Roger Ebert

This is the kind of movie where you squirm out of enjoyment, not terror, and it's probably going to be popular with younger audiences - it doesn't pound you over the head with violence. Like the spider itself, it has a certain respect for structure.

The movie is, indeed, perhaps the most believable that Herzog has made. For a director who gravitates toward the extremes of human behavior, this film involves extreme behavior, yes, but behavior forced by the circumstances.

What's surprising is how well Whitmore, the director, manages to direct traffic. He's got one crisis cooling, another problem exploding, a third dilemma gathering steam and people exchanging significant looks about secrets still not introduced. It's sort of a screwball-comedy effect, but with a heart.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Inside Job involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves.

The film had a curious effect on me. I was sometimes confused about events as they happened, but all the pieces are there, and the film creates an emotional whole. It's more effective when it's complete than during the unfolding experience.

A fog of gloom lowers over The Whole Ten Yards, as actors who know they're in a turkey try their best to prevail.

This is such a rare movie. Its characters are uncompromisingly themselves, flawed, stubborn, vulnerable.

The movie makes two mistakes: (1) It isn't very funny, and (2) it makes the crucial error of taking its story seriously and angling for a happy ending.

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

Episode III has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular. The special effects are more sophisticated than in the earlier movies, of course, but not necessarily more effective.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

To see this movie is to understand why the faces on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to the first Americans. The movie's final image is haunting.

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

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

This movie gets you coming and going.

That it works is because of the high-energy animation, some genuinely beautiful visual concepts and a story that's a little more sensuous than we expect in animation.

Causes us to leave the theater quite unreasonably happy.

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

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

Did I like the film? Yeah, kinda, but not enough to recommend. The first film arrived with freshness and an unexpected zing, but this one seems too content to follow in its footsteps.

The most valuable task of the film is to re-create the historic legal struggles that led to Brown, and to remember heroes who have been almost forgotten by history.

A bright and sometimes breathtaking retelling of the rock opera of the same name. It is, indeed, a triumph over that work; using most of the same words and music, it succeeds in being light instead of turgid, outward-looking instead of narcissistic.

Gremlins was hailed as another "E.T." It's not. It's in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it's a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Movie-going, it's a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don't go if you still believe in Santa Claus.

Princess Kaiulani is much remembered in Hawaii, much forgotten on the mainland, and the subject of this interesting but creaky biopic.

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension.

That such intelligence could be contained in a movie that is simultaneously so funny and so entertaining is some kind of a miracle.

A brave, funny, affecting film.

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

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

Quaid is instantly likable, with that goofy smile. Richardson, who almost always plays tougher roles and harder women, this time is astonishing, she's so warm and attractive.

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

There's only one character we can identify with - a San Francisco police detective played by David Caruso - and he doesn't drive the plot so much as get swept along by it.

That's what's intriguing about the film: Instead of pumping up the plot with recycled manufactured thrills, it's content to contemplate two reasonably sane adults who get themselves into an almost insoluble dilemma.

It exists somewhere between parody and melodrama, between the tragic and the goofy. There are moments when the movie doesn't seem to know where it's going, but for once that's a good thing because the uncertainty almost always ends with some kind of a delightful, weird surprise.

The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience.

I'm glad I saw the film. It challenged me.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

Forms a community that eventually envelops us.

The shots are beautifully composed, the editing paces the process of self-discovery, the dialogue is spare and heartfelt, the performances are deeply human -- especially by Efron.

It accomplishes an amazing thing. It explains the national debt, the foreign trade deficit, the decrease in personal savings, how the prime interest rate works, and the weakness of our leaders.

What makes Vice Versa so wonderful is the way Reinhold and Savage are able to convince us that each body is inhabited by the other character.

Another illustration of how absorbing a film can be when the plot doesn't stand between us and a character.

The same material, filmed in America, might seem thin and contrived; the adventures are arbitrary, the cuteness of the men grows wearing, and when Nino has an accident with a chainsaw, we can see contrivance shading off into desperation.

Singin' in the Rain is a comedy, but The Band Wagon has a note of melancholy along with its smiles, a sadness always present among Broadway veterans, who have seen more failure than success, who know the show always closes and that the backstage family breaks up and returns to the limbo of auditions and out-of-town tryouts.

Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film.

No Such Thing is inexplicable, shapeless, dull. It doesn't even rise to entertaining badness.

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.

It leads to one of those endings where you sit there wishing they'd tried a little harder to think up something better.

Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales is a strange and daring Western that brings together two of the genre's usually incompatible story lines. On the one hand, it's about a loner, a man of action and few words, who turns his back on civilization and lights out for the Indian nations. On the other hand, it's about a group of people heading West who meet along the trail and cast their destinies together. What happens next is supposed to be against the rules in Westerns, as if Jeremiah Johnson were crossed with Stagecoach: Eastwood, the loner, becomes the group's leader and father figure.

Spider-Man 3 is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.

Antwone Fisher has a confrontation with his past, and a speech to the mother who abandoned him, and a reunion with his family, that create great, heartbreaking, joyous moments.

The elaborate special effects also seem a little out of place in a Sherlock Holmes movie, although I'm willing to forgive them because they were fun.

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

What makes the film astonishing is that it follows a real boy on a real journey, and the boy is in England at this moment.

Celtic Pride is a little too lumbering to really take off as a comedy; the director, Tom De Cerchio, doesn't show a light touch. But there is the germ of an idea here, especially in the scenes where the professional star ridicules two grown men for taking a basketball game so seriously. And then there are some nice reversals in the final scenes, as Mike and Jimmy balance between their sports loyalties and their survival instincts. But I wish the movie had been a little more focused, a little quicker on its feet. [19 Apr 1996, p.31]

The movie sees World War II and the following years through the eyes of those who went away and those who stayed at home, and it tells one small true story that represents the incalculable effect of the war.

The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time. It even undermines the charm of compound interest.

All of this has a fascination, and yet Red Trousers is a jumbled and unsatisfying documentary.

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

This is exactly the sort of plot Marx or Fields could have appeared in. Dangerfield brings it something they might also have brought along: a certain pathos. Beneath his loud manner, under his studied obnoxiousness, there is a real need. He laughs that he may not cry.

The plot will require some discussion after the film is over. Is it misleading? Yes. Does it cheat? I think not. It only seems to cheat. That’s part of the effect. All’s fair in love and war, and the plots of thrillers.

There is no one in the movie to provide a reasonable reaction to anything; the adults are all demented, evil, or, in the case of Mr. Poe, stunningly lacking in perception, and the kids are plucky enough, but rather dazed by their misfortunes.

There have been a lot of movies where stars have repeated the triumphs of their parts - but has any star ever done it more triumphantly than Marlon Brando does in "The Freshman"? He is doing a reprise here of his most popular character, Don Vito Corleone of "The Godfather," and he does it with such wit, discipline and seriousness that it's not a ripoff and it's not a cheap shot, it's a brilliant comic masterstroke.

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

A first-rate, slam-bang action thriller with a lot of style and no little humor.

Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

Although Newman is a delight, the best surprise in the movie is the performance of a new actress named Lolita Davidovich, who plays Blaze Starr. She has a comfortableness in the role that is just right.

Tries hard to be a good film, but if it had relaxed a little, it might have been great.

I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.

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

Will this movie change anything, or this review make you want to see it? No, probably not. But when you come in tomorrow morning, someone will have emptied your wastebasket.

What makes the film fun is the deadpan, tongue-in-cheek humor that undermines the seemingly sincere dramatic scenes.

Interlaces interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers with new performances of many of the hit songs, and some sequences in which events of the past are re-created. The flashback sequences are not especially effective, but are probably better than more talking heads. Or maybe not.

The movie is as light and frothy as a French comedy, which is what it is, a reminder that Cedric Klapisch also directed "When the Cat's Away" (1996).

Stakeout is an example of a movie that would have been a lot better if the filmmakers had been prepared to trust the human dimensions of their characters - to follow these people where their personalities led. Instead, Badham takes out an insurance policy by adding the assembly-line violence.

The speeches reel on and on, talky and redundant, like an essay in a polemical magazine. Eventually we’ve had enough. The movie has everything it needs to be a successful satire on advertising, and more.

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

Is the film worth seeing? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it is exactly what it is, and no, for the same reason.

Not a bad movie, although it could have been better. It isn't flat-out silly like "Troy," its actors look at home as their characters, and director Antoine Fuqua curtails the use of computer effects in the battle scenes, which involve mostly real people.

