Roger Ebert

A decent futuristic action picture with some great sets, some intriguing ideas, and a few images that will stay with me.

The director, Joseph Ruben ("The Stepfather," "Sleeping With the Enemy"), uses a kind of flat, logical storytelling that leads us inexorably toward his conclusions.

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent.

In fact the sequel is a better film than the original, as if writer-producer Luc Besson had a clearer idea of what he wanted to do (and didn't want to do).

But Mimic is superior to most of its cousins, and has been stylishly directed by Guillermo Del Toro, whose visual sense adds a certain texture that makes everything scarier and more effective.

American Violet, it's true, is not blazingly original cinema. Tim Disney's direction and the screenplay by Bill Haney are meat and potatoes, making this story clear, direct and righteous.

What's interesting is that every single person in this film is seen as themselves, is allowed to speak and seems to have a good heart. I've rarely seen a documentary quite like it. It has a point to make but no ax to grind.

Here is a film that begins with merciless comic savagery and descends into merely merciless savagery. But wow, what an opening.

You may very well hate it, but at least you've been informed. Perhaps you could enjoy the material about other religions, and tune out when yours is being discussed. That's only human nature.

The cast is large, well chosen and diverting. The ceremony is delightful.

The movie generates little suspense and no relief. And yet it is worth seeing as a chamber piece, an exercise in which two great actors expand their range and work together in great sympathy. Both Nicholson and Streep have moments as good as anything they have done.

Silly at times, leaning toward the screwball tradition of everyone racing around the house at the same time in a panic fueled by serial misunderstandings. There is also a thoughtful side.

A perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film.

Iron Will is an Identikit plot, put together out of standard pieces. Even the scenery looks generic; there's none of the majesty of Disney's genuinely inspired dog movie, "White Fang."

Adam wraps up their story in too tidy a package, insisting on finding the upbeat in the murky, and missing the chance to be more thoughtful about this challenging situation.

It's a spellbinder with a lot of Hitchcock touches and an Ennio Morricone score to match. But does it play fair with us?

If a movie like this had a neat ending, the ending would be a lie. We do not want answers, but questions and observations.

The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.

Mike Hodges' gritty new film noir I'll Sleep When I'm Dead begins in enigma and snakes its way into stark clarity.

Although Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been praised as a milestone in American literature, this film version brings into question how much of a story it really offers.

It's impressive, how thoughtfully Penn handles this material.

It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.

The ghouls are a little too ridiculous to quite fulfill their function in the movie. They make all the wrong decisions, are incompetent and ill-coordinated.

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

Does it by the numbers, so efficiently this feels more like a Hollywood wannabe than a French film. Where's the quirkiness, the nuance, the deeper levels?

Mermaids is not exactly good, but it is not boring. Winona Ryder, in another of her alienated outsider roles, generates real charisma. And what the movie is saying about Cher is as elusive as it is intriguing.

Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we've seen the originals, and these aren't the originals.

It's nimble, bright and funny. It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature.

Some of the bits work and others don't, but no one seems to be keeping score, and that's part of the movie's charm.

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

A story like Five Senses sounds like a gimmick, but Podeswa has a light touch when dealing with the senses and a sure one when telling his stories.

Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful.

It crash-lands with an ending of soppy moralizing, but until the end, it's smart and merciless in the tradition of the original story.

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

The downward arc of the first two acts of the movie is made harrowing and yet perversely amusing by the performance of Paul Kaye.

Quick Change is a funny but not an inspired comedy. It has two directors - Howard Franklin and Bill Murray - and I wonder if that has anything to do with its inability to be more than just efficiently entertaining.

I found myself debating the film's moral questions on the way out of the theater.

Support Your Local Sheriff is a textbook example of the evil influence TV has on the movies. It's essentially a lousy TV situation comedy dragged out to feature length for no good reason.

Clint Eastwood's film is a determined attempt to be faithful to the book's spirit, but something ineffable is lost just by turning on the camera: Nothing we see can be as amazing as what we've imagined.

