Roger Ebert

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did The Natural have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning?

I've seen so many thrillers that, frankly, I don't always care how they turn out — unless they're really well-crafted. What I like about Eyewitness is that, although it does care how it turns out, it cares even more about the texture of the scenes leading to the denouement.

There comes a time in some movies when sheer spectacle overwhelms any consideration of plot, and Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction is a movie like that. It has a plot so unlikely and confused that we can't believe it for much more than 15 seconds at a time, but its action sequences are so absorbing and its mountaintop photography so compelling that we don't care.

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

What saves this movie, which won this year's audience award at Sundance, from being boring are performances by two actors who see a chance to go over the top and aren't worried about the fall on the other side.

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

A clever, funny and very skillful thriller about how a kid builds his own atomic bomb. This isn't really a teenage movie at all, it's a thriller. And it's one of those thrillers that stays as close as possible to the everyday lives of convincing people, so that the movie's frightening aspects are convincing.

The Jessica Lange character is wrong because she isn't selfish enough. In the original, the character was a tough dame who had married the fat spider for money, and was looking out only for herself. Here the character's motivations are marred by soft bourgeois values like affection and career dreams. The original film had a good girl and a bad girl; the Lange character wants to be both.

This is the most gruesome and quease-inducing film you are likely to have seen. You may not even want to read the descriptions in this review. Yet it is also beautiful, angry and sad, with a curious sick poetry, as if the Marquis de Sade had gone in for pastel landscapes.

In Hilary Swank, the film finds the right actress to embody gritty tenacity.

It is a well-crafted movie that works, that entertains, and that pulls us through its pretty standard material with the magnetism of the Ray Sharkey performance.

Tells a story we think we already know, but we're wrong: It has new things to say within an old formula.

There is real wit in Glover's performance. And wit, too, in R. Lee Ermey's performance as the boss, which draws heavily on Ermey's real-life experience as a drill sergeant.

This is the kind of adventure picture the studios churned out in the Golden Age -- so traditional it almost feels new.

The material never really takes hold. It seems awkward. It lacks fire and passion. Watching it was like having a pale memory of a vivid experience.

One fundamental problem with the movie is that John Travolta is seriously miscast as a nuclear terrorist. Say what you will about the guy, he doesn't come across as a heavy.

I guess it's a tribute to The Man With Two Brains that I found myself laughing a fair amount of the time, despite my feelings about Martin.

The movie isn't a comic book that's been assembled out of the spare parts from other crime movies; it's an original, in-depth look at this world, written and directed with concern—apparently after a lot of research and inside information.

I didn't find “The Jerk” very funny...There's a smarmy undercurrent in this movie that seems to imply that Steve Martin may be playing a jerk, but that we all know what a cool guy he is. Well, if you're going to play a jerk, play one as if you think you are one, or you might wind up looking like a jerk.

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

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

The film is punctuated by violence, a great deal of violence, although most of it is exaggerated comic-book style instead of being truly gruesome. Walking that fine line is a speciality of Hill, who once simulated the sound of a fist on a chin by making tape recordings of Ping-Pong paddles slapping leather sofas.

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

There is a very good movie named "Before Sunset" that begins more or less where this one ends. Which tells you something right there.

Uusually satisfying in the way it unfolds.

Exactly the kind of documentary we all want to have made about ourselves, in which it is revealed that we are funny, smart, beloved, the trusted confidant of famous people.

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

The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing.

Apart from the other good things in Tightrope, I admire it for taking chances; Clint Eastwood can get rich making Dirty Harry movies, but he continues to change and experiment, and that makes him the most interesting of the box-office megastars.

The race is more like a private poker game held upstairs in somebody's suite during the World Series of Poker.

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

A little more zip, and Hero might really have worked. It has all the ingredients for a terrific entertainment, but it lingers over the kinds of details that belong in a different kind of movie.

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

Trucker sets out on a difficult and tricky path, and doesn't put a foot wrong.

