Roger Ebert

What made Shackleton's adventure so immediate to later generations was that he took along a photographer, Frank Hurley, who shot motion picture film and stills.

I prefer "Life Is Beautiful," which is clearly a fantasy, to Jakob the Liar, which is just as contrived and manipulative but pretends it is not.

Carnal Knowledge is clearly Mike Nichols' best film. It sets out to tell us certain things about these few characters and their sexual crucifixions, and it succeeds.

Pretty much required viewing.

Together [Christopher Eccleston, Rachel Griffiths and Kate Winslet] stake a difficult story and make it into a haunting film.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

Directed with sly grace and quiet elegance by Sally Potter, it is not about a story or a plot, but about a vision of human existence.

The story is as pure and lean as the original fable which formed in Steinbeck's mind. And because they don't try to do anything fancy -- don't try to make it anything other than exactly what it is -- they have a quiet triumph.

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.

It stands with integrity and breaks our hearts.

Rock conveys a lot of information, but also some unfortunate opinions and misleading facts. That doesn't mean the move isn't warm, funny, and entertaining.

The entire film centers on the remarkable performance by Natasha Richardson as Hearst. She convinces us she is Hearst, not by pressing the point, but by taking it for granted.

A pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that's like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don't want to see again any time real soon.

The really good superhero movies, like "Superman," "SpiderMan 2" and "Batman Begins," leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters.

It's one of the great moviegoing experiences.

Keane is played by Damian Lewis. Here he inhabits an edge of madness that Lodge Kerrigan understands with a fierce sympathy.

Here there is a dry wit, generated between the well-balanced performances of Fiennes and Blanchett, who seem quietly delighted to be playing two such rich characters.

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.

Swimming is above all about a young woman's face, and by casting an actress whose face projects that woman's doubts and yearnings, it succeeds. The face belongs to Lauren Ambrose.

A film of remarkable sensitivity and insight.

Anderson is like Dave Brubeck, who I'm listening to right now. He knows every note of the original song, but the fun and genius come in the way he noodles around. And in his movie's cast, especially with Owen Wilson, Anderson takes advantage of champion noodlers.

All of this could have been nice and juicy if Walter Hill had done a few more things with his screenplay, such as made the characters into people.

For a movie audience, The Hours doesn't connect in a neat way, but introduces characters who illuminate mysteries of sex, duty and love.

Enormously entertaining.

Sometimes two performances come along that are so perfectly matched that no overt signals are needed to show how the characters feel about each other. That's what happens between Melissa Leo and Misty Upham in Frozen River.

In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman uses a tactfully unobtrusive camera, a distinctive conversational style of dialog and the fluid movements of his actors to give us people who are characters from the moment we see them; we have the sense that when they leave camera range they're still thinking, humming, scratching, chewing and nodding to each other in the street.

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

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.

I don't much care if the battles aren't that amazing, because the story doesn't depend on them. It's about a sacrifice made by Spock, and it draws on the sentiment and audience identification developed over the years by the TV series.

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

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

What makes the movie fascinating is that it doesn't settle for a soap opera resolution to this story, with Pilar as the victim, Antonio as the villain, and evil vanquished. It digs deeper and more painfully.

If anybody ever wrote a Field Guide to Alcoholics, with descriptions of their appearance, sexual behavior and habitats, there would be a full-color portrait on the cover of Tommy, the hero of Trees Lounge.

The outcome of this journey is going to be predictable and disappointing. Mottola does his best to make the trip itself enjoyable.

Another one of those road comedies where Southern roots are supposed to make boring people seem colorful. If these characters were from Minneapolis or Denver, no way anyone would make a film about them.

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

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

The movie is harmless and fitfully amusing.

The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making plot points.

The funniest American comedy of the year.

Great World of Sound, a Sundance hit, is Zobel’s first film, a confident, sure-handed exercise focusing on the American Dream, turned nightmare.

The movie is an engrossing melodrama, and it has its heart in the right place.

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.

One of those movies that never convince you its stories are really happening.

"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.

The Muppets Take Manhattan is yet another retread of the reliable old formula in which somebody says "Hey, gang! Our senior class musical show is so good, I'll bet we could be stars on Broadway!" The fact that this plot is not original does not deter you, Kermit, nor should it. It's still a good plot.

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

In Good Company is a rare species: a feel-good movie about big business. It's about a corporate culture that tries to be evil and fails.

