Roger Ebert

Here is a film that, for all of its plot, depends on characters in service of their emotional turmoil. It feels good to see Coppola back in form.

It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc. Example: Airplane Captain (Peter Graves): Surely you can't be serious. Doctor (Leslie Nielsen): I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny.

Griffiths is one of the most intensely interesting actresses at work today.

Both a distraction and a revelation.

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

What I liked the most about the second "Dozen," was another performance, the one by Alyson Stoner as their daughter Sarah. As a girl poised on the first scary steps of adolescence, she finds the kind of vulnerability and shy hope that Reese Witherspoon projected in "The Man in the Moon."

The parts work even if the whole leaves me uncertain. Many movies are certain about their whole, but are made of careless parts. Forced to choose, I would take the parts.

Perhaps too laden with messages for its own good, but it has many moments of musical beauty, and it's interesting to watch Janet McTeer.

Die Another Day is still utterly absurd from one end to the other, of course, but in a slightly more understated way. And so it goes, Bond after Bond, as the most durable series in movie history heads for the half-century.

If the film has a flaw, and I'm afraid it does, it's the Sondre Lerche songs on the soundtrack. They are too foregrounded and literal, either commenting on the action or expounding on associated topics. In such a laid-back movie, they're in our face.

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

The movie treads a dangerous line. There are times when its ferocity threatens to break through the boundaries of comedy - to become so unremitting we find we cannot laugh.

Despite everything I have said, I found Memphis Belle entertaining, almost in spite of my objections. That's because it exploits so fully the universal human tendency to identify with a group of people who are up in an airplane and may not be able to get down again.

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

This is an atmospheric, intense film, well acted, and when it's working it has a real urgency.

What I liked about Two-Lane Blacktop was the sense of life that occasionally sneaked through, particularly in the character of G.T.O. (Warren Oates).

While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film "Atonement," which in an oblique way touches on similar issues.

The center of the film is the simple, almost elementary insight that fantasies can be hazardous: You've got to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

The movie is funny without being hilarious, touching but not tearful, and articulate in the way that Burns is articulate, by nibbling earnestly around an idea as if afraid that the core has seeds.

I liked this movie a lot - not just for Bacon and Renfro, but also for the work of the wonderfully-named Calista Flockhart, as the girl who dates Karchy.

Basically the movie is a bubble-headed series of teenage crises and crushes, alternating with historically accurate choreography of such forgotten dances as the Madison and the Roach.

A visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it's getting interesting.

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

Flatliners is an original, intelligent thriller, well-directed by Joel Schumacher. I only wish it had been restructured so we didn't need to go through the same crisis so many times.

The movie tries for tragedy and reaches only pathos, but then Bobby lost his chance to be a tragic hero by living this long in the first place.

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

A fresh and lovable comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family planning their son's bar mitzvah.

Hoffman has countless characters inside of him, and this is one of his nicest.

Not a great movie, simply functional, but Cusack gives a great performance. The film somehow doesn't live up to his work.

Will you like this film? Yes, probably, if you like monster and horror movies. The movie occupies familiar ground, but it has a freshness and winsome humor to fit it, and Craven moves confidently through the three related genres he's stealing from (monster movies, mad scientist movies, and transformation movies in which people turn into strange beings). There's beauty in this movie, if you know where to look for it.

Not brilliant and it has some clunky moments where we see the plot wheels grinding, but it has its heart and its grin in the right places.

It's the kind of sweet, good-humored comedy that used to star Margaret Rutherford, although Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, its daring top-liners, would have curled Dame Margaret's eyebrows.

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

None of this amounts to anything more than goofy fun, but that's what the ads promise, and the movie delivers.

Project X is not a great movie because its screenplay doesn't really try for greatness. It's content to be a well-made, intelligent entertainment aimed primarily, I imagine, at bright teenagers. It works on that level.

The whole enterprise seems to be Isaacson's project. He narrates the film. Kristin, his wife, seems fully in accord with him, and they're both courageous, but I would have liked more insights from the side of her that teaches psychology.