I admired the movie. It is made with quiet competence, and will remind some viewers of the Hitchcock who made “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “Foreign Correspondent.”

Cat People moves back and forth between its mythic and realistic levels, held together primarily by the strength of Kinski's performance and John Heard's obsession. Kinski is something. She never overacts in this movie, never steps wrong, never seems ridiculous; she just steps onscreen and convincingly underplays a leopard. Heard also is good.

The Karate Kid was one of the nice surprises of 1984 -- an exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long time.

The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message.

It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction'' and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.

It confronts the relationship between Fonda and Voight with unusual frankness -- and with emotional tenderness and subtlety that is, if anything, even harder to portray.

Vulgarity is a very tricky thing to handle in a comedy; tone is everything, and the makers of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" have an absolute gift for taking potentially funny situations and turning them into general embarrassment. They're tone-deaf.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

Although not bowling me over, Planet 51 is a jolly and good-looking animated feature in glorious 2-D.

It is a brave experiment, based on life and using actors who play themselves, but it buys into the whole false notion that artists are somehow too brilliant to be sober.

Has too much docudrama and not enough soul.

Its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with.

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.

Never comes alive.

The movie is both interesting and unsatisfying. The Keitel performance is over the top, inviting us to side with Furtwangler simply because his interrogator is so vile.

American teenage movies tidy things up by pairing off the right couples at the end. In Europe they know that summers end and life goes on.

Picks and chooses cleverly, skipping blithely past the entire Russian Revolution but lingering on mad monks, green goblins, storms at sea, train wrecks and youthful romance.

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 Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

This is a brighter, more engaging film than the original "Madagascar."

The movie was made with a lot of love and startingly fresh memories of the early 1940s, and reminds us once again that Spacek is a treasure.

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

For a time in her life, a woman's pregnancy is the most important thing about her. That is the subject of Hideaway.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

The first-time director is Mateo Gil, known for the screenplays of "Open Your Eyes," "The Sea Inside" and "Agora." Ironic, that the film's weakness is its screenplay.

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

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.

I have no idea if this movie was made stoned. Like its predecessors by Cheech and Chong, it might as well have been.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

A wacky and eccentric heist comedy with many virtues, but it is also a remake of "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958), a movie much beloved by me. Some scenes are so close to the original it's kind of uncanny.

I expected another mindless surfing movie. Blue Crush is anything but.

Any attempt to defend this movie on rational grounds is futile. The whole point is Jackie Chan, he does what he does better than anybody. He's having fun. If we allow ourselves to get in the right frame of mind, so are we.

The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

She's So Lovely does not depict choices most audiences will condone, or even understand, but the film is not boring, and has the dread hypnotic appeal of a slowly developing traffic accident (in which we think there will probably be no fatalities).

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.

A perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller.

Wah-Wah has a sequence, based on old newsreels, in which the flag is lowered and the sun sets on another bit of the empire. Odd how many critics have felt the whole movie should be about this. I don't see why. The story is about people who lived closed lives, and a film about them would necessarily give independence only a supporting role.

Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Connery labors mightily. There is still the same Bond grin, still the cool humor under fire, still the slight element of satire. But when he puts on his cute little helmet and is strapped into his helicopter, somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we're left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.

The movie would have benefitted from a tight rewrite (it is too ambitious in including plot threads it doesn't have time to deal with), but Gibson's strong central performance speeds it along.

Sort of entertaining, but lacks the focus and comic energy of Judge's "Office Space" (1999), and to believe that Suzie would be attracted to the gigolo requires not merely the suspension of disbelief, but its demolition.

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

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

Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.

Since you have probably not seen "Nine Queens," Criminal will be new to you, and I predict you'll like the remake about as much as I liked the original -- three stars' worth. If, however, you've seen "Nine Queens," you may agree that some journeys, however entertaining, need only be taken once.

As Darabont directs it, it tells a story with beginning, middle, end, vivid characters, humor, outrage and emotional release. Dickensian.

