Roger Ebert

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

This one basically just sticks to the real story, which has all the emotional wallop that's needed.

The movie is so gloriously bloody-minded, so perverse in its obstinacy, that it rises to a kind of mad purity. The longer the movie ran, the less I liked it and the more I admired it.

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

For Your Eyes Only is a competent James Bond thriller, well-crafted, a respectable product from the 007 production line. But it's no more than that.

It isn't a masterpiece, but it is a good-hearted, sweet comedy, featuring an overland chase that isn't original but sure is energetic.

All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off.

By the end of the film I conceded, yes, there are good performances and the period is well captured, but the movie didn't convince me of the feel and the flavor of its experiences.

Jogs doggedly on the treadmill of comedy, working up a sweat but not getting much of anywhere.

But the film is not as amusing as the premise, and there were long stretches when I'd had quite enough of Mrs. Doubtfire.

What's lacking is a feeling for the heat and deafening chaos of actual club shows. The movie hangs back a little, folds its arms and nods its head, rather than rushing the stage or diving into the mosh pit. The tumult is depicted, not captured.

There's a universal story here about immigrant parents and children, and how American culture can swamp family traditions, and make parents and children culturally unrecognizable to one another.

The Little Drummer Girl lacks the two essential qualities it needs to work: It's not comprehensible, and it's not involving.

All classic and airtight, and handled by Richet with economy and a sturdy clarity of action; he doesn't go overboard with manic action scenes.

Sweet and warm-hearted, but there is another film with a similar story that is boundlessly better, and that is "My Dog Skip" (2000).

Cronyn and Tandy rescue the movie from looking altogether like a retread, and the saucers do their part, too. Designed by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects wizards, the saucers swoop and vibrate and blink and purr and even have children, which they assemble out of old toasters and other househood appliances. "Batteries Not Included" is a sweet, cheerful and funny family entertainment.

It creates original characters - Hudson and, especially, the little dynamo M. J. - and makes them more important than the plot. We care, and that's the key.

The Dream Team is essentially a formula picture filled with missed opportunities. The fact that it has several passages that really work, and that the actors create characters we can care about, only underlines the bankruptcy of its imagination.

Now, Forager is a uncompromising film about two people who don't deserve each other - but maybe nobody deserves either one of them.

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

Jet Lag is sort of a grown-up version of "Before Sunrise"...The difference between the two films is sort of depressing.

They are, in fact, likable. That's why their comedy is so sad.

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

A Time to Kill, based on the first novel by John Grisham, is a skillfully constructed morality play that pushes all the right buttons and arrives at all the right conclusions.

An efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19. Audiences who want to be Gotchaed will enjoy it.

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

Just remember that its hero stands for countless others.

And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes, the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't.

It is a joy to look at frame by frame, and it would be worth getting the Blu-ray to do that. I am not quite so thrilled by the story, which at times threatens to make "Gormenghast" seem straightforward.

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

The movie fails to work up much excitement, and the title song by Bob Dylan is quite simply awful.

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

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

Historical dramas can be fun if you approach them in the right spirit, and I enjoyed Mary, Queen of Scots.

An odd, desperate film, lost in its own audacity, and yet there are passages of surreal beauty and preposterous invention that I have to admire. The film doesn't work, and indeed seems to have no clear idea of what its job is, and yet (sigh) there is the temptation to forgive its trespasses simply because it is utterly, if pointlessly, original.

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

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

Above all, this is a movie where the characters ask the same questions we do: They're as smart about themselves as we are.

A high-spirited charmer, a fantasy that sparkles with delights.

Look, this isn't a great movie. If you're not a kid, don't go unless there's a kid you want to take. But if you are a kid, and you have ever for a moment wondered what it would be like to play major-league ball at your age, then take it from the old Little Leaguer and see this movie.

If there’s anything worse than a long, slow, boring buildup to a payoff, it’s the buildup without the payoff. This movie doesn’t feel finished.

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?

Not very funny, and maybe couldn't have been very funny no matter what, because the pieces for comedy are not in place.

