Roger Ebert

Claire Denis, born in French Africa, is a director who seems drawn to stories about characters who want to build families out of unconventional elements. With Nenette et Boni, she makes a more delicate film. She feels affection for the characters, especially Boni, and is very familiar with them. Maybe that's why she feels free to tell the story so indirectly.

Movies like The Syrian Bride are not overtly political, but nibble around the edges, engaging our tendency to take a big political position and then undermine it with humanitarian exceptions.

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

I am gradually developing a suspicion, or perhaps it is a fear, that Jim Carrey is growing on me. Am I becoming a fan? In Liar Liar he works tirelessly, inundating us with manic comic energy.

Dead Calm generates genuine tension, because the story is so simple and the performances are so straightforward. This is not a gimmick film (unless you count the husband's method of escaping from the sinking ship), and Kidman and Zane do generate real, palpable hatred in their scenes together.

A movie filled with moments in which we recognize not movie stars, but ourselves.

It is done well, yet one is still surprised to find it done at all.

George Tillman says Soul Food is based in part on his own family, and I believe him, because he seems to know the characters so well; by the film's end, so do we.

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

How Stella Got Her Groove Back tries its best to turn a paperback romance into a relationship worth making a movie about, but fails.

His film is pro-Kerry, yes, but the focus is on history, not polemics, and provides a record of the crucial role of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The underlying secret of the four comedians is the way they find humor in daily life, and in their families. In this they're a lot like the Kings of Comedy.

This is essentially Renee Zellweger's picture, and she glows in it.

Brian De Palma’s Sisters was made more or less consciously as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, but it has a life of its own and it’s a neat little mystery picture.

Lethal Weapon 2 is that rarity - a sequel with most of the same qualities as the original. I walked into the movie with a certain dread. But this is a film with the same off-center invention and wild energy as the original.

What she hasn't done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel's passages, particularly from the later chapters, it's dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted. I suppose life on an isolated moor was like that at the time, but do we need this much atmosphere?

21 Grams tells such a tormenting story that it just about survives its style. It would have been more powerful in chronological order, and even as a puzzle, it has a deep effect.

What I enjoyed was the way the film summons up the pure obsessive passion that chess stirs in some people.

Harrelson is an ideal actor for the role. Especially in tensely wound-up movies like this, he implies that he's looking at everything and then watching himself looking.

It's refreshing, this late in the summer, to find a hot weather comedy that doesn't hate its characters and embed them in scatology and sexual impossibilities.

This is a wonderful formula. I love it. The Poseidon Adventure is the kind of movie you know is going to be awful, and yet somehow you gotta see it, right?

LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' is to "In the Company of Men'' as Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction'' was to "Reservoir Dogs.'' In both cases, the second film reveals the full scope of the talent, and the director, given greater resources, paints what he earlier sketched.

One of the movie's intriguing qualities is that its horrors take place within a world that is not as cruel and painful as we know it could be.

The film is astonishing in its visual beauty; cinematographer Greig Fraser ("Snow White and the Huntsman") finds nobility in this arduous journey.

Despite the rather washed-out color photography it's very much worth seeing.

City Slickers comes packaged as one kind of movie - a slapstick comedy about white-collar guys on a dude ranch - and it delivers on that level while surprising me by being much more ambitious, and successful, than I expected. This is the proverbial comedy with the heart of truth, the tear in the eye along with the belly laugh. It's funny, and it adds up to something.

The movie is as light and frothy as a French comedy, which is what it is, a reminder that Cedric Klapisch also directed "When the Cat's Away" (1996).

Within the limitations of his bare-bones production, Smith shows great invention, a natural feel for human comedy, and a knack for writing weird, sometimes brilliant, dialogue.

Robocop is a thriller with a difference.

Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and Cat's Eye is one of his most effective films.

Lady in White tells a classic ghost story in such an everyday way that the ghost is almost believable, and the story is actually scarier than it might have been with a more gruesome approach.

Told with the simplicity and beauty of a child's fairy tale, but with emotional undertones and a surrealistic style that adults are more likely to appreciate.