Emily Blunt makes Victoria as irresistible a young woman as Dame Judi Dench made her an older one in "Mrs. Brown" (1997).

A pleasant but inconsequential comedy, awkward for the actors, and contrived from beginning to end.

The bare story itself could be simplistic and silly: Cops chasing a couple of kids on a horse. But when relationships are involved, and social realities, and a certain level of magical realism, then the story grows and deepens until it really involves us. Kids will probably love this movie, but adults will get a lot more out of it.

The screenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seen characters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as the genre requires.

The Black Windmill commits the one crime no thriller can be pardoned for. It's not thrilling. It's also terribly passive and static, and Siegel directs Caine almost to a standstill.

I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences.

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

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

John Sayles and Haskell Wexler, who has photographed this movie with great beauty and precision, have ennobled the material.

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

In too much of a hurry to be much of a people picture. And the standoff at the end edges perilously close to the ridiculous, for a movie that's tried so hard to be plausible.

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it.

Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.

Spellbinding.

One of the movie's most enjoyable in-jokes is the way some of the animals actually look a little like the humans doing their voices.

Trouble in Mind is not a comedy, but it knows that it is funny.

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

Body of Lies is a James Bond plot inserted into today's headlines. The film wants to be persuasive in its expertise about modern spycraft, terrorism, the CIA and Middle East politics. But its hero is a lone ranger who operates in three countries, single-handedly creates a fictitious terrorist organization, and survives explosions, gunfights, and brutal torture.

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

The movie makes its point early and often: That its characters are hung up on food, and eat for unhealthy and obsessive reasons. It's true. We know it's true. We wait in vain for additional insights.

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad.

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

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

If the movie is imperfect, it's not boring and is often very funny, as in a solo dance that Nick does in his apartment, to Frank Sinatra singing "I Won't Dance."

But at the center of the film is an actor whose mind and heart are far, far away, and he is like a black hole, consuming light and energy. He's running on empty. Sometimes there are even scenes where you can sense the other actors scrutinizing Phoenix in a certain way, or urging him, with their tones of voice, to an energy level he cannot match. It is all very sad.

I call the movie a thriller, even though the outcome is known, because it plays like one: We may know that the world doesn't end, but the players in this drama don't, and it is easy to identify with them.

The characters are allowed to be smart, to react in unexpected ways, and to be more concerned with doing the right thing than with doing the expedient or even the lustful thing.

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

Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.

A well-made thriller with a lot of good acting, but the death of Elisabeth Campbell is so unnecessarily graphic and gruesome that by the end I felt sort of unclean.

The Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list. Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least 20 years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.

There's some kind of pulse of sincerity beating below the glittering surface, and it may come from Mitchell's own life story.

Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess.

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

This is an amazingly ambitious movie, not so much because of the time and space it covers (a lot), but because Potter trusts us to follow her heroine through one damn thing after another.

One of those movies you like more at the time than in retrospect.

The Rainmaker, unlike most Grisham films, doesn't have to drag a high-paid superstar around and give him all the best lines. DeVito's role is in the fading tradition of the star character actor.

The third act departs from Chekhov and is original with Miller; it not only makes a nicely ironic point, but, because he takes his time with it, allows for a meditation on the distance between art and life.

Dolls isn't a film for everybody, especially the impatient, but Kitano does succeed, I think, in drawing us into his tempo and his world, and slowing us down into the sadness of his characters.

The Fourth Protocol is first-rate because it not only is a thriller, but it also pays attention to its characters and shows how their actions grow out of their personalities. Like Michael Caine's other recent British spy film, "The Whistle Blower," it is effective not simply because it's a thriller but also because for long stretches it simply is a very absorbing drama.

No actor is better than Bill Murray at doing nothing at all, and being fascinating while not doing it. Buster Keaton had the same gift for contemplating astonishing developments with absolute calm. Buster surrounded himself with slapstick, and in Broken Flowers Jim Jarmusch surrounds Murray with a parade of formidable women.

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

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

There must be humor here somewhere.

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

Brosnan redefines "hit man" in the best performance of his career, and Kinnear plays with, and against, his image as a regular kinda guy.

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

Not an easy film and is for those few moviegoers who approach a serious movie almost in the attitude of prayer.

