Roger Ebert

It walks and talks like a big budget horror film, heavy on special effects and pitched at the teenage audience, and maybe that's how it will be received. But it's more impressive if you ignore the genre and just look at what's on the screen.

This is the kind of movie you sort of like, and yet even while you're liking it, you're thinking how much better these characters and this situation could have been with a little more imagination and daring.

The movie has an unforced, affectionate sense of humor about its characters.

It's a superb film -- funny, insightful and very wise about the realities of political life.

It is a surprisingly entertaining film - funny, wicked, sharp-tongued and devious. It does not solve the case, nor intend to. I am afraid it only intends to entertain.

A treasure of a movie because it knows so much about baseball and so little about love.

One of the best films of the year.

Two people finally tell each other the truth. This is, of course, an astonishing breakthrough in movies about teenagers, and All the Right Moves deserves it.

As we watch them drilling with flashcards and worksheets, we hope they will win, but we're not sure what good it will do them.

Slam is a fable disguised as a slice of life, and cobbled together out of too many pieces that don't fit smoothly together. It's moving, but not as effective as it could have been.

What I got was a fairly intriguing story and an actual plot that is actually resolved. That doesn't make the movie good enough to recommend, but it makes it better than the ads suggest.

Coup de Torchon left me cold, unmoved and uninvolved. All I could find to admire was the craftsmanship.

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.

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.

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

A brilliant nightmare and like all nightmares it doesn't tell us half of what we want to know.

Gloria is tough, sweet and goofy.

All of the cliches are in the right places, most of the gags pay off and there are moments of real amusement as the Australian cowboy wanders around Manhattan as a naive sightseer. The problem is that there's not one moment of chemistry between the two stars.

The more you consider Sunrise the deeper it becomes -- not because the story grows any more subtle, but because you realize the real subject is the horror beneath the surface.

This is a good idea for a movie. Unfortunately, in Brainstorm it remains basically an idea. The characters take such a secondary importance to the gadget that we never feel much for them.

It is only now that I am in a condition to appreciate the 1950s.

Here is a satire both savage and elegant, a dagger instead of a shotgun.

What happens next is a cross between "Night of the Living Dead," "The Birds" and a disaster movie, if you follow me.

Meryl Streep is indeed poised and imperious as Miranda, and Anne Hathaway is a great beauty who makes a convincing career girl. I liked Stanley Tucci, too, as Nigel... But I thought the movie should have reversed the roles played by Grenier and Baker. Grenier comes across not like the old boyfriend but like the slick New York writer, and Baker seems the embodiment of Midwestern sincerity.

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

Directed by Jay Roach, who made the "Austin Powers" movies and here shows he can dial down from farce into a comedy of (bad) manners. His movie is funnier because it never tries too hard.

The chemistry between Martin and Caine is fun, and Headly provides a resilient foil as a woman who looks like a pushover but somehow never seems to topple.

The screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax MASH.

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.

Dr. Furter is played by a British actor named Tim Curry, who bears a certain resemblance to Loretta Young in drag. He's the best thing in the movie, maybe because he seems to be having the most fun.

It's sharp and funny--not a children's movie, but one of those hybrids that works on different levels for different ages.

A bloody screwball comedy, a film of high spirits. It tells a complicated story with acute timing and clarity, and gives us drug-dealing lowlifes who are almost poetic in their clockwork dialogue.

The movie makes no attempt to psychoanalyze its Kit Carruthers, and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart.

The French Connection is routinely included, along with "Bullitt," "Diva" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What is not always remembered is what a good movie it is apart from the chase scene.

It's also interesting to see how little screen time the final disco competition really has, considering how large it looms in our memories.

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

Black Widow is an interesting movie struggling to escape from a fatal overload of commercial considerations.

If it is true that mankind has 100 years to live before we destroy our planet, it provides an enlightening vision of how Manhattan will look when it lives on without us. The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds.

Reilly is required to walk a tightrope; is he suffering or kidding suffering, or kidding suffering about suffering? That we're not sure adds to the appeal.

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Harmless, brainless, good-natured fun.