I enjoyed this film so much I'm sorry to report it was finally too much of a muchness. You can only eat so much cake.

The movie belongs to Finney, but mention must be made of Jacqueline Bisset as his wife and Anthony Andrews as his half-brother. Their treatment of the consul is interesting. They understand him well.

One aspect of the film is befuddling. Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) is a popular blogger with conspiracy theories about the government's ties with drug companies. His concerns are ominous but unfocused. Does he think drug companies encourage viruses? The blogger subplot doesn't interact clearly with the main story lines and functions mostly as an alarming but vague distraction.

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

About two men who both wanted to be dominant, who both had all the answers, who were inseparably bound together in love and hate, and who created extraordinary work--while all the time each resented the other's contribution.

Despite its flaws, Pieces of April has a lot of joy and quirkiness; it's well-intentioned in its screwy way, with flashes of human insight, and actors who can take a moment and make it glow.

Jim Braddock is almost transparent in the simple goodness of his character; that must have made him almost impossible to play. Russell Crowe makes him fascinating, and it takes a moment of two of thought to appreciate how difficult that must have been.

A demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze style, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that's defiantly uncouth.

The most fascinating scenes in Waking Sleeping Beauty involve the infamous Disney work ethic. Friends of mine at the studio said the unofficial motto was, "If you didn't come in on Saturday, don't even bother to come in on Sunday."

A special movie - not just a police thriller, but a movie that has researched gangs and given some thought to what it wants to say about them.

[Benton's] memories provide the material for a wonderful movie, and he has made it, but unfortunately he hasn't stopped at that. He has gone on to include too much. He tells a central story of great power, and then keeps leaving it to catch us up with minor characters we never care about.

For all its absurdity Cronos generates a real moral conviction.

Although the movie seems happiest when it is retailing potential scandal, its heart is not in sex but in business, and the central value in the film is the work ethic.

It accomplishes an amazing thing. It explains the national debt, the foreign trade deficit, the decrease in personal savings, how the prime interest rate works, and the weakness of our leaders.

Farewell, My Lovely is a great entertainment and a celebration of Robert Mitchum's absolute originality.

Cedar Rapids has something of the same spirit of "Fargo" in its approach to the earnest natures of its small-towners.

Many of the scenes in No Country for Old Men are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo." To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another.

Begins and ends with facts of war, but it is really a film about the nature of male and female, about middle-class values and those who cannot afford them, about how helpless we can be when the net of society is broken.

What's fun is the carefree way the animators swing through their story, using the freedom of the cartoon form to blend 19th century realism with images that seem borrowed from more recent special-effects pictures.

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.

How this all finally works out is deeply satisfying. Only after the movie is over do you realize what a balancing act it was, what risks it took, what rewards it contains. A character says at one point that she has grown to like Bianca. So, heaven help us, have we.

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

A film like this would have little chance without the right casting, and James Rolleston is so right as Boy, it's difficult to imagine anyone else.

The movie contains many of the usual ingredients of teenage suburban angst tragicomedies, but writer-director Mike Mills, who began with a novel by Walter Kirn, uses actors who can riff.

I get letters from people who would like to make a movie. My advice could be, find a subject like Speed Levitch and follow him around with a video camera. That's what Bennett Miller did--directing, producing and photographing The Cruise.

A big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s (Tarantino) the real thing, a director of quixotic delights.

You cannot do in real life most of the things the characters in these movies do, because of the unfortunate restrictions imposed by Newton's Laws, but what the heck: It's fun to watch.

This is a good movie, from a masterful novel.

The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience.

No one is better at this kind of performance than Nicolas Cage. He's a fearless actor. He doesn't care if you think he goes over the top. If a film calls for it, he will crawl to the top hand over hand with bleeding fingernails.

The photography and sound here are very effective in establishing that a train is an enormously heavy thing, and once in motion wants to continue. We knew that. But Scott all but crushes us with the weight of the juggernaut. We are spellbound.

This is a great-looking movie, much enlivened by the inspiration of giving Merida three small brothers, little redheaded triplets.