The King of Comedy is not, you may already have guessed, a fun movie. It is also not a bad movie. It is frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective.

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

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

Sellers works. He develops a character and plays it, for better or worse, for the whole movie.

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.

The movie is filled with life and energy, and the music is honest. The Commitments is one of the few movies about a fictional band that’s able to convince us the band is real and actually plays together.

De Niro and Penn are both essentially serious dramatic actors, and maybe the reality of the location gave them such a solid grounding that they felt they had permission for the necessary goofiness.

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.

While most band documentaries wade through sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, this one has no sex, no drugs, and the kind of rock 'n' roll that reminds one of their fans of "something I'd hear at a dorm party."

In Purple Rain, Prince found an answer in his own life, and provided intercuts to an autobiographical story. This time, he lets the music simply speak for itself. It's fun as far as it goes, but Purple Rain, of course, went further.

The movie doesn't have the complexity and depth of "Groundhog Day" (which I recently saw described as "the most spiritual film of our time"), but as entertainment it's ingratiating and lovable.

It's better to know going in that you're not expected to be able to fit everything together, that you may lose track of some members of the large cast, that it's like attending a family reunion when it's not your family and your hosts are too drunk to introduce you around.

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

The actors all find the correct notes. It is a French film, and so they are allowed to be adult and intelligent.

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

Look at the cast and credits to form an idea of the directors and actors at work here. By its nature, New York, I Love You can't add up. It remains the sum of its parts. If one isn't working for you, wait a few minutes, here comes another one. New Yorkers, I love you.

A movie like Keyhole plays like a fever dream using the elements of film noir but restlessly rearranging them in an attempt to force sense out of them. You have the elements lined up against the wall, and in some mercurial way, they slip free and attack you from behind.

What I liked was a horror movie that was scaring me with ideas and gore, instead of simply with gore.

The movie is an ideal showcase for the talents of Coogan.

I am not a golf fan but found The Greatest Game Ever Played absorbing all the same, partly because of the human element, partly because Paxton and his technicians have used every trick in the book to dramatize the flight and destination of the golf balls.

Not a great, breakout comedy, but more the kind of movie that might eventually become a regular on the midnight cult circuit.

For all its absurdity Cronos generates a real moral conviction.

Gandolfini comes in from left field and provides a character with dimensions and surprises, bringing out the best in Roberts. Their dialogue scenes are the best reason to see the movie.

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

Bernie Mac gives a funny and kind of touching performance as a man who attains greatness once and then has to do it again.

The movie depends mostly on wild exaggerations of 007, and here it does something right: It shows stunts and special effects that look like they might have been staged in 1967.

I guess I sort of liked the film. although I wonder why it couldn't have spent more time on natural history and the sense of discovery.

The things that make Overboard special, however, are the genuine charm, wit and warm energy generated by the entire cast and director Garry Marshall. Hawn and Russell work well together, never overplaying scenes that easily could have self-destructed.

The film begins slowly with a murky plot and too many new characters, but builds to a sensational climax.

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

This kind of film requires us to be very forgiving, and if we are, it promises to entertain. Angels & Demons succeeds.

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

This is a weird, uneven, generally intriguing thriller about a young man whose fantasy life is totally controlled by images from movies.

Nowhere near one of Crowe's great films (like "Almost Famous"), but it is sweet and good-hearted and has some real laughs.

This whole movie is about manners. There is sex and violence, but the movie is not about giving in to them; it's about carrying on as if they didn't exist.

The movie brings into focus how rare religion and spirituality are in American films.

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

I found Interview kind of fascinating, especially in the ways that Buscemi and Miller make their performances into commentaries on the types of characters they play.

This is a devilishly ingenious screenplay by the sisters Jill and Karen Sprecher.

This is a full-bore, PG-rated, sweet rom-com. It sticks to the track, makes all the scheduled stops and bears us triumphantly to the station. And it is populated by colorful characters, but then, when was the last time you saw a boring Irishman in a movie?