Chick Flick indeed! Guys, take your best buddy to see this movie. Tell him, "It's really cool, dude, even though there aren't any eviscerations."

Fosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man.

A riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones.

No actor is more aware of his own instruments, and Eastwood demonstrates that in Pale Rider, a film he dominates so completely that only later do we realize how little we really saw of him.

By the time the Incredible Hulk had completed his hulk-on-hulk showdown with the Incredible Blonsky, I had been using my Timex with the illuminated dial way too often.

This performance, unlike anything Paul Dano has ever done, must have required some courage. It requires an actor to cast aside all conceits of performance, presence, charisma and even timing.

Mr. Jealousy isn't quite successful, but it does provide more evidence of Baumbach's talent.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips uses its budget quietly, with good taste, and succeeds in being a big movie without being a gross one. I think I enjoyed it about as much as any road show since Funny Girl.

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

Luckily, there's enough of the domestic comedy to make the movie work despite its crasser instincts. One of the big surprises in the movie is Selleck's wonderful performance as the bachelor architect. After playing action heroes on TV and in the movies, he now reveals himself to be a light comedian in the Cary Grant tradition - a big, handsome guy with tenderness and vulnerability

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.

A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don't have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.

Most movies remain at the top level of action: They are about what happens. A few consider the meaning of what happened, and even fewer deal with the fact that we have a choice, some of the time, about what happens and what we do about it.

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

Tolkin gives us one richly detailed set piece after another, involving luncheons, openings, massages, telephone tag, psychic consultations, sex, heartfelt conversation, and pagan rituals led by a bald-headed woman who sees what others cannot see.

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world's leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

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.

The movie is ultimately not quite successful; when it was over I felt there was some additional payoff or explanation still due. Perhaps the arbitrary, unfinished nature of the story is part of its purpose. But I felt that characters this interesting should not be allowed to remain complete ciphers. Still, in individual moments, The Comfort of Strangers has an eerie, atmospheric charm.

Dead Snow, as you may have gathered, is a comedy, but played absolutely seriously by sincere, earnest young actors.

Lars von Trier exhibits the imagination of an artist and the pedantry of a crank in Dogville, a film that works as a demonstration of how a good idea can go wrong.

This is a brave, layered film that challenges the wisdom of victory at any price. Both of its central characters would slip easily into conventional plot formulas, but Bahrani looks deeply into their souls and finds so much more.

The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up.

It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns and worms. Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.

This is a fresh and cheerful movie with a goofy sense of humor and a good ear for how teenagers talk.

The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness.

Biloxi Blues may indeed be based on memories from Neil Simon’s experiences in basic training during World War II, but it seems equally based on every movie ever made about basic training, and it suffers by comparison with most of them.

A beguiling film about words, secrets and tobacco.

If you've seen “The Karate Kid” (1984), the memories will come back during this 2010 remake. That's a compliment.

Mo' Better Blues is not a great film, but it's an interesting one, which is almost as rare.

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.

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

The movie is successful largely because [DiCaprio] is a good enough actor to hold his own in his scenes with De Niro, so that the movie remains his story, and isn't upstaged by the loathsome but colorful Dwight.

The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.

Between the Caan and Dillon characters there are atmosphere, desperation and romance, and, at the end, something approaching true pathos.

I think if you care for James, you must see it. It is not an adaptation but an interpretation.

Surprisingly sweet and gentle comedy.

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.

So what has happened is that this uptight, ferocious, little gamin Lisbeth has won our hearts, and we care about these stories and think there had better be more.

As pure movie, The X-Files more or less works. As a story, it needs a sequel, a prequel, and Cliff Notes.

This movie is not a collection of parts from other films. It's an original, and what it does best is show how strangers can become friends, and friends can become like family.

The film is confoundingly watchable.

It is a minor movie, but a big-time minor movie...If there is such a thing as a must-see three-star movie, here it is.

It is not a serious film about its subject, nor is it quite a dark comedy, despite some of Pacino's good lines. The epilogue, indeed, cheats in a way I thought had been left behind in grade school. And yet there are splendid moments.