I enjoyed Ashes of Time Redux, up to a point. It's great-looking, and the characters all know what they would, although we do not.

This film is so good it is devastating.

This is not a particularly memorable film, but Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves.

The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.

The De-Dee character subverts those expectations; she shoots the legs out from under the movie with perfectly timed zingers.

Berg was the pioneer for an indie TV entrepreneur like Lucille Ball.

Body Double is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely. The movie is so cleverly constructed, with the emphasis on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, that we are neither faster nor slower than the hero as he gradually figures out the scheme that has entrapped him.

The costumes and everything else in the film--the photography, the music, above all Shakespeare's language--is so voluptuous, so sensuous.

What comes across is that she is, after all, a very good editor.

I Went Down is a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else. It takes the form of a road movie and the materials of gangster movies (do real gangsters learn how to act by watching movies?), but what happens is beside the point. It's what they say while it's happening that makes the movie so entertaining.

The acting is on the money, the writing has substance, the direction knows when to evoke film noir and when (in a trick shot involving loaded dice) to get fancy.

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.

Problem is, it's so laid-back it eventually gets monotonous. If the style and pacing had been as outrageous as the subject matter, we might have had something really amazing here.

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

Not a conventional documentary about quantum physics. It's more like a collision in the editing room between talking heads, an impenetrable human parable and a hallucinogenic animated cartoon.

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

Some of the film's more thought-provoking scenes involves games played at Chicago's Near North Elementary. The players are obviously emulating pro games they've seen on TV. It's not a "game" for them. They go for hard hits.

The movie resembles Mad magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" series, elevated to labyrinthine levels of complexity.

But what's most visible in the movie is the engaging acting. Murphy and Aykroyd are perfect foils for each other.

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

A Shock to the System confounds our expectations and keeps us intrigued, because there's no way to know, not even in the very last moments, exactly which way the plot is going to fall.

Because the film marches so inexorably toward its conclusion, it would be unfair to hint at what happens, except to say that it provides a heartbreaking insight into the way that fear creates cowards.

It's interesting that two of the best thrillers of the last several months, "Tell No One" and Just Another Love Story, have come from Europe. Both movies gain because they star actors unfamiliar to us.

There's always rationing in wartime. What's rationed in Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime are feelings of hope, kindness and optimism.

Dumb as they (allegedly) are, the characters in Small Time Crooks are smarter, edgier and more original than the dreary crowd in so many new comedies.

Not a very entertaining movie; it's a long slog unless you're fascinated by the undercurrents.

As for myself, as Leticia rejoined Hank in the last shot of the movie, I was thinking about her as deeply and urgently as about any movie character I can remember.

A key part of AA was anonymity: "Who you see here, what you say here, let it stay here." Bill Wilson himself was not anonymous - that horse was already out of the barn - and his fame was such that Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential men of the century. Told he should be on a postage stamp, he said: "They'd have to show the back of my head."

In its warmth and in its enchantment, as well as in its laughs, this is the best comedy in a long time.

There is mostly sadness and regret at the surface in 4 Little Girls, but there is anger in the depths, as there should be.

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

Out of Africa is a great movie to look at, breathtakingly filmed on location. It is a movie with the courage to be about complex, sweeping emotions, and to use the star power of its actors without apology.

A film peculiar beyond all understanding, based on a premise that begs belief. It takes itself with agonizing seriousness, and although it has the form of a parable, I am at a loss to guess its meaning. Yet I was drawn hypnotically into the weirdness.

Stakeout is an example of a movie that would have been a lot better if the filmmakers had been prepared to trust the human dimensions of their characters - to follow these people where their personalities led. Instead, Badham takes out an insurance policy by adding the assembly-line violence.

When I see these six together, I can't help thinking of the champions at the Westminster Dog Show. You have breeds that seem completely different from one another (Labradors, poodles, boxers, Dalmatians), and yet they're all champions.

This is a sweet, bittersweet comedy, well-executed if perhaps a little heavy on anecdotage. You know who might have made it in the old days? I kept thinking of Woody Allen. You don't know what you want. Woody knows what you want.

