Roger Ebert

It is perfectly cast and soundly constructed, and all else flows naturally. Steve Martin and John Candy don't play characters; they embody themselves.

An inspired example of the story in which the adolescent hero discovers that the world sucks, people are phonies, and sex is a consolation. Because the genre is well established, what makes the movie fresh is smart writing, skewed characters, and the title performance by Kieran Culkin.

One of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made.

Safety Not Guaranteed not only has dialogue that's about something, but characters who have some depth and dimension.

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.

Annette Bening plays Julia in a performance that has great verve and energy, and just as well, because the basic material is wheezy melodrama.

We get the sense of a live intelligence, rushing things ahead on the screen, not worrying whether we'll understand.

It’s not easy to make comedies that work as drama, too. But Carney’s acting is so perceptive that it helps this material succeed.

Under Fire surrounds these performances with a vivid sense of place and becomes, somewhat surprisingly, one of the year's best films.

A scrappy indie movie that comes out of nowhere and blows up stuff real good. It also possibly represents the debut of a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a natural driven by wild energy, like Tarantino.

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.

The grubby, low-budget intensity of the film gives it a lovable quality that high-tech movies wouldn't have.

Like another recent feel-good film about the disease, Gus Van Sant's "Restless," it creates a comforting myth. That's one of the things movies are good for.

The movie doesn't bludgeon us with gags. It proceeds with a certain comic relentlessness from setup to payoff, and its deliberation is part of the fun.

A wonderful film, nostalgia not for a time but for a style of filmmaking, when shell-shocked young audiences were told a story and not pounded over the head with aggressive action.

War Horse is bold, not afraid of sentiment and lets out all the stops in magnificently staged action sequences. Its characters are clearly defined and strongly played by charismatic actors. Its message is a universal one.

Somehow manages to combine the sweetness and innocence of the original with a satirical bite all its own.

The Aristocrats might have made a nice short subject. At 87 minutes, it's like the boozy salesman who corners you with the Pinocchio torture.

It's a funny, engaging comedy that takes the familiar but underrated Emma Stone and makes her, I believe, a star.

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 a genuinely interesting idea, filled with dramatic possibilities, but the movie approaches it on the level of a dim-witted sit-com. Thoughtful scenes are followed by slapstick, emotional moments lead right into farce, and the movie doesn't have an ounce of true moral courage; it sidesteps every single big issue that it raises.

The tension between the slimefest milieu and the charm of the performances is maybe what makes Feeling Minnesota work.

One hell of a thriller. It's not often that I feel true suspense and dread building within me, but they were building during long stretches of this expertly constructed film.

Drew me in from the opening shots. Byler reveals his characters in a way that intrigues and even fascinates us, and he never reduces the situation to simple melodrama, which would release the tension. This is like a psychological thriller, in which the climax has to do with feelings, not actions.

Perhaps I have made the movie sound too serious... So let me just say that Down and Out in Beverly Hills made me laugh longer and louder than any film I've seen in a long time.

What sets Heathers apart from less intelligent teenage movies is that it has a point of view toward this subject matter - a bleak, macabre and bitingly satirical one.

A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.

Detropia offers no solution to this crisis, and indeed there may be none. This documentary is more eulogy and elegy.

It's a film filled with wicked satire and sex both joyful and pitiful.

A movie that seems consumed with a desire to push us too far. This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we're being One-Upped if we allow ourselves to be offended.

Rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past.

Hovers intriguingly between homage and revenge.

You leave Felicia's Journey appreciating it. A week later, you're astounded by it.

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

It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story.

Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.

Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details.

The way this unfolds is surprisingly engaging.

It is a stunning work of visual style - the best version of a comic book universe I've seen - and Brandon Lee clearly demonstrates in it that he might have become an action star, had he lived.

The Stepfather has one wonderful element: Terry O'Quinn's performance.

A demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break.

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.

Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated. Here he employs all of his art.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

Keke Palmer, a young Chicago actress whose first role was as Queen Latifah's niece in "Barbershop 2," becomes an important young star with this movie. It puts her in Dakota Fanning and Thora Cross territory, and there's something about her poise and self-possession that hints she will grow up to be a considerable actress.

The Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris is famous for its "erotic chic" revues, but I found nothing either erotic or chic in this reduction of body parts to geometrical displays.

This movie leaves me looking forward to the director's next film; we can say of Rian Johnson, as somebody once said about a dame named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "You're good. You're very good."

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

A lightweight rom-com elevated by its performances. It is a reminder that the funniest people are often not comedians, but actors playing straight in funny roles.

It's hard enough for a director to work with actors, but if you're working with your own family in your own house and depicting passive aggression, selfishness and discontent and you produce a film this good, you can direct just about anybody in just about anything.

To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply.

Passes the time pleasantly and has a few good laughs.

What adds boundless energy to Walk the Line is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

Antal's visuals create a haunted house where the lights are off in most of the rooms and there may, indeed, be a monster in the closet.

Movies about high school misfits are common; this is an uncommon one. Terri, so convincingly played by Jacob Wysocki, is smart, gentle and instinctively wise.

But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has.

Sam and Frankie are certainly interesting enough that a film about them coming to grips with this hidden truth would have been justified. It also would probably have been harder to write than this one, so People Like Us marches on with a coy little smile, toying with Frankie and the audience.

One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen's Match Point is that each and every character is rotten.

The movie's delicately timed pacing and Pollack's visual style work almost stealthily to involve us; we begin to feel the physical weariness and spiritual desperation of the characters.

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.

Truly, Madly, Deeply, a truly odd film, maddening, occasionally deeply moving.

A brave, funny, affecting film.

What's best about the movie is the sense of madness and mania running just beneath its surface.

What are we to make of this existence? Doc sees himself a messiah of surfing, clean living and healthy exercise. We might be more inclined to see him as a narcissistic monster, ruling his big family with an iron fist.

Mulan is an impressive achievement, with a story and treatment ranking with "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."

The Weavers of 2003 did not sing as well as they did in 1982, or 1952, but if anything they had more heart, because more memories.

The film is funny, energetic, teeth-gnashingly venomous and animated with an eye to exploiting the 3-D process with such sure-fire techniques as a visit to an amusement park. The sad thing, I am forced to report, is that the 3-D process produces a picture more dim than it should be.

Bully is a sincere documentary but not a great one. We feel sympathy for the victims, and their parents or friends, but the film helplessly seems to treat bullying as a problem without a solution.

I'm not surprised that Rashida Jones took the lead in writing this screenplay; the way things are going now, if an actress doesn't write a good role for herself, no one else is going to write one.

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

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

Great World of Sound, a Sundance hit, is Zobel’s first film, a confident, sure-handed exercise focusing on the American Dream, turned nightmare.

The Rainmaker, unlike most Grisham films, doesn't have to drag a high-paid superstar around and give him all the best lines. DeVito's role is in the fading tradition of the star character actor.

Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.

What we sense after the film is that the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy.

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

Real Genius contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.

Undefeated is an emotional and effective film.

Whatever happened to the delight and, if you'll excuse the term, the magic in the "Harry Potter" series? As the characters grow up, the stories grow, too, leaving the innocence behind and confusing us with plots so labyrinthine that it takes a Ph.D from Hogwarts to figure them out.

This is a serious movie about drinking but not a depressing one. You notice that in the way it handles Charlie (Aaron Paul), Kate's husband. He is also her drinking buddy. When two alcoholics are married, they value each other's company because they know they can expect forgiveness and understanding, while a civilian might not choose to share their typical days.

We go expecting to be inspired and uplifted, and we leave somewhat satisfied in those areas, but with reluctant questions about how well the story has aged, and how relevant it is today.

Swimming is above all about a young woman's face, and by casting an actress whose face projects that woman's doubts and yearnings, it succeeds. The face belongs to Lauren Ambrose.

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

One of the joys of Waking Ned Devine is in the richness of the local eccentric population.

