Roger Ebert

This is a movie that knows it is absurd, and does little to deny it.

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.

The bottom line on a film like this is, Tom Cruise looks cool and holds our attention while doing neat things that we don't quite understand--doing them so quickly and with so much style that we put our questions on hold, and go with the flow.

Despite its visual restlessness and its dogs, Mondovino is a fascinating film.

There are a lot of moments to remember in The Golden Child, but the one I will treasure the longest happens when Eddie Murphy gets behind the wheel of a beat-up station wagon and is led by a sacred parakeet to the lair of the devil.

The movie's interest is not in the plot, which is episodic and "colorful," but in the performances.

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

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.

The Fox and the Hound is one of those relatively rare Disney animated features that contains a useful lesson for its younger audiences. It's not just cute animals and frightening adventures and a happy ending; it's also a rather thoughtful meditation on how society determines our behavior.

Management works as a sweet rom-com with some fairly big laughs.

This is an Imaginarium indeed. The best approach is to sit there and let it happen to you; see it in the moment and not with long-term memory, which seems to be what Parnassus does.

A film like this can end honestly in only one way, and Ku is true to it. Life will go on, one baffling day after another. There can be no release, only a gradual deadening.

The director, James Cameron, is a master of action (he worked with Schwarzenegger on "Terminator 2"), and when he's doing his thing, no one does it better.

Will kids like the movie? I suspect they will. Kids like to see other kids learning the rules even if they don't much want to learn them themselves.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff.

It's as slam-bang preposterous as any R-rated comedy you can name. It's just that Paul Blart and the film's other characters don't feel the need to use the f-word as the building block of every sentence.

Not a well-oiled enterprise but more of a series of laughs separated by waits for more laughs. It has a kind of earnest, eager quality, and it's so screwy you feel affection for it.

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

Basically aimed at audiences who want elaborate fight sequences and fidget at the dialogue in between. It's for the fans, not the crossover audience.

Most horror movies are exercises in unrelieved vulgarity, occasionally interrupted by perfunctory murders. This movie, to borrow an immortal comment by Mel Brooks, "rises below vulgarity." If you are sick up to here of horror movies in general and Steven King in particular, this is the movie for you.

This is not a great movie, but it's very watchable and has some good laughs. The casting of Aniston is crucial, because she's the heroine of this story, and the way it's put together there's danger of her becoming the shuttlecock. Aniston has the presence to pull it off.

The bedrock of the plot is the dogged determination of the Bruce Willis character. Jack may be middle-aged, he may be tired, he may be balding, he may be a drunk, but if he's played by Bruce Willis you don't want to bet against him.

An entertaining, clever black comedy that takes place entirely in Tarantino-land.

Doesn't require you to know anything about the band Metallica or heavy metal music, but it supplies a lot of information about various kinds of monsters.

The movie's story actually does work as a story and not simply as a wheezy Hollywood formula. Sometimes you walk into a movie with quiet dread and walk out with quiet delight.

This is the kind of movie you'll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It's not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through, but it announces Wong Kar-Wai, its Hong Kong-based director, as a filmmaker in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard.

An undemanding formula picture that's a lot of superficial fun and not much more.

Despite the elements I could have done without, the movie is often very funny, and a lot of the credit goes to Del Toro, who creates a slow-talking, lumbering character who's quite unlike his image in "Usual Suspects."

The way this unfolds is surprisingly engaging.

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

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

It has greatness in moments, and is denied greatness overall only because it is such a peculiar construction; watching it is like channel-surfing between a teen romance and a dark abysm of loss and grief.

Has laughs, thrills, wit and scary monsters, and is one of those goofy movies like "Critters" that kids itself and gets away with it.

The only problem is that the plot meanders when nobody is singing. If you're making the kind of movie where everybody in the audience knows for sure what's going to happen, it's best not to linger on the recycled bits.

Trouble With the Curve isn't a great sports film, like Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" (2004). But it's a superior entertainment, moving down somewhat predictable paths with an authenticity and humanity that appeals.