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

There’s joy in watching a movie like You, the Living. It is flawless in what it does, and we have no idea what that is. It’s in sympathy with its characters. It shares their sorrow, and yet is amused that each thinks his suffering is unique.

There's no chemistry between Deeds and Babe, but then how could there be, considering that their characters have no existence, except as the puppets in scenes of plot manipulation.

Apart from its pure entertainment value - this is the best American crime movie in years - it is an important statement about a time and a condition that should not be forgotten. The Academy loves to honor prestigious movies in which long-ago crimes are rectified in far-away places. Here is a nominee with the ink still wet on its pages.

These actors, alas, are at the service of a submoronic script and special effects that look like a video game writ large.

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.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made.

The three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and -- wow! -- Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

This is the kind of movie you happen across on TV, and linger to watch out of curiosity, but its inspired moments serve only to point out how routine, and occasionally how slow and wordy, the rest of it is.

There is hardly a moment in the whole film when I knew for sure what was going to happen next, yet I didn’t feel manipulated; I felt as if the movie were giving itself the freedom to be completely spontaneous.

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

It drifts above the surface of its natural subjects, content to be a genre picture. We're always aware of the formula--and in a picture based on real life, we shouldn't be.

Sex Is Comedy is not sure what it's really about, or how to get there; the director is seen as flighty and impulsive, the situations seem like set-ups, and we never know what the Actor and Actress are really thinking -- or if thinking has anything to do with it.

There's some really fine stuff here, and Part Two isn't afraid to poke fun when it's appropriate.

There is no mechanical plot that has to grind to a Hollywood conclusion, and no contrived test for the heroes to pass; this is a movie about two particular young men, and how they pass their lives.

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

Twelve and Holding could have been a series of horror stories, but the filmmakers and their gifted young actors somehow negotiate the horrors and generate a deep sympathy.

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

The movie is a paid holiday for its director, Harold Becker. I say this because I know what Becker is capable of.

To describe the story is to miss the nuances that make it tantalizing.

A comedy so listless, leisurely and unspirited that it was an act of the will for me to care about it, even while I was watching it.

The film is unusual for not having a plot or a payoff.

Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does.

If I were asked to say with certainty which movies will still be widely known a century or two from now, I would list "2001,'' "The Wizard of Oz,'' Keaton and Chaplin, Astaire and Rogers, and probably "Casablanca'' ... and "Star Wars,'' for sure.

If The Electric Horseman has a flaw, it's that the movie's so warm and cozy it can hardly be electrifying. The director, Sydney Pollack, gives us solid entertainment, but he doesn't take chances and he probably didn't intend to.

This is not a deep movie, but it's a broad one. It reunites three talents who had an enormous hit with "Y Tu Mama Tambien": actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, and Carlos Cuaron, who wrote that film and writes and directs this one. Instead of trying to top themselves with life and poignancy, they wisely do something for fun.

Grey Gardens, one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.

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

A movie like this can get you thinking.

An enjoyable film, and yet it left me somehow unsatisfied...there is too much contrivance in the way [Austen] dispatches her men to London when she is done with them.

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

Kicking and Screaming doesn't have much of a plot, but of course it wouldn't; this is a movie about characters waiting for their plots to begin.

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.

This is a grown-up movie, in its humor and in its wisdom about life. You need to have lived a little to understand the complexities of Tobias Allcott, who is played by James Coburn with a pitch-perfect balance between sadness and sardonic wit.

Kline's Frenchman is somehow not worldly enough, and Ryan's heroine never convinces us she ever loved her fiance in the first place. A movie about this kind of material either should be about people who feel true passion or should commit itself as a comedy. Compromise is pointless.

A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.

Hal Hartley is on his way to creating a distinctive film world, and although Trust is not a successful film, you can see his vision at work, and it's intriguing.

It's all recycled material from other movies - all except for some nice personal touches added by the actors. They bring style to a movie that needs it.

Any plot discipline (necessary so that we care about some characters and not the others) has been lost in an orgy of special effects and general mayhem.

Out of Africa is a great movie to look at, breathtakingly filmed on location. It is a movie with the courage to be about complex, sweeping emotions, and to use the star power of its actors without apology.

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.

A joyous movie.

It's not art, it's not “Juno,” it's not “Girlfight,” for that matter, but as a movie about a flesh-eating cheerleader, it's better than it has to be.

A comedy worthy of the best Woody Allen, and Adrian is not unlike Woody's persona: a sincere, intense, insecure nebbish, hopeless with women, aiming for greatness.

