man. He was dealt a hand that might have destroyed him. He overcame his start and is now a wise and influential role model. He does unto horses as he wishes his father had done onto him.

I like the way the slacker characters maintain their slothful gormlessness in the face of urgent danger, and I like the way the British bourgeois values of Shaun's mum and dad assert themselves even in the face of catastrophe.

An endlessly fascinating movie.

This profound and immensely touching film in only 75 perfect minutes achieves the profundity of an epic.

A formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise. Johnny Hallyday was brought in by To as a last-minute sub for Alain Delon, and could have been the first choice: He is tall, weathered, grim and taciturn.

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it.

The film would have benefitted by being less encompassing and focusing on a more limited number of emblematic characters -- Meinhof and Herold, for starters.

Here is an entire movie about looking cool while not wiping out. Call it a metaphor for life.

It is nearly flawless.

Coppola's new film is not so much about the car as about the man, and it is with the man that he fails to deliver.

The film's second half is the most touching, because it shows that our lives are not merely our own, but also belong to the events we set in motion.

Ivan Reitman's direction and Gary Ross' screenplay use intelligence and warmhearted sentiment to make Dave into wonderful lighthearted entertainment.

May be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock 'n' roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage.

A direct, spare, touching film.

As well-directed a film as you'll see from America this year, an unsentimental and yet completely involving story of a young man who cannot see a way around his fate.

A fascinating study of behavior that violates the rules.

Munch's screenplay is tenderly observant of his characters. He watches them as they float within the seas of their personalities. His scenes are short and often unexpected. The story unfolds in sidelong glances.

The ending of the film is as calculated and cruel as a verbal assault by a Neil LaBute character.

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

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

Airport 1975 is good, exciting, corny escapism and the kind of movie you would not want to watch as an in-flight film.

Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches.

Here is a tense and sorrowful film where common sense struggles with blood lust.

What's Love Got to Do With It ranks as one of the most harrowing, uncompromising showbiz biographies I've ever seen.

Here was a great artist. She enjoyed her life. She didn't complain at the time, she didn't complain when she went cold turkey, she didn't complain in her 80s.

The central performance in Brothers is by Connie Nielsen, who is strong, deep and true.

Some women are simply sexy forever. Helen Mirren is a woman like that. She's 64. As she enters her 70s, we'll begin to develop a fondness for sexy septuagenarians.

Margin Call employs an excellent cast who can make financial talk into compelling dialogue. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless.

Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good. You will see what I mean.

World on a Wire is slowed down compared to most Fassbinder. He usually evokes overwrought passions, sudden angers and jealousies, emotional explosions, people hiding turmoil beneath a surface of pose. Here there's less of that emotional energy. But if you know Fassbinder, you might want to see this as an exercise of his mind, a demonstration of how one of his stories might be transformed by the detachment of science fiction.

There will be better movies playing in the same theater, even if it is a duplex, but on the other hand there is something to be said for goofiness without apology by broken lizards who just wanna have fun.

Here is a rare movie that begins by telling us how it will end and is about how the hero has no idea why.

A film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic.

Tries hard to be a good film, but if it had relaxed a little, it might have been great.

House Party is silly and high-spirited and not particularly significant, and that is just as it should be.

Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess.

Takes advantage of the road movie genre, which requires only a goal and then permits great freedom in the events along the way.

Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music.

Interlaces interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers with new performances of many of the hit songs, and some sequences in which events of the past are re-created. The flashback sequences are not especially effective, but are probably better than more talking heads. Or maybe not.

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

This is, first of all, an electrifying and poignant love story....And it is also one hell of a thriller.

The Mother peers so fearlessly into the dark needs of human nature that you almost wish it would look away. It's very disturbing.

This is not great comedy, and Wayans doesn't find ways to build and improvise, as Carrey does.

So perceptive and mature it makes similar films seem flippant. The performances are on just the right note, scene after scene, for what needs to be done.

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.

Nil by Mouth is not an unrelieved shriek of pain. There is humor in it, and tender insight.

The Secret of Nimh is an artistic success. It looks good, moves well, and delights our eyes. It is not quite such a success on the emotional level, however, because it has so many characters and involves them in so many different problems that there's nobody for the kids in the audience to strongly identify with. I guess you could say that the Disney tradition lives, but that the Disney magic still remains elusive.

