Roger Ebert

The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.

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

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

The actors are splendid, especially Sarah Polley and Sean Penn, but we never feel confident that these two plots fit together, belong together, or work together.

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

I watched the movie with interest, yes, but not emotional involvement, and my appreciation of Moore was based more on her essence than on her character.

The movie turns cruel and ugly, and hasn't paid the dues to earn its last scenes. Parigi had me there for a while, but when he lost me, it was big time.

I was interested all through the movie--interested, but not riveted. I cared, but not quite enough.

The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing.

The real surprise of the movie is Eddie Murphy, who finds his character and stays with him.

Here is a great story born to be creepy, and the movie churns through it like a road company production. If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out.

An undemanding formula picture that's a lot of superficial fun and not much more.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

Absorbing, if somewhat slow-paced, and has without doubt the most blood-curdling scene of live childbirth in a PG-13 movie.

A film with a rich and convincing texture, a drama with power and anger.

An ingenious attempt to update an old plot with new technology, and it is made with competence, skillful acting, and the ability to make us feel cleverer about digital stuff than we really are.

A movie with an impenetrable plot that nevertheless has its moments.

The best film ever made about filmmaking.

A painfully stolid movie that lumbers past emotional issues like a wrestler in a cafeteria line, putting a little of everything on his plate.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

There won't be a person in the audience who can't guess exactly how it will turn out. Yet it goes through its paces with such skill and charm that, yes, I enjoyed it.

Because it is slick and classy and good to look at, and the actors are well within their range of competence, you can enjoy the movie on a made-for-TV level, but you wish it had been smarter and tougher.

One of the sly pleasures of Latter Days is the sight of this gay-themed movie recycling so many conventions from straight romantic cinema, as if it's time to catch up.

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

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

One of the most profoundly stupid movies I've ever seen.

Like "The Exorcist," the best film in the genre, it is inspired by some degree of religious scholarship and creates believable characters in a real world. That religions take demonic possessions seriously makes them more fun for us, the unpossessed.

The movie is fun until they set sail.

The Paperboy is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all.

On balance, I think it's an interesting miss, but a movie you might enjoy if (a) you don't expect a masterpiece, and (b) you like the dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies.

Sniper expresses a cool competence that is a pleasure to watch. It isn't a particularly original film, but what it does, it does well. We've seen so many bad movies about guys walking through the jungle with rifles that it's interesting the way this one grabs us through its command of the locations and its storytelling skill.

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device.

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

Weighed down by its splendor. There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role (in fact, Doris Day was in this role, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies").

The movie tells no clear story and has no clear ideas.

It comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time.

The cast is uniformly capable and dead serious, and if you're buying what Luc Besson is selling, he's not short-changing you.

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

The movie is simply a failure of imagination. Nobody looked at the screenplay and observed that it didn’t try hard enough, that it had no surprises, that it didn’t attempt to delight its audiences with twists and turns on the phoned-in plotline.

The plot of the movie is meh.

Lin takes an established franchise and makes it surprisingly fresh and intriguing. The movie is not exactly "Shogun" when it comes to the subject of an American in Japan (nor, on the other hand, is it "Lost in Translation"). But it's more observant than we expect, and uses its Japanese locations to make the story about something more than fast cars.

It is a Kafkaesque story, in which ominous things follow one another with a certain internal logic but make no sense at all.

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

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

It has elements of sweet romance and elements of macabre humor, and divides its characters between the two.

I don't require that a movie have a message, but in a message movie it is helpful to know what the message is.

After seeing Gere and Roberts play much smarter people (even in romantic comedies), it is painful to see them dumbed down here. The screenplay is so sluggish, they're like Derby winners made to carry extra weight.

This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Now that I've seen it twice, I think I understand it, or maybe not. Certainly it's entertaining as it rolls along.

Today's kids are learning from the Turtles that the world is a sinkhole of radioactive waste, that it's more reassuring to huddle together in sewers than take your chances competing at street level, and that individuality is dangerous. Cowabunga.