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

Fascinating and has a lot of laughs in it.

Forget about the plot, the characters, the intrigue, which are all splendid in House of Flying Daggers, and focus just on the visuals.

The movie never really comes together, and I think the fault for that begins with Williams. When the star of a movie seems desperate enough to depend on one-liners, can the rest of the cast be blamed for losing confidence in the script?

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

The New York art world quickly makes Basquiat a star. His work is good (when you see it in the movie, you can feel why people liked it so much), but his story is better: from a cardboard box to a gallery opening!

This human level is always there beneath the thriller elements. The screenplay takes care to bring the crime story and the personal histories together, so that even the crossed lines of romance work as plot points, not just sentiment.

Something New delivers all the usual pleasures of a love story, and something more. The movie respects its subject and characters, and is more complex about race than we could possibly expect.

A tender and passionate protest, not without laughter, by Bertrand Tavernier -- a director who is not only gifted but honorable.

Down Periscope plays so much like a sitcom it may even inspire one, especially since it has two of the key requirements: an easy-going father figure, and action largely confined to one set. It's about a troublesome Navy officer (Kelsey Grammer) who is finally given command of his own submarine, an ancient 1958 diesel model he refers to as the USS Rustoleum. [01 Mar 1996, p.33]

There's so much good here, in the dialogue, the performances and the observation, that the movie succeeds at many moments even while pursuing its doomed grand design.

Cuaron's version of magic realism consists of seeing incredibly fanciful sets and situations in precise detail, and Johnson has provided him with the freedom and logistical support to create such places as the street where Miss Minchin's school looms so impressively.

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

Uys's style sheds a sweet and gentle light on this new comedy, which is a sequel to the surprising international success - and, I think, a better film.

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.

The movie is clearly intended for girls between the ages of 9 and 15, and for the more civilized of their brothers, and isn't of much use to anyone else.

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

It's a cheerfully unashamed exploitation of two of our great national preoccupations, pro football and guns.

This is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.

Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.

This movie is all elbows. Nothing fits. It doesn't add up. It has some terrific free-standing scenes, but they need more to lean on.

Sounder is a story simply told and universally moving. It is one of the most compassionate and truthful of movies, and there's not a level where it doesn't succeed completely.

The Thing is basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in The Thing. But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary.

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.

Off the Map is visually beautiful as a portrait of lives in the middle of emptiness, but it's not about the New Mexico scenery. It's about feelings that shift among people who are good enough, curious enough or just maybe tired enough to let that happen.

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.

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

This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

What distinguishes Personal Best is that it creates specific characters--flesh-and-blood people with interesting personalities, people I cared about. “Personal Best” also seems knowledgeable about its two subjects, which are the weather of these women's hearts, and the world of Olympic sports competition.

There were moments in Stand and Deliver that moved me very deeply and other moments so artificial and contrived that I wanted to edit them out, right then and there. The result is a film that makes a brave, bold statement about an unexpected subject, but that lacks the full emotional power it really should have.

Ozu is one of the greatest artists to ever make a film. This was his last one.

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.

What distinguishes My Fair Lady above all is that it actually says something. It says it in a film of pointed words, unforgettable music and glorious images, but it says it.

Who was Joseph Fiennes channeling when he chose this muddled tone? Obviously he was reluctant to gave a broad, inspirational performance of the kind you find in deliberately religious films.

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

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.

It's warm, entertaining, funny, and centered around that great Sissy Spacek performance, but it's essentially pretty familiar material (not that Loretta Lynn can be blamed that Horatio Alger wrote her life before she lived it). The movie isn't great art, but it has been made with great taste and style; it's more intelligent and observant than movie biographies of singing stars used to be. That makes it a treasure to watch, even if we sometimes have the feeling we've seen it before.

It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. And the dialogue in it is actually worth listening to, because it is written with wit and romance.

The most fascinating scenes in Waking Sleeping Beauty involve the infamous Disney work ethic. Friends of mine at the studio said the unofficial motto was, "If you didn't come in on Saturday, don't even bother to come in on Sunday."

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

Plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories. It can't decide what tone to strike.

Material like this is only as good as the acting and writing. The Ref is skillful in both areas. Dennis Leary, who has a tendency, like many standup comics, to start shouting and try to make points with overkill, here creates an entertaining character.

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

Nosferatu the Vampyre cannot be confined to the category of "horror film." It is about dread itself, and how easily the unwary can fall into evil.

Little Voice is unthinkable without the special and unexpected talent of its star.

