Roger Ebert

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

The scenes involving the dragon are first-rate. The beast is one of the meanest, ugliest, most reprehensible creatures I've ever seen in a film, and when it breathes flames it looks like it's really breathing flames.

This story is told by writer-director Im Sang-soo with cool, elegant cinematography and sinuous visual movements. The dominant mood is gothic, with the persistent sadomasochistic undertones that seem inescapable in so much Korean cinema.

It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful.

What the film is really about is social embarrassment, and Bleistein's clear-headed, calm understanding that his old friend has a stupid daughter who has caused fraudulent trouble for a great many people.

Four Lions is impossible to categorize. It's an exceedingly dark comedy, a wicked satire, a thriller where the thrills center on the incompetence of the villains.

This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

The film's primary effect is on the senses. Everything is brought together into a disturbing foreshadow of dreadful secrets.

It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.

Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

Once is the kind of film I've been pestered about ever since I started reviewing again. People couldn't quite describe it, but they said I had to see it. I had to. Well, I did. They were right.

Here we have an odd cross between a fairy tale and a high-tech action movie. It could have been a fairly strained attempt at either, but director Joe Wright ("Atonement") combines his two genres into a stylish exercise that perversely includes some sentiment and insight.

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

What happens would not make sense in many households, but in this one, it represents a certain continuity, and confirms deep currents we sensed almost from the first.

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.

Lee has a wealth of material here, and the film tumbles through it with exuberance.

Bob Byington directs with an exact sense of what he wants; consider the perfect timing of his use of Harmony's mom (Margie Beegle). How she says "don't ask me" and "leave me out of it" is unreasonably funny.

The three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and -- wow! -- Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

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

Dillon has the kind of acting intelligence that allows him to play each scene for no more than that particular scene is really about; he's not trying to summarize the message in every speech. That gives him an ease, an ability to play the teenage hero as if every day were a whole summer long.

I call the movie a thriller, even though the outcome is known, because it plays like one: We may know that the world doesn't end, but the players in this drama don't, and it is easy to identify with them.

If Cameron wants to be a pioneer instead of a retro hobbyist, he should obviously use Maxivision 48, which provides a picture of such startling clarity that it appears to be 3-D in the sense that the screen seems to open a transparent window on reality. Ghosts of the Abyss would have been incomparably more powerful in the process.

Unlike any other film I have seen about the Holocaust.

Interiors becomes serious by intently observing complex adults as they fend and cope, blame and justify. Because it illuminates some of the ways we all act, it is serious but not depressing; when it's over, we may even find ourselves quietly cheered that Allen has seen so clearly how things can be.

The animation is elegant, the story is much more involving than in the original, and there's boundless energy.

A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.

This is a framework that could have benefitted from more irony and complexity, especially with the resources of Langella, but at the end, I felt the movie was too easily satisfied.

There are better movies opening this weekend. There are better movies opening every weekend. But Slither has a competence to it, an ability to manipulate obligatory horror scenes in a way that works.

Because this film is violent and cruel and very sad, why would you want to see it? For a couple of reasons, perhaps. One might be to watch two great actors, Penn and Walken, at the top of their forms in roles that give them a lot to work with. Another might be to witness some of the dynamics of a criminal society, some of the forces that push criminals further than they intend to go.

What I like about movies like this is the way they keep us involved until the end. There is no formula that we can project; “Thelma & Louise” was clearly heading for an act of self-destruction, but here we have no idea what to expect, except (inevitably) the birth of a child.

There's an unlikelihood so large in Future Weather that it nearly derails the film. That was what I admired the most about it.

An endlessly surprising, very dark, human comedy, with a plot that cannot be foreseen but only relished.

There's some really fine stuff here, and Part Two isn't afraid to poke fun when it's appropriate.

There are great performances in the central roles. Phoenix essentially carries the story; it's about him. Lahti and Hill have that shattering scene together. And Lahti and Hirsch, huddled together in bed, fearfully realizing that they may have come to a crossroads, are touching; we see how they've depended on each other. This is one of the best films of the year.