Songwriter is one of those movies that grows on you. It doesn't have a big point to prove, and it isn't all locked into the requirements of its plot. It's about spending some time with some country musicians who are not much crazier than most country musicians, and are probably nicer than some. It also has a lot of good music.

If anybody ever wrote a Field Guide to Alcoholics, with descriptions of their appearance, sexual behavior and habitats, there would be a full-color portrait on the cover of Tommy, the hero of Trees Lounge.

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

Using a dialogue-heavy approach that's unusual for Cronenberg, his film is skilled at the way it weaves theory with the inner lives of its characters. We are learning, yet never feel we're being taught.

Brooks, who co-wrote (with Monica Johnson) and directed as well as stars, is much too smart to settle for the obvious gags and payoffs. All of his films depend on closely observed behavior and language, on the ways language can refuse to let us communicate, no matter how obsessively we try to nail things down. In his scenes with Reynolds, they are told quietly, conversationally; they're not pounding out punch lines, and that's why the dialogue is so funny.

The ghost of anime can be seen here trying to dive into the shell of the movie mainstream. But this particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience, I suspect; it's not until the second hour that the story begins to reveal its meaning. But I enjoyed its visuals, its evocative soundtrack (including a suite for percussion and heavy breathing), and its ideas.

Entertaining and surprisingly amusing, under the circumstances. The film is in a better state of mind than its characters. Its humor comes, as the best humor does, from an acute observation of human nature.

If Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them.

The Last of the Mohicans is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be -- more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit -- but it is probably more entertaining as a result.

This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous.

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.

Emma writes everything down and then offers helpful suggestions, although she fails to supply the most useful observation of all, which would be to observe that the entire novel is complete crap.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a comedy that feeds off the blaxploitation movies, and although, like all good satires, it is cheerfully willing to be offensive, it is almost completely incapable of being funny.

Pretty much required viewing.

It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of The Last Emperor the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy.

For four hours we live in these two rooms and discover the secrets of these people, and at the end we have gone deeper, seen more, and will remember more, than with most of the other movies of our life.

Submarine isn't an insipid teen sex comedy. It flaunts some stylistic devices, such as titles and sections and self-aware narration, but it doesn't try too hard to be desperately clever.

The movie is astonishingly foul-mouthed, but in a fluent, confident way where the point isn't the dirty words, but the flow and rhythm, and the deep, sad yearning they represent.

The effect of this scene is so powerful that I leaned forward like a jury member, wanting her to get away with it so I could find her innocent.

The movie is as intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year.

Streep wisely goes for oblique humor rather than straight-ahead villainy, making the character different and yet just as loathsome.

The case involves lots of flaws in the original trial: unreliable eyewitnesses, time discrepancies, conflicts of interest. In other hands, this material might seem familiar, but Woods puts a spin on it, an intensity that makes it feel important - to him, and therefore to us.

I have a weakness for actresses like Greta Gerwig. She looks reasonable and approachable.

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

One of the risks taken by The Killing Fields is to cut loose from that tradition, to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure, and to trust that we'll find the characters so interesting that we won't miss the cliché. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience.

This is a film situated precisely on the dividing line between traditional family entertainment and the newer action-oriented family films. It is charming and scary in about equal measure, and confident for the first two acts that it can be wonderful without having to hammer us into enjoying it, or else. Then it starts hammering.

An epic poem of violence and greed.

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.

There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths

Lucas is one of the year's best films, and although its three stars are all teenagers, I doubt if anyone of any age will give more sensitive and effective performances this year.

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

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.

Oshima, directing his first film in 14 years, has found an actor with the physical attributes to play the character and seems content to leave it at that; his camera regards Sozaburo as an object of beauty but hardly seems to engage him.

It's Mamet in a lighthearted mood, playing with dialogue, repeating phrases just because he likes them, and supplying us with a closing line that achieves, I think, a kind of greatness.

There is a lot of individualism in this movie, both in the filmmaking and in the characters.

Rango is some kind of a miracle: An animated comedy for smart moviegoers, wonderfully made, great to look at, wickedly satirical, and (gasp!) filmed in glorious 2-D.