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

Tom Cruise is perfectly satisfactory, if not electrifying, in the leading role.

This is a very good haunted house film. It milks our frustration deliciously.

All the time Phil and Claire seem like the kind of people who don't belong in a screwball comedy. That's why it's funny. They're bewildered.

For those who have read the poets and are curious about their lives, Sylvia provides illustrations for the biographies we carry in our minds.

Foster, I believe, sees right through this material and out the other side, and doesn't believe in a bit of it.

A splendid movie while its hero is preparing for his flight and actually experiencing it, but it's not nearly as interesting once he descends to earth.

Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy. There's an over-the-top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing and to the hyperactive camera.

The new version is just as satisfying, if not as dry and cynical, as the original.

The Arrival fulfills one of the classic functions of science fiction, which is to take a current trend and extend it to a possible (and preferably alarming) future. The Arrival gives its aliens credit for reasoning that we might almost be tempted to agree with. We're just finishing what you started, one of the aliens tells Zane, referring to the smokestacks, auto exhausts, rain forests and so on. What would have taken you 100 years will only take us 10. He, or it, has a point.

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

Where did Hollywood get the conviction that audiences demand an ending that lets them off the hook? Foster doesn't let herself off the hook in The Brave One, and we should be as brave as she is.

There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

Stone's most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense.

Real Steel is a real movie. It has characters, it matters who they are, it makes sense of its action, it has a compelling plot. This is the sort of movie, I suspect, young viewers went to the "Transformers" movies looking for.

Now here's this rich and textured film.

I confess I felt involved in Unknown until it pulled one too many rabbits out of its hat. At some point, a thriller has to play fair.

We have the feeling that Kemp/Thompson saw much of life through the bottom of a dirty glass and did not experience it with any precision. The film duplicates this sensation, not with much success.

This is a featherweight G-rated comedy of no consequence, except undoubtedly to kids about Ramona's age.

There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.

Spike Lee misjudged his material and audience. He doesn't find a successful way to express his feelings, angers and satirical points.

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

This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.

Low-key, understated style. The suspense beats away underneath.

It evokes the atmosphere of a Sergio Leone Western, sneaking up under the movie's human comedy and adding a smile.

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

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

What makes The Anniversary Party intriguing is how close it cuts to the bone of reality--how we're teased to draw parallels between some of the characters and the actors who play them.

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?

The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies.

The plot in Throw Mama from the Train is top-heavy, but the movie doesn't make as much as it could from its weird characters.

Pfeiffer looks, acts and sounds wonderful throughout all of this, and George Clooney is perfectly serviceable as a romantic lead, sort of a Mel Gibson lite. I liked them. I wanted them to get together. I wanted them to live happily ever after. The sooner the better.

The plot of Touch sounds like a comedy. But the experience of seeing the film is subduing; the movie plays in a muted key.

Bottle Shock is more than the story. It is also about people who love their work, care about it with passion and talk about it with knowledge.

It has a charm based on its innocence, its conviction, its pre-Beatles soundtrack and the big 1950s cars the kids drive around in.

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

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

I realized the human potential movement has gotten completely out of hand when I heard Goofy telling Max they needed to spend more "quality time" together.

The film is built around two relationships, both touching, both emotionally true.

The beauty in this film is in its directness. There are some obligatory scenes. But there are also some very original and touching ones. This is a movie that has its heart in the right place.

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

It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.

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.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

WQhat would it really be like to huddle in a wrecked aircraft for 10 weeks in freezing weather, eating human flesh? I cannot imagine, and frankly this film doesn't much help me.

It's fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.

I didn't laugh much. I don't think the Stooges are funny, although perhaps I might once have. Some of the sight gags were clever, but meh. The three leads did an admirable job of impersonation. I think this might be pretty much the movie Stooges fans were looking for.

The movie creates such an urgent situation, and fills it with such interesting characters, that when everything goes wrong at the end I felt more than disappointed, I felt cheated.

