Roger Ebert

Preserves the flavor of the original and even improves upon it.

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige has just about everything I require in a movie about magicians, except ... the Prestige.

I have problems with Naqoyqatsi as a film, but as a music video it's rather remarkable.

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

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

This movie is sick. It pretends to be a warning against compulsive gambling, but it falls for the oldest dodge in the gambler's book: "I only gambled enough to win back my losses." Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more from an MGM movie that was shot on location at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

A movie made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not condescend, not for a second.

The footage on the Paris Island obstacle course is powerful. But Full Metal Jacket is uncertain where to go, and the movie's climax, which Kubrick obviously intends to be a mighty moral revelation, seems phoned in from earlier war pictures.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.

Filmed in the colors of newborn Technicolor, plotted as a tribute to the conventions of Hollywood romance, filled with standard songs, it's by and for people who love those kinds of movies. Others will find it cliched and predictable, but they won't understand.

Berg was the pioneer for an indie TV entrepreneur like Lucille Ball.

Sutherland's performance is the film's treasure. Watching the way he gently tries to direct his headstrong young star, we are seeing a version of Phil Jackson's Zen and the art of coaching.

That's another thing about Carion's direction: He has an eye for unusual, atmospheric touches -- the kinds of striking little things you notice in the world and think: "Somebody should put that in a movie."

After "Monster," here is another extraordinary role from an actress [Theron] who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men.

A brawny space opera, transplanting the conventions of Western, cop and martial arts films to the Red Planet.

Diner is often a very funny movie, although I laughed most freely not at the sexual pranks but at the movie's accurate ear, as it reproduced dialogue with great comic accuracy.

The movie is unpleasant to look at. It's darker than "Seven," but without sufficient purpose, and my overall memory of it is of people screaming in the shadows. To call this a comedy is a sign of optimism; to call it a comeback for Murphy is a sign of blind faith.

Towelhead presents material that cries out to be handled with quiet empathy and hammers us with it. I understand what the film is trying to do, but not why it does it with such crude melodrama. The tone is all wrong for a story of child sexuality and had me cringing in my seat.

The movie is a work of art and whimsy as much as one of science.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

I would be lying if I did not admit that this is all, in its absurd and overheated way, entertaining.

Deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans. It lingers to create atmosphere, a sense of place, a sympathy with the characters, instead of rushing into cheap thrills.

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.

The story, about an ant colony that frees itself from slavery to grasshoppers, is similar in some ways to the autumn's other big animated release, "Antz," but it's aimed at a broader audience and lacks the in-jokes.

The film is competently made, and the attractive cast emotes and screams energetically.

The film has its rewards and one performance of great passion. That would be by Ellen Burstyn, as Miss Addie, who plays it all in her sick bed in a Tennessee country mansion with a debutante party going on downstairs.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. The Secret in Their Eyes is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs.

Better than "Gladiator" -- deeper, more thoughtful, more about human motivation and less about action.

The plot exists to be disregarded, the characters are deliberately constructed of cardboard, the sight gags are idiotic, and the dialogue is dumb. Really dumb. So dumb you laugh twice, once because of how stupid it is, and the second time because you fell for it.

The charm of Bagdad Cafe is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.

It's intense and involving, and it doesn't let us go.

Then I realized the movie's point is that someone like this nerdy Harvard boy might be transformed in a fairly short time into a bloodthirsty gang fighter. The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

Cuts between a rich assortment of characters; it's like a low-rent, on-the-fly version of Robert Altman's "The Player" or "Short Cuts."

There is not a spark of chemistry between Chris and Jamie, although the plot clearly requires them to fall in love. There is so much chemistry involved with the Anna Faris character, however, that she can set off multiple chain reactions with herself, if you see what I mean.

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

Lumbers a little on its way to a preordained conclusion, but is intriguing for its glimpses of backstage life in shabby German postwar vaudeville, and for Dietrich's performance, which seems to float above the action as if she's stepping fastidiously across gutters.

Even if the ending doesn't entirely succeed, it doesn't cheat, and it comes at the end of an uncommonly absorbing movie.

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

This is the best-looking horror film since Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

This isn't a made-for-video that they decided to put into theaters, but a version intended from the first to be theatrical. That's important, because it means more detail and complexity went into the animation.