What sets Heathers apart from less intelligent teenage movies is that it has a point of view toward this subject matter - a bleak, macabre and bitingly satirical one.

No movie has had a greater impact on the way people looked. The music of course is immortal.

It provides the most observant study of working journalists we're ever likely to see in a feature film. And it succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the mixture of exhilaration, paranoia, self-doubt, and courage that permeated the Washington Post as its two young reporters went after a presidency.

Somehow manages to combine the sweetness and innocence of the original with a satirical bite all its own.

I thought this was going to be another hilarious disaster movie, but I was wrong. The Delta Force settles down into a well-made action film that tantalizes us with its parallels to real life.

A black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and the Coens themselves...an assured piece of comic filmmaking.

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

Now is Slipstream worth seeing? I think so, if you'll actively engage your sympathy with Hopkins' attempt to do something tricky and difficult. If you want to lie back and let the movie come to you, you may be lying there a long time.

Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.

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

A remarkable documentary by two Irish filmmakers that is playing in theaters on its way to HBO. It is remarkable because the filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, had access to virtually everything that happened within the palace during the entire episode.

This isn't a great movie. But it's sincere as an entertainment, it looks good, it's atmospheric, and I will perk up the next time I hear Gianna is in a picture.

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.

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

Abandon your expectations of an orderly plot, and you'll end up humming the title song. The movie's a vast, rambling, nostalgic expedition back into the big band era, and a celebration of the considerable talents of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro.

Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

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

This is one of those comedies that doesn't pound us on the head with the obvious, but simply lets us share vast amusement.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.

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

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

I saw Tarzan once, and went to see it again. This kind of bright, colorful, hyperkinetic animation is a visual exhilaration.

Impressive moviemaking, showing Scorsese as a master of a traditional Hollywood genre.

The Dead Zone does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: It makes us forget it is supernatural.

Stone and his editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, have somehow triumphed over the tumult of material here and made it work - made it grip and disturb us.

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

Intense, erotic and willful.

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

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

Succeeds at being three things at once: an enthralling animated film, a visual wonderment and a decent science-fiction story.

It is a great performance by Danny Glover, the portrait of a proud man who discovers his pride was entrusted to the wrong things.

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

May be a sardonic view of Japanese corporate culture, but that's not all it is. The movie is also subtly sexual and erotic, despite the fact that every scene takes place in the office and there is not a single overt sexual act or word or gesture or reference.

At one time or another, Casino Royale undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

A movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing and the lack of a parent or adult guardian.

It is easy to analyze the mechanism, but more difficult to explain why this film is so deeply moving.

The real objective of all the "M:I" movies is to provide a clothesline for sensational action scenes. Nothing else matters, and explanatory dialogue would only slow things down. This formula worked satisfactorily in "M:I," directed by Brian De Palma, and "M:I II," directed by John Woo, and I suppose it works up to a point in M:I III, directed by J.J. Abrams, if what you want is endless, nonstop high-tech action.

What I will remember is the photography, and the bliss (just this side of madness) with which the Jeff Daniels character invents his foolhardy schemes.

A whirling, uplifting, thrilling story with a heart-touching message that emerges from the comedy and song.

Masterful at concealing its true nature and surprising us with the turns of the story.

The movie's delicately timed pacing and Pollack's visual style work almost stealthily to involve us; we begin to feel the physical weariness and spiritual desperation of the characters.

Here is a movie that ignores the Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed. Bringing Down the House is glued together with one of the wings treated like a piece of tail.

Despite its creativity, the movie remains space opera and avoids the higher realms of science-fiction.

It was produced, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also wrote American Graffiti, and it has the same sharp memory for those specific moments when young people suspect they are doing certain things for the last times in their lives. So it is bittersweet, of course -- bittersweet, that indispensable street you travel through adolescence on.

The result is one of the jollier comedies of the year, a movie so mainstream that you can almost watch it backing away from confrontation, a film aimed primarily at a middle-American heterosexual audience.

Not a documentary about anything in particular. That is its charm. It's a meandering visit by a curious man with a quiet sense of humor, who pokes here and there in his family history, and the history of tobacco.

The part that needs work didn't cost money. It's the screenplay. Having created the characters and fashioned the outline, Tarantino doesn't do much with his characters except to let them talk too much, especially when they should be unconscious from shock and loss of blood.

Ephron develops this story with all of the heartfelt sincerity of a 1950s tearjerker (indeed, the movie's characters spend a lot of time watching "An Affair to Remember" and using it as their romantic compass).