Delicacy is a sweetheart of a love story, and cornball from stem to stern.

One wonders how In the Mouth of Madness might have turned out if the script had contained even a little more wit and ambition.

In its clumsy way, it throws in comments now and then to show it knows the difference between Arab terrorists and American citizens.

It is well-made, well-photographed and plausibly acted, and is better than it needs to be.

Baby Boom makes no effort to show us real life. It is a fantasy about mothers and babies and sweetness and love, with just enough wicked comedy to give it an edge.

Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: "Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext."

The movie works because it is, above all, sincere. It's not sports by the numbers. The starring performance by Kuno Becker is convincing and dimensional and we begin to care for him.

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

It's awkward, not because of the subject matter, but because of the contrasting acting styles. Here are two men trying to communicate in a touchy area and they behave as if they're from different planets.

At the end of the movie we are conscious of large themes and deep thoughts, and of good intentions drifting out of focus.

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

What's admirable about Being Flynn is that it doesn't cave in to the standard Hollywood redemption formulas, with the father redeemed and the son inspired. It's more complicated than that.

Too clever by half. It's the worst kind of con: It tells us it's a con, so we don't even have the consolation of being led down the garden path.

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

A high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it’s an established brand not protected by copyright.

The movie has great moments and a lot of life, sensational special effects and costumes, and Ross, Jackson, and Russell. Why doesn't it involve us as deeply as The Wizard of Oz? Maybe because it hedges its bets by wanting to be sophisticated and universal, childlike and knowing, appealing to both a mass audience and to media insiders. The Wizard of Oz went flat-out for the heart of its story; there are times whenThe Wiz has just a touch too much calculation.

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.

The bottom line is, all these people chase the same money around with the success of doggie tail-biting, and it's a lot of fun, and it's not often in these con films that everybody is conning everybody, and they're all scared to death, and nobody knows which cup the pea is under.

Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

The characters deserve a better movie, but they get a pretty good one.

Watching the film, I enjoyed a lot of it, especially Keaton's permutations on the theme of himself. But I wondered why the possibilities weren't taken to greater comic extremes.

Logan's Run is a vast, silly extravaganza that delivers a certain amount of fun, once it stops taking itself seriously.

It's a bludgeon movie with little respect for the audience's intelligence, and simply pounds us over the head with violence whenever there threatens to be a lull. Anyone can make a movie like this.

This is a deceptive film. It starts in one direction and discovers a better one. Cheshire is a dry, almost dispassionate narrator, and that is good; preaching about his discoveries would sound wrong.

This is a movie for those who sometimes, in the stillness of the sleepless night, are so filled with hope and longing that they feel like -- well, like uttering wild goat cries to the moon. You know who you are.

The peculiar quality of Vanity Fair, which sets it aside from the Austen adaptations such as "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," is that it's not about very nice people. That makes them much more interesting.

The movie seemed the stuff of anecdote, not drama, and as the alleged protagonist, Luca/Franco is too young much of the time to play more than a bystander's role.

A musical and a biography, and brings to both of those genres a worldly sophistication that is rare in the movies.

Parables are stories about other people that help us live our own lives. The problem with the French film Ricky is that the lesson of the parable is far from clear, and nobody is likely to encounter this situation in his own life.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

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.

It's a strong, intelligent performance [by Gibson], filled with life, and it makes this into a surprisingly robust Hamlet.

The performances are spot on, and I especially like the spunky Gyllenhaal, who with this film and the underrated "Secretary" (2002), has built up a nice sideline in sexual exploration.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

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

She's the One plays like an overhaul of “The Brothers McMullen” with a larger budget, and it's time for him to move on.

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

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

Passionada assembles the elements for a soap opera, and turns them into a bubble bath.

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

An uneven but touching comedy with a cheery score that sounds too much like whistling on the way past the graveyard.

On film, Rent is the sound of one hand clapping.

This one holds its flavor better than most.