This movie takes a lot of delight in being more psychologically complex than it has to be. It contains fights and shootouts and big chase scenes, but they're all firmly centered on who the characters are and what they mean to one another.

Romero finds still new and entertaining ways for unspeakably disgusting things to happen to the zombies and their victims.

The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles.

Chabrol as always shows a tenderness toward the lives of people who are exceptional only because crime touches them.

It is a first film by a young British director who exhibits in every scene a complete mastery of the kind of characterization he is attempting. This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise.

The situations are more or less standard (fights over sleeping arrangements, emergencies that have to be solved, moments of truth and confession), but the dialogue and the acting bring the material up to another level.

Backstage at the Muppet works, we see countless drawers filled with eyeballs, eyebrows, whiskers and wigs. It's the only world Kevin wanted to live in, and he made it.

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.

A love story about two strong-willed people who find exhilaration in testing each other. It is not about sexual love, or even romantic love, really, but about that kind of love based on challenge and fascination.

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.

In an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it's so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

This Is Elvis is the extraordinary record of a man who simultaneously became a great star and was destroyed by alcohol and drug addiction. What is most striking about its documentary footage is that we can almost always see both things happening at once.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

Like most British family films, Water Horse doesn't dumb down its young characters or insult the intelligence of the audience. It has a lot of sly humor about what we know, or have heard, about the Loch Ness monster.

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

Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.

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

An intelligent, upbeat, happy movie.

Movies like Wonderland invite me into the screen with them. I am curious. I begin to care.

David Gordon Green's second film, is too subtle and perceptive, and knows too much about human nature, to treat their lack of sexual synchronicity as if it supplies a plot.

Aladdin is good but not great, with the exception of the Robin Williams sequences, which have a life and energy all their own.

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

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.

Simple enough to delight a child and complex enough to baffle a philosopher.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, doesn't make level one thrillers, and his characters may be smarter than us, or dumber. It's never just about the plot, anyway. It has to do with random accidents, dangerous coincidences, miscalculations, simple mistakes. And the motives are never simple.

Astin's performance is so self-effacing, so focused and low-key, that we lose sight of the underdog formula and begin to focus on this dogged kid who won't quit. And the last big scene is an emotional powerhouse, just the way it's supposed to be.

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

Clint Eastwood, a master director, orchestrates all of these notes and has us loving Mandela, proud of Francois and cheering for the plucky Springboks. A great entertainment. Not, as I said, the Mandela biopic I would have expected.

Here is a satire both savage and elegant, a dagger instead of a shotgun.

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. Open Water had that effect on me.

Romero loses momentum in the closing passages because he has too many loose ends to keep track of. Somewhere within this movie’s two hours or so is hidden an absolutely spellbinding 90-minute thriller.

One of the best qualities of Map of the Human Heart was that I never quite knew where it was going. It is a love story, a war story, a lifetime story, but it manages to traverse all of that familiar terrain without doing the anticipated.

The film is a display of traditional movie craftsmanship, especially at the level of the screenplay, which respects the characters and story and doesn't simply use them for dialogue breaks between action sequences.

The film is confoundingly watchable.

Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer be possible to consider her in the same way.

The movie has many scenes of delicious comedy, Clooney and Zeta-Jones play their characters perfectly in an imperfect screenplay.

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.

When it's all over, you'll probably have the fondest memories of Robert Downey Jr.'s work. It's been a good year for him, this one coming after "Iron Man." He's back, big time.

This is such a rare movie. Its characters are uncompromisingly themselves, flawed, stubborn, vulnerable.

The Tracker is one of those rare films that deserves to be called haunting. It tells the sort of story we might find in an action Western, but transforms it into a fable or parable.

What makes Mike Nichols' version more than just a retread is good casting in the key roles, and a wicked screenplay by Elaine May.

It's the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective.

The movie is an uncommonly knowledgeable portrait of the way musical gifts could lift people of ordinary backgrounds into high circles.

One of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

Mad Dog and Glory is one of the few recent movies where it helps to pay close attention. Some of the best moments come quietly and subtly, in a nuance of dialogue or a choice of timing. The movie is very funny, but it's not broad humor, it's humor born of personality quirks and the style of the performances.