A friend asked: "Wouldn't you love to attend a wedding like that?" In a way, I felt I had. Yes, I began to feel absorbed in the experience. A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.

As Soderbergh lovingly peels away veil after veil of deception, the film develops into an unexpected human comedy. Not that any of the characters are laughing.

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

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

Schrader doesn't speak to the deeper and more human themes he's introduced. Too bad. But Hardcore, flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

I don't think Fat Albert is up to speed; in its meandering, low-key way, it seems destined more for a future on de-ved, returning to the video world where the characters say they feel more at home.

Her Majesty is the kind of movie where you start out smiling, and then smile more broadly, and then really smile, and then realize with a sinking heart that the filmmakers are losing it.

Essentially just a love story, and not sturdy enough to carry the burden of both radical politics and a bittersweet ending.

Superman is a pure delight, a wondrous combination of all the old-fashioned things we never really get tired of: adventure and romance, heroes and villains, earthshaking special effects, and -- you know what else? Wit.

What I admire most about the film is the way it enters the terms of this world -- of international politics, security procedures, shifting motives -- and observes the details of all-night stakeouts, shop talk, and interlocking motives and strategies.

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

An intriguing movie, ambitious and inventive, and almost worth seeing just for Anjelica Huston's obvious delight in playing a completely uncompromised villainess.

I cannot in strict accuracy recommend this film. It's such a jumble of action and motivation, ill-defined characters and action howlers.

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

Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.

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.

Keke Palmer, a young Chicago actress whose first role was as Queen Latifah's niece in "Barbershop 2," becomes an important young star with this movie. It puts her in Dakota Fanning and Thora Cross territory, and there's something about her poise and self-possession that hints she will grow up to be a considerable actress.

Isn't bad so much as jumbled...You get the sense of too much input, too many bright ideas, too many scenes that don't belong in the same movie.

Has maturity and emotional depth: There are no cheap shots, nothing is thrown in for effect, realism is placed ahead of easy dramatic payoffs, and the audience grows deeply involved.

Radio Days is so ambitious and so audacious that it almost defies description. It's a kaleidoscope of dozens of characters, settings and scenes - the most elaborate production Allen has ever made - and it's inexhaustible, spinning out one delight after another.

I have only one complaint, and it is this: Every American should be as fortunate as I have been. As Moore makes clear in his film, some 50 million Americans have no insurance and no way to get it.

The key element in any action picture, I think, is a good villain. Terminator 2 has one, along with an intriguing hero and fierce heroine, and a young boy who is played by Furlong with guts and energy.

Astin's performance is so self-effacing, so focused and low-key, that we lose sight of the underdog formula and begin to focus on this dogged kid who won't quit. And the last big scene is an emotional powerhouse, just the way it's supposed to be.

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

The movie has slick production values and a few clever lines, and is an invaluable illustration of the Principle of Evil Marksmanship. This principle, you will recall from my Glossary of Movie Terms, teaches us that in the movies the bad guys can never hit anything with a gun, and the good guys can hardly miss.

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

In an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it's so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

All heart and has the best intentions in the world, but what a bore. It's a beat slower than it should be, it makes its points laboriously, and the plot surprise would be obvious even if I hadn't seen the same device used in exactly the same way earlier this year in "Chasing Liberty."

The Eclipse is needlessly confusing. Is it a ghost story or not? Perhaps this is my problem.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

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

The damnedest film. I can't recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.

Junebug is a great film because it is a true film. It humbles other films that claim to be about family secrets and eccentricities. It understands that families are complicated and their problems are not solved during a short visit, just in time for the film to end. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.

Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.

The fundamental problem is the point of view.

It has more intelligence than heart, and is more clever than enlightening. But it is never boring, and there are moments when it reminds us of how sexy the movies used to be, back in the days when speech was an erogenous zone.

A special movie - not just a police thriller, but a movie that has researched gangs and given some thought to what it wants to say about them.

This restored 35mm print, now in art theaters around the country, may be 37 years old, but it is the best foreign film of the year.

“At the Max” is a rock concert brought to a point approaching virtual reality.