By the time Missing begins its crucial last half-hour, a strange thing has happened. We care about this dead American, and his wife and father, almost despite the movie. The performances of Spacek and Lemmon carry us along through the movie's undisciplined stylistic displays.

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

What redeems Virtuosity a little is that even at the end, even in the midst of the action cliches, it still finds surprises in the paradox of a villain that is also a program.

"Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails.

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.

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.

The movie is not plot-driven, for which we must be thankful, because to force their feelings into a plot would be a form of cruelty. The whole point is that these lives have no plot.

A consistently entertaining documentary bringing together a remarkable variety of surviving performances on films and records, going back to circa 1900.

I can imagine a broader comedy in which the situation might work. Remember Mrs. Robinson or Stifler's mom? But here there's a fugitive undercurrent of sincerity. Hello, I Must Be Going raises questions it doesn't have the answers for.

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

It is exciting to watch this movie. It is never boring. Lee is like a juggler who starts out with balls and gradually adds baseball bats, top hats and chainsaws. It's not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one.

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

The guests at the dinner are a strange lot. To describe them would be to give away their jokes, and one of the pleasures of the movie is having each one appear.

If someone could give you a pill that allowed you to live for 500 years, would you take it? Not me.

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.

A Saturday afternoon stop for the kiddies -- harmless, skillful and aimed at grade schoolers.

Cute, crude and good-hearted movie.

There are enough plots here to challenge a Robert Altman, specialist in interlocking stories, but the director, Bob Giraldi, masters the complexities as if he knows the territory. He does.

Brief, spare and heartbreaking.

If you're curious about why the demonstrators are so angry, this is why they're so angry.

The movie is kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place.

There are elements in the movie that make it worth seeing, and that set it aside from the routine movies in this genre.

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. It's harmless, simple-minded.

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.

You have to make some distinctions in your mind. In one category, "2001: A Space Odyssey" remains inviolate, one of the handful of true film masterpieces. In a more temporal sphere, "2010" qualifies as superior entertainment, a movie more at home with technique than poetry, with character than with mystery, a movie that explains too much and leaves too little to our sense of wonderment, but a good movie all the same.

A whimsical comedy, very whimsical, depending on the warmth of Segal and Sarandon, the discontent of Helms and Greer, and still more warmth that enters at midpoint with Carol (Rae Dawn Chong), Sarandon's co-worker at the office.

Always sweet and sometimes surprisingly touching.

His story is simple, unadorned, direct. Only the margins are complicated.

A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.

Preserves the flavor of the original and even improves upon it.

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige has just about everything I require in a movie about magicians, except ... the Prestige.

I have problems with Naqoyqatsi as a film, but as a music video it's rather remarkable.

A movie made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not condescend, not for a second.

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.

Filmed in the colors of newborn Technicolor, plotted as a tribute to the conventions of Hollywood romance, filled with standard songs, it's by and for people who love those kinds of movies. Others will find it cliched and predictable, but they won't understand.

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

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.

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

A brawny space opera, transplanting the conventions of Western, cop and martial arts films to the Red Planet.

I would be lying if I did not admit that this is all, in its absurd and overheated way, entertaining.

The film has its rewards and one performance of great passion. That would be by Ellen Burstyn, as Miss Addie, who plays it all in her sick bed in a Tennessee country mansion with a debutante party going on downstairs.

The plot exists to be disregarded, the characters are deliberately constructed of cardboard, the sight gags are idiotic, and the dialogue is dumb. Really dumb. So dumb you laugh twice, once because of how stupid it is, and the second time because you fell for it.

Cuts between a rich assortment of characters; it's like a low-rent, on-the-fly version of Robert Altman's "The Player" or "Short Cuts."

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

Even if the ending doesn't entirely succeed, it doesn't cheat, and it comes at the end of an uncommonly absorbing movie.

That it transcends this genre -- that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure -- is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.

The ending is a cheap shot. An inconclusive ending would have been better, and perhaps more honest. The movie and the ending have so little in common that it's as if the last scene is spliced in from a different film.