That it transcends this genre -- that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure -- is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.

The ending is a cheap shot. An inconclusive ending would have been better, and perhaps more honest. The movie and the ending have so little in common that it's as if the last scene is spliced in from a different film.

The first hour of Protocol is so much fun, and the Goldie Hawn character is such an engaging original, that at first I couldn't believe they were going to throw away all that work by going for a standard Hollywood ending. But they did.

A lighthearted and goofy musical comedy about a love affair between an extraterrestrial and a manicurist.

Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

That it works as well as it does is because the stars, Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, have an easy rapport and some good one-liners, and the film is short and manic.

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

The movie consists of the journey, the conversations, the scenery, the little human stories. No big drama. No emergencies. Just carrying the mail, which over the years has supplied the threads to bind together all of these lives.

The most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is.

Here is a director taking audacious chances, doing wild and unpredictable things with his camera and actors, just to celebrate moviemaking.

The movie is slapstick with a deft character touch here and there. It's hard to keep all the characters and plot lines alive at once, but Ruthless People does it, and at the end I felt grateful for its goofiness.

High Hopes is an alive and challenging film, one that throws our own assumptions and evasions back at us. Leigh sees his characters and their lifestyles so vividly, so mercilessly and with such a sharp satirical edge, that the movie achieves a neat trick: We start by laughing at the others, and end by feeling uncomfortable about ourselves.

Here is a movie that knows its women, listens to them, doesn't give them a pass, allows them to be real: It's a rebuke to the shallow "Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

It is not filled with quick cutting or gimmicky editing, but Jerry Schatzberg's direction is so confident that we cover the ground effortlessly. We meet the characters, we get to know the world.

Has slick production credits and performances that are quite adequate given the (narrow) opportunities of the genre.

Within Clay Pigeons is a smaller story that might have involved us more, but it's buried by overkill.

Movies like this do not grab you by the throat. You have to be receptive.

A lot of actors can hold big machineguns and stand convincingly in front of special effects and explosions. Not many can stand in front of a camera and be nine months pregnant, and actually make us care.

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

It is one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler's ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.

Science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is.

The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.

The movie is a little more lightweight than the usual People's Choice Award winner at Toronto, but why not? It was the best-liked film at the 2006 festival, and I can understand that.

Wise and subtle in the way it presents its older man. A less interesting movie would make him lustful and self-deceiving, a man who believes his is the secret of eternal youth and virility.

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

The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.

This is Mike Leigh's funniest film since "Life Is Sweet" (1991). Of course he hasn't ever made a completely funny film, and Happy-Go-Lucky has scenes that are not funny, not at all.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation.

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story.

Excruciatingly boring.

Repo Men makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care.

Claire Danes is as fresh as running water in this role, exhibiting the clarity and directness that has become her strength; her characters tend to know who they are, and why.

Like many thrillers that begin with an intriguing premise, Bad Influence is more fun in the setup than in the payoff. For at least the first hour, we are not quite sure what game Lowe is playing, and the full horror of his plan is only gradually revealed.

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

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.

The one saving grace in Halloween III is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening.

The movie operates at the level of a literate sitcom, in which the dialogue is smart and the characters are original, but the outcome and most of the stops along the way are preordained.

One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the title. Pause by the poster on the way into the theater. That will be your high point.

Hell Night is a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.

The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong.

Wan's movie is very efficient. Bacon, skilled pro that he is, provides the character the movie needs, just as he has in such radically different films as "Where the Truth Lies," "The Woodsman" and "Mystic River."

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

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

Meg Ryan does such an effective job of evoking her sexually hungry lonely girl that it might have been better to just follow that line and not distract her and the audience with the distraction of a crime plot.

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

There's a funny line or two, a fetching performance by Stacey Nelkin as a young wench, some nonsense about a buried treasure, and then Yellowbeard is soon over and soon forgotten.

The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood.

The formula is obvious, but the story, curiously, turns out to be based on fact.

As suspense thrillers go Point Blank is pretty good.

The film is beautifully well-mounted. The locations, the sets, the costumes, everything conspire to re-create the Rome of that time. It provides a counterpoint to the usual caricature of Mussolini. They say that behind every great man there stands a great woman. In Mussolini's case, his treatment of her was a rehearsal for how he would treat Italy.