This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven't had as much fun second-guessing a movie since "Mulholland Drive."

The Coens' Ladykillers, on the other hand, is always wildly signaling for us to notice it. Not content to be funny, it wants to be FUNNY! Have you ever noticed that the more a comedian wears funny hats, the less funny he is?

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

There has to come a time when inspiration gives way to habit, and I think the Pink Panther series is just about at that point. That's not to say this film isn't funny -- it has moments as good as anything Sellers and Edwards have ever done -- but that it's time for them to move on.

The movie's not without its moments.

Well written. The dialogue is smart and fresh.

The movie is the latest horror show from Stuart Gordon, whose Re-Animator was one of the great trash pictures of 1985. From Beyond doesn't quite measure up - it's not trashy enough and it doesn't have the insane tunnel vision of the first movie - but in its own way, this is quite a job.

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

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.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of charm and excitement, a sort of bittersweet farewell to a time when a man with an airplane could make a living taking the citizens of Nebraska on their first fiveminute flights.

What we have here is basically two hours of inventive, colorfully imagined entertainment, with the Brinks job laid on top: A movie-movie, so to speak, and fun from beginning to end.

This movie is knowledgeable about the city and the people who make accommodations with it.

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

The movie is never quite bold enough to point out the contradiction of Muslims and Christians hating one another, even though they both in theory worship the same god.

It's more of a melodrama, a film that doesn't say priests are bad but observes that priests are human and some humans are bad.

The movie is pieced together out of uneven footage, and the idea of a documentary seems to have occurred in the midst of filming.

The machinery in this movie is so efficient that we don't know the answer until the very last shot.

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

Scanners is a new horror film made with enough craft and skill that it could have been very good, if it could find a way to make us care about it.

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

This is a movie in the true tradition of film noir -- which someone who didn't write a dictionary once described as a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.

It has charm, a sly intelligence, and the courage to go for special effects sequences.

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.

There is a real terror in the faces of these kids as they realize that people have died, that guns kill, that your life can be ruined, or over, in an instant.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

The important thing about "The Importance" is that all depends on the style of the actors, and Oliver Parker's film is well cast.

A movie with the nerve to end with melodramatic sentiment--and get away with it, because it means it. Expect lots of damp eyes in the audience.

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

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.

One question is not addressed by the movie: Why were the children deported in the first place? Yes, we know the "reasons," but what were the motives?

The events involving the big speaking competition are so labored that occasionally the twins seem to be looking back over their shoulders for the plot to catch up.

The movie is directed with efficiency by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) who knows that pacing is indispensable to a procedural.

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.

If Fugitive Pieces has a message, it is that life can heal us, if we allow it.

A smart and good movie that could have been a great one if it had a little more daring.

Fiennes and Richardson make this film work with the quiet strangeness of their performances; if they insist on their eccentricities, it's because they've paid them off and own them outright.

The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke.

A good film in many ways, but its best achievement is the casting of Jamal Woolard, a rapper named Gravy, in the title role.

Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.

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

The most valuable task of the film is to re-create the historic legal struggles that led to Brown, and to remember heroes who have been almost forgotten by history.

Bride Flight takes this melodrama and adds details of period, of behavior, of personality, to somewhat redeem its rather inevitable conclusion.

It's an old-fashioned romantic triangle, told with schmaltzy music on the sound track and a heroine with a smoky singing voice, and then the Nazis turn up and it gets very complicated and heartbreaking.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.

The problem with a story like this is that it's almost too perfect. It tends to break out of the boundaries of the typical sports movie, and undermine those easy cliches that are so reassuring to sports fans.

The movie is so sincere and confused in its values that it mirrors the goofy loyalties and violent pathology of its characters.

In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.

One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.

I found the idea of the plot more interesting than the plot itself, and am finding the movie more fun to write about than to see.