Over the Edge is a funeral service held at the graveside of the suburban dream. It tells a ragged story that ends with an improbable climax, but it's acted so well and truly by its mostly teen-age cast that we somehow feel we're eavesdropping.

The Well Digger's Daughter is such a success that Auteuil has already been signed to direct three more Pagnol classics, and I eagerly want to see them.

Williams handles the main line of the story, the war between Ted and Marion, clearly and strongly; you may not always hurt the one you love, but you certainly know how to.

The Sound of My Voice never precisely declares whether her story is true. Without going into detail, I can say that the film never precisely declares anything to be true.

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

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

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

As a source of information about his life and work, this interview is almost worthless, but as an insight into his style, it is priceless.

Kevin Bacon stars in one of his best performances.

A disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression.

The two leading men, Northam and Everett, are smooth and charming.

A compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader.

Because Die Hard 2 is so skillfully constructed and well-directed, it develops a momentum that carries it past several credibility gaps that might have capsized a lesser film.

Although Newman is a delight, the best surprise in the movie is the performance of a new actress named Lolita Davidovich, who plays Blaze Starr. She has a comfortableness in the role that is just right.

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.

Maggie, Eric's mother, and Angie the manager are the most fully realized characters in the movie, which doesn't offer a single positively drawn male homosexual.

This film is joyous, but more than that: It's lovely in its construction. The director, Prashant Bhargava, born and raised on Chicago's South Side, knows what his basic story line is, but reveals it subtly.

You might think Tom Hanks is miscast as the lovable sinner. Dennis Quaid, maybe, or Woody Harrelson. But Hanks brings something unique to the role.

The film is more violent, less cute than the others, but the action is not the mindless destruction of a video game; it has purpose, shape and style.

Marcia Gay Harden finds a fine balance between madness and the temptations of overacting. Yes, she runs wild sometimes, but always as a human being, not as a caricature.

A reminder of the pleasure of classic martial-arts films in which skilled athletes performed many of their own stunts.

Evil Under The Sun is not, alas, as good as Beat the Devil, but it is the best of the recent group of Christie retreads.

When we speak of "American health care," we should in fact be calling it "American sickness care." There's more money to be made in making people sick and healing them than in keeping them well in the first place. The documentary Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare makes this argument with stunning clarity.

Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run has some very funny moments, and you'll laugh a lot, but in the last analysis it isn't a very funny movie. It isn't really a movie at all. I suspect it's a list of a lot of things Woody Allen wanted to do in a movie someday, and the sad thing is he did them all at once.

At what point did I realize The Ambassador was an actual documentary, and not a fraud? Perhaps when I realized that everyone in the film was just as dishonest, venal and corrupt as they seemed - including the director.

For all of its huge budget, Independence Day is a timid movie when it comes to imagination. The aliens, when we finally see them, are a serious disappointment.

For people who love London and yet are thoughtful about it, this film is indispensable.

There is a terrifying moment in adolescence when suddenly some of the kids are twice as big as the rest of the kids. It is terrifying for everybody: For the kids who are suddenly tall and gangling, and for the kids who are still small and are getting beat up all the time. My Bodyguard places that moment in a Chicago high school and gives us a kid who tries to think his way out of it.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is probably the best film of its sort since The Wizard of Oz. It is everything that family movies usually claim to be, but aren't: Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and, most of all, a genuine work of imagination. Willy Wonka is such a surely and wonderfully spun fantasy that it works on all kinds of minds, and it is fascinating because, like all classic fantasy, it is fascinated with itself.

Reflections is a better film than we had any right to expect. It follows the McCullers story faithfully and without compromise. The performances are superb.

A smart film with an edge to it.

Last Days is a definitive record of death by gradual drug exhaustion. After the chills and thrills of "Sid & Nancy" and "The Doors," here is a movie that sees how addicts usually die, not with a bang but a whimper. If the dead had it to do again, they might wish that, this time, they'd at least been conscious enough to realize what was happening.