It is not a "dirty movie," and in fact takes spirituality and morality more seriously than most films do. And in the bad lieutenant, Keitel has given us one of the great screen performances in recent years.

The movie has so many other delights, though, that it's fun anyway. Maybe it wasn't exactly intended to be a love story.

The film, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, is pitched pretty firmly at that level of ambition: Broadly drawn characters, quick one-liners, squabbling family members, lots of sex.

This is a harmless and pleasant Disney comedy and one of only three family movies playing over the holidays.

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

The dialogue has an edgy wit, although it has no ambitions to be falling-down funny. Here is the Odd Couple formula applied in a specific time and place that make them feel very odd indeed.

The scenes involving the dragon are first-rate. The beast is one of the meanest, ugliest, most reprehensible creatures I've ever seen in a film, and when it breathes flames it looks like it's really breathing flames.

Stripes is an anarchic slob movie, a celebration of all that is irreverent, reckless, foolhardy, undisciplined, and occasionally scatological. It's a lot of fun.

This is not a political documentary. It is a crime story. No matter what your politics, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will make you mad.

Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.

If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.

One of the best-looking films ever made, in its photography, in its use of locations, in its recreation of the America that Woody Guthrie discovered.

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

Alexander Payne is a director whose satire is omnidirectional. He doesn't choose an easy target and march on it. He stands in the middle of his story and attacks on all directions.

Maybe there's too much talent. Every character shines with such dazzling intensity and such inexhaustible comic invention that the movie becomes tiresome, like too many clowns.

Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.

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

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

Sweet rather than exciting.

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

The story is more entertaining as it rolls along than it is when it gets to the finish line. But at least King uses his imagination right up to the end, and spares us the obligatory violent showdown that a lesser storyteller would have settled for.

I can't single out a performance. This is a superb ensemble, conveying hat joy actors feel when hey know they're good in good material. This is not a traditional feature, but it's one of Spike Lee's best films.

Real Genius contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.

If it doesn't work, it fails spectacularly, but it does work, and it succeeds in making its plot clear even though the basic story device is unending confusion.

Night Moves is one of the best psychological thrillers in a long time.

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

The movie is like a low-rent version of the rock concert documentaries that would follow.

This is a wonderful formula. I love it. The Poseidon Adventure is the kind of movie you know is going to be awful, and yet somehow you gotta see it, right?

A masterpiece.

There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally.

The Other, which is based on the novel by former actor Tom Tryon (you saw him as The Cardinal), has been criticized in some quarters because Mulligan made it too beautiful, they say, and too nostalgic. Not at all. His colors are rich and deep and dark, chocolatey browns and bloody reds; they aren’t beautiful but perverse and menacing.

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 typical Horatio Alger story, with rats playing more prominent supporting roles than they customarily did in Horatio Alger.

Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho.”

What is remarkable about "Mr. Jones" is how clearly it communicates his feelings. We begin to understand why manic-depression is sometimes described as the only mental illness its victims enjoy - on the up days, anyway.

Hickenlooper's film evokes what the Japanese call mono no aware, which refers to the impermanence of life and the bittersweet transience of things. There is a little Rodney Bingenheimer in everyone, but you know what? Most people aren't as lucky as Rodney.

Is Prisoner of Azkaban as good as the first two films? Not quite. It doesn't have that sense of joyously leaping through a clockwork plot, and it needs to explain more than it should. But the world of Harry Potter remains delightful, amusing and sophisticated.

For all of its huge budget, Independence Day is a timid movie when it comes to imagination. The aliens, when we finally see them, are a serious disappointment.

Disappointing then, that the movie introduces such an extraordinary living being and focuses mostly on those around her. All the same, it’s well done, and intriguing.

It's a shame the plot is so contrived, because parts of this movie are really pretty good.

Cocteau, a poet and surrealist, was not making a "children's film" but was adapting a classic French tale that he felt had a special message after the suffering of World War II: Anyone who has an unhappy childhood may grow up to be a Beast.

The movie is pleasant, sedate, subdued and sweet, but there is not a moment of suspense in it.

Here is a comedy of great high spirits, with an undercurrent of sadness and sweetness that makes it a lot better than the plot itself could possibly suggest.