As loaded with special effects as "The Matrix,'' but they're on a different scale. Many of his best effects are gooey, indescribable organic things, and some of the most memorable scenes involve characters eating things that surgeons handle with gloves on.

Coppola is unable to draw all this together and make it work on the level of simple, absorbing narrative. The stunning text of "The Godfather" is replaced in Part II with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions.

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

This good movie is buried beneath millions of dollars that were spent on "production values" that wreck the show.

It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines.

Streep’s performance is risky, and masterful.

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

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

The movie's not without charm. There's a fresh, sweet relationship between one of the girls (Phoebe Cates) and her boyfriend, in which she is permitted to have the normal fears, doubts and reservations of anyone her age. I'm not sure how that plot got into this smarmy-minded movie, but it was like a breath of fresh air.

I feel such an affection for Chabrol and his work that I probably can't see The Flower of Evil as it would be experienced by a first-time viewer. Would that newcomer note the elegance, the confidence, the sheer joy in the way he treasures the banalities of bourgeois life on his way to the bloodshed?

This movie has a lot of good music in it, some on the soundtrack, some on the screen. Jackson and Bernie Mac have enormous fun doing intricate dance moves together.

The kind of film you can appreciate as an object, but not as a story. It's a lovingly souped-up incarnation of the film-noir look, contains well-staged and performed musical numbers, and has a lot of cigarettes, tough tootsies, bad guys and shadows. What it doesn't have is a story that pulls us along, or a hero who seems as compelling as some of the supporting characters.

To give the movie credit, it's as bored with the underlying plot as we are. Even the prom queen election is only a backdrop for more interesting material, as She's All That explores differences in class and style, and peppers its screenplay with very funny little moments.

The most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.

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

This movie kept me involved and intrigued, and for that I'm grateful. I'm beginning to wonder whether, in some situations, absurdity might not be a strength.

The two leading men, Northam and Everett, are smooth and charming.

The end of the film understandably lays on the emotion a little heavily, but until then Courage Under Fire has been a fascinating emotional and logistical puzzle--almost a courtroom movie, with the desert as the courtroom.

House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep, it privately thinks it is superior.

This is the second movie Judd and Freeman have made together (after "Kiss the Girls" in 1997). They're both good at projecting a kind of Southern intelligence that knows its way around the frailties of human nature.

A film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc.

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

A crisp, smart, cynical film about dishonor among thieves.

Fantastically powerful despite its flaws. (Review of Original Release)

Hard Candy is impressive and effective. As for what else it may be, each audience member will have to decide.

This movie is NEW from the get-go. It could be your first Bond. In fact, it was the first Bond; it was Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, and he was still discovering who the character was.

The movie crackles with energy and life, and with throwaway slang dialogue by Mamet, who takes realistic speech patterns and simplifies them into a kind of hammer-and-nail poetry.

A red-blooded adventure movie, dripping with atmosphere, filled with the gruesome and the sublime, and surprisingly faithful to the novel.

Singles is not a great cutting-edge movie, and parts of it may be too whimsical and disorganized for audiences raised on cause-and-effect plots. But I found myself smiling a lot during the movie, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with recognition. It's easy to like these characters, and care about them.

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?

When interesting people have little to say, we watch the body language, listen to the notes in their voices. Rarely does a movie elaborate less and explain more than Tender Mercies.

These stories have as their justification that fact that they are intrinsically interesting. I think that's enough.

The movie works like thrillers used to work, before they were required to contain villains the size of buildings.

The best performance, because it's more nuanced, is by Liev Schreiber. His Zus Bielski is more concerned with the big picture, more ideological, more driven by tactics.

I'm Not Scared is a reminder of true childhood, of its fears and speculations, of the way a conversation can be overheard but not understood, of the way that the shape of the adult world forms slowly through the mist.

This is the documentary that caused a sensation at Sundance 2004 and allegedly inspired McDonald's to discontinue its "super size" promotions as a preemptive measure.

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.

A lame and labored comedy.

The plot is simple-minded and disappointing, and the chase and action scenes are pretty much routine for movies in the sci-fi CGI genre. The robots never seem to have the heft and weight of actual metallic machines, and make boring villains.

The production design deserves Academy recognition. But at the most fundamental level, Toys is a film not quite sure what it's about.

Inside Deep Throat, a documentary that premiered at Sundance and is now going into national release, was made not on the fringes but by the very establishment itself.