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

Not just a thriller, not just a social commentary, not just a comedy or a romance, but all of those in a clearly seen, brilliantly made film.

It's a good movie, and Channing and Stiles are the right choices for these roles. They zero in on each other like heat-seeking missiles.

This is an almost Dostoyevskian study of a man brooding upon evil until it paralyzes him.

Surprisingly moving.

A film like Haywire has no lasting significance, but it's a pleasure to see an A-list director taking the care to make a first-rate genre thriller.

The shots are beautifully composed, the editing paces the process of self-discovery, the dialogue is spare and heartfelt, the performances are deeply human -- especially by Efron.

The famous faces make it difficult, at first, to sink into the story, but eventually we do; the characters become so convincing that even if we're aware of Keaton and Streep, it's as if these events are happening to them.

A movie out of the ordinary -- especially if you like science fiction.

These stories have as their justification that fact that they are intrinsically interesting. I think that's enough.

A Late Quartet does one of the most interesting things any film can do. It shows how skilled professionals work.

Good Morning, Vietnam works as straight comedy and as a Vietnam-era MASH, and even the movie’s love story has its own bittersweet integrity.

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

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.

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

It is about the desiring itself, not about what they desire. That makes it more intriguing than if we knew their secret--and sexier.

I feel such an affection for Chabrol and his work that I probably can't see The Flower of Evil as it would be experienced by a first-time viewer. Would that newcomer note the elegance, the confidence, the sheer joy in the way he treasures the banalities of bourgeois life on his way to the bloodshed?

An imperfect but deeply involving and beautifully made Western.

The movie, written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, has the directness and clarity of a documentary, but allows itself touches of tenderness and grief.

The movie is not terrifically good, but the premise is intriguing.

The movie's strength is in the acting, with Gosling once again playing a character with an insistent presence.

The movie's heart is in the right place.

In too much of a hurry to be much of a people picture. And the standoff at the end edges perilously close to the ridiculous, for a movie that's tried so hard to be plausible.

The story tells a useful lesson, the jungle inhabitants are amusing, and although the movie is not a masterpiece it's pleasant to watch for its humor and sweetness.

[It's] like Tarantino crossed with the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been into chopping off fingers...Fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive.

Runaway Train is a reminder that the great adventures are great because they happen to people we care about.

It offers the rare pleasure of an author directing his own book, and doing it well. No one who loves the book will complain about the movie, and especially not about its near-ideal casting.

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

The film has been criticized by some as too politically correct. Perhaps so. But the characters' reality rises above the film's ideas and makes it human.

We know Kline can play kooky (he won an Oscar as Otto in "A Fish Called Wanda"), and he does it very well, but the effort can become exhausting after a while.

Edmon Roch's Garbo the Spy is an engrossing documentary that is itself largely a work of the director's imagination.

This kind of casting can't help but give the movie an intimate, familiar feeling, and maybe that's why the comedy works as human comedy and not just manufactured laughs.

A remarkable film.

This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.

Bite the Bullet finds the traditional power and integrity of the Western intact after all.

What makes the film involving is that it doesn't depend on the mechanical resolution of the plot, but on the close observation of its effects on these distinctive characters.

The writer and director, Michael Schorr, is making his first film, but has the confidence and simplicity of someone who has been making films forever.

The 1954 film version of Orwell's novel turned it into a cautionary, simplistic science-fiction tale. This version penetrates much more deeply into the novel's heart of darkness.

Movies like this can be insufferable if they lay it on too thick. The Boy Who Can Fly finds just about the right balance between its sunny message and the heartbreak that's always threatening to prevail.

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.

The movie is part farce (unplanned entrances and exits), part slapstick (misbehavior of corpses) and part just plain wacky eccentricity. I think the ideal way to see it would be to gather your most dour and disapproving relatives and treat them to a night at the cinema.