Play Misty for Me is not the artistic equal of Psycho (1960), but in the business of collecting an audience into the palm of its hand and then squeezing hard, it is supreme. It doesn't depend on a lot of surprises to maintain the suspense. There ARE some surprises, sure, but mostly the film's terror comes from the fact that the strange woman is capable of anything.

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.

The movie is ribald, funny and sometimes sweet, and well acted by Murphy, Lawrence and a strong supporting cast.

It's corny in places, and kind of dumb, and its subplot about the romance between the boy and the girl seems plundered from some long-shelved Roddy McDowell script. But The Man from Snowy River has good qualities, too, including some great aerial photography of thundering herds of horses, and the invigorating grandeur of the Australian landscape.

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

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.

When a movie does have a lot to say – as, for example, “Nashville” did – it’s a relief when the director finds a way to say it through the characters, instead of to them. Still, “Swept Away” is an absorbing movie, it tells a story we get involved in and (despite all I’ve said) it’s often very funny.

Ruby in Paradise is a breathtaking movie about a young woman who opens the book of her life to a fresh page, and begins to write.

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

The crucial decision in The Reader is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general.

Mel Brooks is home with Young Frankenstein, his most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny).

Joe presents not so much a problem for Jayne and Laura as an opportunity. It's time to finally grow up and be true daughters and sisters. They've waited long enough. All of this, I must add, is done with a nicely screwy, sometimes stoned humor.

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

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is about as close as you can get to absolute nothing and still have a product to project on the screen.

The genius of The Krays, Peter Medak's new film about the most notorious villains of modern British crime, is that the movie is not simply a catalog of stabbings, garrotings and bloodletting. It goes deeper than into the twisted pathology of twins whose faces would light up with joy when their mom told them they looked just like proper gentlemen.

Die Hard With a Vengeance is basically a wind-up action toy, cleverly made, and delivered with high energy. It delivers just what it advertises, with a vengeance.

Ladybird, Ladybird...could have been a predictable tear-jerking docudrama, but is too honest to stack the deck.

The quality of the acting is so much better than the material deserves.

William Hurt can be so subterranean we don't know where he's tunneling. Here he seems to be one thing while becoming its opposite.

The Man in the Moon is a wonderful movie, but it is more than that, it is a victory of tone and mood. It is like a poem.

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

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

It's over the top, an exercise in action comedy that cuts loose from logic and enjoys itself.

There's a lot to like in "Dennis the Menace." But Switchblade Sam prevents me from recommending it.

Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose, one of the best biopics I've seen, tells Piaf's life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard, who looks like the singer.

This is one of the most intelligent and compelling movie musicals in a long time - and the most grown up.

Music was the ANC's most dangerous weapon, and we see footage of streets lined with tens of thousands of marchers, singing and dancing, expressing an unquenchable spirit.

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

The movie is not in any sense a musical featuring this band (which, as nearly as I could tell, does not have a name). The soundtrack has a lot of music, freely selected from pop hits old and new, but the running gag is that the band never gets to play, and so we never get to hear it.

After Hours is a brilliant film that is so original, so particular, that we are uncertain from moment to moment exactly how to respond to it. The style of the film creates, in us, the same feeling that the events in the film create in the hero. Interesting.

Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses' achieves a kind of grandeur.

Delightful from beginning to end.

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

Rarely has a film centered on a character so superficial and unconvincing, played with such unrelenting sameness. I didn't hate it so much as feel sorry for it.

There are two basic weaknesses. One is that the boy supplies the point of view, and yet the story is not about him, so instead of identifying with him, we are simply frustrated in our wish to see more than he can see. The other problem is that Gong Li's character is thoroughly unlikable.

The very soul of sophomorism. It is callow, gauche, obvious and awkward, and designed to appeal to those with similar qualities.

Nothing here about human nature. No personalities beyond those hauled in via typecasting. No lessons to learn. No joy to be experienced. Just mayhem, noise and pretty pictures.

The film is lame comedy surrounded by high-energy blues (and some pop, rock and country music).

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.

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

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.