Betty Blue is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

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

It's strange about Stir Crazy. We go in with big expectations, and we laugh so much at the beginning that we're ready for the movie to launch itself as a hit. And then it all goes flat and we come out disappointed.

The principal pleasure of the movie is in the ensemble work of the actresses, as they trade one-liners and zingers and stick together and dish the dirt. Steel Magnolias is willing to sacrifice its over-all impact for individual moments of humor, and while that leaves us without much to take home, you've got to hand it to them: The moments work.

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

The story of Black Rain is thin and prefabricated and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, so Scott distracts us with overwrought visuals.

3-D is a distraction and an annoyance.

W., a biography of President Bush, is fascinating. No other word for it.

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

It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story.

Twilight will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this.

A peculiar and intriguing film.

This is not a "horror" film or an "underground" film, but an act of transgression so extreme and uncompromised, and yet so amateurish and sloppy, that it exists in a category of one film -- this film.

It has all the necessary girls, gimmicks, subterranean control rooms, uniformed goons and magic wristwatches it can hold, but it doesn't have the wit and it doesn't have the style of the best Bond movies.

Winstone's interaction with Gibson provides the movie with much of its interest. For the rest, it's a skillful exercise in CGI and standard-order thriller supplies.

Original, absorbing and curiously moving.

Mommie Dearest is a painful experience that drones on endlessly, as Joan Crawford's relationship with her daughter, Christina, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress. It left me feeling creepy.

Sleepless in Seattle and Only You and now Love Affair, all movies about nice people getting into goofy misunderstandings because they love one another so much.You have to be in the right mood to enjoy movies like this. Or maybe they put you in the mood.

Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It's like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn't accomplish anything.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

It contains risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, but most of all, it sees what danger and heartbreak are involved. It is riveting from start to finish.

One of the problems with Mel Brooks's High Anxiety is that it picks a tricky target: It's a spoof of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves. And satire works best when its target is self-important.

Only movie lovers who have marinated their imaginations in the great B movies from RKO and Republic will recognize The Hot Spot as a superior work in an old tradition - as a manipulation of story elements as mannered and deliberate, in its way, as variations on a theme for the piano.

What sets Prefontaine aside from most sports movies is that it's not about winning the big race. It's about the life of a runner.

The movie is too flighty and uncentered, and it allows actual violence to break the spell when false alarms would have sufficed.

The result: No other studio could produce historical treasure like this from its vaults.

That looking-glass quality is missing, alas, from Back to the Future Part III, which makes a few bows in the direction of time-travel complexities, and then settles down to be a routine Western comedy.

It leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself?

Working within the limitations of the star rating system, I give four stars to the subjects of this movie, and two stars to the way they have been boiled down into cute pictures and sound bites.

It's not the idea that people will kill each other for entertainment that makes Series 7 jolting. What the movie correctly perceives is that somewhere along the line we've lost all sense of shame in our society.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

A movie with some nice surprises, mostly because it takes the time to create some interesting characters.

Friends With Kids is altogether too casual about parenthood, and that supplies a shaky foundation to a plot that's less about human nature and more about clever dialogue.

The Fog is encouraging because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish. This isn't a great movie but it does show great promise from Carpenter.

All that was needed to pull these elements together was a structure that would clearly define who the characters were, what they stood for and why we should care about them. Unfortunately, that is all that is missing.

The performances by Miller and Graynor are high-spirited enough that you yearn to see them in worthier material. The potential is there. If there's anything more seductive to Manhattanites than sex, it's a cheap apartment overlooking Gramercy Park.

An exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's (Zemeck) is one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D.

I was pleased again and again by set-ups, camera angles, lighting effects, editing rhythms and the fanciful staging of action scenes. But I never for a moment cared about the characters, and the plot was all too conveniently structured - just a guideline to the action.

Alive and daring.

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.