It is also a rarity, a patriotic film that has a liberal, rather than a conservative, heart. It made me feel good to be an American, and good that Vladimir Ivanoff was going to be one, too.

It's a feel-good film, warm and good-hearted, and as it was heading for its happy ending, I was still a little astonished how much I was enjoying it.

Benoit Jacquot's engrossing film tells a story we know well, seen from a point of view we may not have considered.

What sets Deep Cover apart is its sense of good and evil, the way it has the Fishburne character agonize over the moral decisions he has to make.

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie.

A three-year labor of love from a mother for her daughter. It is a touching movie that, at first, might seem like a public service announcement, but eventually takes us into some touching personal struggles.

What a thoughtful film this is, and how thought-stirring. Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction comes advertised as a romance, a comedy, a fantasy, and it is a little of all three, but it's really a fable, a "moral tale."

This is the kind of movie where you squirm out of enjoyment, not terror, and it's probably going to be popular with younger audiences - it doesn't pound you over the head with violence. Like the spider itself, it has a certain respect for structure.

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.

Stillman writes his own dialogue, and is a master of clever double-reverse wit.

Selena succeeds, through Lopez's performance, in evoking the magic of a sweet and talented young woman.

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

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

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

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.

I might have enjoyed Desert Hearts more if it had been more subtle and observant about the two women. It might have been a better movie if it had been about discovery instead of seduction.

The movie was directed by Perkins, in his filmmaking debut. I was surprised by what a good job he does. Any movie named Psycho III is going to be compared to the Hitchcock original, but Perkins isn't an imitator. He has his own agenda.

It works gloriously as space opera.

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

Anderson is like Dave Brubeck, who I'm listening to right now. He knows every note of the original song, but the fun and genius come in the way he noodles around. And in his movie's cast, especially with Owen Wilson, Anderson takes advantage of champion noodlers.

I enjoyed the film on two levels: for its skill and its silliness.

Giamatti's performance is one of those achievements. He is making a career of playing unremarkable but memorable men.

Not at the level of "Finding Nemo" or "Shrek," but is a lot of fun, awfully nice to look at, and filled with energy and smiles.

They talk warmly and with enthusiasm about certain titles, but I have the eerie feeling that they must be at a movie whether they enjoy it or not.

Has a bracing truth that's refreshing after the phoniness of female-bonding pictures like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

Rich and droll, and yet slight--a film of modest virtues, content to be small, achieving what it intends.

As for myself, I think he made it all up and never killed anybody. Having been involved in a weekly television show myself, I know for a melancholy fact that there is just not enough time between tapings to fly off to Helsinki and kill for my government.

It takes a lot of patience to watch The Russia House, but it takes even more patience to be a character in the movie. To judge by this film, the life of a Cold War spy consists of sitting for endless hours in soundproof rooms with people you do not particularly like, waiting for something to happen. Sort of like being a movie critic.

The Soderbergh version is like the same story freed from the weight of Tarkovsky's solemnity. And it evokes one of the rarest of movie emotions, ironic regret.

There's so much good here, in the dialogue, the performances and the observation, that the movie succeeds at many moments even while pursuing its doomed grand design.

This is not a deep movie, but it's a broad one. It reunites three talents who had an enormous hit with "Y Tu Mama Tambien": actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, and Carlos Cuaron, who wrote that film and writes and directs this one. Instead of trying to top themselves with life and poignancy, they wisely do something for fun.

Hal Hartley is on his way to creating a distinctive film world, and although Trust is not a successful film, you can see his vision at work, and it's intriguing.

But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.

There is a lot of plot in this movie - probably too much. The best thing to do is to accept the plot, and then disregard it, and pay attention to the scenes of passion. They really work.

It is also a film of controlled visual style; Kitano's compositions are like arrangements of bodies in space and time. That said, and with all due respect, I expected a better time.

Even the ordinary moments in True Stories seem a little odd, as if the actors are trying to humor the weirdo they're working for.