A lighthearted and goofy musical comedy about a love affair between an extraterrestrial and a manicurist.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

The movie consists of the journey, the conversations, the scenery, the little human stories. No big drama. No emergencies. Just carrying the mail, which over the years has supplied the threads to bind together all of these lives.

Movies like this do not grab you by the throat. You have to be receptive.

We walk into the theater expecting absolutely nothing of substance, and that's exactly what we get, served up with high style.

Science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is.

The movie is a little more lightweight than the usual People's Choice Award winner at Toronto, but why not? It was the best-liked film at the 2006 festival, and I can understand that.

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.

The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.

The movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it's over. Yet it proves Ben Wheatley not only knows how to make a movie, but he knows how to make three at the same time.

Claire Danes is as fresh as running water in this role, exhibiting the clarity and directness that has become her strength; her characters tend to know who they are, and why.

Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.

Like many thrillers that begin with an intriguing premise, Bad Influence is more fun in the setup than in the payoff. For at least the first hour, we are not quite sure what game Lowe is playing, and the full horror of his plan is only gradually revealed.

The formula is obvious, but the story, curiously, turns out to be based on fact.

As suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.

The movie is not a special effects extravaganza like "The Grinch," but in a way that's a relief. It's more about charm and silliness than about great hulking multimillion-dollar high-tech effects.

The movie is effective, well-acted and convincing.

It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive.

Chalk is not the kind of movie many people will appreciate at first viewing. You have to understand who Nilsson and his actors are, and give some thought to the style, to appreciate it.

The movie is essentially a morality play, and it's not a surprise to learn that Larry Cohen, the writer, came up with the idea 20 years ago--when there were still phone booths and morality plays.

I understood the general outlines of the story, I liked the bold strokes he uses to create the characters, and I was amused by the camera work, which includes a lot of shots that are about themselves.

Here is a perplexing and frustrating film, which works with great skill to involve our emotions, while at the same time making moral and racial assertions that are deeply troubling.

"How many bands stay together for 30 years?" asks Slash of Guns N' Roses, in a backstage interview. "You've got the Stones, the Who, U2 -- and Anvil." Yeah. And Anvil.

Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

The whole program could make a nice introduction to moviegoing for a small child.

Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare.

A video game crossed with a buddy movie, a bad cop-good cop movie, a Miami druglord movie, a chase movie and a comedy. It doesn't have a brain in its head, but it's made with skill and style and, boy, is it fast and furious.

Only a few sequels have been as good as the originals; the characters especially like "Aliens'' and "The Godfather, Part II.'' As for Scream 2, it's ... well, it's about as good as the original.

Masterson, like many actors, is an assured director even in her debut; working with her brother Pete as cinematographer, she creates a spell and a tenderness and pushes exactly as far as this story should go.

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.

It doesn't make the slightest effort to cater to conventional appetites. But the more you appreciate what they're trying to do, the more you like it.

A funny movie with its heart finally in the right place, but all sorts of unacknowledged complications lurk just beneath its polished surface.

There is very little comic invention in the idea for Doctor Detroit (the screenplay is Identikit sitcom), but there's a lot of invention in Aykroyd's performance.

This is a movie about the end of youth and high romance, about death and the possibility of simple human compassion.

The movie's screenplay is contrived and not blindingly original, but Barrymore illuminates it with sunniness, and creates a lovable character

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.

Robocop is a thriller with a difference.

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

Not as taut as it could have been, but I prefer its emotional perception to the pumped-up sports cliches I was sort of expecting.

Assuming that few members of SpongeBob's primary audience are reading this (or can read), all I can tell you is, the movie is likely to be more fun than you expect.

It seems to me that Campbell has a good case here--good enough, anyway, to convince the judges on the African court.

The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen.

Mammoth is a perfectly decent film. Too bad it isn't more thoughtful. It's easy to regret misfortune if all you do is regret it.

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."

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

This is a documentary about what happens to you when you appear in "Troll 2."

Works because the story is sympathetic to the feelings of the characters, observes them as individuals, is not concerned with the sensational aspects of their household but in the gradual way practical matters work themselves out.

Not very much really happens in Duck Season, but in its rich details, it remembers how absorbing and endless every single day can seem when you're 14.