I feel like recommending the performances, and suggesting they be transported to another film. The actors emerge with glory for attempting something very hard and succeeding remarkably well. They deserve to be in a better movie.

Starts out with the materials of an ordinary movie and becomes a rather special one.

The movie doesn't crank up the volume with violence and jailhouse cliches, but focuses on this person and his possibilities for change.

Movies like this are not for everyone, but arrive like private messages for their own particular audiences.

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

The plot of Point Blank, summarized, invites parody (rookie agent goes undercover as surfer to catch bank robbers). The result is surprisingly effective.

And Cruise is so efficiently packaged in this product that he plays the same role as a saint in a Mexican village's holy day procession: It's not what he does that makes him so special; it's the way he manifests everybody's faith in him.

An honest, on-the-ground documentary about the lives of Americans fighting there. It has no spin. It's not left or right.

The film is not a compelling drama so much as a poignant observation of a sad situation.

This is not a cute fantasy in which bears ride tricycles and play house. It is about life in the wild, and it does an impressive job of seeming to show wild bears in their natural habitat.

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

This is a basic story, simply and directly told by Irish writer-director Ciaran Foy. He doesn't try to explain too much, he doesn't depend on special effects and stays just this side of the unbelievable.

Schlaich portrays a society in which some are racists who act cruelly toward the black man, and others, even strangers, go out of their way to help him.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.

The patter is always fascinating, and at right angles to the action. [Mamet]'s like a magician who gets you all involved in his story about the King, the Queen and the Jack, while the whole point is that there's a rabbit in your pocket.

Familiar in its story arc, but fresh in its energy and lucky in its choice of actors.

This conclusion is too pat to be satisfying, but the film has a kind of hard, cold effect.

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

By occupying their roles believably, by acting as we think their characters probably would, they save the movie from feeling like basic Hollywood action (even when it probably is). This is one of the year's best thrillers.

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

Brassed Off is a sweet film with a lot of anger at its core.

You hear some nostalgia, but with most of them you don't get the idea that if they had the chance they'd do it all again.

Winner of Sundance's grand jury prize for world cinema, Happy, Happy is a very strange film. Yet I was happy to be watching. It is short and intense enough that it always seems on track, even if the train goes nowhere.

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

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

A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.

One of the nice things about the movie is the way it provides chills and thrills and still tones down the violence.

Coffy is slightly more serious and a little more inventive than it needs to be.

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

The comedy here isn't all on the surface, and Viterelli [the bodyguard Jelly] is one reason why.

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

To my surprise, Ratner does a sure, stylish job, appreciating the droll humor of Lecter's predicament, creating a depraved new villain in the Tooth Fairy (Ralph Fiennes), and using the quiet, intense skills of Norton to create a character whose old fears feed into his new ones. There is also humor, of the uneasy he-can't-get-away-with-this variety, in the character of a nosy scandal-sheet reporter (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

As good as Gibson is, his character is still caught between the tragedy of the man and the absurdity of the Beaver. Fugitive thoughts of Señor Wences crept into my mind. I'm sorry, but they did.

Essentially a hyperactive showcase for Tsui Hark's ability to pile one unbelievably complex action sequence on top of another.

If the movie is not original, at least it's a showcase for the actors and writers. It does not speak as well, alas, for director Jordan Melamed and his cinematographer, Nick Hay.

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.

For me, Richard Jenkins is the heart of Norman. How often I've admired him; even in unworthy roles, he has such strength, he never seems the need to try.

The movie reveals its serious undertones (with commentary by the Greek chorus, which occasionally breaks into song and dance) while at the same time developing a plot that lends itself to slapstick.

It's strange how the earlier movies fill in the gaps left by this one, and answer the questions. It is, I suspect, not even possible to understand this film without knowing the first two, and yet, knowing them, Part III works better than it should.

David Schwimmer has made one of the year's best films: Powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive.

If Wayne and Garth ever grow confident of their success, the series will be over. Everything depends on the delighted disbelief with which they greet every new victory.