Helped enormously by Rachel McAdams, whose performance is convincing because she keeps it at ground level; thrillers are invitations to overact, but she remains plausible even when the action ratchets up around her.

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

This is a movie that strains at the leash of the possible, a movie of great visionary wonders.

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.

The screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax MASH.

He (Walken) is a gifted classical actor...and here he understands Victor Kelly from the inside out.

Masterful at concealing its true nature and surprising us with the turns of the story.

What lends Rapt its fascination is that it represents such a dramatic fall from grace for its hero.

The movie may be inconsequential, but in some ways that's a strength. Without hauling in a lot of deep meanings, it remembers with great warmth a time and a place.

Sutherland's performance is the film's treasure. Watching the way he gently tries to direct his headstrong young star, we are seeing a version of Phil Jackson's Zen and the art of coaching.

The artistry is peaceful and comforting to the eyes but not especially stirring. Given the pictorial extremes that Studio Ghibli has gone to in the past, "Up on Poppy Hill" is weak tea.

The strangest thing about Birdy which is a very strange and beautiful movie indeed, is that it seems to work best at its looniest level, and is least at ease with the things it takes most seriously.

Patton Oswalt is, in a way, the key to the film's success. Theron is flawless at playing a cringe-inducing monster and Wilson touching as a nice guy who hates to offend her, but the audience needs a point of entry, a character we can identify with, and Oswalt's Matt is human, realistic, sardonic and self-deprecating. He speaks truth to Mavis.

Streep is very funny in the movie; she does a good job of catching the knife-edged throwaway lines that have become Carrie Fisher's speciality. And director Mike Nichols captures a certain kind of difficult reality in his scenes on movie sets, where the actress is pulled this way and that by people offering helpful advice. Everyone wants a piece of a star, even a falling one.

Although we find out a lot about this virtual hermit and develop an admiration for his cantankerous principles, the movie leaves some questions unanswered.

What distinguishes Personal Best is that it creates specific characters--flesh-and-blood people with interesting personalities, people I cared about. “Personal Best” also seems knowledgeable about its two subjects, which are the weather of these women's hearts, and the world of Olympic sports competition.

Singles is not a great cutting-edge movie, and parts of it may be too whimsical and disorganized for audiences raised on cause-and-effect plots. But I found myself smiling a lot during the movie, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with recognition. It's easy to like these characters, and care about them.

Penn and Nicholson take risks with the material and elevate the movie to another, unanticipated, haunting level.

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.

Enormously entertaining for moviegoers of any age -- But for young women depressed because they don't look like skinny models, this film is a breath of common sense and fresh air. Real Women Have Curves is a reminder of how rarely the women in the movies are real.

No one should have to endure the life that Aileen Wuornos led, and we leave the movie believing that if someone, somehow, had been able to help that little girl, her seven victims would never have died.

Not a great movie, but as a classic heist movie, it's solid professionalism.

I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.

The plot is completely confused, and kids, who are much better at these things than adults, will enjoy its twists and turns. Ustinov is fine as the rum swilling, yo-ho-hoing Blackbeard, and there are several good scenes as he invisibly meddles with the big track meet. Jones and Miss Pleshette are amusing without being insufferably sweet.

It is 92 minutes of rage, acted by Tom Hardy.

Under the direction of David Fincher and with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian. I don't know if it's better or worse. It has a different air.

The Spanish Prisoner resembles Alfred Hitchcock in the way that everything takes place in full view, on sunny beaches and in brightly lit rooms, with attractive people smilingly pulling the rug out from under the hero and revealing the abyss.

Desperately Seeking Susan does not move with the self-confidence that its complicated plot requires. But it has its moments, and many of them involve the different kinds of special appeal that Arquette and Madonna are able to generate. They are very particular individuals, and in a dizzying plot they somehow succeed in creating specific, interesting characters.

This is one of those movies you talk about a lot afterward because the motives of all the characters are so complicated that you're not absolutely sure just who came out ahead.