Suspect is a well-made thriller, but it was spoiled for me by an extraordinary closing scene where Cher, as the defense attorney, solves the case with all of the logic of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The movie stars Jim Carrey, who is in his pleasant mode. It would have helped if he were in his manic mode, although it's hard to get a rise out of a penguin.

The reader of a pulp crime thriller might be satisfied simply with the prurient descriptions, and certainly this film visualizes those and has as its victims Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who embody paperback covers, but the dominant presence in the film is Lou Ford, and there just doesn’t seem to be anybody at home.

Maybe Muppets from Space is just not very good, and they'll make a comeback. I hope so. Because I just don't seem to care much anymore. Sorry, Miss Piggy. Really sorry.

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.

This is one of Denzel Washington's great performances, on a par with his work in "Malcolm X."

It's not the romcom that's so entertaining, anyway; it's the slapstick.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

Speedway is pleasant, kind, polite, sweet and noble, and if the late show viewers of 1988 will not discover from it what American society was like in the summer of 1968, at least they will discover what it was not like.

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

The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

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

A wise and touching film with a lot of love in it. I may have given the wrong impression: It's not entirely about drinking, it's just entirely about a drinker.

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

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

Hartnett shows here a breezy command of his charming, likable character. It is a reminder of his talent and versatility.

Plunges far beneath Todd Solondz's territory and enters the suburbs of John Waters' universe in its fascination for people who live without benefit of education, taste, standards, hygiene and shame. I

Now this is a terrific premise for a thriller, and director George Romero (The Night of the Living Dead) sets it up with skill and style. Unfortunately, the film's biggest disappointment is that it doesn't develop its preternatural opening theme.

The beauty of the "Shop" movies is that they provide a stage for lively characters.

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

Heartbreak Ridge has as much energy and color as any action picture this year, and it contains truly amazing dialogue.

I enjoyed the movie for the sheer physical exuberance of its adventure. It is magnificently mounted and photographed.

There are a lot of movies about escaping from the middle class, but Metroland is one of the few about escaping into it.

If I didn't feel the same degree of involvement with Point of No Return that I did with "La Femme Nikita," it may be because the two movies are so similar in plot, look and feel. I had deja vu all through the movie.

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

Stick It uses the story of a gymnast's comeback attempt as a backdrop for overwrought visual effects, music videos, sitcom dialogue and general pandering. The movie seems to fear that if it pauses long enough to actually be about gymnastics, the audience will grow restless.

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

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

Never quite attains takeoff velocity.

I can imagine it as a sex comedy, as a romance, as a bittersweet exploration of lonely people. Schleppi has a little of all three elements at work here, but it's Tim Blake Nelson's character who keeps the plot from spinning out of control.

The Awakening looks great but never develops a plot with enough clarity to engage us, and the solution to the mystery is I am afraid disappointingly standard.

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

When Marley is not on the screen, Wilson and Aniston demonstrate why they are gifted comic actors. They have a relationship that's not too sitcomish, not too sentimental, mostly smart and realistic.

Flashes of inspiration illuminate stretches of routine sitcom material; it's the kind of movie where the audience laughs loudly and then falls silent for the next five minutes.

The first 30 minutes of the movie gave me lots of room for hope. It was fast-moving, it was visually spectacular, it was exotic and lighthearted and filled with a spirit of adventure. But then, gradually, the movie began to recycle itself. It began to feel as if I was seeing the same thing more than once.

The kind of movie that somehow succeeds in moving very, very slowly even while proceeding at a breakneck pace. It cuts quickly back and forth between nothing and nothing.

The word genius is easily used and has been cheapened, but when it is used to describe Walt Disney, reflect that he conceived of this film, in all of its length, revolutionary style and invention, when there was no other like it--and that to one degree or another, every animated feature made since owes it something.

When bodies are buried in cellars and cats are thrown into lighted ovens, the film reveals itself as unworthy of its subject matter.

The Cutting Edge is a marriage of two durable Hollywood genres: It's an Underdog in Training sports film, crossed with that most beloved of all romantic formulas, the Incompatibles in Love. There is essentially not an original moment in the entire film, and yet it's skillfully made and well-acted.