The movie is funny and entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly undercurrents.

Deathtrap is a wonderful windup fiction machine with a few modest ambitions: It wants to mislead us at every turn, confound all our expectations, and provide at least one moment when we levitate from our seats and come down screaming.

The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.

Robert Redford has shown that he has a real feeling for the West--he's not a movie tourist--and there is a magnificence in his treatment here that dignifies what is essentially a soap opera.

Howard Stern has been accused of a lot of things, but he has never been accused of being dumb. With Private Parts, his surprisingly sweet new movie, he makes a canny career move: Here is radio's bad boy walking the finest of lines between enough and too much.

In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances.

Movies like this are more or less impervious to the depredations of movie critics. Either you laugh, or you don't. I laughed.

It's worth seeing for the acting, and it's got some good laughs in it, and New York is colorfully observed, but don't tell me this movie is about human nature, because it's not; it's about acting.

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.

A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.

I have a feeling the loss of their child and the state of their marriage were what most interested the backers of this film. They must have wanted to make a film about Darwin the man, not Darwin the scientist.

This is a hot modern martial art. Not only do the shots look convincing, not only are they held long enough to allow us to see an entire action, but Belle in real life does a version of this stuff.

It is not the film you think it is going to be. You walk in expecting some kind of North Beach weirdo and his wild-eyed parrot theories, and you walk out still feeling a little melancholy over the plight of Connor.

Lacks any formulas or solutions, and is content to show us its complicated characters, their tangled lives, and the way that our need to love and be loved can lead us in opposite directions.

It's remarkable, a war story told as a chess game where the loser not only dies, but goes by necessity to an unmarked grave.

Family Business tries to play it down the middle, when it probably should have jumped in one direction or the other, toward a pure caper or toward a family drama.

The film is warm and intriguing, and he (Valentin) is the engine that pulls us through it. We care about what happens to him; high praise.

The plot is a little of Fatal Attraction, a little of Jagged Edge and a little of Wall Street. It works because it's so audacious in combining elements that don't seem to belong together.

The Night They Raided Minsky's is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick extravaganza, but it isn't. It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in "Gypsy") and it really seems to understand this most-American art form.

Not as inspired as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" but in the same spirit. It's goofy fun. Or maybe we should make that daffy fun.

It is the craftsmanship that elevates One True Thing above the level of a soaper.

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

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky concerns a love affair between two irresistible forces who have never met an immovable object before.

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

Forget the plot. The movie is really about Steve and Terri taking us on a guided tour of the crocs, snakes, deadly insects and other stars of the outback fauna. Steve's act is simplicity itself.

The movie evokes that long-ago world carefully and with a certain poetry; it was shot in the Dominican Republic. There is a lot of music, much of it from the period and performed by the same musicians or their successors.

Nastassja Kinski, in one of her most affecting performances, does much to convey the turmoil going in her soul.

The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.

A sweetheart of a film, whimsical and touching. It positions itself somewhere between a slice of life and a screwball comedy.

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.

This is a slice-of-life movie, the kind that director Jonathan (Melvin and Howard) Demme is good at.

So it goes with the family in this movie. All of its members are engaged in a mutual process of shooting one another down. Watching Margot at the Wedding is like slowing for a gaper's block.

I enjoyed the film's look and feel, the perfectly modulated performances, and the whole tawdry world of spy and counterspy, which must be among the world's most dispiriting occupations. But I became increasingly aware that I didn't always follow all the allusions and connections. On that level, "Tinker Tailor" didn't work for me.

The movie works. It is food at last for we who hunger for a screwball comedy utterly lacking in redeeming social importance.

The more it builds, the more it grows on you.

What sets this film above so many movies about animals is that it's about a dog who is realistic in every aspect.

The heart of the movie is in the Spacey performance, and in knowing that less is more, he plays Prot absolutely matter-of-factly.

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.

A lovely film, but maddeningly complacent.

A big, slick melodrama that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish and does so with great craft.