Surrogates is entertaining and ingenious, but it settles too soon for formula.

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

The one element in the movie that is not standard and that does have some energy is the TV show itself, with Dawson's performance as the egotistical, sleaze-bag host.

Its primary flaw is that it's not critical. It is a celebration of an idiotic lifestyle, and I don't think it knows it.

Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.

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

In The Hottest State, Hawke uses fairly standard childhood motivations for his unhappiness and reveals too little real interest in the Sara character.

The photography, the dialogue, the acting, the script, the special effects and especially the props (such as a spaceship that looks like it would get a D in shop class) are all deliberately bad in the way that such films were bad when they were REALLY being made.

A screwball film noir with a lot of medium laughs and a few great big ones,

A film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable.

Tells this story in a straightforward, calm way that works ideally as the chronicle of a man's life but perhaps less ideally as drama.

An entertaining family movie, and may serve a useful purpose if it inspires kids to overthrow their coaches and take over their own sports.

Guy Ritchie, who started out as such an innovator in "Lock, Stock, etc.," seems to have headed directly for reliable generic conventions as a producer. But they are reliable, and have become conventions for a reason: They work. Mean Machine is what it is, and very nicely, too.

The movie is ingenious in the way it surrounds its essentially crass subject matter with a camouflage of romantic scenery.

The central weakness of Cocoon: the Return is that the film lacks any compelling reason to exist. Yes, it is a heartwarming film.

The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie.

Stella is the kind of movie they used to call a tearjerker, and we might as well go ahead and still call it that, because all around me at the sneak preview people were blowing noses and sort of softly catching their breath - you know, the way you do when you're having a great time.

Country Strong is a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.

Coppola's teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

Adventures in Babysitting seemed littered with unrealized possibilities. The movie has good raw material, but it never really was pulled together into something I could care about much.

One of the best cop thrillers since "Training Day."

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.

Warm-hearted and effective.

It fulfills every one of our expectations with a deadening safeness. It is about a man who wants a child so that he will leave something after himself, but it never convinces us that he has a self to leave.

The movie’s premise doesn’t work – not at all, not even a little, not even part of the time – and that means everyone in the movie looks awkward and silly all of the time.

As in his previous film, Davis gets mileage out of supporting players who do not look or sound like professional actors and so add a level of realism to the action.

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

Works splendidly as a courtroom thriller about military values as long as you don't expect it to seriously consider those values.

Here is a movie that embraces its goofiness like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

I’ve seen versions of the plot of “Necessary Roughness” in almost every other movie ever made about an underdog sports team - but I fell for it again this time, because it was well done, and because the movie doesn’t try to pump itself up into more than it is, a good-humored entertainment.

It's pretty good, in fact, with full-blooded performances and heartfelt melodrama.

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

If the crime elements in K-9 are routine, the relationship between Belushi and the dog at least has the courage to be goofy.

Meg Ryan does this sort of thing about as well as it can possibly be done, and after "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," here is another ingenious plot that teases us with the possibility that true love will fail, while winking that, of course, it will prevail.

The movie is not a great dramatic statement, but you know that from the modesty of the title. It is about movement in emotional waters that had long been still. Taylor makes it work because she quietly suggests that when Evie's life has stalled, something drastic was needed to shock her back into action, and the carving worked as well as anything.

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

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

No one with the slightest knowledge of human nature will be able to find a single moment of this film to believe. It is all formula, every last miserable frame of it.

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

A sweet film, mildly pleasant to watch, but it's not worth the trip or even a detour.

The heart of the film is in the performances of Danes and Beckinsale after they're sent to prison.

Might be fun for younger teenagers who want to be reassured that people in their 30s still behave like younger teenagers.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.

There is something not quite right about the film itself.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead.

Achieves something that is uncommonly difficult. It is a spiritual movie with the power to emotionally touch believers, agnostics and atheists -- in that descending order, I suspect.

Innocent Blood is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities. More's the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.