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

The film's appeal is in the details. This is one of [Merchant-Ivory's] best films.

What is most wonderful about Man on the Moon, a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman's stubborn vision.

The documentary shows what a tight-knit group the Chicks are.

What Happened Was... is in many ways an admirable movie, and Noonan and Sillas do a quiet, thorough job of representing these two people who seem on the edge of being walled up inside their own walls. There are many small moments of perfect observation. But I never really felt they were building to anything, or heading anywhere.

[Furie) retains the ability to make a picture move, grow on us and involve us. That’s what happens during The Boys in Company C.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

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

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

This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. Mulholland Drive works directly on the emotions, like music.

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

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.

Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys.

A Shock to the System confounds our expectations and keeps us intrigued, because there's no way to know, not even in the very last moments, exactly which way the plot is going to fall.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

The thriller occupies the same territory as countless science fiction movies about deadly invasions and high-tech conspiracies, but has been made with intelligence and an appealing human dimension.

I think the screenplay, written by director Isabel Coixet, is shameless in its weepy sentiment. But there is truth here, too, and a convincing portrait of working-class lives.

What makes Roxanne so wonderful is not this fairly straightforward comedy, however, but the way the movie creates a certain ineffable spirit.

McNamara speaks concisely and forcibly, rarely searching for a word, and he is not reciting boilerplate and old sound bites; there is the uncanny sensation that he is thinking as he speaks.

Kaufman's love for the Yeager character pays off in the magical closing sequence of the film, when the "best pilot in the world" eyeballs anew Air Force jet and says, "I have a feeling this little old plane right here might be able to beat that Russian record."

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

It's one of those loving modern retreads of older genre movies.

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

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

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

A family film that shames the facile commercialism of a product like "Pokemon" and its value system based on power and greed.It is made with delicacy and beauty.

Movies like The Syrian Bride are not overtly political, but nibble around the edges, engaging our tendency to take a big political position and then undermine it with humanitarian exceptions.

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

The film is inspirational and educational - and it is also entertaining, as movies must be before they can be anything else.

A new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood.

The great achievement of Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent.

We might quarrel with the crucial decision at the end of Tully, but we have to honor it because we know it comes from a good place. So does the whole movie.

Some cases should never come to trial, because no verdict would be adequate. You are likely to be discussing this film long into the night.

All of these serious questions linger just under the surface of Mississippi Masala, which is, despite its subject, surprisingly funny and cheerful at times, and generates a full-blown romanticism.

Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours is an attempt to take a 1950s crime classic and remake it by turning up the heat, but Cimino has set the heat too high, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with dialogue even a True Detective editor would question.

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

The genius of the movie is the way is sidesteps all of the obvious cliches of the underlying story and makes itself fresh, observant, tough and genuinely moving.

There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.

An uncommonly engaging comedy with ripe tragic undertones.

Tells a story of conventional melodrama, and makes it extraordinary because of the acting.

The movie is set up as a valentine to Vardalos. She should try sending herself flowers.

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

It is 92 minutes of rage, acted by Tom Hardy.

Stephen King seems to be working his way through the reference books of human phobias, and Cat's Eye is one of his most effective films.

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.

So the movie's flawed. So it leaves us with loose ends and questions. That finally doesn't bother me, because what it does accomplish is done so well, is seen so sharply, is presented so unforgivingly, that Network will outlive a lot of tidier movies.

This is a wonderful film; the kind of exploration of doomed young sexuality that, like Elvira Madigan, makes us agree that the lovers should never grow old.

Ocean's Thirteen proceeds with insouciant dialogue, studied casualness, and a lotta stuff happening, none of which I cared much about because the movie doesn't pause to develop the characters, who are forced to make do with their movie-star personas.

Performance is a bizarre, disconnected attempt to link the inhabitants of two kinds of London underworlds: pop stars and gangsters. It isn’t altogether successful, largely because it tries too hard and doesn’t pace itself to let its effects sink in.

It goes through the motions of an action thriller, but there is a deadness at its center, a feeling that no one connected with it loved what they were doing.

The middle 100 minutes of the movie are charming and moving and surprisingly interesting.