[An] extraordinary documentary, nothing at all like what I was expecting to see. Here is not a sick and drugged man forcing himself through grueling rehearsals, but a spirit embodied by music. Michael Jackson was something else.

Watching this film was a cheerless exercise for me. The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.

Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny.

Likely to appeal to the fans of "The Sixth Sense," "Ghost" and other movies where the characters find a loophole in reality. What it also has in common with those two movies is warmth and emotion.

The five subjects of Home Movie at least know exactly why they live where they do and as they do, and they do not require our permission or approval.

What an elegantly seen Dracula this is, all shadows and blood and vapors and Frank Langella stalking through with the grace of a cat. The film is a triumph of performance, art direction and mood over materials that can lend themselves so easily to self-satire

This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical. It wants to depict lives that are without curiosity, introspection and hope.

What makes the film fun is the deadpan, tongue-in-cheek humor that undermines the seemingly sincere dramatic scenes.

On the surface, this film is an enchanting meditation. At its core is the hard steel of individuality.

These fears explain why in its scenes on the Eiger itself, North Face starts strongly and ends as unbearably riveting. They also explain why it was a strategic error to believe this story needed romantic and political subplots.

It's a strange, magical film, in which Allen uses the arts of the ancient Chinese healer as a shortcut to psychoanalysis; at the end of the film, which covers only a few days, Alice has learned truths about her husband, her parents, her marriage, her family and herself, and has undergone a profound conversion in values. Because this is a Woody Allen film, a lot of that metaphysical process is very funny.

The movie's intriguing in its fanciful way, and there are times when both Calvin and Ruby seem uncannily like they're undergoing revision at the hands of some uber-writer above them both.

Green's approach certainly opens up opportunities for his students, and is a refreshing change from the lockstep public school approach, which punishes individualism.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

There are some moments in The Witches of Eastwick that stretch uncomfortably for effects - the movie's climax is overdone, for example - and yet a lot of the time this movie plays like a plausible story about implausible people. The performances sell it. And the eyebrows.

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

The Eclipse is needlessly confusing. Is it a ghost story or not? Perhaps this is my problem.

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.

As you listen to his uncanny narration of Tupac: Resurrection, which is stitched together from interviews, you realize you're not listening to the usual self-important vacancies from celebrity Q&As, but to spoken prose of a high order, in which analysis, memory and poetry come together seamlessly in sentences and paragraphs that sound as if they were written.

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.

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

The Breakfast Club doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak.

Shot in Argentina, where a prosperous middle-class economy was destroyed during 10 years of IMF policies.

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

It is not a compelling documentary (too much exposition, not enough on-the-spot reality), but it is instructive and disturbing.

Racing With the Moon is a movie like Valley Girl or Baby, It's You, a movie that is interested in teenagers and willing to listen to how they talk and to observe, with great tenderness, the fragility and importance of their first big loves.

A gentle story that involves a great deal of violence, but mostly the violence is muted and dreamy, like a confrontation with a fearsome scarecrow that looks horrifying but is obviously not real --- or real enough, but not alive.

In Good Company is a rare species: a feel-good movie about big business. It's about a corporate culture that tries to be evil and fails.

If you don't already know who Bruce Campbell is, it will set you searching for other Bruce Campbell films on the theory that they can't all be like this. Start with "Evil Dead II," is my advice. Not to forget "Bubba Ho-Tep." In fact, start with them before My Name Is Bruce, which is low midrange in the Master's oeuvre.

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

Is Terminator 3 a skillful piece of work? Indeed. Will it entertain the Friday night action crowd? You bet. Does it tease and intrigue us like the earlier films did? Not really.

The movie is more concerned with the story line (premiere-fire-threat-rescue) than with painting the time and place.

Julie & Julia is not lacking in entertainment value, especially with the Streep performance. But if the men had been portrayed as more high-spirited, it might have taken on intriguing dimensions.