Poltergeist is an effective thriller, not so much because of the special effects, as because Hooper and Spielberg have tried to see the movie's strange events through the eyes of the family members, instead of just standing back and letting the special effects overwhelm the cast along with the audience.

A black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and the Coens themselves...an assured piece of comic filmmaking.

One of those films where you don't know whether to laugh or cringe, and find yourself doing both. It's a challenge: How do we respond to this loaded material?

After months and months of comedies that did not make me laugh, here at last is one that did.

So Paine's 2006 doc has a happy sequel. His film is just as polished and good-looking as his first one, gives us a good look at automakers we like, and is entertaining. But the first film was charged with drama. "Revenge" is somewhat anticlimactically charged with a wall plug.

Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle works so well because Eddie is played by Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum has perhaps never been better.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

I'm not sure the movie should have pumped up the melodrama to get us more interested, but something might have helped.

In today's political climate, this movie and its people all seem to come from a very long time ago.

If the film had been less extreme in the adventures of its heroes, more willing to settle for plausible forms of rebellion, that might have worked. It tries too hard, and overreaches the logic of its own world.

John Trank's Chronicle grows into an uncommonly entertaining movie that involves elements of a superhero origin story, a science-fic­tion fantasy and a drama about a disturbed teenager.

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.

I was confused sometimes during Baron Munchausen and bored sometimes, but this is a vast and commodious work, and even allowing for the unsuccessful passages there is a lot here to treasure.

Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales is a strange and daring Western that brings together two of the genre's usually incompatible story lines. On the one hand, it's about a loner, a man of action and few words, who turns his back on civilization and lights out for the Indian nations. On the other hand, it's about a group of people heading West who meet along the trail and cast their destinies together. What happens next is supposed to be against the rules in Westerns, as if Jeremiah Johnson were crossed with Stagecoach: Eastwood, the loner, becomes the group's leader and father figure.

So, yes, it's soppy and manipulative and mushy. But that train looks real enough to ride.

Yes, it has some big laughs, and yes, some of the special effects are fun, but the movie has too many gremlins and not enough story line.

It doesn't have the little in-jokes that make "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." fun for grown-ups. But adults who appreciate the art of animation may enjoy the look of the picture.

This is in many ways his most revealing film, his most painful, and if it also contains more than his usual quotient of big laughs, what was it the man said? "We laugh, that we may not cry."

The third act departs from Chekhov and is original with Miller; it not only makes a nicely ironic point, but, because he takes his time with it, allows for a meditation on the distance between art and life.

The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.

By the end of the film the 1949 film noir sources are plainly in view, but earlier, Soderbergh seems more interested in personality quirks than double-crosses, and those are the more interesting scenes.

It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood.

A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin - not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.

She is also, we sense, a woman of great generosity of spirit, and a TV natural: The star she most reminds me of is Lucille Ball.

A documentary about a town of 33,000 so consumed by football it makes South Bend and Green Bay look distracted.

Sayles' film moves among a large population of characters with grace, humor and a forgiving irony.

O Brother contains sequences that are wonderful in themselves--lovely short films--but the movie never really shapes itself into a whole.

Gena Rowlands plays the role at perfect pitch: She is able to suggest, even in the midst of seemingly ordinary moments, the controlled panic of a person who needs a drink, right here, right now.

By far the best of the mid-1970s wave of disaster films.

Douglas plays Ben as charismatic, he plays him shameless, he plays him as brave, and very gradually, he learns to play him as himself. That's the only role left.

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

You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.

Children should not be allowed within a mile of this film, but it will appeal to "Jackass" fans and other devotees of the joyously ignorant.

Wants to make larger points, but succeeds only in being a story of derangement.

What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.

Little Voice is unthinkable without the special and unexpected talent of its star.

Someone like Petey Greene made a difference and made a mark, and broadcasting is better because of his transparent honesty. He helped transform African-American stations more, probably, than their mostly white owners desired. And talk talents like Howard Stern, whether they know who he was, owe him something.