No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.

The mechanics of the final showdown are unexpected and yet show an undeniable logic, and are sold by the acting skills of Willis and Pollak.

The movie works so hard at juggling its cliches that it fails to generate interest in its story.

Johnny Knoxville, famous for "Jackass,"...is, in fact, completely convincing and probably has a legitimate movie career ahead of him and doesn't have to stuff his underpants with dead chickens and hang upside down over alligator ponds any more.

The baseball action isn't very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing.

I could not for a moment believe that this movie was intended as a plausible portrait of how casinos work, how gamblers work, and especially of how casino managers work. To enjoy this movie, you need more than a willing suspension of disbelief. You need a faith in disbelief.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

Bronson is a first-rate action star with a catlike grace and a nice air of menace. But here, trying to land a helicopter after only a few lessons on how to fly it, or staging a phony rape scene to distract prison guards, Bronson is given a sort of incompetency he doesn't wear well. We believe him more easily when he's strong, silent and infallible.

A pure thriller, all blood, no frills, in which a lot of people get shot, mostly in the head.

For all of its sensational stunts and flashes of wit, however, Last Action Hero plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself.

A film overgrown with so many directorial flourishes that the heroes need machetes to hack their way to within view of the audience.

The movie is simply not clear about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. It is heavy on episode and light on insight, and although it takes courage to bring up touchy topics it would have taken more to treat them frankly.

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

If the movie finally doesn't work as well as it should, it may be because the material isn't a good fit for Kitano's hard-edged underlying style.

The beauty of Twilight Zone -- The Movie is the same as the secret of the TV series: It takes ordinary people in ordinary situations and then (can you hear Rod Serling?) zaps them with "next stop -- the Twilight Zone!"

The good idea: Richard Pryor plays a character who is blind, and Gene Wilder plays a character who is deaf, and once they become friends they make a great team. The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.

A family movie that some will find wholesome and heartwarming and others will find cornball and tiresome. You know who you are. I know who I am. This is not my kind of movie.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

An imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

When I heard that John Cusack had been cast for this film, it sounded like good news: I could imagine him as Poe, tortured and brilliant, lashing out at a cruel world. But that isn't the historical Poe the movie has in mind. It is a melodramatic Poe, calling for the gifts of Nicolas Cage.

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.

Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.

The movie sinks into contrived plot manipulation.

Is this some kind of a test? The Hangover, Part II plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness.

There isn't a lot in the movie that is funny.

Works as Gothic melodrama because it understands the genre so well.

The charm of The Ring Two, while limited, is real enough; it is based on the film's ability to make absolutely no sense, while nevertheless generating a real enough feeling of tension a good deal of the time.

To watch Samuel L. Jackson in the role is to realize again what a gifted actor he is, how skilled at finding the right way to play a character who, in other hands, might be unplayable.

Has a freshness and charm, a winning way with its not terrifically original material.

So breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver.

If you like him on TV, you'll like him here, too, because it's more of the same stuff, only outdoors and with animals and shooting stars and the kinds of balloons people can go up in.

Clint Eastwood's Firefox is a slick, muscular thriller that combines espionage with science fiction. The movie works like a well-crafted machine, and it's about a well-crafted machine.

It will appeal to the large Indian audiences in North America and to Bollywood fans in general, who will come out wondering why this movie, of all movies, was chosen as Hollywood's first foray into commercial Indian cinema.

How much more interesting is a film like "(500) Days of Summer," which is about the complexities of life, in comparison with this one, which cheerfully cycles through the cliches.

Plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you'd like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem.

A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland.

A jolly movie and I smiled pretty much all the way through, but it doesn't shift into high with a solid thunk the way "Bridget Jones' Diary" did.

You want to see guys with muscles shooting machineguns at guys without muscles? These are the movies for you. You have more than muscles between your ears? Try something else.

Depp accepts the character and all of its baggage, and works without a net.

The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It's fun.