Yet in its high spirits and wicked good humor, Emma is a delightful film--second only to "Persuasion" among the modern Austen movies, and funnier, if not so insightful.

It goes without saying it's preposterous. But it has the texture and takes the care to be a full-blown film.

What all three of these stories share is the quality found in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: An attention to horror as it emerges from everyday life as transformed by fear, fantasy and depravity.

The Boston Strangler requires a judgment not only on the quality of the film (very good), but also on its moral and ethical implications.

But don't get the idea City Island is a laff riot. For this story about these people, it finds about the right tone. They're silly and foolish, as are we all, but deserve what happiness they can negotiate.

[Keaton and Nicholson] bring so much experience, knowledge and humor to their characters that the film works in ways the screenplay might not have even hoped for.

This film is true about human nature. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting.

Mean Girls dissects high school society with a lot of observant detail, which seems surprisingly well-informed. The screenplay by "Saturday Night Live's" Tina Fey is both a comic and a sociological achievement.

Eddie Murphy looks like the latest victim of the Star Magic Syndrome, in which it is assumed that a movie will be a hit simply because it stars an enormously talented person. Thus it is not necessary to give much thought to what he does or says, or to the story he finds himself occupying.

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

In the early scenes of White Hunter, Black Heart, Eastwood fans are likely to be distracted to hear Huston's words and vocal mannerisms in Eastwood's mouth, and to see Huston's swagger and physical bravado. Then the performance takes over, and the movie turns into one of the more thoughtful films ever made about the conflicts inside an artist.

Effective without being overwhelming.

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.

Of the voices, Griffith makes Margalo lovable and as sexy as a little yellow bird can be, and Lane does a virtuoso job with Snowbell, the only cat with dialogue by Damon Runyon. Fox's Stuart is stalwart and heroic--the Braveheart of mice. As for the parents, Davis and Laurie deserve some kind of award for keeping straight faces.

The film is pitch-perfect in its decor, music, clothes, cars, language and values. It takes place during those heady years between the introduction of the Pill and the specter of AIDS, when men shaped as adolescents by Playboy in the 1950s now found some of their fantasies within reach.

What it doesn't have is a narrative magnet to pull us through - a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot.

Someone like Abe could only prevail through the powers of denial and optimistic wishing, and Solondz makes that happen, as the film gradually slips into fantasy.

If "Henry V," the first film [Branaugh] directed and starred in, caused people to compare him to Olivier, "Dead Again" will inspire comparisons to Welles and Hitchcock - and the Olivier of Hitchcock's "Rebecca."

It is the first directing effort by Lili Zanuck, co-producer of Driving Miss Daisy, but feels like the work of a more experienced director, especially in the way she gives full measure to the many strong supporting performances in the film.

The film is astonishing in the amount of material it contains. It isn't thin or superficial; there is an abundance of observation and invention here.

Here, as the little cinder girl, she is able to at last put aside her bedraggled losers and flower as a fresh young beauty, and she brings poignancy and fire to the role.

An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.

Possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten, over-photographed film of the year. Which is not to say it isn't great to look at. It is.

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

As for Coppola and his world, it's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.

The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules.

It is light and pleasant and funny, the characterization is strong, and the voices of Phil Harris (O'Malley the Alley Cat) and Eva Gabor (Duchess, the mother cat) are charming in their absolute rightness.

Even with its excesses, Frantic is a reminder of how absorbing a good thriller can be.

What it all comes down to is a skillfully assembled 130 minutes at the movies, with actors capable of doing absurd things with straight faces, and action sequences that toy idly with the laws of physics.

This is a delightfully goofy, self-aware movie that knows it is a movie.

The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value; is too much fable to be convincing as life.

It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.

There may be possibilities here, but they're lost in the extraordinary boredom of a long third act devoted almost entirely to loud, pointless and repetitive action.

The movie was mostly shot on two difficult locations: The streets of East L.A., and inside Folsom Prison. It knows these worlds. The language, the clothes, the attitudes, are all shown with the understated conviction of a director who is sure of his material.