Dolls isn't a film for everybody, especially the impatient, but Kitano does succeed, I think, in drawing us into his tempo and his world, and slowing us down into the sadness of his characters.

One of the most involving of the many first-rate thrillers that have come recently from Scandinavia.

What is finally clear: It doesn't matter a damn what your will says if you have $25 billion, and politicians and the establishment want it.

The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious.

Because Tin Men is based on fundamental truth, it is able to be funny even in some of its quieter moments.

An animated film both harrowing and heartwarming, about a story that will never, ever, be remade by Disney.

The film's headlong momentum streamrolls over all our questions, and we're carried along by the expertly choreographed action. Even after everything seems over, it isn't, and the last minutes are particularly satisfying.

The performances are pitch perfect, even including Gabriel Chavarria as Ramon, the man who steals the truck. It adds an important element to the film that he embodies a desperate man, not a bad one.

May be a sardonic view of Japanese corporate culture, but that's not all it is. The movie is also subtly sexual and erotic, despite the fact that every scene takes place in the office and there is not a single overt sexual act or word or gesture or reference.

Leconte brings his film to transcendent closure without relying on stale plot devices or the clanking of the plot. He resorts to a kind of poetry. After the film is over, you want to sigh with joy, that in this rude world such civilization is still possible.

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.

It doesn't have the inspired perfection of Stranger Than Paradise, in which every shot seemed inevitable. But it's a good movie, and the more you know about movies, the more you're likely to like it.

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

Mullen and Garfield anchor the film. Mullen, that splendid Scottish actor ("My Name Is Joe") and Garfield, 24, with his boyish face and friendly grin.

An Officer and a Gentleman is the best movie about love that I've seen in a long time.

It is a skillful, well-made film, although, since Ellsberg is the narrator, it doesn't probe him very deeply.

A linear story, or one that was fragmented more clearly, could have been more effective. Still, a good film, ambitious and effective, introducing a gifted young actress and a director whose work I'll anticipate.

No one, male or female, has any fun, but the men behave as if they do. They are all half-stupefied by the languor in which they drown.

Does for motorcycle racing what The Endless Summer did for surfing and it's enjoyable in exactly the same way.

The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else.

Here is a movie that knows its women, listens to them, doesn't give them a pass, allows them to be real: It's a rebuke to the shallow "Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

There is a kind of horror movie that plays so convincingly we don't realize it's an exercise in pure style. ''Halloween'' is an example, and John Dahl's Joy Ride is another.

The movie's strength is not in its story but in its unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style. (Review of Original Release)

The very best thing about the movie is its dialogue. Paul Brickman, who wrote and directed, has an ear so good that he knows what to leave out.

The movie, which should have been titled "Defend the Block," illustrates once again that zombie, horror and monster movies are a port of entry for new filmmakers. The genre is the star.

Pleasence, in a role that requires him to run sideways most of the time with his head at a crooked angle, is hilarious and frightening as a man going mad, and the film has an eerie appeal.

The movie has good special effects and suitably gruesome characters, but it's bloodless.

Instead of staying on that safe, predictable level, it begins to dig into the awkwardness and hypocrisy of our commonly shared, attitudes about race.

It is a good story, a natural, and it grabs us. But just as there is almost no way to screw it up, so there's hardly any way to bring it above a certain level of inspiration.

I'm happy I saw Win Win. It would have been possible to be happier.

Emily is played by Maggie Cheung with such intense desperation that she won the best actress award at Cannes 2004.

Streep’s performance is risky, and masterful.

Riedelsheimer, earlier made "Rivers and Tides" (2002), about another artist from Scotland, Andy Goldsworthy, whose art involves materials found in nature...Evelyn Glennie and Andy Goldsworthy have in common a profound sensitivity to their environments.

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.

Movies like Tumbleweeds exist in the details, not the outcome. Even a happy ending, we suspect, would be temporary. We don't mind, since the characters have been intriguing to know and easy to care about.

The point of the movie is not the plot, but the character and the atmosphere.

What's best about the movie is its playfulness.

This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second. It's a roller-coaster ride, a visual extravaganza, a technical triumph, and a whole lot of fun.