Justin Timberlake continues to demonstrate that he is a real actor, with screen presence. But after the precise timing and intelligence he brought to "The Social Network," it's a little disappointing to find him in a role that requires less. He has a future in the movies.

The result of the film is shocking, saddening and frustrating.

In movies with this story structure, all depends on the precise timing of the delay and the revelation, and Bounce misses. Not by a lot, but by enough.

It's a movie without a brain. Charlie's Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie.

This is one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema.

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

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

I can see what Thomson is getting at and even sort of appreciate it at times; the movie isn't boring, but it meanders and loses track of plot threads. Any feelings we have for the characters is muted because they all richly deserve to die at one another's hands.

It's a tribute to The Celebration that the style and the story don't stumble over each other. The script is well planned, the actors are skilled at deploying their emotions, and the long day's journey into night is fraught with wounds that the farcical elements only help to keep open.

Winner should have told us a lot more about his lawman, or a lot less.

Brannigan isn't great, but it's a wellcrafted action movie and, besides, it's got John Wayne in it.

There's a high gloss and some nice payoffs, but not quite as much humor as usual; Bond seems to be straying from his tongue-in-cheek origins into the realm of conventional techno-thrillers.

The concept is inspired. The execution is lame. Anger Management, a film that might have been one of Adam Sandler's best, becomes one of Jack Nicholson's worst.

A tight, taut thriller with a twist.

Begins rather awkwardly, but ends by making a statement that explains a great many things. One question left unasked: Why did we promise to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons but refuse to recognize it as a sovereign nation?

This movie is, of course, intended as a comedy, and it has some funny moments. But it's just not successful, and I think the reason is that Hamilton never for a second plays Zorro as if he were really playing Zorro... When a movie sets out a create a funny Zorro, that's bringing coals to Newcastle. By playing every scene for laughs, Hamilton has nothing to play against.

Here is a film about African Americans that sidesteps all the usual, hopeful cliches and comments on how one failed generation raises another.

The moral reasoning in the film is so confusing that only by completely sidestepping it can the plot work at all.

Malice is one of the busiest movies I've ever seen, a film jampacked with characters and incidents and blind alleys and red herrings. Offhand, this is the only movie I can recall in which an entire subplot about a serial killer is thrown in simply for atmosphere.

Ruffalo plays the character with that elusive charm he also revealed in "You Can Count on Me."

Feels a little uncertain, as if it's moving from present to past under the demands of a screenplay rather than because it really feels that way. But the growing-up stuff is kind of wonderful.

Never quite lifts off. The elements are here, but not the magic.

No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."

Casting can be the reason that one movie works and another doesn't. It is the first reason for the success of The Girl From Monaco, the kind of romantic comedy with a twist that used to star Jack Lemmon.

A sweet but inconsequential romantic comedy.

Beauty and the Beast reaches back to an older and healthier Hollywood tradition in which the best writers, musicians and filmmakers are gathered for a project on the assumption that a family audience deserves great entertainment, too.

The photography is undeniably beautiful, but there comes a point when we've had too many mountains and too little plot. All that holds the movie together is the screen persona of Eastwood, who is so convincingly tight-lipped that sometimes you have the feeling he knows what's going on and just won't tell.

Three Days of Rain is only a sketch compared to the power of Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives," which continues to grow in my memory.

The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.

The Mothman is singularly ineffective as a threat because it is only vaguely glimpsed, has no nature we can understand, doesn't operate under rules that the story can focus on, and seems to be involved in space-time shifts far beyond its presumed focus. There is also the problem that insects make unsatisfactory villains unless they are very big.

You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

I think more edge is needed, more reality about the racial situation at the time, more insight into how and why R&B and rock ’n’ roll actually did forever transform societies in America and the world.

If we haven't caught on from earlier films that drug pushing is a thankless persuasion, maybe this is the movie that will pound in the lesson.

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

What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse.