Succeeds beyond any expectations suggested by the title and extends John Cusack's remarkable run: Since 1983, in 55 films, he's never made a bad one.

A fairly close remake of the great 1981 Dudley Moore movie, with pleasures of its own.

This is actually a pretty good thriller, based more on character and plot than on action for its own sake. The need to construct killings that look like accidents adds to the interest.

Dogfight isn't a love story so much as a story about how a young woman helps a confused teenage boy to discover his own better nature. The fact that his discoveries take place on the night before he ships out to fight the war in Vietnam only makes the story more poignant.

It uses a colorful vocabulary, it contains a lot of energy, it elevates its miserable heroes to the status of icons (in their own eyes, that is).

For a parody, the movie is surprisingly competent in some of the action scenes, when the dim-witted hero turns out to have lightning improvisational skills.

Endearing and vulgar in about the right proportion. The movie doesn't exactly work, but sometimes when a car won't start, it's still fun to look at the little honey gleaming in the driveway.

Many love stories contrive to get their characters together at the end. This one contrives, not to keep them apart, but to bring them to a bittersweet awareness that is above simple love. Some audience members would probably prefer a romantic embrace in the sunset, as the music swells. But "Love Jones'' is too smart for that.

This is an uncommonly involving thriller. I could call it a film noir, except that the sun never sets in the film. That makes a perfect contrast with the only other feature filmed in Barrow, the vampire movie "30 Days of Night" (2007), in which it never rises.

More fable than slice of life, and all these people and props give Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman their opening to create two screwy characters from opposite ends of the great personality divide

Although the movie centers on well-made action scenes and contains a couple of tidy surprises, its strength comes from the portrait of this soldier on the edge.

Perhaps Lumet was simply too ambitious in trying to work anti-bugging sentiment into the film. If he'd thrown out all the hidden mikes and stuck with the Heist, The Anderson Tapes would have moved with a more confident step in the direction of Rififi.

Wickedly effective thriller.

Learning of this story, I thought, aw, come on, give me a break. But it turns out the story is not only based on fact, but the actual dolphin involved, named Winter, stars in the movie as herself. Her new tail functions admirably.

Essentially silliness crossed with science fiction. The actors make it fun to watch.

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.

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.

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

An Almodovar film is always an exercise in style, but High Heels also generates narrative energy and mystery, and provides what was, for me, a genuine surprise at the end.

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

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.

I should have brought a big yellow legal pad to the screening, so I could take detailed notes just to keep the time-lines straight. And yet the movie is fun, mostly because it's so screwy.

Not one of the great dog movies, but it's a good one, abandoning wall-to-wall cuteness for a drama about a homeless puppy.

I admire The Rite because while it delivers what I suppose should be called horror, it is atmospheric, its cinematography is eerie and evocative, and the actors enrich it.

One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this.

Strong performances, particularly by Glenn as the hard-bitten climber with a private agenda, Vertical Limit delivers.

Payne is played in the movie by Damon Wayans, in the best work he's done since the inspired "In Living Color" TV series.

A subtle but unmistakable aura of jolliness sneaks from the screen.

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

All of the performances are pitched correctly. Nobody pushes too hard. Nobody underlines anything. Perhaps calmed by Van Sant, the characters seem peaceful, not troubled (as they should be).

An energetic and eccentric animated cartoon.

I am not one of you. But I have enough of you in me to pass along the word. Far out.

There is much cleverness and ingenuity in Payback, but Mel Gibson is the key. The movie wouldn't work with an actor who was heavy on his feet, or was too sincere about the material.

The Goonies, like Gremlins, shows that Spielberg and his directors are absolute masters of how to excite and involve an audience. "E.T." was more like "Close Encounters"; it didn't simply want us to feel, but also to wonder, and to dream.

Surely few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely than Bardem.

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.

The result is a movie character who seems half real, half animated.