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

Superman III is the kind of movie I feared the original "Superman" would be. It's a cinematic comic book, shallow, silly, filled with stunts and action, without much human interest.

Uusually satisfying in the way it unfolds.

Here are people who do not allow the use of their last names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera -- and even willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless and perhaps deranged.

America's Sweethearts recycles "Singin' in the Rain" but lacks the sassy genius of that 1952 musical, which is still the best comedy ever made about Hollywood.

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

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. It's harmless, simple-minded.

But when you think of the "Babe" pictures, and indeed even an animated cartoon like "Home on the Range," you realize Stripes is on autopilot with all of the usual elements: a heroine missing one parent, an animal missing both, an underdog (or underzebra), cute animals, the big race.

The word preposterous is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness.

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

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.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, makes the mistake of thinking we care more about the gold than about the city slickers. Like too many sequels, it has forgotten what the first film was really about. Slickers II is about the MacGuffin instead of the characters.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

OK, OK. They're good dancers, and well-choreographed. You can see the movie for that and be charitable about the moronic plot.

"Star Trek V" is pretty much of a mess - a movie that betrays all the signs of having gone into production at a point where the script doctoring should have begun in earnest. There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends. Of all of the "Star Trek" movies, this is the worst.

What is it about Indiana that inspires movies about small-town dreamers who come from behind to win?

She (Taymor) doesn't capture Shakespeare's tone (or his meaning, I believe), but she certainly has boldness in her reinvention.

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

Dad is a case of a movie with too much enthusiasm for its own good. If the filmmakers had only been willing to dial down a little, they would have had the materials for an emotionally moving story, instead of one that generates incredulity.

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

Liv Tyler is a very particular talent who has sometimes been misused by directors more in love with her beauty than with her appropriateness for their story. Here she is perfectly cast.

The story is so interesting, and Bacon and the other actors are so capable, that if this movie had been two hours out of their lives, I would have found it compelling. What we get, though, is 35 minutes of their lives and a lot of recycled visual cliches.

A brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com.

As an idea, the film is fascinating, but as an experience it grows tedious; the concerts lack closeups, the sex lacks context, and Antarctica could use a few penguins.

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

Rod is played by Andy Samberg from "Saturday Night Live," who on the basis of this film, I think, could become a very big star.

By movie's end, I'd seen some swell photography and witnessed some thrilling chase scenes, but when it came to understanding the movie, I didn't have a clue.

A film that begins in intrigue, develops in fascination and ends in a train wreck. It goes spectacularly wrong, and yet it contains such a gripping performance by Robin Wright Penn that it succeeds, in a way, despite itself.

It says something for Robert Downey Jr. that in a movie where a man becomes a dog, Downey creates the weirdest character.

If you're a fan of extreme skateboarding, motorcycling and motocross, this is the movie for you. If not, not. And even if you are, what's in the film other than what you might have seen on TV? Yes, it's in 3D, which adds nothing and dims the picture.

If I can't quite recommend the movie, it's because so much of the plot is on autopilot. The dialogue spells out too much that doesn't need to be said.

I laughed at American Pie 2, yes, but this is either going to be the last "Pie" movie or they're going to have to get a new angle.

At a time when so many American movies keep dialogue at a minimum so they can play better overseas, what a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music.

A seriously confused film that makes three or four passes at being a better one and doesn't complete any of them.

I liked it in the same way I might like an arcade game: It holds your attention until you run out of quarters, and then you wander away without giving it another thought.

All of the elements are here for a movie I would probably enjoy very much, but somehow they never come together.

Total Recall is well-crafted, high energy sci-fi. Like all stories inspired by Philip K. Dick, it deals with intriguing ideas. It never touched me emotionally, though, the way the 1990 film did, and strictly speaking, isn't necessary.

A film like this is refreshing and startling in the way it cuts loose from formula and shows us confused lives we recognize.

It could have been more, could have been a triumph and a classic, instead of simply an effective entertainment.

A turgid melodrama with the emotional range of a sympathy card.