Here is a bad movie into which a great character seems to have dropped from another dimension.

There are many moments here that are very funny, but the film as a whole is a bit too long.

It's a funny homage, a nod to the way that some movies are universal in their appeal.

Wants to make larger points, but succeeds only in being a story of derangement.

The film is short at 82 minutes, but surprisingly moving, and has a couple of really thrilling sequences.

The movie is a competent thriller, but maybe could have been more.

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

I've never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. The Accidental Tourist is one of the best films of the year.

Good performances and an interesting idea are metamorphosed into one of the silliest movies in a long time.

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

The movie is almost always good to look at, thanks to Richard MacDonald's sets (he linked together two giant sound stages) and Sven Nykvist's photography. And Nolte and Winger are almost able to make their relationship work, if only it didn't seem scripted out of old country songs and lonely hearts columns.

It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony.

One of the irritations of Ghost is that the Moore character is such a slow study.

One of the nicest things about the movie is the way it maintains its note of slightly bewildered innocence.

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

The masterstroke is the use of Bryan Adams, who seems like a joke when he first appears (the movie knows this), but is used by Konchalovsky in such a way that eventually be becomes the embodiment of the ability to imagine and dream--an ability, the movie implies, that's the only thing keeping these crazy people sane.

LaBute likes people who think themselves into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied, speculated about, suspected, fought against.

The movie uses the materials of melodrama, but is gentle with them; it's oriented more in the real world, and doesn't jack up every conflict and love story into an overwrought crisis.

He can take a licking and keep on slicing. In the latest Halloween movie, he absorbs a blow from an ax, several knife slashes, a rock pounded on the skull, a fall down a steep hillside and being crushed against a tree by a truck. Whatever he's got, mankind needs it.

The best shot in this film is the first one. Not a good sign.

The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.

A strange mutant beast, half Nickelodeon movie, half R-rated comedy. It's like kids with potty-mouth playing grownup.

Most important, I cared about the Jennifer Connelly character; she is not a horror heroine, but an actress playing a mother faced with horror. There is a difference, and because of that difference, Dark Water works.

Mars Attacks! has the look and feel of a schlocky 1950s science-fiction movie, and if it's not as bad as a Wood film, that's not a plus: A movie like this should be a lot better, or a lot worse.

The problem may be that the movie isn’t nearly tough enough. It needs to be more hard-boiled, more merciless in its dissection of egos, more perceptive about the cutthroat nature of show business.

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

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

Although the film has big structural problems and leaves a lot of loose ends, there was never a moment when it didn’t absorb me, because I felt as if I was watching the characters talk to one another, instead of to me.

A movie that takes advantage of the great good nature and warmth of Queen Latifah, and uses it to transform a creaky old formula into a comedy that is just plain lovable.

This one is not terrifically good, but moviegoers will get what they're expecting.

This movie just recycles "Grease," without the stars, without the energy, without the freshness and without the grease.

Chasing Madoff is not a very good documentary, but it's a very devastating one.

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. The Iron Lady fails in both of these categories.

The movie remains an actor's exercise--too much dialogue, too much time in the room, too much happening offstage, or in the past, or in memory, or in imagination.

A march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom cliches and the bog of Idiot Plots.

Sudden Impact is a Dirty Harry movie with only the good parts left in. All the slow stuff, such as character, motivation, atmosphere and plot, has been pared to exactly the minimum necessary to hold together the violence.

I mention all of these tiny logical quibbles because I was amused by them. I was also amused by the film. It isn't as good as the original "Under Siege," but it moves quickly, has great stunts and special effects, and is a lot of fun.

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

No Man's Land is better than the average thriller because it is interested in those moral questions - in the way money and beautiful women and fast cars look more exciting than good police work.

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

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

I suspect its audience, which takes these films very seriously indeed, will drink deeply of its blood. The sensational closing sequence cannot be accused of leaving a single loophole, not even some those we didn't know were there.

Kaprisky, as the young French student, is an unknown in a role too large and complex for her, and there are times when she seems lost in a scene, looking to Gere for guidance. The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with - and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.