One of the year's best films for a lot of reasons, including its ability to involve the audience almost breathlessly in a story of mounting tragedy.

It's so neat, so formula, so contrived, I was thinking about "The Graduate" instead of about characters I had spent two hours with. So, I suspect, was Nichols.

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

If it does nothing else, Another 48 HRS reminds us that Murphy is a big, genuine talent. Now it's time for him to make a good movie.

Audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces.

Most dances are for people who are falling in love. The tango is a dance for those who have survived it, and are still a little angry about having their hearts so mishandled. The Tango Lesson is a movie for people who understand that difference.

It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.

If Cameron wants to be a pioneer instead of a retro hobbyist, he should obviously use Maxivision 48, which provides a picture of such startling clarity that it appears to be 3-D in the sense that the screen seems to open a transparent window on reality. Ghosts of the Abyss would have been incomparably more powerful in the process.

Now why did I like this movie? It was just plain dumb fun, is why. It is absurd and preposterous, and proud of it.

The actors are attractive, the city is magnificent, the love scenes don't get all sweaty, and everybody finishes the summer a little wiser and with a lifetime of memories. What more could you ask?

A perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller.

The problem with Code 46 is that the movie, filled with ideas and imagination, is murky in its rules and intentions. I cannot say I understand the hows and whys of this future world, nor do I much care, since it's mostly a clever backdrop to a love affair that would easily teleport to many other genres.

The best performance in the film is by Arestrup as Cesar. You may remember him from Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (2005), where he played a seedy but confident father who psychically overshadows his son.

Brian De Palma’s Sisters was made more or less consciously as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, but it has a life of its own and it’s a neat little mystery picture.

Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.

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

It is a good story, a natural, and it grabs us. But just as there is almost no way to screw it up, so there's hardly any way to bring it above a certain level of inspiration.

This is the kind of movie where you laugh occasionally and have a silly grin most of the rest of the time.

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

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

A first draft for a movie that could have been extraordinary.

There is mostly sadness and regret at the surface in 4 Little Girls, but there is anger in the depths, as there should be.

The movie overcomes its lack or originality in the setup by making good use of its central idea, that a pair of sneakers could make a kid into an NBA star. This is a message a lot of kids have been waiting to hear.

The situations are more or less standard (fights over sleeping arrangements, emergencies that have to be solved, moments of truth and confession), but the dialogue and the acting bring the material up to another level.

Lady in White tells a classic ghost story in such an everyday way that the ghost is almost believable, and the story is actually scarier than it might have been with a more gruesome approach.

Jason X sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought. Only its title works.

Take out the gangsters, pump up the Shogun role, give Taimak and Vanity a little more screen time, and you'd have a great entertainment instead of simply a great near-miss.

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

The movie is essentially a series of conversations punctuated by brief, violent interludes. It's all style. It isn't violence or chases, but the way the actors look, move, speak and embody their characters.

Maryam is more timely now than ever.

The kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by "No Country for Old Men," and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But There Will Be Blood"is not perfect, and in its imperfections we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing.

The movie is directed with efficiency by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) who knows that pacing is indispensable to a procedural.

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

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

I enjoyed Ashes of Time Redux, up to a point. It's great-looking, and the characters all know what they would, although we do not.

The film is told almost entirely without dialogue, but is alive to sound; we spend observant, introspective hours in a Hungarian hamlet where nothing much seems to happen -- oh, except that there's a suspicious death.

Some of these stories are fascinating and some are heartbreaking, but together they seem too contrived.

The film is too confusing to be successful, but too striking and visually beautiful to be ignored.

The actors are better than the material.

A clever thriller with a lot of unbelievable scenes and a sappy ending, but two wonderful performances.

It's unnecessary in the sense that there is no good reason to go and actually see it.

It will not appeal to the impatient, but those who like long books and movies will admire the way it accumulates power and depth. It is about youthful idealism, headstrong love and fierce ambition, and is pessimistic about all of them.

There are some one-liners that zing not only with humor but truth. On the whole I was satisfied.

A good movie, fearless and true, observant and merciless. Naomi Watts was brave to make it and gifted to make it so well.

The movie surprised me. It treats its disabled characters with affection and respect, it has a plot that uses the Special Olympics instead of misusing them, and it's actually kind of sweet.