The movie is sweet, funny, observant and goofy with a small ``g,'' which means you don't get paid, but at least you don't have to wear the suit.

I don't know when I've seen a thriller more frightening. I couldn't tear my eyes from the screen. Collapse is even entertaining, in a macabre sense. I think you owe it to yourself to see it.

Damage, like "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," is one of those rare movies that is about sexuality, not sex; about the tension between people, not "relationships"; about how physical love is meaningless without a psychic engine behind it. Stephen and Anna are wrong to do what they do in "Damage," but they cannot help themselves. We know they are careening toward disaster. We cannot look away.

This is an uncommonly intelligent film, smart and amusing too, and anyone who thinks it is not faithful to Austen doesn't know the author but only her plots.

A sober, even low-key documentary about how the American death penalty system is broken and probably can’t be fixed.

This is a rare fight movie in which we don't want to see either fighter lose. That brings such complexity to the final showdown that hardly anything could top it - but something does, and Warrior earns it.

I Will Follow doesn't tell a story so much as try to understand a woman. Through her, we can find insights into the ways we deal with death.

I like this movie. More important, I like Mike Birbiglia in it. Whether he has a future in stand-up I cannot say, but he has a future as a monologist and actor.

The kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent.

Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel.

Separate Lies reminded me of Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors"... seemingly about the portioning of blame. It is actually about the burden of guilt, which some can carry so easily while for others, it is intolerable.

The movie felt long to me, and there were some stretches during which I was less than riveted. Is it possible that there wasn't enough Sendak story to justify a feature-length film?

To describe the plot is to miss the point. Fallen Angels takes the materials of the plot -- the characters and what they do -- and assembles them like a photo montage. At the end, you have impressions, not conclusions.

To Be or Not To "Be works as well as a story as any Brooks film since "Young Frankenstein," and darned if there isn't a little sentiment involved as the impresario and his wife, after years of marriage, surprise each other by actually falling in love.

It's so clever that finally that's all it is: clever.

Told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective.

In a prison filled with vivid, Dickensian characters, several stand out. There is, for example, the unlikely couple of Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro), tall and muscular, and No Way (Gero Camilo), a stunted little man. They are the great loves of each other's lives.

In its quiet, dark, claustrophobic way, this is one of the best films of the year.

Slight and sometimes wearisome.

"Willem Dafoe is Max Schreck." I put quotes around that because it's not just a line for a movie ad but the truth: He embodies the Schreck of "Nosferatu" so uncannily that when real scenes from the silent classic are slipped into the frame, we don't notice a difference.

This is a rare thriller that's as much character study as sound and fury.

It stands with integrity and breaks our hearts.

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

The Tenant's not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment. If it didn't have the Polanski trademark, we'd probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.

Alexander's performance makes the film possible to watch without unbearable heartbreak, because she is brave and decent in the face of the horror. And the last scene, in which she expresses such small optimism as is still possible, is one of the most powerful movie scenes I've ever seen.

Although Clockers is... a murder mystery, in solving its murder, it doesn't even begin to find a solution to the system that led to the murder. That is the point.

The Mighty Quinn is a spy thriller, a buddy movie, a musical, a comedy and a picture that is wise about human nature. And yet with all of those qualities, it never seems to strain: This is a graceful, almost charmed, entertainment.

The film is told almost entirely without dialogue, but is alive to sound; we spend observant, introspective hours in a Hungarian hamlet where nothing much seems to happen -- oh, except that there's a suspicious death.

Things Change is a delicate balance of things that don’t easily go together: farce, wit, violence and heart. Here they do.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is an accomplished balancing act.

This is easily the most absurd of the "Star Trek" stories - and yet, oddly enough, it is also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms. I'm relieved that nothing like restraint or common sense stood in their way.

Coppola has fun directing, and his film is filled with sight jokes, high-spirited performances and a lively sound track by the Lovin' Spoonful.

So extreme is his mad dog behavior, indeed, that it shades over into humor: Washington seems to enjoy a performance that's over the top and down the other side.