It's one of those ageless movies, like "Casablanca" or "The Third Man," that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they've surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. It's a Wonderful Life falls in the second category.

Brian De Palma's Carrie is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in "Jaws."

John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is swashbuckling adventure, pure and simple, from the hand of a master. It's unabashed and thrilling and fun.

The movie is not a special effects extravaganza like "The Grinch," but in a way that's a relief. It's more about charm and silliness than about great hulking multimillion-dollar high-tech effects.

Madagascar is funny, especially at the beginning, and good-looking in a retro cartoon way, but in a world where the stakes have been raised by "Finding Nemo," "Shrek" and "The Incredibles," it's a throwback to a more conventional kind of animated entertainment. It'll be fun for the smaller kids, but there's not much crossover appeal for their parents.

The documentary is an uncommon meeting between Treadwell's loony idealism, and Herzog's bleak worldview.

The movie is effective, well-acted and convincing.

Too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars' acting styles.

It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive.

Burden of Dreams gives us an extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams.

Chalk is not the kind of movie many people will appreciate at first viewing. You have to understand who Nilsson and his actors are, and give some thought to the style, to appreciate it.

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

The movie is genuinely exciting and romantic, great to look at, and timeless.

Larry Clark's Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing.

It's a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

If Fugitive Pieces has a message, it is that life can heal us, if we allow it.

To spend 82 minutes watching Not Another Teen Movie would be a reckless waste of your time, no matter how many decades you may have to burn.

The movie is essentially a morality play, and it's not a surprise to learn that Larry Cohen, the writer, came up with the idea 20 years ago--when there were still phone booths and morality plays.

I understood the general outlines of the story, I liked the bold strokes he uses to create the characters, and I was amused by the camera work, which includes a lot of shots that are about themselves.

For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn't feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family.

Here is a perplexing and frustrating film, which works with great skill to involve our emotions, while at the same time making moral and racial assertions that are deeply troubling.

"How many bands stay together for 30 years?" asks Slash of Guns N' Roses, in a backstage interview. "You've got the Stones, the Who, U2 -- and Anvil." Yeah. And Anvil.

I might have enjoyed Desert Hearts more if it had been more subtle and observant about the two women. It might have been a better movie if it had been about discovery instead of seduction.

From beginning to end, we've been there, seen that.

Funny Farm is kind of a loony, off-center comedy version of Hill's "The World According to Garp," another movie about strange people in bizarre situations.

Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

The Secret of My Success seems trapped in some kind of time warp, as if the screenplay had been in a drawer since the 1950s and nobody bothered to update it.

But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has.

One of the strengths of this film is that it never pauses to explain.

I've seen comedies with fewer laughs than Body of Evidence, and this is a movie that isn't even trying to be funny. It's an excruciatingly incompetent entry in the Basic Instinct genre, filled with lines that only a screenwriter could love, and burdened with a plot that confuses mystery with confusion.

Until it descends into mindless routine action in the climactic scenes, Tears of the Sun is essentially an impressionistic nightmare.

What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.

The movie is so filled with action that dramatic conflict would be more than we could handle, so all of the characters are nice.

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

The movie doesn't get all soppy at the end and is surprisingly unsentimental for a Disney animated feature. It keeps its edge and its comic zest all the way through, and although it arrives relatively unheralded, it's a jewel.

My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.

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

When it's all over, you'll probably have the fondest memories of Robert Downey Jr.'s work. It's been a good year for him, this one coming after "Iron Man." He's back, big time.

Only a few sequels have been as good as the originals; the characters especially like "Aliens'' and "The Godfather, Part II.'' As for Scream 2, it's ... well, it's about as good as the original.

Stars Eastwood as an American icon once again -- this time as a cantankerous, racist, beer-chugging retired Detroit autoworker who keeps his shotgun ready to lock and load. Dirty Harry on a pension, we're thinking, until we realize that only the autoworker retired; Dirty Harry is still on the job.

Masterson, like many actors, is an assured director even in her debut; working with her brother Pete as cinematographer, she creates a spell and a tenderness and pushes exactly as far as this story should go.