Begins with a thought-provoking idea from Philip K. Dick, exploits it for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it.

True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.

Some of the gags don't work, and yet I laughed at the Farrellys' audacity in trying them. And the humor isn't just gags and punch lines, but one accomplished comic performance after another.

Hocus Pocus is a film desperately in need of self-discipline. It's one of those projects where you imagine everyone laughing and applauding each other after every scene, because they're so convinced they're wild and crazy guys. But watching the movie is like attending a party you weren't invited to, and where you don't know anybody, and they're all in on a joke but won't explain it to you.

The movie isn't set up to tell a story about a boy who was young in the summer of 1942; it insists on presenting itself, instead, as an adult memory of that long-ago summer. We don't learn very much about the boy because the movie's adult point of view refuses to come to terms with him.

The Wolfman avoids what must have been the temptation to update its famous story. It plants itself securely in period, with a great-looking production set in 1891.

Dear John exists only to coddle the sentiments of undemanding dreamers, and plunge us into a world where the only evil is the interruption of the good.

The film is a sharp disappointment to those who have been waiting for 10 years since the master's last film. The best that can be hoped is that, having made a film, Coppola has the taste again, and will go on to make many more, nothing like this.

The Lady is more professional but, for me, "They Call It Myanmar" is more useful. Lieberman answers questions that Besson does not think to ask.

It's got cheesy special effects, a muddy visual look, and characters who say obvious things in obvious ways.

What is best about the movie are the sequences where it permits itself to establish a child's-eye point of view, in which comic books, fantasy and reality are all combined into a terrific adventure.

There is something intrinsically silly in this story, and unless you can find a way to believe in it at some level (even on the level on which Peter Pan believes in fairies), it's just a lot of feathers. Many of them from horses.

Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.

The problem with "FD3" is since it is clear to everyone who must die and in what order, the drama is reduced to a formula in which ominous events accumulate while the teenagers remain oblivious.

Dante's Peak, written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Roger Donaldson, follows the disaster formula so faithfully that if you walk in while the movie is in progress, you can estimate how long the story has to run. That it is skillful is a tribute to the filmmakers.

Needful Things is yet another one of those films based on a Stephen King story that inspires you to wonder why his stories don't make better films. The movie only has one note, which it plays over and over, sort of a Satanic water torture. It's not funny and it's not scary and it's all sort of depressing.

Is there another great modern writer so hard to translate successfully into cinema? Saul Bellow? Again, it's all in the language. The only thing Saul and Gabo have in common is the Nobel Prize. Now that's interesting.

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

It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."

Although the movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene, it has a sweetness that is impossible to discount, and it is often very funny.

The movie has good special effects and suitably gruesome characters, but it's bloodless.

Emily Browning's face helps The Uninvited work so well...She makes you fear for her, and that's half the battle. Yet she's so fresh she's ready for a Jane Austen role.

The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.

Whoever cast De Niro and Grodin must have had a sixth sense for the chemistry they would have; they work together so smoothly, and with such an evident sense of fun, that even their silences are intriguing.

There’s wit, rudeness, satire, lust and pathos, all effortlessly rolled up together. "Skin Deep" is sort of a filmmaker’s triathalon, and if Edwards doesn’t set any new records, he enters every event.

True Colors requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief; it demands a willful abandonment of incredulity.

It is an assault on all the senses, including common. Walking out, I had the impression I had just seen the video game and was still waiting for the movie.

He seems fueled more by anger and ego than spirituality and essentially abandons his family to play with his guns. It's intriguing, however, how well Butler enlists our sympathy for the character.

If there's anything worse than a movie hammered together out of pieces of bad screenplays, it's a movie made from the scraps of good ones.

The Forgotten is not a good movie, but at least it supplies a credible victim (Moore).

I liked a lot of it myself, and with me, a few broadswords and leather jerkins go a long way.

It's chirpy, it's bright, there are pretty locations and lots happens. This is the kind of movie that can briefly hold the attention of a cat.

Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah is built on Tommy Lee Jones' persona, and that is why it works so well. The same material could have been banal or routine with an actor trying to be "earnest" and "sincere."

It isn't bad so much as it lacks any ambition to be more than it so obviously is.

The best things about Brooklyn's Finest are the one-on-one scenes. These are fine actors.

M. Butterfly does not take hold the way the stage play did.

It looks great. The technical credits are impeccable, and Clooney and Kidman negotiate assorted dangers skillfully. But it's mostly spare parts from other thrillers.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown steadily more repetitive and dreary, "LCTR:TCOL" uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of pulp adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies.

Williams has extraordinary success in channeling this other person.

It's fast-footed and fun. "Rugrats in Paris" had charms for grownups, however, Recess: School's Out seems aimed more directly at grade-schoolers.

Did you (Garry Marshall) deliberately assemble this movie from off-the-shelf parts or did it just happen that way? The film is like a homage to the cliches and obligatory stereotypes of its genre.

If you're a fan of Hector Lavoe and Latin music, or Lopez and Anthony, you'll want to see El Cantante for what's good in it. Otherwise, you may be disappointed. The director (Leon Ichaso) and his co-writers haven't licked a crucial question: Why do we need to see this movie and not just listen to the music?

The Great Gatsby is a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

Like the original 1963 movie and the TV series, it expects us to be endlessly amused by a dolphin that does things that are endless but not amusing.

Here's a movie that's well visualized, that does a riveting job of exploring an authentic subculture, that has a fairly high level of genuine suspense from beginning to end. . and that then seems to make a conscious decision not to declare itself on its central subject. What does Friedkin finally think his movie is about?

At some point during the pitch meetings for D.E.B.S. someone must certainly have used the words "Charlie's Lesbians."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Part 2 carries a proud old name in the annals of exploitation, but its only ambition is to outgross the original film. It fails.

Soppy and sentimental, it evokes "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" without improving on it.

A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to.

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

If Depardieu seems right at home in My Father the Hero, perhaps that is because only two years ago he made a French film called "Mon Pere, Ce Heros," with exactly the same plot. I saw it, and would say it was more or less exactly as appealing as this English version.

The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

Sweet, light entertainment, but could have been more.

Slight and sweet, not a great high school movie but kinda nice, with appealing performances by Hart and Grenier.

I want to escape, Oh, Muddah Faddah -- Life's too short for cinematic torture.

What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

Force Ten honors all the obligatory clichés, and then there's a nice twist involving the explosion inside the dam, and then we get the special effects, and then it's over. It doesn't leave much of an impression; a director like Guy Hamilton, a graduate of four of the Bond pictures, can turn out action movies like this in his sleep. This time, alas, that's apparently what he did.

The target audience for Phantasm II obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.

Both the lottery scene and the anti-union material seem to be fictionalized versions of material in the powerful documentary "Waiting for Superman," which covered similar material with infinitely greater depth.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.

Big Top Pee-wee is as guileless and cheerful as Pee-wee’s first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s not as magical. It has too much plot, somehow, and not enough wide-eyed discovery in which everything is new to Pee-wee every moment of his life. He seems almost from Earth in this movie.

Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.

The poems can be read. The film must stand on its own, apart from the poems, and I'm afraid it doesn't. One admires the energy and inventiveness that Holland, Thewlis and DiCaprio put into the film, but one would prefer to be admiring it from afar.

An unconvincing, harmless action movie that at its best moments is a pale echo of "Raiders."

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

A love story about two people with no apparent chemistry, whose lives are changed by a stranger who remains an uninteresting enigma. No wonder it just sits there on the screen.

I WANTED it to be a typical romantic comedy starring those two lovable people, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. And it was. And some of the dialogue has a real zing to it. There were wicked little one-liners that slipped in under the radar and nudged the audience in the ribs.

Not as awe-inspiring as the first film or as elaborate as the second, but in its own B-movie way, it's a nice little thrill machine.