Takes us all the way to the rim of space only to bog us down in a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.

The Last Boy Scout is a superb example of what it is: a glossy, skillful, cynical, smart, utterly corrupt and vilely misogynistic action thriller. To give it a negative review would be dishonest, because it is such a skillful and well-crafted movie.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.

Rousing in an old pulp science fiction sort of way, but the climactic scene transcends the rest, and stands by itself as one of the great animated action sequences.

What's alluring is the way the characters played by John Livingston and Sabrina Lloyd savor each other, in between their troubles. Movies are too quick to interrupt romance with sex. Sarah and Rand fascinate us with their dance of dread and desire.

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

Whimsy with a capital W. No, it's WHIMSY in all caps. Make that all-caps italic boldface. Oh, never mind. I'm getting too whimsical.

Kazan writes plausible, literate dialogue and Hoblit creates a realistic world, so that the horror never seems, as it does in less ambitious thrillers, to feel at home.

There is something repulsive and manipulative about it, and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the school yard, trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.

The movie is only 84 minutes long, including credit cookies, but that is quite long enough. All the same, it's fitfully amusing and I have the sense that Spanish-speaking audiences will like it more than I did, although whether they'll be laughing with it or at it, I cannot say.

Poignancy. Lessons to be learned. Speeches to be made. Lost marbles to be rediscovered. Tears to be shed. The conclusion of Hook would be embarrassingly excessive even for a movie in which something of substance had gone before.

My deepest objection to the movie is that it is so blood-soaked. When dialogue arrives to interrupt the carnage, it's like the seventh-inning stretch.

I think Dwayne Johnson has a likable screen presence and is a good choice for an innocuous family entertainment like this.

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

Irreconcilable Differences is sometimes cute, and is about mean parents, but it also is one of the funnier and more intelligent movies of 1984, and if viewers can work their way past the ungainly title, they're likely to have a surprisingly good time.

Goya's Ghosts is like the sketchbook Goya might have made with a camera.

It's the ending, really, that spoils The Cowboys. Otherwise, it's a good-to-fine Western, with a nice, sly performance by Roscoe Lee Browne as the trail cook, and the usual solid Wayne performance.

The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny, cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4 to 11) that it may work as pure escapism.

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

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

All through the movie, Scream 4 lets us know that it knows exactly what it's up to - and then goes right ahead and gets up to it.

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

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.

Disney continues to make movies like Gus and people continue to pay to see them, but the process seems futile and this time even the mule seems bored.

Clive Owen makes a semi-believable hero, not performing too many feats that are physically unlikely. As the plucky DA, Naomi Watts wisely plays up her character's legal smarts and plays down the inevitable possibility that the two of them will fall in love.

It's nice enough, it's sweet, I loved LaPaglia's work, but there's nothing compelling here.

It was fun, it was funny, it was alive.

I don't believe New Jerusalem takes a position in favor of either character. It's more of an intense study of these two men and their barren work in a shabby store by the side of a highway.

What makes Critters more than a ripoff are its humor and its sense of style. This is a movie made by people who must have had fun making it.

It takes some doing to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work. But Nacho Libre does it.

Insights into human nature don't seem to be the point of the movie, anyway. It's a slick, trashy, entertaining melodrama, with too many dumb scenes to qualify as successful.

All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.

If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the artifice of the rest.

(Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.

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.

Kate Bosworth holds it all together with a sweetness that is beyond calculation.

If you require that you "like" a movie, then Rick is not for you, because there is nothing likable about it. It's rotten to the core and right down to the end. But if you find that such extremes can be fascinating, then the movie may cheer you, not because it is happy, but because it goes for broke.

Take away the drugs, and this is the story of a boring life in wholesale.

What redeems the film is its successful escapism, and Lane's performance. They are closely linked.

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

The Hunger is an agonizingly bad vampire movie, circling around an exquisitely effective sex scene.