Strongman is a tantalizing example of the kind of documentary I find engrossing: A film about an unusual person that invites us into the mystery of a human life.

Evolution aside, there are some wonderful images in Aliens of the Deep, even if the crew members say how much they love their jobs about six times too often.

The charm of Bagdad Cafe is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.

Hickenlooper's film evokes what the Japanese call mono no aware, which refers to the impermanence of life and the bittersweet transience of things. There is a little Rodney Bingenheimer in everyone, but you know what? Most people aren't as lucky as Rodney.

Trumbo has taken the most difficult sort of material -- the story of a soldier who lost his arms, his legs, and most of his face in a World War I shell burst -- and handled it, strange to say, in a way that's not so much anti-war as pro-life. Perhaps that's why I admire it.

The result is not a formal doc but an extended chat between two professionals who, as Pollack puts it, search for "a sliver of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference."

A rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking hung by the fireside with care. How else to explain an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with "The Thing"?

The writing, acting and direction are so convincing that at some point I stopped thinking about the constraints and started thinking about the movie's freedoms.

Here's a Brazilian thriller that's so angry and specifically political, it's hard to believe they got away with making it.

What Burton has made is a film which celebrates Wood more than it mocks him, and which celebrates, too, the zany spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the oddest films ever made.

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

Little Man Tate is the kind of movie you enjoy watching; it's about interesting people finding out about themselves.

What Happened Was... is in many ways an admirable movie, and Noonan and Sillas do a quiet, thorough job of representing these two people who seem on the edge of being walled up inside their own walls. There are many small moments of perfect observation. But I never really felt they were building to anything, or heading anywhere.

There is a funny movie lurking at the edges of Splash, and sometimes it even sneaks on screen and makes us smile. It's too bad the relentlessly conventional minds that made this movie couldn't have made the leap from sitcom to comedy.

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

The movie is passable as a story but fascinating as a document. It gives a more complete visual picture of the borders, the Palestinian settlements and the streets of Jerusalem than we ever see on the news.

The film is entertaining in its own right, and thought-provoking. Why don't more people quickly see through their hoaxes?

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.

Dawn of the Dead is one of the best horror films ever made -- and, as an inescapable result, one of the most horrifying. It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling. It is also (excuse me for a second while I find my other list) brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society. Nobody ever said art had to be in good taste.

This is a movie of substance and thrilling historical sweep, and its three hours allow Szabo to show the family's destiny forming and shifting under pressure.

The acting is macho understatement. Mesrine is a character who might have been played years ago by Gerard Depardieu, who appears here as Guido, a bullet-headed impresario of larceny.

Donnie Darko is the one that got away. But it was fun trying to land it.

Here is a movie that makes you want to do something. Cry, or write a check, or howl with rage.

Ghostbusters is one of those rare movies where the original, fragile comic vision has survived a multimillion-dollar production.

Since the predator is imaginary but the people who made this film are not, Predator 2 speaks sadly of their own lack of curiosity and imagination.

Certainly it is Lugosi's performance, and the cinematography of Karl Freund, that make Tod Browning's film such an influential Hollywood picture.

Mrs. Henderson Presents is not great cinema, and neither was the Windmill great theater, but they both put on a good show.

The bare story itself could be simplistic and silly: Cops chasing a couple of kids on a horse. But when relationships are involved, and social realities, and a certain level of magical realism, then the story grows and deepens until it really involves us. Kids will probably love this movie, but adults will get a lot more out of it.

Light Sleeper isn't about the help he can get from psychics, however; it's about desperation that makes him project healing qualities upon anyone who is halfway sympathetic. The movie is familiar with its life of night and need. It finds the real human qualities in a person like the Susan Sarandon character - who, in a crisis, reacts with loyalty and quick thinking.

By now, everyone knows who wins, but the scenes before the fight set us up for it so completely, so emotionally, that when it's over we've had it. We're drained.

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

The movie isn't in the same league as Disney's big four, and it doesn't have the same crossover appeal to adults, but as family entertainment it's bright and cheerful, and it has its moments.