Lumbering from one expensive set piece to the next without taking the time to tell us a story that might make us care.

There was perhaps a time, 20 years ago, when the sophomorism of Amazon Women on the Moon might have seemed faintly daring. But even Mad magazine has moved on from simple satire to a more off-center view of its subjects.

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

Stargate is like a film school exercise. Assignment: Conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches.

The movie's shot in black and white; Allen is one of the rare and valuable directors who sometimes insists in working in the format that is the soul of cinema.

Begins with promise, proceeds in fits and starts, and finally sinks into a cornball drone of greeting-card sentiment.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne. We can admire someone for daring to do the audacious, or pity someone for recklessly doing something stupid, but when a character commits an act of stupid audacity, the admiration and pity cancel each other, and we are left only with the possibility of farce.

The movie has a certain mordant humor, and some macho dialogue that's funny. Woods manfully keeps a straight face through goofy situations where many another actor would have signaled us with a wink. But the movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.

The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.

An assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.

Take away the basic human appeal of Fox and his love interest, Gabrielle Anwar, and what you have left wouldn't fuel 22 minutes of a sitcom.

Terror Train is a curious hybrid that doesn't seem to know just what it wants to be. It has, I guess, few artistic pretensions, and yet it's not a rock-bottom-budget, schlock exploitation film.

You wouldn't think Hope and Jonathan Winters, those masters of timing, could possibly make a dull and sloppy comedy, but they did, and their method is instructive.

A movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.

The movie wants to be good-hearted but is somehow sort of grudging. It should have gone all the way. I think Fred Claus should have been meaner if he was going to be funnier, and Santa should have been up to something nefarious, instead of the jolly old ho-ho-ho routine.

I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own.

It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won. I might not have cared in a better movie, either, but I might have been willing to pretend.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.

There is nothing really wrong with the scenes in the institution, except that they're in the wrong movie.

I was surprised to find myself seduced by the film’s simple, sweet story, and amused by the sly indications that the Cleavers don’t live in the 1950s anymore.

On some dumb fundamental level, Airport kept me interested for a couple of hours. I can't quite remember why. The plot has few surprises (you know and I know that no airplane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed). The gags are painfully simpleminded (a priest, pretending to cross himself, whacks a wise guy across the face). And the characters talk in regulation B-movie clichés like no B-movie you've seen in ten years.

The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City received zero stars is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve zero stars. It doesn't achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.

The story is a mess, but for long periods of time that hardly matters. It's beside the point, as we enter one of the most striking spaces I've ever seen in a film.

It’s not a game anymore. In 1957, these kids were playing. And it was a perfect game.

A few loopholes I can forgive. But when a plot is riddled with them -- I get distracted.

Oh, did I dislike this film. It made me squirm. Its premise is lame, its plot relentlessly predictable, its characters with personalities that would distinguish picture books.

Without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.

You want a good horror film about a child from hell, you got one. Do not, under any circumstances, take children to see it. Take my word on this.

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.

I didn't much like RoboCop 2 (the use of that killer child is beneath contempt), but I've gotta hand it to them: It's strange how funny it is, for a movie so bad. Or how bad, for a movie so funny.

Author! Author! is never even able to establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos, between heart-rending family conferences and a ridiculous final scene.

Look at the performances. They're surprisingly good, and I especially admired the work of Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn as the parents of one of two girls who go walking in the woods.

The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven't seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator's daydreams. Science-fiction and special effects fans may find these scenes worth the ticket price. But the movie's flaw is that there's not enough detail about the aliens, and the movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be "poor, nasty, brutish and short." So is this movie.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

The surprise for me is Christina Ricci, who I think of as undernourished and nervous, but who flowers here in warm ripeness.

Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.

If The Way West does not wholly succeed as drama, it is at least a well-made and wholly professional Hollywood Western. Western fans, myself included, might enjoy it for that alone. Widmark and Mitchum are excellent in roles unusual for them and Douglas, as always, is a seasoned old hand.