A sweet, good-looking film about nice people in a beautiful place, and young John Bell is an appealing performer in the tradition of the Culkins. Quinn and Nielsen are pros who take their roles seriously, and Vic Sarin's direction gets the job done.

It isn't a successful movie but is sometimes a very interesting one, and there is real charm and comic agility by the two leads.

A particularly nasty and mean-spirited action picture, with the dramatic depth of an arcade game.

Most movies are made by males and show women enthralled by men. This movie knows better.

Uncle Buck attempts to tell a heart-warming story through a series of uncomfortable and unpleasant scenes; it's a tug-of-war between its ambitions and its methods.

A darker, deeper fantasy epic than the "Rings" trilogy, "The Chronicles of Narnia" or the "Potter" films. It springs from the same British world of quasi-philosophical magic, but creates more complex villains and poses more intriguing questions. As a visual experience, it is superb. As an escapist fantasy, it is challenging.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a murky, unfocused, violent and depressing version of the classic story, with little of the lightheartedness and romance we expect from Robin Hood.

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

Boring, repetitive and maddening about a subject you'd think would be fairly interesting: snowboarding down a mountain.

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

It's all atmospheric, quirky and entertaining: the kind of neo-noir in which old-fashioned characters have updated problems.

The Navajo code talkers have waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here merely as a gimmick in an action picture.

A lightweight charmer with a winning performance by Robin Tunney.

The sweetest and most openhearted love fable since "The Princess Bride."

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

It's a real movie, full-blooded and smart, with qualities even for those who have no idea who Stan Lee is. It's a superhero movie for people who don't go to superhero movies, and for those who do, it's the one they've been yearning for.

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

This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie.

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

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

It all comes down to the difference between a "concert film" and a documentary. Let’s Spend The Night Together is essentially a concert film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more.

It's a comedy, but there's more in it than that; it's a movie about the ways we pursue, possess, and consume each other as sad commodities.

Contraband is based on an Icelandic thriller named "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," which leads you to suspect that neither New Orleans nor Panama City is particularly essential to the plot. That film starred Baltasar Kormakur, who is the director of this one, perhaps as a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.

A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

On the basis of this film, Monty Lapica, at 24, has a career ahead of him as a director, an actor or both. He also has a life ahead of him, which the film does a great deal to make clear.

Benton has made better movies, but this one has no organic reality.

The movie is forgiving. But the search for happiness is doomed by definition: You must be happy with what you have, not with what you desire, because the cost of the quest is too high.

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

So the movie probably contains enough laughs to satisfy the weekend audience. Where it falls short is in the characters and relationships.

The story, having failed to provide itself with character conflicts that can be resolved with drama, turns to melodrama instead.

This stuff is so concocted I had no business caring about it. But I did, because of Bullock.

It's the kind of movie that provides diversion for the idle channel-surfer but isn't worth a trip to the theater. A lot of it seems cobbled together out of spare parts.

The problem with The Baxter is right there at the center of the movie, and maybe it is unavoidable: Showalter makes too good of a baxter. He deserves to be dumped.

Mighty Joe Young is not meek and harmless; it's a full-blooded action picture, all right, but with a certain warmth and humor instead of a scorched-earth approach. You feel good at the end, instead of merely relieved.

I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there.

It's an overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

The problems resulting from the switch of identities are fairly predictable, but fun: This is one of the better recent Disney productions.

There is a curious problem with Birthday Girl, hard to put your finger on: The movie is kind of sour. It wants to be funny and a little nasty, it wants to surprise us and then console us, but what it mostly does is make us restless.

While there are too many characters in too much story for the movie to really involve us, it's amusing as a series of sketches about how the French think they are a funny race (or the Americans, take your choice).

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

By casting attractive stars in the leads, by finding the right visual look, by underlining the action with brooding, ominously sad music, a good director can create the illusion of meaning even when nothing's there.

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

This movie wasn't made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold 30 million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party.

The result is a tiresome exercise that circles at great length through various prefabricated stories defined by the advice each couple needs (or doesn't need).