Campbell's performance is carnal, verbally facile, physically uninhibited and charged with intelligence.

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

A funny movie with its heart finally in the right place, but all sorts of unacknowledged complications lurk just beneath its polished surface.

The curious case of two appealing performances surviving a bombardment of schlock.

I can't recommend the movie, except to younger viewers, but I don't dislike it. It's "Coach Carter" Lite, and it does what it does.

There is very little comic invention in the idea for Doctor Detroit (the screenplay is Identikit sitcom), but there's a lot of invention in Aykroyd's performance.

Routinely called Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's "2001" -- But Kubrick's film is outward, charting man's next step in the universe, while Tarkovsky's is inward, asking about the nature and reality of the human personality.

This is a movie about the end of youth and high romance, about death and the possibility of simple human compassion.

The movie's screenplay is contrived and not blindingly original, but Barrymore illuminates it with sunniness, and creates a lovable character

What's fun is the carefree way the animators swing through their story, using the freedom of the cartoon form to blend 19th century realism with images that seem borrowed from more recent special-effects pictures.

Too much action brings the movie to a dead standstill. Why don't directors understand that? Why don't they know that wall-to-wall action makes a movie less interesting -- less like drama, more like a repetitive video game?

Robocop is a thriller with a difference.

Grips the attention and is exciting and involving. I recommend it on that basis--and also because of the new information it contains.

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

The wedding sequence... is a virtuoso stretch of filmmaking: Coppola brings his large cast onstage so artfully that we are drawn at once into the Godfather's world.

Not as taut as it could have been, but I prefer its emotional perception to the pumped-up sports cliches I was sort of expecting.

I liked the movie without loving it. It's not great Woody Allen, like "Sweet and Lowdown" or "Bullets Over Broadway," but it's smart and sly, and the blindness is an audacious idea.

Chick Flick indeed! Guys, take your best buddy to see this movie. Tell him, "It's really cool, dude, even though there aren't any eviscerations."

Walking in, I thought I knew what to expect, but i didn't anticipate how William Friedkin would jolt me with the immediate urgency of the action. This is not an arm's-length chase picture, but a close physical duel between its two main characters.

Rear Window lovingly invests in suspense all through the film, banking it in our memory, so that when the final payoff arrives, the whole film has been the thriller equivalent of foreplay.

In most movies, we know the police bullets will never find their target. With Mesrine, (1) sometimes they do, and (2) in real life, he survived an incredible 20 years with the police firing at him at least annually.

In America is not unsentimental about its new arrivals (the movie has a warm heart and frankly wants to move us), but it is perceptive about the countless ways in which it is hard to be poor and a stranger in a new land.

Assuming that few members of SpongeBob's primary audience are reading this (or can read), all I can tell you is, the movie is likely to be more fun than you expect.

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

Sean Penn('s) performances are master classes in the art of character development.

I liked these characters precisely because they were not designed to be likable -- or, more precisely, because they were likable in spite of being exasperating, unorganized, self-destructive and impervious to good advice.

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

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

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

Iron Will is an Identikit plot, put together out of standard pieces. Even the scenery looks generic; there's none of the majesty of Disney's genuinely inspired dog movie, "White Fang."

Jennifer Aniston has at last decisively broken with her "Friends" image in an independent film of satiric fire and emotional turmoil. It will no longer be possible to consider her in the same way.

It seems to me that Campbell has a good case here--good enough, anyway, to convince the judges on the African court.

I could see how, with a rewrite and a better focus, this could have been a film of "Braveheart'' quality instead of basically just a costume swashbuckler.

The remarkable thing about Wadleigh's film is that it succeeds so completely in making us feel how it must have been to be there. [2005]

Adam wraps up their story in too tidy a package, insisting on finding the upbeat in the murky, and missing the chance to be more thoughtful about this challenging situation.

The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen.

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

The film's failure is to get from A to B. We buy both good Sam and bad Sam, but we don't see him making the transition.

There are moments of sudden truth in the film; Freundlich, who also made "The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997), about an almost heroically depressed family at Thanksgiving, can create and write characters, even if he doesn't always know where to take them.

The plot of Touch sounds like a comedy. But the experience of seeing the film is subduing; the movie plays in a muted key.

Dead Man is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.