Not very much happens in Metropolitan, and yet everything that happens is felt deeply, because the characters in this movie are still too young to have perfected their defenses against life.

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

Lost in La Mancha, which started life as one of those documentaries you get free on a DVD, ended as the record of swift and devastating disaster.

So strong, so shocking and yet so audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know quite what to make of it.

The movie pays off in a kind of emotional complexity rarely seen in crime movies.

I had to forget what I knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air, it's like nothing he's done before, and it proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role.

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

Heart-stopping in its coverage of the brave and risky attempt by a scientist named James Balog and his team of researchers on the Extreme Ice Survey, where "extreme" refers to their efforts almost more than to the ice.

Bridesmaids seems to be a more or less deliberate attempt to cross the Chick Flick with the Raunch Comedy. It definitively proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity.

This is the first film to approach the subject of "undocumented workers" solely through their eyes. This is not one of those docudramas where we half-expect a test at the end, but a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" that gets inside the hearts of its characters and lives with them.

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

A funny, wickedly self-aware musical that opens by acknowledging they've outlived their shelf life.

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended.

Doesn't replace "Fingers," but joins it as the portrait of a man reaching out desperately toward his dying ideals.

Any laughs that it inspires will be very hollow. It's more of a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate.

You sit there, and the action assaults you, and using words to re-create it would be futile. What actually happens to Jason Bourne is essentially immaterial. What matters is that SOMETHING must happen, so he can run away from it or toward it.

More important, it has a Disney willingness to allow fantasy into life, so New York seems to acquire a new playbook.

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.

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

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.

Bright, lively and entertaining, but it's no "Shrek." Maybe it's too much to expect lightning to strike twice.

Lili Taylor plays Solanas as mad but not precisely irrational. She gives the character spunk, irony and a certain heroic courage.

[Robin Williams] has been ill-served by a screenplay that isn't curious about what his life would really be like.

On the basis of its scale, energy and magical events, this is the Hong Kong equivalent of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. But it transcends them with the stylization of the costumes, the panoply of the folklore, the richness of the setting, and the fact that none of the characters (allegedly) have superpowers.

The point of the film is not to create suspense, but to capture the relentlessness of human greed, the feeling that the land is so important the human spirit can be sacrificed to it.

The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end and is surprisingly unsentimental for a Disney animated feature. It keeps its edge and its comic zest all the way through, and although it arrives relatively unheralded, it's a jewel.

This curious idea for a movie actually works.

More than most films, it depends on the strength of its performances for its effect - and especially on Penn's performance. If he is not able to convince us of his power, his rage and his contempt for the life of the girl, the movie would not work. He does, in a performance of overwhelming, brutal power.

The Witnesses doesn't pay off with a great operatic pinnacle, but it's better that way. Better to show people we care about facing facts they care desperately about, without the consolation of plot mechanics.

Some movies seem born to inspire video games. All they lack is controllers and a scoring system. How to Train Your Dragon plays more like a game born to inspire a movie.

Warren Beatty's Bulworth made me laugh -- and wince.

Imagine music for a sorcery-related plot and then dial it down to ominous forebodings. Without Thomas Newman's score, Side Effects would be a lesser film, even another film.

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.

It is flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding.

Watching Holbrook, I was reminded again of how steady and valuable this man has been throughout his career.

The film's implication, quite starkly, is that a strong military doesn't favor crybabies, that a certain degree of rape is unavoidable - and inevitably, that some women may have been asking for it. One hearing noted that the victim was dressed provocatively. In her official uniform.

A wild elaboration. If you have never seen a Japanese anime, start here. If you love them, Metropolis proves you are right.

Seen simply as a film, The Motorcycle Diaries is attenuated and tedious. We understand that Ernesto and Alberto are friends, but that's about all we find out about them; they develop none of the complexities of other on-the-road couples, like Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde or Huck and Jim. There isn't much chemistry.

The key element in any action picture, I think, is a good villain. Terminator 2 has one, along with an intriguing hero and fierce heroine, and a young boy who is played by Furlong with guts and energy.

Although it seems to borrow the pattern of the traditional boxing movie, the boxer here is not the usual self-destructive character, but the center of maturity and balance in a community in turmoil.