You might be tempted to think that Arthur would be a bore, because it is about a drunk who is always trying to tell you stories. You would be right if Arthur were a party and you were attending it. But Arthur is a movie. And so its drunk, unlike real drunks, is more entertaining, more witty, more human, and more poignant than you are. He embodies, in fact, all the wonderful human qualities that drunks fondly, mistakenly believe the booze brings out in them.

The movie is brave to raise the questions it does, although at the end I looked in vain for a credit saying, "No extras were underpaid in the making of this film."

As a drama about the ravages of mental illness, the movie works; too bad most of the critics read it only as a romantic soap opera in which the hero is an obsessive sap. They read the signs but miss the diagnosis.

It's a portrait of a time and place, characters keeping company around a simple kitchen table, and the helplessness adolescents feel when faced with the priorities of those in power. What I'll take away from it is the knowledge that now the Fannings have given us two actresses of such potential.

What Raising Arizona needs more than anything else is more velocity. Here's a movie that stretches out every moment for more than it's worth, until even the moments of inspiration seem forced.

The point is not really what is said, but the tone of voice, the word choices, the conversational strategies, the sense of life going on all the time, everywhere, all over town.

The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.

A sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller.

The film is too confusing to be successful, but too striking and visually beautiful to be ignored.

One of the pleasures of 21 Jump Street is that the screenplay by Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill is happy to point out all of its improbabilities; the premise is preposterous to begin with, and they run with that.

It never really pulls itself together into the convincing, focused drama it promises, yet it kept me involved right up until the final scenes, which piled on developments almost recklessly.

After seeing Kinyarwanda, I have a different kind of feeling about the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The film approaches it not as a story line but as a series of intense personal moments.

A powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.

What's effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture.

A lot of rock stars and other showbiz heroes have the notion that because they’re successful in other areas, they can direct a movie, too. Usually they’re wrong. But Mellencamp turns out to have a real filmmaking gift.

This premise is well-established because of a disturbingly good performance by Daryl Sabara as Kyle, the disgusting son.

Circle of Friends is heartwarming and poignant, a love story that glows with intelligence and feeling.

Although the actors are convincing and the film well-crafted, The Company Men delivers few satisfactory character portraits because the movie isn't really about characters, it's about economic units.

An energetic and eccentric animated cartoon.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through "Flight of the Bumble Bee" -- or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for "Lady of Spain."

A warm human comedy.

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

Death of a Gunfighter is quite an extraordinary western. It's one of those rare attempts (the last was Will Penny) to populate the West with real people living in real historical time.

Some of the stories are pretty good, especially Charles Burns' tale involving a nasty and vaguely humanoid insect that burrows under the skin.

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.

Performance is a bizarre, disconnected attempt to link the inhabitants of two kinds of London underworlds: pop stars and gangsters. It isn’t altogether successful, largely because it tries too hard and doesn’t pace itself to let its effects sink in.

It is easy to analyze the mechanism, but more difficult to explain why this film is so deeply moving.

A raw, wounding, powerfully acted film, and you cannot look away from it.

Its best scenes come as the characters are established and get to know one another. Sharif at 71 still has the fire in his eyes that we remember from "Lawrence of Arabia," and is still a handsome presence.

This is one of the best movies of the year.

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

This is a remarkable film about a strange and prophetic man. What does it tell us? Did living a virtual life destroy him?

This is a well-made film, with plausible performances by all the leads, especially Ann Dowd.

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

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

When a movie does have a lot to say – as, for example, “Nashville” did – it’s a relief when the director finds a way to say it through the characters, instead of to them. Still, “Swept Away” is an absorbing movie, it tells a story we get involved in and (despite all I’ve said) it’s often very funny.

While so many films about coming of age involve manufactured dilemmas, here is one about a woman who indeed does come of age, and magnificently.

Gloria is tough, sweet and goofy.

After "Monster," here is another extraordinary role from an actress [Theron] who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men.

Bullhead contains the elements for a simple but overwhelming personal tragedy. It also contains other elements that create a muddle. It's one of those films you have to reconstruct in your mind.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club is, quite simply, a wonderful movie. It has the confidence and momentum of a movie where every shot was premeditated -- and even if we know that wasn't the case, and this was one of the most troubled productions in recent movie history, what difference does that make when the result is so entertaining?