What's a little startling about this movie is that all of this works. The Blues Brothers cost untold millions of dollars and kept threatening to grow completely out of control. But director John Landis (of “Animal House”) has somehow pulled it together, with a good deal of help from the strongly defined personalities of the title characters. Belushi and Aykroyd come over as hard-boiled city guys, total cynics with a world-view of sublime simplicity, and that all fits perfectly with the movie's other parts. There's even room, in the midst of the carnage and mayhem, for a surprising amount of grace, humor, and whimsy.

It's a screwball comedy. It's also, I have to say, a feel-good movie that made me smile a lot.

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

We're swept up in the story's need to find a happy ending.

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

Is this movie for the whole family to attend? No, it is a movie for small children and their parents or adult guardians, who will take them because they love them very much.

The movie gets credit for not making the high life seem colorful or funny. It is not. It is boring, because when the drugs are there they simply clear the pain and allow the mind to focus on getting more drugs.

The way to enjoy this film is to put your logic on hold, along with any higher sensitivities that might be vulnerable and immerse yourself as if in a video game.

The Andromeda Strain is a splendid entertainment that will get you worried about whether they'll be able to contain that strange blob of alien green crystal.

Bowie, slender, elegant, remote, evokes this alien so successfully that one could say, without irony, this was a role he was born to play.

I admired this movie. It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.

To laugh at parts of this film would indicate one has a streak of Woodcockism in oneself. But to gaze in stupefied fascination is perfectly understandable. That's what makes Thornton such a complex actor.

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.

The story itself doesn't matter much. We go to a classic John Wayne Western not to see anything new, but to see the old done again, done well, so that we can sink into the genre and feel confident we won't be betrayed.

Honest, observant, and subtle.

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

What is best in the film is its depiction of the warrior's epic journey, photographed with breathtaking beauty and simplicity by Roman Osin.

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

I liked the movie. I smiled a lot. It maintained its tone in the face of bountiful temptations to get easy laughs.

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

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

I was expecting Doc Hollywood to be a comedy. And it is a comedy. But it surprised me by also being a love story, and a pretty good one - the kind where the lovers are smart enough to know all the reasons why they shouldn't get together, but too much in love to care.

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.

What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course.

The stuff in outer space is unexpected, the surprise waiting out there is genuine, and meanwhile, there's an abundance of charm and screen presence from the four veteran actors.

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.

Hill doesn't really try to avoid the cliches in a story like this. He simply turns up the juice. Like his "Southern Comfort," "48 Hrs.," and "The Warriors," this is a movie that depends on style, not surprises. He doesn't want to make a different kind of movie; he wants to make a familiar story look better than we've seen it look recently. And yet there is a big surprise in Extreme Prejudice in the appearance and character of Nick Nolte.

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.

Has a freshness and charm, a winning way with its not terrifically original material.

What I liked most was its unforced, genuine affection for its characters.

There are few reasons you must see this movie, but absolutely none that you should not.

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.

Although the movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene, it has a sweetness that is impossible to discount, and it is often very funny.

I like the way the personalities are allowed to upstage the plot in Fighting, a routine three-act fight story that creates uncommonly interesting characters.

It has elements of sweet romance and elements of macabre humor, and divides its characters between the two.

There’s wit, rudeness, satire, lust and pathos, all effortlessly rolled up together. "Skin Deep" is sort of a filmmaker’s triathalon, and if Edwards doesn’t set any new records, he enters every event.

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.

The movie is above all entertaining, if you enjoy human grotesquerie and flamboyant acting. Let's face it: Many of us do. There's a reason Hannibal Lecter remains the most popular villain in the movies.

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

Branagh sets the pace just this side of a Marx Brothers movie.

Has the outer form of a brave statement about the races in America, but the soul of a sports movie in which everything is settled by the obligatory last play in the last seconds of the championship game.

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.

Planet of the Apes is much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don't get in the way. If you only condescend to see an adventure thriller on rare occasions, condescend this time. You have nothing to lower but your brow.

All of this is actually a lot of fun, if you like special effects and gore.

An absorbing experience.

Now here's this rich and textured film.