A fascinating portrait of an almost likable rogue. You'd rather spend time with him than a lot of more upstanding citizens.

The film is intended for family audiences. It is so gentle and whimsical that one wonders if American children, accustomed to the whiz-bang action of most animation, will accept it. Maybe there would be hope for the younger ones - but what will they make of the subtitles?

It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.

Whether you will like Jay and Silent Bob depends on who you are. Most movies are made for everybody. Kevin Smith's movies are either made specifically for you, or specifically not made for you.

As Soderbergh lovingly peels away veil after veil of deception, the film develops into an unexpected human comedy. Not that any of the characters are laughing.

A cheerfully energetically and very vulgar comedy.

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.

The nice thing about Shaft is that it savors the private-eye genre, and takes special delight in wringing new twists out of the traditional relationship between the private eye and the boys down at homicide.

Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.

Russell doesn't give a damn about the material he started with, greatest art work of the century or not, and he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another. He is aided by his performers, especially Ann-Margret, who is simply great as Tommy's mother.

There's a lot that's good in White Palace, involving the heart as well as the mind.

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.

This is the kind of movie you happen across on TV, and linger to watch out of curiosity, but its inspired moments serve only to point out how routine, and occasionally how slow and wordy, the rest of it is.

I saw more important films at Sundance 2003, but none more purely enjoyable than Bend It Like Beckham, which is just about perfect as a teenage coming-of-age comedy.

It's pleasant enough as a date movie, but that's all.

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

The movie is quick and cheerful, and Spurlock is engaging.

I.Q. is a romantic comedy with its heart in the right place, and all of the other pieces distributed correctly, too.

The film has many virtues, but for me the most enchanting is simply the lust with which it depicts a bold and colorful era in history.

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.

Because it speaks to a terror that lurks deep within our memories, Parents has the potential to be a great horror film. But it never knows quite what to do with its inspiration. Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror? The right note is never found, and so the movie's scenes coexist uneasily with one another.

By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.

There is clear definition between closer and further elements. I've seen a lot of 3-D recently, and in terms of technical quality, this is the best.

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.

The movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.

A great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

It's a film you enjoy in pieces, but the jigsaw never gets solved.

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

We might quarrel with the crucial decision at the end of Tully, but we have to honor it because we know it comes from a good place. So does the whole movie.

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

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.

This movie is a little treasure, a funny, sexy, appealing story of a Valley Girl's heartbreaking decision: Should she stick with her boring jock boyfriend, or take a chance on a punk from Hollywood?

One of the worst movies of this or any year.

Louis Malle's Pretty Baby is a pleasant surprise: After all the controversy and scandal surrounding its production, it turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie.

The problem may be that Bill Melendez, who directed, and Charles M. Schultz, who wrote the movie based on his own comic characters, couldn't decide whether to aim for kids or their parents.

The actors are better than the material.

This is the first movie about virtual reality to deal in a challenging way with the implications of the technology. It's fascinating the way Bigelow is able to suggest so much of VR's impact (and dangers) within a movie - a form of VR that's a century old.

American Teen isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein has achieved an engrossing film.

The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own.

The Edge is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet, which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet. It's subtly funny in the way it toys with the cliches of the genre.

Talk Radio is based on a play Bogosian wrote and starred in, and it was the right decision to star him in the movie, too, instead of some famous film actor. He feels this material from the inside out, and makes the character convincing. That’s especially true during a virtuoso, unsettling closing monologue, in which we think the camera is circling Bogosian - until we realize the camera and the actor are still, and the backgrounds are circling.

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.

Oddly enough, Crimson Tide develops into an actors' picture, not just an action movie. There are a lot of special effects, high-tech gadgets and violent standoffs, yes, but the movie is really a battle between two wills.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

What did I think about this movie? As a film critic, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the self-aware characters. At the same time, I was aware of the incredible level of gore in this film. It is really violent.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

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.