Like Crazy is a well-made film. The scenes showing Jacob and Anna falling in love have a freshness, and I learn Doremus handed his actors an outline and together they improvised every scene. Some of the whispered endearments under the sheets are delightful.

An effective entertainment, and Jennifer Lawrence is strong and convincing in the central role. But the film leapfrogs obvious questions in its path, and avoids the opportunities sci-fi provides for social criticism.

Wise and subtle in the way it presents its older man. A less interesting movie would make him lustful and self-deceiving, a man who believes his is the secret of eternal youth and virility.

Brilliant and heartbreaking, takes place in the present but is timeless.

Amazing in what it shows, but underwhelming in what it does with it.

The plot unfolds with the gradual richness of something by Eric Rohmer, who has the whole canvas in view from the beginning but uncovers it a square inch at a time. By the end of Jump Tomorrow I was awfully fond of the picture.

Watching The American President, I felt respect for the craft that went into it: the flawless re-creation of the physical world of the White House, the smart and accurate dialogue, the manipulation of the love story to tug our heartstrings.

A documentary with privileged access to the legendary designer in his studio, workshop, backstage, his homes, even aboard his yacht and private jet.

An uncommon comedy that is fairly serious most of the time.

The plot to this point could be the stuff of soap opera, but there's always something askew in an Alan Rudolph film, unexpected notes and touches that maintain a certain ironic distance while permitting painful flashes of human nature to burst through.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

It is more of a wonderment, lolling in its enchanting images--original, delightful and funny.

It's an effective film, livened with animated rats, never boring.

An action epic with the spirit of the Hollywood swordplay classics and the grungy ferocity of "The Road Warrior."

The key to the film is in the performances by Spall and Stevenson -- and by Marsan. The utter averageness of the characters, their lack of insight, their normality, contrasts with the subject matter in an unsettling way.

Despite its flaws, despite its gaps, despite two key scenes that are dreadfully wrong, Shoot the Moon contains a raw emotional power of the sort we rarely see in domestic dramas.

The strength of the movie, however formulaic its structure, is that it is slightly more thoughtful about its characters. It's not deep, mind you, but it considers their problems as more than fodder for comedy.

Sayles has started with a domestic comedy, and led us unswervingly into the heart of darkness.

One of the best police movies in recent years, a virtuoso fusion of performances and often startling action.

The chemistry between Martin and Caine is fun, and Headly provides a resilient foil as a woman who looks like a pushover but somehow never seems to topple.

There's little effort at psychological depth, and the characters float along on the requirements of comedy. But it's sweet comedy, knowing about human nature, and Deneuve and Depardieu, who bring so much history to the screen, seem to create it by their very natures.

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

The memory of the Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster performances in "Gunfight" haunts the sequel like a ghost, but Hour of the Gun pretty much manages to stand on its own.

Eric Bana's performance suggests he will soon be leaving the comedy clubs of Australia and turning up as a Bond villain or a madman in a special-effects picture. He has a quality no acting school can teach and few actors can match: You cannot look away from him.

It evokes Saturday afternoon serials in an age when most of the audience will never have seen one. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself.

It is a great performance by Danny Glover, the portrait of a proud man who discovers his pride was entrusted to the wrong things.

This is one of Anthony Hopkins' most endearing, least showy performances.

What I've come away with is a notion of a land which, despite its crushing problems, has produced a population that seems extraordinarily radiant.

Filled with abundant evidence of Goodman as a public intellectual, assembled by its director Jonathan Lee, who believes the time is here for a rediscovery of his ideas.

I laughed, yes, I did, several times during Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That's proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity.

You watch, you are absorbed, and from scene to scene, Henry Fool seems to be adding up, but then your hand closes on air. I am left unsure of my response - of any response.

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care.

As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a masterful film.

In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.v

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story.

This movie does not describe the America I learned about in civics class, or think of when I pledge allegiance to the flag. Yet I know I will get the usual e-mails accusing me of partisanship, bias, only telling one side, etc. What is the other side? See this movie, and you tell me.