I feel something is missing. There had to be dark nights of the soul. Times of grief and rage. The temptation of nihilism. The lure of despair. Can a 13-year-old girl lose an arm and keep right on smiling?

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

So determined to be clever and whimsical that it neglects to be anything else.

Has zest and humor and some lovable supporting characters, but do we really need this zapped-up version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic? Eighteenth century galleons and pirate ships go sailing through the stars, and it somehow just doesn't look right.

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

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

True Romance, which feels at times like a fire sale down at the cliche factory, is made with such energy, such high spirits, such an enchanting goofiness, that it's impossible to resist. Check your brains at the door.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the new Disney production from the team that made Mary Poppins, and it has the same technical skill and professional polish. It doesn't have much of a heart, though, and toward the end you wonder why the Poppins team thought kids would like it much.

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

Parker succeeds in making the prison into a full, real, rounded world, a microcosm of human behavior; I was reminded of e.e. cummings' novel The Enormous Room. The movie's art direction is especially good at recreating that world, as in a scene where Hayes and his friends try to escape down an old cistern. And there are visions into the inferno, as in a scene in the madhouse where the inmates circle forever around a stone pillar. The movie creates spellbinding terror, all right; my only objection is that it's so eager to have us sympathize with Billy Hayes.

None of the action is coherent; shots and shells are fired, people and killed or not, explosions rend the air, SUVs spin aloft (the same one more than once, I think), and there is no sense of strategy.

I found the opening third tremendously intriguing and involving, I thought the emotions were so real they could be touched, but then the film lost its way and fell into the clutches of sentimental melodrama.

Movies like this renew my faith that the future of the cinema lies not in the compromises of digital projection, but by leaping over the limitations of digital into the next generation of film technology.

Until the plot becomes intolerably cornball, there's charm in the story.

Once in the jungle they have all sorts of harrowing adventures, and I enjoyed it that real things were happening, that we were not simply looking at shoot-outs and chases, but at intriguing and daring enterprise.

A well-crafted example of a film of pure sensation. I do not mind admitting I was enthralled.

This film is an affront. It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies.

Private Benjamin is refreshing and fun. Goldie Hawn, who is a true comic actress, makes an original, appealing character out of Judy Benjamin, and so the movie feels alive, not just an exercise in gags and situations.

We are not looking at flesh-and-blood actors but special effects that look uncannily convincing, even though I am reasonably certain that Angelina Jolie does not have spike-heeled feet. That's right: feet, not shoes.

The movie is like a Dickens novel in which the hero moves through the underskirts of society, encountering one colorful character after another.

Spider-Man 3 is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.

More evolved, more confident, more sure-footed in the way it marries minimal character development to seamless action.

Each scene works within itself on its own terms. But there is no whole here. I've rarely seen a narrative film that seemed so reluctant to flow. Nor perhaps one with a more accurate title.

Saints and Soldiers isn't a great film, but what it does, it does well.

Without a great Bond girl, a great villain or a hero with a sense of humor, The Living Daylights belongs somewhere on the lower rungs of the Bond ladder. But there are some nice stunts.

What impressed me is how effective the movie was, even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion. That's a tribute to the director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and the actors, who have been chosen with the same kind of typecasting that perhaps occurs in life.

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

Sometimes overwrought excess can be its own reward. If Obsession had been even a little more subtle, had made even a little more sense on some boring logical plane, it wouldn't have worked at all.

Has a good heart and some fine performances, but is too muddled at the story level to involve us emotionally.

Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie.

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

The movie is broad and clumsy, and the dialogue cannot be described as witty, but a kind of grandeur creeps into the screenplay by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson.

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

Cuts back and forth between a tragic story involving the Holocaust and an essentially trivial, feel-good story about a modern-day reporter. It's an awkward fit and diminishes the impact of the earlier story.

The movie isn't as funny or entertaining as "Evil Dead II," however, maybe because the comic approach seems recycled.

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

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

There is undoubtedly a movie to be made about this material -- a different movie.