Nine to Five is a good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history, I suspect, primarily because it contains the movie debut of Dolly Parton. She is, on the basis of this one film, a natural-born movie star, a performer who holds our attention so easily that it's hard to believe it's her first film.

One of the pleasures is watching the gears mesh. The screenplay has been written by Corneau and Nathalie Carter with meticulous attention to detail. Like classic mystery authors, they play fair, so that the surprises at the end are consistent with what we've seen - although we didn't realize it at the time.

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

Compellingly watchable.

The film is confoundingly watchable.

This formula is fraught with pitfalls, but the characters and the actors redeem it with a surprising emotional impact.

Confounds all convention and denies all expected pleasures, providing instead the delight of watching Herzog feed the police hostage formula into the Mixmaster of his imagination.

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

I was entertained, and yet I felt a little empty-handed at the end, as if an enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion.

Effective without being overwhelming.

It has that unwound Roddy Doyle humor; the laughs don't hit you over the head, but tickle you behind the knee.

Because they all seem to be people first and genders second, they see the humor in their bewildering situation as quickly as anyone, and their cheerful ability to rise to a series of implausible occasions makes Victor/Victoria not only a funny movie, but, unexpectedly, a warm and friendly one.

One of the best things about Stay Hungry is that we have almost no idea where it's going; it's as free-form as Nashville and Rafelson is cheerfully willing to pause here and there for set pieces.

Some people will find it emotionally manipulative. Some people like to be emotionally manipulated. I do, when it's done well.

Motel Hell is a welcome change-of-pace; it's to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" as "Airplane!" is to "Airport." It has some great moments.

An impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome.

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

Begley and Stevens add tone to the cast, and Hingle comes over like an especially earnest Karl Malden. The moral of the story is vaguely against capital punishment, and there's a lot of that thin, windblown guitar twanging for you thin, wind-blown guitar twanging fans.

It works gloriously as space opera.

This is the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn't made from any known formula and doesn't follow the rules.

Suspension of disbelief, always necessary in a thriller, is required here in wholesale quantities. But in a movie like Out of Time I'm not looking for realism, I'm looking for a sense of style brought to genre material.

The Stoning of Soraya M.”has such a powerful stoning sequence that I recommend it if only for its brutal ideological message. That the pitiful death of Soraya is followed by a false Hollywood upbeat ending involving tape recordings and silliness about a car that won't start is simply shameful. Nowrasteh, born in Colorado, attended the USC Film School. Is that what they teach there?

With Solomon & Gaenor, it is hard to overlook the folly of the characters. Does it count as a tragedy when the characters get more or less what they were asking for?

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

A well-crafted entertainment containing enough ideas to qualify it as science fiction and not just as a futurist thriller.

Hancock is a lot of fun, if perhaps a little top-heavy with stuff being destroyed. Smith makes the character more subtle than he has to be, more filled with self-doubt, more willing to learn.

Who would have guessed such a funny movie as Zombieland could be made around zombies? No thanks to the zombies.

I would not have missed seeing this film, and I recommend it for its richness of imagery. But at 127 minutes, which seems a reasonable length, it plays long.

The whole movie, in fact, is smarter than most contemporary thrillers. It gives us credit for being able to figure things out, and it contains characters who are devilishly intelligent. Almost smart enough, we think for a while, to really pull this thing off.

The music probably sounds fine on a CD. Certainly it is well-rehearsed. But the overall sense of the film is of good riddance to a bad time.

It's a close call here. I guess I recommend the movie because the dramatic scenes are worth it. But if some studio executive came along and made Stone cut his movie down to two hours, I have the strangest feeling it wouldn't lose much of substance and might even play better.

It's about change, acceptance and love, and it rounds those three bases very nicely, even if it never quite gets to home.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.

Of Amanda Bynes let us say that she is sunny and plucky and somehow finds a way to play her impossible role without clearing her throat more than six or eight times.

The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality.

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

A satire with the reckless courage to take on both sides in the abortion debate.

I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level.