This is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn't realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There's something to it.

One of the things I like about the movie is the wit of its dialogue, the way sentences and conversations coil with confidence up to a conclusion that is totally unexpected.

Blanchett, Crudup and Gambon stand above and somehow apart from the absurdities of the screenplay.

Both a distraction and a revelation.

Finds a tone that remains more entertaining than depressing, more absorbing than alarming.

A delicious pastry of a movie -- You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile.

In drawing out his effects, Amenabar is a little too confident that style can substitute for substance. As our suspense was supposed to be building, our impatience was outstripping it.

That could have been a good movie, but predictable. Mike Nichols' Silkwood is not predictable.... We realize this is a lot more movie than perhaps we were expecting.

The movie is wise, deep, and painful, and it is filled with words. Used to be, a "sex film" contained lots of nudity and steamy scenes. That kind of stuff would just slow this one down.

Well of course he wins the race and gets the girl. You know that to begin with when you go to a movie named Winning that stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and is about the Indy 500.

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

Disturbing, analytical and morose. This is not a "political" film nor yet another screed about the Bush administration or the war in Iraq. It is driven simply, powerfully, by the desire to understand those photographs.

Certainly the best in its technical credits, and among the best in the ingenuity of its plot.

Above all, just plain funny. It's funny with some dumb physical humor, yes, and some gross-out jokes apparently necessary to all buddy movies, but also funny in observations, dialogue, physical behavior and Sydney Fife's observations as a people-watcher.

Dying is not this cheerful, but we need to think it is. The Barbarian Invasions is a movie about a man who dies about as pleasantly as it's possible to imagine; the audience sheds happy tears.

“The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment.

It's very perceptive about the relationships among its characters - how they talk, how they compete, what their values are. And Howard has cast the movie with splendid veteran actors, who are able to convey all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of real people.

The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.

It moves with a majestic pacing over the affairs of four generations, demonstrating that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children.

A delightful demonstration of how spirituality can coexist quite happily with an intense desire for France to defeat Brazil.

After it is over, you will want to go back and think things through again, and I can help you by suggesting there is one, and only one, interpretation that resolves all of the difficulties, but if I told you, you would have to kill me.

Sean Penn('s) performances are master classes in the art of character development.

The investigation itself must remain undescribed here. But its ending is a neat and ironic exercise in poetic justice.

The movie's humor works best when the illogic of the TV show gets in the way.

Bertolucci can direct great set pieces, of course, and some of his biggest scenes (like the outdoor dances that are his favorites) are spectacular. But he needs well-defined characters to anchor his stories, and he seems more confident when he drills into their psyches instead of spreading himself all over the ideological map.

It would be easy to tear the plot to shreds and catch Kramer in the act of copping out. But why? On its own terms, this film is a joy to see, an evening of superb entertainment.

Nichols has done the same thing in Catch-22 that he did in The Graduate. He's given us a funny beginning, then switched tones and gone serious. And then tacked on a Great Escape ending which answers none of the questions he's so painfully raised.

There's a freedom in his structure. This isn't a formal documentary, but as I mentioned, a meander.

The result is unconvincing and disorganized. Yes, there are some spectacular stunts and slick special effects sequences. Yes, Jones is right on the money, and Snipes makes a sympathetic fugitive. But it's the story that has to pull this train, and its derailment is about as definitive as the train crash in the earlier film.

One of the best-looking films ever made, in its photography, in its use of locations, in its recreation of the America that Woody Guthrie discovered.

Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music.

Starman contains the potential to be a very silly movie, but the two actors have so much sympathy for their characters that the movie, advertised as space fiction, turns into one of 1984's more touching love stories.

But if the movie were simply the story of this event, it would be no more than a sad record. What makes it more is the way it shows how racism breeds and feeds, and is taught by father to son.

The actors are attractive, the city is magnificent, the love scenes don't get all sweaty, and everybody finishes the summer a little wiser and with a lifetime of memories. What more could you ask?

This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I'm trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure.