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.

Kicking and Screaming doesn't have much of a plot, but of course it wouldn't; this is a movie about characters waiting for their plots to begin.

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.

I can imagine it as a sex comedy, as a romance, as a bittersweet exploration of lonely people. Schleppi has a little of all three elements at work here, but it's Tim Blake Nelson's character who keeps the plot from spinning out of control.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

Middle of Nowhere isn't a highly charged drama, as you might have gathered. Most of the action takes place within the mind of a lonely woman. That's why Corinealdi is so effective in the lead.

A new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood.

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

The director, Peter Cattaneo, takes material that could would be at home in a sex comedy, and gives it gravity because of the desperation of the characters; we glimpse the home life of these men, who have literally been put on the shelf, and we see the wound to their pride.

The movie, written and directed by Dylan Kidd, depends on its dialogue, and like a film by David Mamet or Neil LaBute has characters who use speech like an instrument. The screenplay would be entertaining just to read, as so very few are.

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

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

It lovingly, almost sadistically, lays out the situation and deliberately demonstrates all the things that can go wrong. And I mean all the things.

Nothing Cruise has done will prepare you for what he does in Born on the Fourth of July. His performance is so good that the movie lives through it. Stone is able to make his statement with Cruise's face and voice and doesn't need to put everything into the dialogue.

This is not a major Spielberg film, although it is an effortlessly watchable one.

Peggy Sue Got Married is a lot of things - a human comedy, a nostalgic memory, a love story - but there are times when it is just plain creepy, because it awakens such vivid memories in us.

The weakness of Black Girl is in its slow, journeyman style; one feels that Sembene learned filmmaking by making this film. It also suffers from a kind of primitive naturalism, as if the script were by James T. Farrell out of Theodore Dreiser. Every motive is spelled out in unnecessary detail, and little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters.

Mel Brooks will do anything for a laugh. Anything. He has no shame. He's an anarchist; his movies inhabit a universe in which everything is possible and the outrageous is probable, and Silent Movie, where Brooks has taken a considerably stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly, made me laugh a lot.

While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level.

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound.

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.

What an anguished story it tells, of a marriage from hell.

What's fascinating is the way Mario, working from his father's autobiography and his own memories, has somehow used his first-hand experience without being cornered by it.

Payami has a visual style that is sometimes astonishing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes both.

The film's anti-Semitism is articulate but wrong, and the conflict between what the hero says and what he believes (or does not want to believe) is at the very center of the story.

We have all the action heroes and Method script-chewers we need right now, but the Cary Grant department is understaffed, and Hugh Grant shows here that he is more than a star, he is a resource.

What makes the film astonishing is that it follows a real boy on a real journey, and the boy is in England at this moment.

Directed with sly grace and quiet elegance by Sally Potter, it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence.

An ingenious thriller that doesn't make much sense but doesn't need to, because it moves at breakneck speed through a story of a man's desperation to save his pregnant wife after she has been kidnapped. This is the kind of movie where you get involved first and ask questions later.

The film is so well made and acted, because it captures its period so meticulously.

The movie therefore offers meager pleasures of character. Where it excels is in staging and cinematography. The running sequences, in races, on city streets and through forests, are very well-handled.

Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" is disappointingly lacking in bite and sophistication, the first two qualities we'd expect from the director of "The Apartment" and "The Fortune Cookie."

I've only been to Denmark twice and have no idea if this is even remotely a Danish situation, but it could fit right fine in the Old West.

Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy. There's an over-the-top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing and to the hyperactive camera.

I have only one complaint, and it is this: Every American should be as fortunate as I have been. As Moore makes clear in his film, some 50 million Americans have no insurance and no way to get it.

This is one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema.

An elegant story about an elegant woman, told in an elegant visual style. It moves too slowly for those with impaired attention spans, but is fascinating in its style and mannerisms.

Bronstein's performance is crucial. It's difficult to make a manic character plausible, but he does.

It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.

This isn't one of Burton's best, but it has zealous energy. It might have been too macabre for kids in past, but kids these days, they've seen it all, and the charm of a boy and his dog retains its appeal.

A mordant and bleak comedy, almost without dialogue, about Palestinians under Israeli occupation.