Setting entirely aside the accuracy of the film, the IRA still has him marked for death, and indeed there was an attempt on his life in Canada 10 years after he fled. He’s still out there somewhere.

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

The movie doesn't know how odd it seems to cut from the bloodshed in the ring to the dialogue of the supporting players, who still think they're in a comedy.

The film, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, is pitched pretty firmly at that level of ambition: Broadly drawn characters, quick one-liners, squabbling family members, lots of sex.

It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle.

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

The problem is that the film is at such pains to make its points that it doesn't trust us to find our own connections.

A comedy, but a peculiar one. Peculiar, because it never quite addresses the self-deception which causes Christiane to support the communist regime in the first place.

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.

Falling Down does a good job of representing a real feeling in our society today. It would be a shame if it is seen only on a superficial level.

The actors, as sometimes happens, create those miracles that can endow a film with conviction. Moadi and Hatami, as husband and wife, succeed in convincing us their characters are acting from genuine motives.

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

This is exactly the sort of plot Marx or Fields could have appeared in. Dangerfield brings it something they might also have brought along: a certain pathos. Beneath his loud manner, under his studied obnoxiousness, there is a real need. He laughs that he may not cry.

Other pleasures: The wicked trick used to smuggle Connery into the locked car with the gold; the chase scene on top of the train; and, of course, the exquisite presence of Down, who has a bedroom scene with Connery that makes James Bond look curiously like Sherlock Holmes.

Blake Edwards's "10" is perhaps the first comedy about terminal yearning. Like all great comedies, it deals with emotions very close to our hearts: In this case, the unutterable poignance of a man's desire for a woman he cannot have.

After I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It's that good a movie.

All of Me shares with a lot of great screwball comedies a very simple approach: Use absolute logic in dealing with the absurd. Begin with a nutty situation, establish the rules, and follow them. The laughs happen when ordinary human nature comes into conflict with ridiculous developments.

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

The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making plot points.

Documents what threatens to become an irreversible decline in aquatic populations within 40 years.

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

Every good actor has a season when he comes into his own, and this is Terrence Howard's time.

Civil Action is like John Grisham for grownups.

Poetic in its sadness, and Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again.

It may be that a relationship like the one here between Rosalba and Fernando is impossible in real life. All the more reason for this movie.

Although playing a hockey coach might seem like a slap shot for an actor, Russell does real acting here. He has thought about Brooks and internalized him.

This is a grand, confident entertainment, sure of the power of Adjani, Depardieu and the others, and sure of itself.

A skillful action movie about a plot that exists only to support a skillful action movie. The entire story is a set-up for the martial arts and chases. Because they are done well, because the movie is well-crafted and acted, we give it a pass. Too bad it's not about something.

There is a lot of truth in this portrait of a marriage running out of the will to survive.

Off the Map is visually beautiful as a portrait of lives in the middle of emptiness, but it's not about the New Mexico scenery. It's about feelings that shift among people who are good enough, curious enough or just maybe tired enough to let that happen.

One thing I like about the film is the way it teasingly introduces elements that, in other films, would lead to big dramatic formulas, and then sidesteps them.

True Confessions contains scenes that are just about as good as scenes can be. Then why does the movie leave us disoriented and disappointed, and why does the ending fail dismally? Perhaps because the attentions of the filmmakers were concentrated so fiercely on individual moments that nobody ever stood back to ask what the story was about.

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

Oh, God! is lighthearted, satirical, and humorous and (that rarest of qualities) in good taste.

The movie tells us nothing we haven't heard before.

On Golden Pond is a treasure for many reasons, but the best one, I think, is that I could believe it. I could believe in its major characters and their relationships, and in the things they felt for one another, and there were moments when the movie was witness to human growth and change. I left the theater feeling good and warm, and with a certain resolve to try to mend my own relationships and learn to start listening better.

You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it.

Sophie's Choice is a fine, absorbing, wonderfully acted, heartbreaking movie.