Then I realized the movie's point is that someone like this nerdy Harvard boy might be transformed in a fairly short time into a bloodthirsty gang fighter. The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

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

Here is a rarity, a film about religion that is neither pious nor sensational, simply curious. No satanic possessions, no angelic choirs, no evil spirits, no lovers joined beyond the grave. Just a man doing his job.

It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

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

This is the most confused feature-length film I've ever seen.

A rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3-D and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing.

It is not about whether the hero will get the girl. It is about whether the hero should get the girl, and when was the last time you saw a movie that even knew that could be the question?

This movie is lively at times, it's lovely to look at, and the actors are persuasive in very difficult material. But around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody by that point much cares.

It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.

Hitchcock tells the story not so much as the making of the film, but as the behind-the-scenes relationship of Alma and Hitch. This is a disappointment, since I imagine most movie fans will expect more info about the film's production history.

Jackson disappears into his role, completely convincing, but then he usually is. What a fine actor. He avoids pitfalls like making Champ a maudlin tearjerker, looking for pity. He's realistic, even philosophical, about his life and what happened to him.

This isn't a serious historical film. It plays different instruments than Spielberg's "Lincoln." Murray, who has a wider range than we sometimes realize, finds the human core of this FDR and presents it tenderly.

It offers wonderful things, but they aren't what's important. It's as if Burton directed at arm's length, unwilling to find juice in the story.

There's not much wrong with Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, except that there's not much really right about it.

A movie where the story, like the sub, sometimes seems to be running blind. In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat.

Seems curiously unfinished, as if director John Landis spent all his energy on spectacular set pieces and then didn't want to bother with things like transitions, character development, or an ending.

Seven Years in Tibet is an ambitious and beautiful movie with much to interest the patient viewer, but it makes the common mistake of many films about travelers and explorers: It is more concerned with their adventures than with what they discover.

This is a family drama, all right - but not one of those neat docudramas in which every character comes attached to a fashionable problem, and all the problems are solved in the same happy ending. The family in Light of Day is more like your average, everyday, unhappy family in which the biggest problem is that some of the members quite simply hate each other.

The Frears version is cerebral and claustrophobic, an exercise in sexual mindplay.

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

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.

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.

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

The leading men are successful. Alan Bates, in a change of pace, is the loyal shepherd. Terence Stamp is a suitably vile Sgt. Troy, and Peter Finch makes Boldwood strong and honorable in his love for Bathsheba. Miss Christie, however, is too sweet and superficial, and so is the film.

The movie’s failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and special effects, when it might have been more fun to make a satirical comedy about punk teenagers.

It's easy to pick holes in movies like this, to find the inconsistencies and the oversights and say the movie's no good because we're smarter than it is. But maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe the actual pleasure comes from the fun of being frustrated and full of free advice while the character marches to her doom.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus.

The first hour of Protocol is so much fun, and the Goldie Hawn character is such an engaging original, that at first I couldn't believe they were going to throw away all that work by going for a standard Hollywood ending. But they did.

The movie is finally just a little too ungainly, too jumbled at the end, for me to recommend, but it has heart, and I feel a lot of affection for it.

The plot is essentially a backdrop, as it was in "Charade," for Paris, suspense, romance and star power -- If it is true that there will never be another Audrey Hepburn, and it is, I submit it is also true that there will never be another Thandie Newton.

Cate Blanchett plays Guerin in a way that fascinated me for reasons the movie probably did not intend.

Fascinating because it require us to see the younger character through two sets of eyes -- our own, which witness an attractive woman drawn to a younger male, and the women's, which see a lost love in a new container.

I felt the Kids were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices.

There are scenes that don't even pretend to work. And others that have a sweetness and visual beauty that stops time and simply invites you to share.

What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments.

In Step Brothers, the language is simply showing off by talking dirty. It serves no comic function, and just sort of sits there in the air, making me cringe.

It's innocent and sometimes kind of charming. The sets are entertaining. There are parallels in appearance and theme to a low-rent "Dark City."