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.

A funny movie that only gets funnier the more familiar you are with the James Bond movies, all the Bond clones and countless other 1960s films.

A Martin Lawrence performance that deserves comparison with Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, with a touch of Mel Gibson's zaniness in the midst of action.

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.

The problem with everyone in King Kong Lives is that they're in a boring movie, and they know they're in a boring movie, and they just can't stir themselves to make an effort.

Damage, like "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," is one of those rare movies that is about sexuality, not sex; about the tension between people, not "relationships"; about how physical love is meaningless without a psychic engine behind it. Stephen and Anna are wrong to do what they do in "Damage," but they cannot help themselves. We know they are careening toward disaster. We cannot look away.

It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream."

It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story.

There's not much original about the film, but it's played with high spirits and good cheer, there are lots of musical interludes, and it's pitched straight at families.

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

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

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.

Seibei's story is told by director Yoji Yamada in muted tones and colors, beautifully re-creating a feudal village that still retains its architecture, its customs, its ancient values, even as the economy is making its way of life obsolete.

The screenplay for this movie bears every sign of being a first draft - a quick and dirty one. The movie doesn’t feel written, it feels dictated. Three authors are listed, and from the way their movie plays, they must have sat around in an office somewhere trying to get all of their cliches in a row.

The first lighthearted, laugh-oriented family Western in a long time, and one of the nice things about it is, it doesn't feel the need to justify its existence. It acts like it's the most natural thing in the world to be a Western.

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

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

A step or two above the usual Clint Eastwood Western.

Singin' in the Rain is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it.

O Brother contains sequences that are wonderful in themselves--lovely short films--but the movie never really shapes itself into a whole.

It's skillfully mounted and fitfully intriguing, but weaves such a tangled web that at the end I defy anyone in the audience to explain the exact loyalties and motives of the leading characters.

Adult audiences may be underwhelmed. Not younger teenage girls, who will be completely fascinated.

We have all the action heroes and Method script-chewers we need right now, but the Cary Grant department is understaffed, and Hugh Grant shows here that he is more than a star, he is a resource.

Tequila Sunrise is an intriguing movie with interesting characters, but it might have worked better if it had found a cleaner narrative line from beginning to end. It's hard to surrender yourself to a film that seems to be toying with you.

Scrooged is one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time. It was obviously intended as a comedy, but there is little comic about it, and indeed the movie's overriding emotions seem to be pain and anger.

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

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

The story is predictable, but the style had me on the edge of my seat.

Just about perfect for its target audience, and more than that. It has a great look, engaging performances, real substance and even a few whispers of political ideas, all surrounding the freshness and charm of Abigail Breslin, who was 11 when it was filmed.

Here's an angry comedy crossed with an expose and held together by one of those high-voltage Al Pacino performances that's so sure of itself we hesitate to demur.

Like a flowering of talent that has been waiting so long to be celebrated. It is also one of the most touching and moving of the year's films.

Red Rock West is a diabolical movie that exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy.

It leaves us with a series of stark images (of the struggle to harvest wheat during a snowstorm, of lamp-lit farmhomes, of Sorenson’s tireless Model T). And it also acts as a reminder of how much of American history stands in danger of being overlooked just because it happened outside the American mainstream.

Begins and ends with facts of war, but it is really a film about the nature of male and female, about middle-class values and those who cannot afford them, about how helpless we can be when the net of society is broken.

The movie's strength, then, is not in its outrage, but in its cynicism and resignation.

The movie does have charm and moments of humor, but what it doesn't have is romance.

Problem is, it's so laid-back it eventually gets monotonous. If the style and pacing had been as outrageous as the subject matter, we might have had something really amazing here.

Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."

She's Out of Control is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it's a first: the first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive.

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.

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

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

Depp is one of the very best of America's young actors, but "The Brave" is a lightweight and unbelievable story that takes itself with terminal seriousness. [14 May 1997, p.45]

A labored and sour comedy.

Wesley Snipes understands the material from the inside out and makes an effective Blade because he knows that the key ingredient in any interesting superhero is not omnipotence, but vulnerability.

The seductive thing about Aronofsky's film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math.

If I were simply to describe the story of Compromising Positions, it might sound like lighthearted, slightly kinky fun. But the movie has such a bitter core, such a distaste for its characters, that I ended up feeling uncomfortable in its company. I think it's supposed to be a comedy, but I felt depressed by its world of rich, neurotic, bitchy suburbanities.