My guess is that the average firefighter, like the average American moviegoer, might sort of enjoy the movie, which is a skillfully made example of your typical Schwarzenegger action film.

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

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

The movie feels dark, clammy and exhilarating -- it's like belonging to a secret club where you can have a lot of fun but might get into trouble.

Poetic Justice is not ["Boyz N the Hood's"] equal, but does not aspire to be; it is a softer, gentler film, more of a romance than a commentary on social conditions.

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.

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

You may be imagining this is an animated film, and that Jack Black is voicing Lemuel Gulliver. Not at all. This is live action, and despite the 3-D, it's sorta old-fashioned, not that that's a bad thing.

What I regret is that all of the expertise lavished on this movie couldn't have been put at the service of a more intelligent story about real firemen, real working conditions, real heroism, and the real craft and art of fire-fighting.

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

A charming documentary about the finalists in the Teenage Magician Contest at the annual World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas.

There is a kind of pleasure to be had from its directness, from its lack of gimmicks, from its classical form. And just like in the Warners pictures, there is also the pleasure of supporting performances from character actors who come onstage, sing an aria, and leave.

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

Heartbreakers is "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" plus Gene Hackman as W.C. Fields. I guess that's enough to recommend it. It's not a great comedy, but it's a raucous one, hard-working and ribald, and I like its spirit.

A surprisingly effective thriller.

The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character.

This is a story which, in other hands, could have simply been an all-female slasher movie, but Barbet Schroeder, who produced and directed it, has a mordant humor that pushes the material over the top. It is a slasher movie, and a little more.

The tension we need to draw us into the story isn't there; things move at too leisurely a pace, and the movie, like the Jimmy Stewart hero, has to be dragged into the excitement against its will.

Instead of cheap thrills, Schrader gives us a frightening vision of a good priest who fears goodness may not be enough.

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.

Lightweight and made out of familiar elements, but they're handled with humor and invention.

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

The film has extraordinary beauty. Indeed, the visuals by cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki are so awesome that the characters almost seem belittled, which may be Ceylan's purpose.

Silly and spectacular, and fun.

The Clearing doesn't feel bound by the usual formulas of crime movies. What eventually happens will emerge from the personalities of the characters, not from the requirements of Hollywood endings.

The bottom line: I am convinced this message is true.

For a grimmer and more realistic look at this world, no modern movie has surpassed Karel Reisz's "The Gambler'' (1974), starring James Caan in a screenplay by self-described degenerate gambler James Toback.

Right now, she's like the grade-school girl at the spin-the-bottle party who changes the rules when the bottle points at her.

The movie's a mixed bag, but worth seeing for the good stuff, which is a lesson in how productive it can be to allow characters to say what they might actually say.

As for the movie, I've seen better comedy films and better concert films. It noodles around too much and gets distracted from the music. Michel Gondry, who directed, makes good fiction films but is not an instinctive documentarian and forgets that even a fly on the wall should occasionally find some peanut butter. As the record of a state of mind, however, the film is uncanny.

Dillinger is the film, we may speculate, that John Milius was born to make: violent, tough, filled with guns and blood.

Everything is here. It's an effective thriller, he (Affleck) works closely with actors, he has a feel for pacing. Yet I persist in finding chases and gun battles curiously boring.

The movie contains elements that make it very good, and a lot of other elements besides. Less is more.

It is a new documentary of a past event, recapturing the electricity generated by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Courteney Cox, well known from TV, rarely gets an opportunity to revise her famous image, but here she is serious, inward, coiled. She carries the film; the other characters circulate through her consciousness as possibilities and hypotheses.

It shares one annoying practice with their other early films: They like to use distracting little zooms in and out for no reason at all, except possibly to remind us the film is being shot with a camera.

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

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

The charm of the movie comes in the performances - in the way Martin and Hawn lie to themselves and each other - and in the dialog, which is endlessly inventive as one lie piles upon another, and the characters test each other with a high-wire act of falsehood.