The stars are Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep -- arguably the two most distinguished American movie actors under fifty. They have a genuine chemistry together on the screen and undeniable charisma. And that's it in this movie, which gives them not one memorable line of dialogue, not one inventive situation, not one moment when we don't groan at the startling array of clichés they have to march through.

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs, until at times Curtis seems to be working from a checklist of obligatory movie love situations and doesn't want to leave anything out.

The most that can be said for the characters here is they all seem mighty pleased.

A sweet and touching film, worth a visit.

Begins as a great movie (I was spellbound by the first 30 minutes) but ends as only a good one, and I think that's because the screenplay, by Mitch Glazer, too closely follows the romantic line.

Sayles handles this material with gentle delicacy, as if aware that the issues are too fraught to be approached with simple messages.

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

This is a well-crafted movie by a man who knows how to hook the audience with his story; it's Frankenheimer's best work in years.

Beloved evokes some of the fine moments in the careers of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, but it doesn't re-create them.

This is a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

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

Individual moments and lines and events in I Heart Huckabees are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement.

Rendition is valuable and rare. As I wrote from Toronto: "It is a movie about the theory and practice of two things: torture and personal responsibility. And it is wise about what is right, and what is wrong."

These days too many children's movies are infected by the virus of Winning, as if kids are nothing more than underage pro athletes, and the values of Vince Lombardi prevail: It's not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose. This is a movie that breaks with that tradition, that allows its kids to be kids, that shows them in the insular world of imagination and dreaming that children create entirely apart from adult domains and values.

This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.

This movie is just about perfect for teenagers, and it's a surprise that even their parents are allowed to have minds of their own.

The movie seems to be going for a highly mannered, elliptical, enigmatic style, and it gets there. We don't. [15 Feb 1972]

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.

Caveman seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2000.

The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious.

It's easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It's yuppie lite--affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant.

Antonio Banderas is reason enough to see the movie.

A delight on its own terms, even if it has little to do with the real Goethe; here is a randy young man not a million miles apart from Tom Jones.

Born to Win is a good-bad movie that doesn't always work but has some really brilliant scenes.

It's a showcase leading role for Parker Posey, who obviously has the stuff, and generates wacky charm. But the movie never pulls itself together.

This plot, recycled from Austen, is the clothesline for a series of dance numbers that, like Hong Kong action sequences, are set in unlikely locations and use props found there; how else to explain the sequence set in, yes, a Mexican restaurant?

This is a modest but likable film, and Anjelica Huston plays a heroine who makes us smile.

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story.

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.

A modest, cheerful little movie like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is so refreshing. Here is a movie that wants nothing more than to allow some high-spirited kids to sing and dance their way through a silly plot just long enough to make us grin.

King of the Corner is not plot-driven. It's like life: just one damned thing after another

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

Watching MirrorMask, I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.

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

Watching Invincible was a singular experience for me, because it reminded me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing.

You can see how this movie could have been jacked up into a one-level action picture, but what makes it special is how Thornton modulates the material.

Told with the frank simplicity of a classic well-made picture, it tells its story, nothing more, nothing less, with no fancy stuff. We relax as if we've found a good movie on cable. Story is everything here.

Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time.

Follows the "Lock, Stock" formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song.

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

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

Crossroads borrows so freely and is a reminder of so many other movies that it's a little startling, at the end, to realize how effective the movie is and how original it manages to feel despite all the plunderings.

A clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

Romance & Cigarettes is the real thing, a film that breaks out of Hollywood jail with audacious originality, startling sexuality, heartfelt emotions, and an anarchic liberty. The actors toss their heads and run their mouths like prisoners let loose to race free.

There is a word to explain why this particular film so appealed to me. Reader, that word is "escapism." If you understand why I used the word "reader" in just that way, you are possibly an ideal viewer for this movie.

Beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic. Its power is compromised only by an ending that sheepishly backs away from what the film is really about.