The trouble with Funny Girl is almost everything except Barbra Streisand. She is magnificent.

The movie is funny, but it's more than funny, it's exhilarating.

A powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

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

The movie is so accurately acted, especially by Jim Metzler as Mason and Matt Dillon as Tex, that we care more about the characters than about the plot. We can see them learning and growing, and when they have a heart-to-heart talk about going all the way, we hear authentic teenagers speaking, not kids who seem to have been raised at Beverly Hills cocktail parties.

This movie has nothing to do with the song and the 1960 movie whose name it appropriates. It isn't a sequel and isn't a remake and isn't, in fact, much of anything.

If you walk out after 10 or 15 minutes, you will have seen the best parts of the film.

This is a documentary about what happens to you when you appear in "Troll 2."

The screenplay feels unfinished, the direction is ambling, but the performances are interesting.

Works because the story is sympathetic to the feelings of the characters, observes them as individuals, is not concerned with the sensational aspects of their household but in the gradual way practical matters work themselves out.

Not very much really happens in Duck Season, but in its rich details, it remembers how absorbing and endless every single day can seem when you're 14.

Everyone in The Other Side of the Bed, alas, has the depth of a character in a TV commercial: They're all surface, clothes, hair and attitude, and the men have the obligatory three-day beards.

The movie is funny and entertaining in all the usual ways, yes, but I was grateful that it tried for more: that it was actually about something, that it had an original premise, that it used satire and irony and had sly undercurrents.

Deathtrap is a wonderful windup fiction machine with a few modest ambitions: It wants to mislead us at every turn, confound all our expectations, and provide at least one moment when we levitate from our seats and come down screaming.

Warren Beatty's production of Dick Tracy approaches the material with the same fetishistic glee I felt when I was reading the strip.

You do not need to know a lot about jazz to appreciate what is going on because, in a certain sense, this movie teaches you everything about jazz that you really need to know.

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

They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of Antitrust if they'd kept one eye on the Goofy Meter.

He’s a real smoothie, Warren Beatty, and when he plays one in a movie he is almost always effective. But his title role in Bugsy is more than effective, it’s perfect for him - showing a man who not only creates a seductive vision, but falls in love with it himself.

The filmmakers rely so heavily on cliches, on stock characters in old situations, that it's as if they never really had any confidence in their performers.

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

It's very perceptive about the relationships among its characters - how they talk, how they compete, what their values are. And Howard has cast the movie with splendid veteran actors, who are able to convey all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of real people.

The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.

Robert Redford has shown that he has a real feeling for the West--he's not a movie tourist--and there is a magnificence in his treatment here that dignifies what is essentially a soap opera.

The success of Stephen Frears’ film Chéri begins with its casting. Michelle Pfeiffer, as Lea de Lonval, is still a great beauty.

How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much.

This is a movie in the true tradition of film noir -- which someone who didn't write a dictionary once described as a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.

Howard Stern has been accused of a lot of things, but he has never been accused of being dumb. With Private Parts, his surprisingly sweet new movie, he makes a canny career move: Here is radio's bad boy walking the finest of lines between enough and too much.

Steven Spielberg, a gifted filmmaker, should have reimagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.

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

An aggressively unwatchable movie.

The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances.

The film is more violent, less cute than the others, but the action is not the mindless destruction of a video game; it has purpose, shape and style.

The movie reveals its serious undertones (with commentary by the Greek chorus, which occasionally breaks into song and dance) while at the same time developing a plot that lends itself to slapstick.

Movies like this are more or less impervious to the depredations of movie critics. Either you laugh, or you don't. I laughed.

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

It's worth seeing for the acting, and it's got some good laughs in it, and New York is colorfully observed, but don't tell me this movie is about human nature, because it's not; it's about acting.

Empire of the Sun adds up to a promising idea, a carefully observed production and some interesting performances.

The people in this movie have intelligence in their eyes, but their words are defined by the requirements of formula comedy. If this had been a European film, the same plot would have been populated with adults, and the results might have been magical.

The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

The Band’s Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.

A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.

It's only the movie's tendency to repeat itself and to stop for unnecessary scenes of character development that keep it from being a classically pure - which is to say, totally devious - caper movie.

A horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments.