But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.

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

Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly.

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

It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful.

"Kolya" was as emotionally authentic and original as Dark Blue World is derivative and not compelling.

The central performance in Brothers is by Connie Nielsen, who is strong, deep and true.

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

Sir Carol Reed's Oliver! is a treasure of a movie. It is very nearly universal entertainment, one of those rare films like The Wizard of Oz that appeals in many ways to all sorts of people.

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.

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

Exotica is a movie labyrinth, winding seductively into the darkest secrets of a group of people who should have no connection with one another, but do.

Watching Just My Luck, I wished I were a teenage girl, not for any perverse reason but because then I might have enjoyed it a lot more.

Basically what we have here is a drama, with comedy occasionally lifting the mood. The result is a surprising seriousness; this isn't the mindless romp with cute animals.

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

The film is so well made and acted, because it captures its period so meticulously.

There's a lot that's good in White Palace, involving the heart as well as the mind.

Gets off to a start that's so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it's going to be about gimmicks, not characters.

An intelligent, upbeat, happy movie.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang contains about the best two-hour children's movie you could hope for, with a marvelous magical auto and lots of adventure and a nutty old grandpa and a mean Baron and some funny dances and a couple of moments when you've just GOT to cover your face and peek between your fingers, it's so scary.

At the end I didn't feel engaged. I didn't feel that the hero's attention had been quite focused during his quest for the meaning of life. He didn't seem to be a searcher, but more of a bystander, shoulders thrown back, deadpan expression in place, waiting to see if life could make him care.

Like all great stories for children, The Secret Garden contains powerful truths just beneath the surface. There is always a level at which the story is telling children about more than just events; it is telling them about the nature of life.

The movie's humor works best when the illogic of the TV show gets in the way.

Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

It's interesting that two of the best thrillers of the last several months, "Tell No One" and Just Another Love Story, have come from Europe. Both movies gain because they star actors unfamiliar to us.

This is a dishonest, quease-inducing "comedy" that had me feeling uneasy and then unclean. Who in the world read this script and thought it was acceptable?

The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie). To his credit, he never seems to be having fun as he journeys through club land. Few do, for long. If you know someone like Jamie, take him to this movie, and don't let him go to the john.

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

Not a very entertaining movie; it's a long slog unless you're fascinated by the undercurrents.

Rich and droll, and yet slight--a film of modest virtues, content to be small, achieving what it intends.

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

It doesn't have the little in-jokes that make "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." fun for grown-ups. But adults who appreciate the art of animation may enjoy the look of the picture.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is an accomplished balancing act.

Because Tin Men is based on fundamental truth, it is able to be funny even in some of its quieter moments.

The strength of Kinsey is finally in the clarity it brings to its title character. It is fascinating to meet a complete original, a person of intelligence and extremes.

Kidman is superb at making Suzanne into someone who is not only stupid, vain and egomaniacal (we've seen that before) but also vulnerably human.

The filmmakers must have known they were not making a good movie, but they didn't use that as an excuse to be boring and lazy. Barb Wire has a high energy level, and a sense of deranged fun.

So good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.

A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.

While the movie contains delights and inventions without pause and has undeniable charm, while it is always wonderful to watch, while it has the Miyazaki visual wonderment, it's a disappointment, compared to his recent work.

I am not a mind-reader and cannot be sure, but I think a lot of children are going to look at this movie with perplexity and distaste. It's just not much fun.

Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

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.

Pretty thin, but you grin while you're watching it.

Simple, bold, and colorful on the surface, but very thoughtful.

To like that kind of story is to like this kind of movie.

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

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

A pointless exercise in "shocking" behavior.

It doesn't even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind -- a big, heavy lump. But in the midst of it, like a visitor from another movie, Lee Marvin desperately labors to inject some flash and sparkle. And he succeeds in bringing whole scenes to life. A good actor can do this, but it's a waste when he must.

Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.

Clockwatchers is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers.

I didn't laugh much during A Very Brady Sequel, but I did smile a lot.

Movies exist to cloak our desires in disguises we can accept, and there is an undeniable appeal to Thirst.