A surprisingly funny movie, the best of the 1970s recycling jobs, with one laugh ("Are you OK, little pony?") almost as funny as the moment in "Dumb and Dumber" when the kid figured out his parakeet's head was Scotch-taped on.

Filled with unexpected facts.

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

Despite its predictable philosophy, however, Nell is an effective film, and a moving one. That is largely because of the strange beauty of Jodie Foster's performance as Nell, and the warmth of the performance by Liam Neeson, as a doctor who finds himself somehow responsible for her.

This movie by its nature is not thrilling, but it is very genuinely interesting, and that is rare.

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.

A creepy documentary with all the elements of a horror film about a demented serial killer, and an extra ingredient: This one is real.

I'd rather August Rush went the whole way than just be lukewarm about it. Yes, some older viewers will groan, but I think up to a certain age, kids will buy it, and in imagining their response, I enjoyed my own.

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.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple; she's pretty and goes one-for-one on the bleep language, and Rogen, how can I say this, is growing on me, the big lug.

The Enforcer is the best of the Dirty Harry movies at striking a balance between the action and the humor. Sometimes in the previous films we felt uneasy laughing in between the bloodshed, but this time the movie's more thoughtfully constructed and paced.

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

The Laughing Policeman is an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances. It provides the special delight we get from gradually unraveling a complicated case.

Shoot this film in black and white and cast Barbara Stanwyck as Elena, and you'd have a 1940s classic.

Although it is not a great movie, it contains some moments when the audience is likely to think, yes, being 16 was exactly like that.

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.

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

This is a rip-snorting adventure fantasy for families, especially the younger members who are not insistent on continuity. Director Michael Apted may be too good for this material, but he attacks with gusto.

The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder their differences and complexities.

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.

It's an intimate performance portrait.

Not often have I been more certain of the direction a movie is heading, or more wrong. Littlerock, a sensitive indie feature by Mike Ott, plays fair. I was misled only by my own cynicism.

Shoot to Kill is fast-food moviemaking - quick, satisfying and transient.

Not a great movie, but it has moments that go off the meter and find visceral impact. The characters driving through the riot-torn streets of Los Angeles provide some of them, and the savage, self-hating irony of Russell's late dialogue provides the rest.

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

A rare item these days: An erotic film made well enough to keep us interested. It's about beautiful people, has a lot of nudity, and the sex is as explicit as possible this side of porno.

The film leads to no showy conclusion, no spectacular climax. It is about movement possible within the soul even in difficult times.

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

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

The result is not a movie that is very good, exactly, but it's entertaining and funny.

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

This a movie with such a light, stylish touch, it makes no claims to profundity and is a sweetly hopeful experience.

Although the narration is addressed to his wife, we learn little about her, his family or his personal life; he is used primarily as a guide through the milestones of the Congo's brief two-month experiment with democracy.

When those little mice bust a gut trying to drag that key up hundreds of stairs in order to free Cinderella, I don't care how many Kubrick pictures you've seen, it's still exciting.

The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina.

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.

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

This is the face of dysfunction. Apparently alcohol and drugs are not involved, except perhaps with some of the missing men. The drug here is despair. They seem to treat it with cigarettes.

This movie plays better than perhaps it should. Directed as a debut by Daniel Barber, it places story and character above manufactured "thrills" and works better.

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

Doesn't reach for reality; it's a deliberate attempt to look and feel like a 1940s social problems picture, right down to the texture of the color photography.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown steadily more repetitive and dreary, "LCTR:TCOL" uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of pulp adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies.

Watching the movie is an entertaining exercise in forensic viewing, and the insidious thing is, even if it is a con, who is the conner and who is the connee?

There are some nice, amusing scenes, especially when one of the dozen (Donald Sutherland) pretends to be a general and inspects some troops. In fact, right up to the last scene the movie is amusing, well paced, intelligent.

A jolly movie and I smiled pretty much all the way through, but it doesn't shift into high with a solid thunk the way "Bridget Jones' Diary" did.

Eight different characters, all played by Murphy, all convincing, each with its own personality. This is not just a stunt. It is some kind of brilliance.

As much parable and fantasy as it is realistic.

This one holds its flavor better than most.