No one is better at this kind of performance than Nicolas Cage. He's a fearless actor. He doesn't care if you think he goes over the top. If a film calls for it, he will crawl to the top hand over hand with bleeding fingernails.

I have a feeling the loss of their child and the state of their marriage were what most interested the backers of this film. They must have wanted to make a film about Darwin the man, not Darwin the scientist.

This is a hot modern martial art. Not only do the shots look convincing, not only are they held long enough to allow us to see an entire action, but Belle in real life does a version of this stuff.

Finian's Rainbow is the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form.

It must be said that this movie is sweet and innocent, and that at a certain level it might appeal to younger kids. I doubt if its ambitions reach much beyond that.

It is not the film you think it is going to be. You walk in expecting some kind of North Beach weirdo and his wild-eyed parrot theories, and you walk out still feeling a little melancholy over the plight of Connor.

Lacks any formulas or solutions, and is content to show us its complicated characters, their tangled lives, and the way that our need to love and be loved can lead us in opposite directions.

This is one of those rare docs, like "Hoop Dreams," where life provides a better ending than the filmmakers could have hoped for. Also like "Hoop Dreams," it's not really a sports film; it's a film that uses sport as a way to see into lives, hopes and fears.

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

Good fun, especially if you like Leone's way of savoring the last morsel of every scene. (Review of Original Release)

Scorsese tells his story with the energy and pacing he's famous for, and with a wealth of little details that feel just right.

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

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

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

Seems conventional in its ideas about where it can go and what it can accomplish. You don't get the idea anyone laughed out loud while writing the screenplay. It lacks a strange light in its eyes. It is too easily satisfied.

The Night They Raided Minsky's is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick extravaganza, but it isn't. It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in "Gypsy") and it really seems to understand this most-American art form.

Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the storyline turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: "Hi! I'm the serial killer!" This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its torturous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

Not as inspired as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" but in the same spirit. It's goofy fun. Or maybe we should make that daffy fun.

It is the craftsmanship that elevates One True Thing above the level of a soaper.

Up in the Air takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.

Jules and Jim is one of those rare films that knows how fast audiences can think, and how emotions contain their own explanations

The movie's strength is not in its story but in its unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style. (Review of Original Release)

Individual moments and lines and events in I Heart Huckabees are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement.

The actors cast themselves adrift on the sinking vessel of this story and go down with the ship.

It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.

These characters and their quest began to grow on me, and by the time the movie was over I cared very much about how their lives would turn out.

The movie is mostly about our nasty heroes being attacked by terrifying antagonists in incomprehensible muddles of lightning-fast special effects. It lacks the quiet suspense of the first “Predator,” and please don't even mention the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures, which lacked the subtlety of “Mothra vs. Godzilla.”

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky concerns a love affair between two irresistible forces who have never met an immovable object before.

Tells one of those rare and entrancing stories where one thing seems to happen while another thing is really happening.

Derailed has a great setup, a good middle passage and some convincing performances. Then it runs off the tracks.

Here is a movie that makes you want to do something. Cry, or write a check, or howl with rage.

Forget the plot. The movie is really about Steve and Terri taking us on a guided tour of the crocs, snakes, deadly insects and other stars of the outback fauna. Steve's act is simplicity itself.

The movie might have had a chance if it had abandoned all the false sentiment and simply acknowledged Crawl as the cretin he is. John Belushi would have known how to play this part.

The movie evokes that long-ago world carefully and with a certain poetry; it was shot in the Dominican Republic. There is a lot of music, much of it from the period and performed by the same musicians or their successors.

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

Drew me in from the opening shots. Byler reveals his characters in a way that intrigues and even fascinates us, and he never reduces the situation to simple melodrama, which would release the tension. This is like a psychological thriller, in which the climax has to do with feelings, not actions.

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

Youngblood is not a bad movie, and indeed has moments of real conviction. But it is doomed by its plot, which is yet another example of what I like to call the Climb from Despair to Victory (CLIDVIC, rhymes with Kid Pic).

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

As a visual spectacle, it is all but overwhelming, putting to shame some of the recent historical epics from Hollywood. If it has a flaw, and it does, it is expressed succinctly by the wife of its hero: "All Mongols do is kill and steal."