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

The Searchers contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances.

Funny and moving, and more entertaining than some of the movies you are considering this weekend.

Let's face it. Nobody is going to Bolero for the plot anyway. They're going for the Good Parts.

For the first half of this movie, I was able to suspend judgment. Interesting things were happening, the performances were good and it is always absorbing to see how other people live. Most of the second half of the movie, alas, is taken up with routine cloak-and-dagger stuff.

An absorbing experience.

When politics do not create walls (as apartheid did), most people are primarily interested in their families, their romances, and their jobs. They hope to improve all three. The movie is about their hope.

One of those rare movies where you leave the theater having been surprised and entertained, and then start arguing.

The characters are allowed to be smart, to react in unexpected ways, and to be more concerned with doing the right thing than with doing the expedient or even the lustful thing.

Steven Spielberg, a gifted filmmaker, should have reimagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.

Yet Love! Valour! Compassion! has power and insight, and perhaps what makes it strong is its disinterest in technical experiments: It is about characters and dialogue, expressed through good acting--the very definition of the "well-made play."

Intelligent and subtle.

As a period biopic, J. Edgar is masterful. Few films span seven decades this comfortably.

Walter Hill's Streets of Fire begins by telling us it's a rock & roll fable ... from another time, another place. The movie is right on the rock & roll, but the alternative time and place are mysteriously convincing -- especially if, like me, you believe the most beautiful post-war American cars were Studebakers.

The best parts of this sweet film involve the middle stretches, when time, however limited, reaches ahead, and the characters do what they can to prevail in the face of calamity. How can I complain that they don't entirely succeed? Isn't the dilemma of the plot the essential dilemma of life?

The film looks great, the songs are wonderfully visualized, and the characters are appealing.

It is just as well that Last Crusade will indeed be Indy's last film. It would be too sad to see the series grow old and thin, like the James Bond movies.

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

What they've done here is to recapture not only the look and the storylines of old horror comics, but also the peculiar feeling of poetic justice that permeated their pages. In an EC horror story, unspeakable things happened to people - but, for the most part, they deserved them.

Richard Dreyfuss, who is sometimes too exuberant, here finds the right tones for Mr. Holland, from youthful cocksureness to the gentle insight of age. His physical transformations over 30 years are always convincing.

Finian's Rainbow is the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form.

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

The movie is nice to look at, the colors and details are elegant, the animals engaging, the action fast-moving, but I don't think older viewers will like it as much as the kids.

Mantegna gives us just enough detail, enough exterior shots, so that we feel we're on a ship. All the rest is conversation and idleness. The lake boat is a lot like life.

I admired Intacto more than I liked it, for its ingenious construction and the way it keeps a certain chilly distance between its story and the dangers of popular entertainment.

There is an underlying likability to Austin Powers that sort of carries us through the movie.

The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.

A featherweight comedy balanced between silliness and charm.

I think it works like a nasty little machine to keep us involved and disturbed; my attention never strayed, and one of the elements I liked was the way Paltrow's character isn't sentimentalized.

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

Not many movies know that truth. Moonlight Mile is based on it.

A return to form for Stone's dark side, Savages generates ruthless energy and some, but not too much, humor.

Roll Bounce, a nostalgic memory of disco roller-dancing in the late 1970s, has warm starring performances from Bow Wow and Chi McBride, who are funny, lovable and sometimes touching.

The Lie is dark enough, but it has affection for its characters and doesn't destroy them. It paints them in three fallible human dimensions, and the actors are warm and plausible.

I enjoyed a lot of A Star Is Born. I thought Miss Streisand was distractingly miscast in the role, and yet I forgave her everything when she sang.

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

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.

As we switched relentlessly back and forth between A and B, I found that I wasn't looking forward to either story.

It fails to make us care, even a little, about the characters and what happens to them. There is nothing at stake.

My only complaint is that its plot flatlines compared to the 1979 version, which was trickier, wittier and smarter. Romero was not above finding parallels between zombies and mall shoppers.