This is a movie that has its commercial concept written all over it; it's so painstakingly crafted as a product that the messy spontaneity of life is rarely allowed to interrupt.

Dolls remains only an idea, a concept. It doesn't become an engine to shock and involve us.

The point is to show us what can be done with recycled traditional animation in the IMAX 3-D process, and the demonstration is impressive.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

You will either be in sympathy with it, or not. Much depends on what you bring into the theater. It is possible that those who know most about Nijinsky will be most baffled, because this is not a film about knowing, but about feeling.

It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.

In a miraculous gift to the audience, 20th Century-Fox does <I>not</I> reveal all of the best gags in its trailer.

Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.

The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.

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.

Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.

The movie has been slapped together by director Todd Phillips, who careens from scene to scene without it occurring to him that humor benefits from characterization, context and continuity. Otherwise, all you have is a lot of people acting goofy.

What I did appreciate is that City of Angels is one of the few angel movies that knows one essential fact about angels: They are not former people. &#148;Angels aren't human. We were never human,&#148; observes Seth. This is quite true. Angels are purely spiritual beings.

A mild pleasure from one end to the other, but not much more. Maybe that's enough, serving as a reminder that movie comedies still can be about ordinary people and do not necessarily have to feature vulgarity as their centerpiece.

Fat Kid Rules the World is a movie with a title that might be misleading: It's a lot better than it sounds like it has any right to be.

All of the actors play without winks and spins, unless you consider Lebowskism itself a wink and spin.

Singleton's film is interesting for a lot of reasons, but especially because he stands outside this campus system and looks at it with a detached eye.

Ang Lee has boldly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a comic book movie.

It's too heavy on plot and too willing to cheat about its plot to be really successful, but it does have its moments, and it's better than your average, run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

Brubaker is a grim and depressing drama about prison outrages - a movie that should, given its absolutely realistic vision, have kept us involved from beginning to end. That it doesn't is the result, I think, of a deliberate but unwise decision to focus on the issues involved in the story, instead of on the characters.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

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

To Rome With Love isn't great Woody Allen. Here is a man who has made a feature every year since 1969, give or take a few, and if they cannot all be great Woody, it's churlish to complain if they're only good Woody.

I can't really recommend the film, unless you admire Caine as much as I do, which is certainly possible.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

The movie is so extravagant and outrageous in its storytelling that it resists criticism: It's self-satirizing.

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

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.

Amusing without ever being break-out funny.

It's unfair to complain that Weiss seems over the top. The portrayal seems to be accurate.

Sandler works so hard at this, and so shamelessly, that he battered down my resistance. Like a Jerry Lewis out of control, he will do, and does, anything to get a laugh. No thinking adult should get within a mile of this film. I must not have been thinking. For my sins, I laughed.

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

A genuine surprise: A movie as funny as the "SNL" stuff, and yet with convincing characters, a compelling story and a sunny, sweet sincerity shining down on the humor.

In sad-sack movies there is often a helpful woman around to help the despairing heroes. In "Garden State," it was Natalie Portman; in "Elizabethtown," Kirsten Dunst. Both were salvation angels, but Tyler has a gentle approach to this kind of role that is perfect for the tone of Lonesome Jim.

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

What is wonderful about Angela's Ashes is Emily Watson's performance, and the other roles that are convincingly cast.

The most outspoken and yet in some ways the calmest of the new documentaries opposing the Bush presidency.

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there.

The movie is lightweight, as it should be.

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

The very embodiment of a star vehicle: a movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care.

I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here.

The animation is nicely stylized and the color palette well-chosen, although the humans are so square-jawed, they make Dick Tracy look like Andy Gump. The voice performances are persuasive. The obvious drawback is that the film is in 3-D. If you can find a theater showing it in 2-D, seek it out.

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.

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

There is no rhythm to the movie, no ebb and flow; it's all flat-out spectacle.

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

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

There is something powerful and elemental in the appeal of gold, especially somebody else's buried treasure, and it plugs holes in the plot that no base metal could possibly cover.