Do we want to know more about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and the history and political grievances behind them? Yes, but that's not how things turned out. Sorry, but there you have it.

It is exuberantly old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment.

Here is a gloriously greasy, sweaty, hairy, bloody and violent Western. It is delicious.

Hackman could charm the chrome off a trailer hitch. Romano is more of the earnest, aw-shucks, sincere, well-meaning kind of guy whose charm is inner and only peeks out occasionally. They work well together here.

It isn't about thrills and explosions, but about tenacity, and most of it takes place within our own imaginations.

Barr could have made an easy, predictable and dumb comedy at any point in the last couple of years. Instead, she took her chances with an ambitious project - a real movie. It pays off, in that Barr demonstrates that there is a core of reality inside her TV persona, a core of identifiable human feelings like jealousy and pride, and they provide a sound foundation for her comic acting.

This is not to say Conan O'Brien is a bad man. In fact, after the movie, I rather admired him. What we are seeing is a man determined to vindicate himself after a public humiliation.

Cowboys & Aliens has without any doubt the most cockamamie plot I've witnessed in many a moon.

One of the things I like best about Poolhall Junkies is its lack of grim desperation.

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

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

Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered.

At the very least a superior action film, in which the action sequences are plausible and grounded in reality.

The Princess and the Frog inspires memories of Disney's Golden Age it doesn't quite live up to, as I've said, but it's spritely and high-spirited, and will allow kids to enjoy it without visually assaulting them.

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

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

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.

Five minutes into the film, I relaxed, knowing it was set in the real world, and not in the Hollywood alternative universe where Julia Roberts can't get a date.

The way all of this plays out is acted warmly by the principals, and Eigil Bryld's photography (of Ireland) makes England look breathtakingly green and inviting. The director, Julian Jarrold ("Kinky Boots" and the TV version of "White Teeth") is comfortable with the material, and it is comfortable with him.

Benny and Joon is a film that approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. The story wants to be about love, but is also about madness, and somehow it weaves the two together with a charm that would probably not be quite so easy in real life.

It has its laughs, but it’s a more thoughtful film, more softhearted toward its characters. It’s warm and poignant.

Duke and his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, don't make Hoodlum into a violent action film, though it has its bloody shoot-outs, but into more of a character study.

A film like The Last Mountain fills me with restless anger. I have seen many documentaries like this, all telling versions of the same story.

Gods and Monsters is not a deep or powerful film, but it is a good-hearted one.

You could think of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers as "Ferris Velasquez's Day Off."

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

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

Serious pianists sometimes pound out a little honky-tonk, just for fun. That's like what Steven Soderbergh is doing in Ocean's Eleven.

What he has here is a story that probably cannot be believed in any conceivable level, and yet, to give him his due, he tells it with such conviction that it works anyway.

The movie contains less of its interesting story and more action and battle scenes than I would have preferred.

The best reason to see it is simply because of the creativity of its visuals. They're entrancing.

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

It's is not a great high school movie like "Election," but it's alive and risky and saucy.

Sir! No Sir! is a documentary about an almost-forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: Anti-war sentiment among U.S. troops grew into a problem for the Pentagon.

The film's heart is in the right place, and Ferris Bueller is slight, whimsical and sweet.

The claustrophobic, isolated Victorian household is a stage on which every nuance, however small, is noticed.

A quietly enthralling film because it contains the murder and the investigation within Carter's smooth calm.

It's a good thing that Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp are on hand to jack up the acting department. Their characters, two world-class goofballs, keep us interested even during entirely pointless swordfights.

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.

There is something almost perverse in the way Boorman defines his point of view. He is not concerned in this film about the tragedy of war, or the meaning of war, but only with the specific experience of war for a grade-school boy. Drawing from his autobiographical memories, he has not given the little boy in the movie any more insights than such a little boy should have.

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

The movie is like the low-rent, road show version of those serious drug movies where everybody is macho and deadly.

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

Conan the Destroyer is more cheerful than the first Conan movie, and it probably has more sustained action, including a good sequence in the glass palace.