The film is a chilling study of an evil, dominant personality and his victims. It works primarily through an astonishingly good performance by Daniel Henshall as Bunting.

What Ferrara needs for his next film is a sound screenplay...He has gone about as far as a director can go on pure style.

The film's appeal is in the details. This is one of [Merchant-Ivory's] best films.

What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.

A real movie, rich and atmospheric, savoring its disreputable characters and their human weaknesses.

The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.

And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease.

Sidewalk Stories weaves a spell as powerful as it is entertaining.

Did this movie have to be so lockstep, so trapped by its mechanical plot, so limited by a murder mystery? What the movie has to say is so pale and limited that, ironically, the most interesting character in the movie is the victim.

Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose, one of the best biopics I've seen, tells Piaf's life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard, who looks like the singer.

What's impressive is how well this film joins its parts into a whole.

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

This is a more thoughtful film, and its action scenes are easier to follow in space and time. If we didn't really need to be told Spidey's origin story again, at least it's done with more detail and provides better reasons for why Peter Parker throws himself into his superhero role.

It takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. Tragedy requires the fall of a hero, and one of the achievements of Nixon is to show that greatness was within his reach.

You're looking for depth and profundity, this is the wrong movie. But under the direction of David Koepp ("Secret Window," the screenplays for "Mission: Impossible" and "Spider-Man"), this is an expert and spellbinding adventure.

Director Jim Mickle, who co-wrote the film with his star Nick Damici, has crafted a good-looking, well-played and atmospheric apocalyptic vision.

This good movie is buried beneath millions of dollars that were spent on "production values" that wreck the show.

Disappointing then, that the movie introduces such an extraordinary living being and focuses mostly on those around her. All the same, it’s well done, and intriguing.

The whole film has a lively Mexican-American tilt, from the Hispanic backgrounds of the young actors to the surprise appearance of none other than Ricardo Montalban, as Grandpa, in a wheelchair with helicopter capabilities.

The kind of caper movie that was made before special effects replaced wit, construction and intelligence. This movie is made out of fresh ingredients, not cake mix. Despite the twists of its plot, it is about its characters.

There is a kind of music to their conversations, now a lullaby, now a march, now a requiem, now hip-hop, and they play with one another like members of an orchestra. The movie's so good to listen to, it would even work as an audio book.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

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

There is an irony here. The film exhibits an admirable determination to do justice to a real story, but the story's not real.

Always sweet and sometimes surprisingly touching.

Husbands has all the confidence of Cassavetes' masterpiece, Faces, but few of the other qualities of the film that preceded it. It has good intentions, I suppose, but it is an artistic disaster and only fitfully interesting on less ambitious levels.

Ty Cobb was by many accounts a mean-tempered, vicious, drunken, wife- beating, racist SOB who was impossible to spend any length of time with, and the movie Cobb faithfully represents those qualities, especially the last one.

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.

This isn’t a breakthrough movie, but for what it is, it’s charming, and not any more innocuous than it has to be.

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

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.

The real objective of all the "M:I" movies is to provide a clothesline for sensational action scenes. Nothing else matters, and explanatory dialogue would only slow things down. This formula worked satisfactorily in "M:I," directed by Brian De Palma, and "M:I II," directed by John Woo, and I suppose it works up to a point in M:I III, directed by J.J. Abrams, if what you want is endless, nonstop high-tech action.

This remake was a bad idea that only got worse.

It's a long, shapeless, undisciplined mess, and every once in awhile it generates a big laugh.

A good, solid science-fiction movie, and a little more.

Return is a movie with some nice, droll opening scenes and the obligatory horrible climax. It doesn't make the mistake of Day Of The Dead - talking too much. It's kind of a sensation-machine, made out of the usual ingredients, and the real question is whether it's done with style. It is.

The great achievement of Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent.

The Reivers is a pleasant, wholesome, straightforward movie of the sort (as they say) they don't make anymore.