There is a wise and understanding teacher on the faculty, played by Anjelica Huston. Defending the work of Dead White Males, she sensibly observes that when they did their best work "they weren't dead yet."

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

So I Married an Axe Murderer is a mediocre movie with a good one trapped inside, wildly signaling to be set free. The good movie involves a droll and eccentric Scottish-American family whose household embraces more of the trappings of Scottishness than your average Glasgow souvenir shop. The bad movie is about a young man's romance with a woman he comes to suspect is an ax murderer.

Sparkle isn't blindingly original but it delivers solid entertainment, and despite the clichés I was never for a moment bored.

Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre. If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, The Devil's Rejects may exercise a certain strange charm.

What this movie needs is a clear, spare, logical screenplay. It's all inspiration and no discipline.

Delightful from beginning to end.

A glorious romantic fantasy, aflame with passion and bittersweet longing.

In its complexity and wit, this is one of his (Allen's) best recent films.

The problem with Die, Mommie, Die, a drag send-up of the genre, is that it spoils the fun by making it obvious.

This is one of the best movies of the year.

I could go two ways. I could say that No Mercy is a dumb formula thriller, which we can all sort of figure out from the ads, or I could go the other way and talk about the movie's style and energy. I think I'll go the second way, because whatever this movie is, it's not boring. It doesn't take shortcuts and it delivers on its grimy, breathless action sequences.

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

The movie feels so plotted, so constructed, so written, that I found myself thinking maybe they shouldn't have filmed the final draft of the screenplay. Maybe there was an earlier draft that was a little disorganized and unpolished, but still had the jumble of life in it.

Gardens of Stone is content to be a slice of life, a story that says some of our best young people went to Vietnam and died there, and those who knew them missed them. We knew that already. Perhaps there is nothing else to be said, but this movie seems to give promise of seeing more deeply, and then it doesn't. Every moment is right, and yet the film as a whole is incomplete.

A no-holds-barred comedy permitting several holds I had not dreamed of. The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity.

Unfortunately, I was also convinced that trapped within this 98-minute film is a good 30-minute news report struggling to get out. Shearer, who is bright and funny, comes across here as a solemn lecturer.

It's never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment.

It’s funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we’d expect from a new Bond movie itself. And all of that is very nice, but nicer still is the perfect pitch of the casting.

The best moments in the movie involve tightly knit dialogue scenes between King and Crystal, who co-wrote the movie. Their timing has the almost effortless music of two professionals who have spent their lifetimes learning how to put the right spin on a word.

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

It seems at first to be merely a jumble of discordant images ("Freaks" shot by the "Blair Witch" crew) but then, if you stay with it, the pattern emerges from the jumble.

It is what it is, without apology or compromise. It made me smile a lot.

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.

Yes, the movie is corny, but no, it's not dumb. It's clever and insightful in the way it gets away with this story, which is almost a fable.

The opening scenes of Johnny Dangerously are so funny you just don't see how they can keep it up. And you're right: They can't. But they make a real try. The movie wants to do for gangster films what Airplane! did for Airport, and Top Secret! did for spy movies.

The movie is told almost entirely from Nolte's point of view, and he makes an immensely likable character right from the top.

The remake is so close to the original that there is no reason to see both, unless you want to prove to yourself that black and white photography is indeed more effective than color for this material.

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it.

Although the movie is a wall-to-wall exercise in bad taste, it somehow retains a certain innocence; it challenges and sometimes shocks, but for me at least it didn't offend, because its motives were so obviously good-hearted.

The movie makes the same mistake as some of the characters in it: It treats these two guys like lovable old characters instead of listening to what they really have to say.

Educating Rita, which might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.

There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.

A quasi-documentary about love that is sweet, true and perhaps a little deceptive.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

Desert Flower tells a rags-to-riches story, but it plays like two stories in conflict. Everything involving Waris in Africa or in London before her success feels true and heartfelt. Many later details are badly handled.