Because it is light and stylish and good-hearted, it is quite possible to enjoy, in the right frame of mind. This is more of a movie to see on video, on an empty night when you need something to hurl at the gloom.

It comes to life in the dance sequences, and then drifts away again.

Action Jackson is a movie where some of the parts are good, but none of them fit and a lot of them stink. The movie tries for so many different effects in the course of its endless 94 minutes that I walked out feeling dizzy.

This was a movie that respected its audience and respected its genuine desire to be well and intelligently entertained.

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

I see so little there: It is all remembered rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of hope, and emptiness.

Sure, Dolly Parton has wonderful energy and a great voice, and sure, Sylvester Stallone has a gift for hambone physical comedy. But this movie is so thin they both seem curiously absent.

It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story.

Consider for a moment how this movie might play if it took itself seriously. Would it be better than as a comedy? I suspect so.

The actors are gifted at establishing character with just a few well-chosen strokes (as a short story writer must also be able to do). We learn as much about each of these women in half an hour as we learn about most movie characters in two hours.

The movie itself is good and shows promise, except for the ending, when Trier shouldn't have been so poetic. Not only does Reprise generate itself, it contains its own review.

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

Any laughs that it inspires will be very hollow. It's more of a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate.

My only complaint is that its plot flatlines compared to the 1979 version, which was trickier, wittier and smarter. Romero was not above finding parallels between zombies and mall shoppers.

Every character has life and depth. It's unusual for an episodic film to involve us so well in individual lives; as the narrative circles through their stories, we're genuinely curious about what will happen next.

Barry Lyndon isn’t a great success, and it’s not a great entertainment, but it’s a great example of directorial vision.

The problem is that the film is at such pains to make its points that it doesn't trust us to find our own connections.

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

The screenplay tries to paper over too many story elements that needed a lot more thought. This movie has been filmed and released, but it has not been finished.

Desperately unfunny.

The movie lacks the wit and self-mocking irony of the Indiana Jones movies, and instead seems like a throwback to the simple-minded, clean-cut sensibility of a less complicated time. That doesn’t mean The Rocketeer is not entertaining. But adjustments are necessary to enjoy it.

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

Some of the political undertones may go astray, but the emotional center of the film is touching and honest.

This kind of casting can't help but give the movie an intimate, familiar feeling, and maybe that's why the comedy works as human comedy and not just manufactured laughs.

Essentially an interlacing of irony and gotcha! Scenes.

This is not the sort of movie you make it your business to see in a theater. But if you're ever surfing cable TV and come across it, you'll linger.

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

The movie is an assembly of clichés and obligatory scenes from dozens of other movies, all are better. It has only one original idea, and that's a bad one: The inspiration of making the hero's sidekick into, simultaneously, his buddy, his critic and his rival.

It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature–so odd, so valuable, so particular.

By the film's end, I found myself simultaneously hoping that ESU would win its big game, and that the school would pull the plug on its football program. I guess that's how I was supposed to feel.

Wickedly funny.

It may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war; The Battle of Algiers has a universal frame of reference.

Has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive.

The movie is focused on two kinds of chemistry: of the kitchen, and of the heart. The kitchen works better.

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

Disturbing, analytical and morose. This is not a "political" film nor yet another screed about the Bush administration or the war in Iraq. It is driven simply, powerfully, by the desire to understand those photographs.

Yes, this is a comedy, but it's also sad, and finally it's simply a story about trying to figure out what you love to do and then trying to figure out how to do it.

It's not often you find this voluntary dimwittedness in a movie, but "If Lucy Fell" offers a depressing example in the case of Joe MacGonaughgill (Eric Schaeffer), one of the least appealing characters ever offered for the public's entertainment.

The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is that it considers the Russian Revolution from, in some ways, the least interesting perspective.

The performance by Ross invests Jessie with a kind of zealous hope that is touching: Here is a slutty loser touched by the divine, and transformed.

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

The film has many virtues, but for me the most enchanting is simply the lust with which it depicts a bold and colorful era in history.

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

The past traps the present, fate smothers spontaneity, and all of the dialog sounds like Dialog - not what people would say, but what characters would say. The film is depressing for some of the right reasons, and all of the wrong ones.