What a simple and yet profound story this is.

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.

Stephen Fry brings a depth and gentleness to the role that says what can be said about Oscar Wilde: that he was a funny and gifted idealist in a society that valued hypocrisy above honesty.

The movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society.

The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time. It even undermines the charm of compound interest.

A beguiling film about words, secrets and tobacco.

There have been many good movies about gambling, but never one that so single-mindedly shows the gambler at his task.

It's always about more than boxing.

Unstrung Heroes has been directed by Diane Keaton with an unusual combination of sentiment and quirky eccentricity.

The result is one of the jollier comedies of the year, a movie so mainstream that you can almost watch it backing away from confrontation, a film aimed primarily at a middle-American heterosexual audience.

It is not a "dirty movie," and in fact takes spirituality and morality more seriously than most films do. And in the bad lieutenant, Keitel has given us one of the great screen performances in recent years.

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.

About Last Night... is a warmhearted and intelligent love story, and one of the year's best movies.

The Muppets are a wonderful creation, but they lose their special quality in "The Great Muppet Caper." They behave like clones of other popular kiddie superstars -- like the basic cartoon heroes they once seemed destined to replace.

Would it be heresy on my part to suggest that Fiddler isn't much as a musical, and that director Norman Jewison has made as good a film as can be made from a story that is quite simply boring?

One of the more thought-provoking sports movies I've seen.

No revival, however joyously promoted, can conceal the fact that this is just an average musical, pleasant and upbeat and plastic.

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.

Gremlins was hailed as another "E.T." It's not. It's in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it's a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Movie-going, it's a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don't go if you still believe in Santa Claus.

It's a superb film -- funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.

The actors are gifted at establishing character with just a few well-chosen strokes (as a short story writer must also be able to do). We learn as much about each of these women in half an hour as we learn about most movie characters in two hours.

A very angry film.

When the Looney Tunes trademark came on the screen at the kiddie matinee of long ago, the kiddies would cheer in unison because they knew they were going to have unmitigated fun. The Emperor's New Groove evokes the same kind of spirit.

And yet ... gee, the movie is charming, despite its exhausted wheeze of an ancient recycled plot idea.

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.

Who is this movie for? Not for most 13-year-olds, that's for sure. The R rating is richly deserved, no matter how much of a lark the poster promises. Maybe the film is simply for those who admire fine, focused acting and writing.

The poster art for A Thousand Words shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

Lohman in particular is effective; I learn to my astonishment that she's 24, but here she plays a 15-year-old with all the tentative love and sudden vulnerability that the role requires, when your dad is a whacko confidence man.

A clever thriller with a lot of unbelievable scenes and a sappy ending, but two wonderful performances.

It doesn't have that sneaky sense of awful things about to happen. Scott makes the hero so rational, normal and self-possessed that we never feel he's in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence.

The genius of The Krays, Peter Medak's new film about the most notorious villains of modern British crime, is that the movie is not simply a catalog of stabbings, garrotings and bloodletting. It goes deeper than into the twisted pathology of twins whose faces would light up with joy when their mom told them they looked just like proper gentlemen.

As loaded with special effects as "The Matrix,'' but they're on a different scale. Many of his best effects are gooey, indescribable organic things, and some of the most memorable scenes involve characters eating things that surgeons handle with gloves on.

A ground-level documentary, messy and immediate, about the daily life of a combat soldier in Iraq. It is not pro-war or anti-war.

Though I usually take pleasure in Almodovar's sexy darkness, this film induces queasiness.

They (the characters) approach the subjects of sex and romance with a naivete so staggering, it must be an embarrassment in the greater world. Inside their hermetically sealed complacency, I suppose it's a little exciting.

Camelot, then, is exactly what we were promised: ornate, visually beautiful, romantic and staged as the most lavish production in the history of the Hollywood musical. If that's what you like, you'll like it. I'll just crouch in the corner here and gnaw my haunch of beef and send the wench to fetch more ale.

Black Widow is an interesting movie struggling to escape from a fatal overload of commercial considerations.