Involving and inspiring in the way a good movie about sports almost always is.

But if you do not have some secret place in your soul that still responds even a little to brave cowboys, beautiful princesses and noble horses, then you are way too grown up and need to cut back on cable news.

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.

A movie that is sort of funny some of the time and then occasionally hilarious.

What is most beguiling about Addams Family Values is the way the relationship between Gomez and Morticia has ripened.

Ingenious in its plotting, colorful in its characters, taut in its direction and fortunate in possessing Cate Blanchett.

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

A film of unusual visual beauty and enormous intrinsic interest.

A faithful remake of the 1976 film, and that's a relief; it depends on characters and situations and doesn't go berserk with visuals.

There are many scholars and critics here, most of them useful and pleasant, who obviously love him. Most remarkably, there is his granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, still looking terrific at 100, who had writing in her blood and wrote "Up the Down Staircase."

Chasing Mavericks is made with more care and intelligence than many another film starting with its template might have been. It's better than most movies targeted at teens. And the cinematography of the big Mavericks scene by Oliver Euclid and Bill Pope is so frightening that you sort of understand why Frosty stays on the shore, watching Jay with binoculars.

Everything comes down to an epic battle between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and that's when my attention began to wander, and the movie lost a potential fourth star.

A movie that I find oddly touching. It is no doubt too thoughtful for the summer action season, but I appreciate the quietly realistic way Shyamalan finds to tell a story about the possible death of man.

Hey, it's no masterpiece. It is what it is: soft-core eroticism. But on that basis, it succeeds, which is why I am giving it three stars. All criticism is subjective, all star ratings are relative, and if you have read this far you want to know if "Sex and Zen" is a superior example of its genre. It is. If there is the slightest doubt, stay around for the closing credits, which begin with gigantic block letters reading: "Recommended by Penthouse." The possibilities for additional recommendations in other kinds of movies are tantalizing.

Developments unfold according to the needs of the characters. The movie is not about springing surprises on us, but about showing these people in a process of discovery. The performances are not pitched toward melodrama; the actors all find the right notes and rhythms for scenes in which life goes on and everything need not be solved in three lines of dialogue.

This is the kind of story that has to be true; as fiction, it would not be believable.

The charm of Goon is that Doug Glatt (Scott) is a genial guy from a nice family. Just because he hands out concussions doesn't mean he dislikes anybody. He's just happy to be wearing a uniform.

Offers modest pleasures. It is not an essential film, but if you go to see it, it will not insult your intelligence, and there's genuine suspense toward the end.

The movie is more slapdash than smooth, more impulsive than calculating, and it takes cheap shots. I responded to its savage, sloppy zeal.

Moves at a breakneck pace, it has strong and simple characterizations, it has good location photography and terrific special effects, and it supplies what it claims to supply: an effective action movie.

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

Kennedy goes for silhouettes and, as I’ve mentioned, for the kind of carefully casual arrangements of figures we find in samurai films - the Japanese Western. The result is a movie that isolates the John Wayne mystique and surrounds it with the necessary simplicity and directness.

Cutthroat Island is everything a movie named Cutthroat Island should be, and no more. It is a pirate picture, pure and simple, and doesn't transcend its genre except perhaps in the luxurious production. Leaner and meaner pirate movies have worked more or less as well, but this one gets the job done.

A gentle and sweet whimsy, attentive to the love between the two brothers, respectful of the boy's growth and curiosity.

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.

This is a movie about a man who is past his shelf life. Sooner or later, he'll end up sitting in front of that cafe with the other guys. He knows it.

After slogging through the predictability of countless would-be action thrillers, I admired the sheer professionalism of this one, which doesn't transcend its genre, but at least honors it.

The result is an actor's dream, a film in which the truth of almost every scene has to be excavated out of the debris of social inhibition.

The Big Year is getting the enthusiastic support of the Audubon Society, and has an innocence and charm that will make it appealing for families, especially those who have had enough whales and dolphins for the year.