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

The movie has its pleasures, although human intelligence is not one of them. Caesar, to begin with, is a wonderfully executed character, a product of special effects and a motion-capture performance by Andy Serkis, who earlier gave us Gollum in "Lord of the Rings."

If you have ever wondered what kind of person volunteers to become a human bomb, and what they think about in the days before their death, this film wonders, too.

Sarandon and Davis find in Callie Khouri’s script the materials for two plausible, convincing, lovable characters. And as actors they work together like a high-wire team, walking across even the most hazardous scenes without putting a foot wrong.

Luke Ford's performance as Charlie is a convincing tour de force. You may recall him as Brendan Fraser's heroic son in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." Rhys Wakefield, in his first feature role, is a good casting decision, suggesting inner turmoil without overacting.

Timecrimes is like a temporal chess game with nudity, voyeurism and violence, which makes it more boring than most chess games but less boring than a lot of movies.

The middle 100 minutes of the movie are charming and moving and surprisingly interesting.

The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.

My Cousin Vinny is a movie that meanders along going nowhere in particular, and then lightning strikes. I didn't get much involved in it, and yet individual moments and some of the performances were very funny. It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.

Perhaps in the next generation a mutant will appear named Scribbler, who can write a better screenplay for them.

Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.

This is the best DiCillo movie I've seen, and he's made some good ones ("Box of Moonlight," "The Real Blonde").

Stripes is an anarchic slob movie, a celebration of all that is irreverent, reckless, foolhardy, undisciplined, and occasionally scatological. It's a lot of fun.

An ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary.

All of this makes an interesting, if not gripping, film about the play, the playwright and the lead-up work to a stage production. It also leaves me wanting a great deal more.

Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

This is one of those curious films before which the viewer is struck dumb. To describe it is to question and praise it - at one and the same time. I enjoyed the time I spent with Moretti, much as I might enjoy sitting next to an interesting stranger on an airplane, and hearing about his life.

This curious idea for a movie actually works.

Rich with characters and flowing with music.

A confused and sometimes overwrought new treatment of the director's most obsessive theme, suicide.

I now believe in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was one of many who somehow absorbed the notion that it was an imaginary illness. I am ashamed of myself.

The first movie I’ve seen about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The director, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, often uses a subjective camera to show the commonplace world melting into bewildering patterns and meanings.

Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of Night on Earth creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as Mystery Train, his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits' music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It's as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them.

A tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that's about four times as good as you'd expect.

The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten during Hackman's one-man show, and it's a flaw the movie doesn't overcome.

The movie is bright, the dialogue has wit and intelligence, and Roberts and Grant are very easy to like. By the end, as much as we're aware of the ancient story machinery groaning away below deck, we're smiling.

I enjoyed the film very much. It was a visceral pleasure to see a hard-boiled guy like David Carr at its center.

The flight sequence and many of the other action scenes in this new Disney animated feature create an exhilaration and freedom that are liberating. And the rest of the story is fun, too.

In a movie with the energy of this one, we're exhilarated by the sheer freedom of movement; the violence becomes surrealistic and less important than the movie's underlying energy level.

Weirdly intriguing.

But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.

I don't much care if the battles aren't that amazing, because the story doesn't depend on them. It's about a sacrifice made by Spock, and it draws on the sentiment and audience identification developed over the years by the TV series.

Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective.

Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.

Here is another Western in the classical tradition.

The movie is uncommonly absorbing.

El Crimen Perfecto has energy, color, spirit and lively performances, but what it does not have are very many laughs.

Grips the attention and is exciting and involving. I recommend it on that basis--and also because of the new information it contains.

This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

What makes Never Say Never Again more fun than most of the Bonds is more complex than that. For one thing, there's more of a human element in the movie, and it comes from Klaus Maria Brandauer, as Largo. Brandauer is a wonderful actor, and he chooses not to play the villain as a cliché. Instead, he brings a certain poignancy and charm to Largo, and since Connery always has been a particularly human James Bond, the emotional stakes are more convincing this time.

The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.

Together [Christopher Eccleston, Rachel Griffiths and Kate Winslet] stake a difficult story and make it into a haunting film.