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

Brilliant and heartbreaking, takes place in the present but is timeless.

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

I think Bloch and Rosenberg should get organized and take on the cabbage. If nothing else, a horror movie about cabbages could help Rosenberg work through his obsession and save a lot of analyst's fees.

I realized there was no hope for the movie because the plot and characters had alienated me beyond repair. If an audience is going to be entertained by a film, first they have to be able to stand it.

A long slog through perplexities and complexities.

It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.

The Devil's Backbone has been compared to "The Others," and has the same ambition and intelligence, but is more compelling and even convincing.

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

Even with its excesses, Frantic is a reminder of how absorbing a good thriller can be.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness gets off to an intriguing start. But then the movie loses its way.

Newsies is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable cliches as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero's best pal, who has a pretty sister.

The screenplay, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, has a good feel for female best-friend relationships, and the dialogue has life and edge to it.

One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings).

Why did it take me so long to see what was right there in front of my face -- that The Company is the closest that Robert Altman has come to making an autobiographical film?

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

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

I've only been to Denmark twice and have no idea if this is even remotely a Danish situation, but it could fit right fine in the Old West.

The movie, unfortunately, doesn't really work; it's one of those films where the characters always seem to be Behaving, as if ordinary life has to be jacked up into eccentricity.

The Gauntlet is classic Clint Eastwood: fast, furious, and funny. It tells a cheerfully preposterous story with great energy and a lot of style, and nobody seems more at home in this sort of action movie than Eastwood.

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

Has little islands of humor and even perfection, floating in a sea of missed marks and murky intentions.

As entertainment, the movie functions successfully. But I don't believe the story is true--not true to the facts, and not true to the morality it pretends to be about.

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

Once in a blue moon a movie escapes the shackles of its genre and does what it really wants to do. Kids in America is a movie like that. It breaks out of Hollywood jail.

Sharky’s Machine contains all of the ingredients of a tough, violent, cynical big-city cop movie, but what makes it intriguing is the way the Burt Reynolds character plays against those conventions.

So unsuccessful in so many different ways that maybe the whole project was doomed.

The movie lacks the warmth and edge of the two previous features ("Walking and Talking" and "Lovely and Amazing"). It seems to be more of an idea than a story.

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

Fascinating to watch as a portrait of political celebrity and ego.

You cannot do in real life most of the things the characters in these movies do, because of the unfortunate restrictions imposed by Newton's Laws, but what the heck: It's fun to watch.

Is it funny? Yes, it is.

The experience of watching The Doors is not always very pleasant.

The whole film has a lively Mexican-American tilt, from the Hispanic backgrounds of the young actors to the surprise appearance of none other than Ricardo Montalban, as Grandpa, in a wheelchair with helicopter capabilities.

Farewell, My Lovely is a great entertainment and a celebration of Robert Mitchum's absolute originality.

The film is smart, quick, and made with real wit. It's never just a crude action movie, bludgeoning us with violence. It's self-aware, it knows who Dirty Harry is and how we react to him, and it has fun with its intelligence. Also, of course, it bludgeons us with violence.

It knows the words but not the music; while the Farrelly brothers got away with murder, The Sweetest Thing commits suicide.

Love and Bullets is a hopelessly confused hodgepodge of chases, killings, enigmatic meetings and separations, and insufferably overacted scenes by Steiger alternating with alarmingly underacted scenes by Bronson.

A carnival geek show elevated in the direction of art. It never quite gets there, but it tries with every fiber of its craft to redeem its pulp origins, and we must give it credit for the courage of its depravity.

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

The whole movie is so well-cast and performed that we watch it unfolding without any particular awareness of "acting."

Despite its flaws, despite its gaps, despite two key scenes that are dreadfully wrong, Shoot the Moon contains a raw emotional power of the sort we rarely see in domestic dramas.

Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie.

A sad-sack movie about the misery of a married couple who fight most of the time. Watching it is like taking a long trip in a small car with the Bickersons.

Husbands has all the confidence of Cassavetes' masterpiece, Faces, but few of the other qualities of the film that preceded it. It has good intentions, I suppose, but it is an artistic disaster and only fitfully interesting on less ambitious levels.

A well-made use of familiar materials.

Vertigo, which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art.

Passes the time pleasantly and has a few good laughs.