Roger Ebert

But the problem is, The Deal, like a lot of real-life Wall Street deals, is a labyrinth into which the plot tends to disappear. The ideas in the film are challenging, the level of expertise is high, the performances are convincing, and it's only at the level of story construction and dramatic clarity that the film doesn't succeed.

This isn't a coming-of-age movie so much as a movie about being of an age.

El Crimen Perfecto has energy, color, spirit and lively performances, but what it does not have are very many laughs.

Uncle Buck attempts to tell a heart-warming story through a series of uncomfortable and unpleasant scenes; it's a tug-of-war between its ambitions and its methods.

Mad City might have been more fun if it had added that extra spin--if it had attacked the audience as well as the perpetrators. As it is, it's too predictable.

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

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

In the way it combines sports with human nature, it reminded me of another wonderful Indiana sports movie, "Breaking Away." It's a movie that is all heart.

The movie is both interesting and unsatisfying. The Keitel performance is over the top, inviting us to side with Furtwangler simply because his interrogator is so vile.

A sly little comic treasure.

So enigmatic, oblique and meandering that it's like coded religious texts that requires monks to decipher.

This isn’t a heartfelt amateur night, but a film by an artist whose art has become his life.

If there is anything lacking in the movie, it may be a certain gusto. The director, Stephen Frears, is so happy to make this a tragicomedy of manners that he sometimes turns away from obvious payoffs.

Redford and his writer, Richard Friedenberg, understand that most of the events in any life are accidential or arbitrary, especially the crucial ones, and we can exercise little conscious control over our destinies.

This movie has a screenplay written and filmed by people who must think nobody in the audience has ever seen a movie before.

This conclusion is too pat to be satisfying, but the film has a kind of hard, cold effect.

(1) Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been, and (2) he is an acquired taste, but please, sir, may I have some more?

The movie might have worked if it had been a satire of those awful made-for-TV Family Problem Movies.

I find movies like this alive and provoking, and I'm exhilarated to have my thinking challenged at every step of the way.

About Last Night... is a warmhearted and intelligent love story, and one of the year's best movies.

All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.

This documentary by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi could have used more music for my taste, and fewer talking heads. But it’s absorbing all the same.

This becomes Tobey Maguire's film to dominate, and I've never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.

Charlize Theron is one of the few actresses equal to the role, bringing to it beauty, steel-edged repose, and mystery.

One of those rare movies where you leave the theater having been surprised and entertained, and then start arguing.

The premise is intriguing, and for a time it seems that the Date Doctor may indeed know things about women that most men in the movies are not allowed to know, but the third act goes on autopilot just when the Doctor should be in.

What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.

There is something repulsive and manipulative about it, and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the school yard, trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.

A splendid movie not just because it tells its romantic story, and makes it visually delightful, and centers it on Depardieu, but for a better reason: The movie acts as if it believes this story. Depardieu is not a satirist - not here, anyway. He plays Cyrano on the level, for keeps.

What Mark does, better perhaps than either he or his father realizes, is to capture some aspects of a lifelong rivalry that involves love but not much contentment.

More evolved, more confident, more sure-footed in the way it marries minimal character development to seamless action.

It is not a children's film and it is not an exploitation film; it is a disturbing and stylish attempt to collect some of the nightmares that lie beneath the surface of Little Red Riding Hood.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

What's best about the movie is the sense of madness and mania running just beneath its surface.

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

This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven't had as much fun second-guessing a movie since "Mulholland Drive."

This is the kind of movie that some kids would probably enjoy - it's filled with technology, special effects and action. But it just doesn't make any sense. And It lacks the wit to have fun with its time travel paradoxes, as last year's wonderful Time After Time did. It just plows ahead. Or behind. Or somewhere.

Hartnett shows here a breezy command of his charming, likable character. It is a reminder of his talent and versatility.

It's the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.

I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as "Welcome to the Dollhouse" or as much as "Clueless," but whichever it does, it's in the same league.

James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence.

An action epic with the spirit of the Hollywood swordplay classics and the grungy ferocity of "The Road Warrior."

Whatever else it may be, Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels” is a joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process. If there is more that can be done with videotape, I do not want to be there when they do it.

If you have seen ads or trailers suggesting that horrible things pounce on people, and they make you think you want to see this movie, you will be correct. It is a competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People Movie. If you think Frank Darabont has equaled the "Shawshank" and "Green Mile" track record, you will be sadly mistaken.

The movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society.

Well of course he wins the race and gets the girl. You know that to begin with when you go to a movie named Winning that stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and is about the Indy 500.

We increasingly admire the quality of the acting: Both actors take their characters through a difficult series of changes, without ever seeming to try, or be aware of it.

Sayles handles this material with gentle delicacy, as if aware that the issues are too fraught to be approached with simple messages.

Some stretches are very funny, although the laughter is undermined by the desperation and sadness of the situations.

Movies like Eye for an Eye cheapen our character by encouraging us to indulge simplistic emotions - to react instead of analyzing. It provides a one-in-a-million situation and tries to teach us a lesson from it; thoughtful audience members will be aware they're not being treated fairly. This is filmmaking at the level of three-card monte. If you don't believe me, see "Dead Man Walking."

What I felt as I watched Scooby-Doo 2 was not the intense dislike I had for the first film, but a kind of benign indifference.

The movie is not a comedy classic. But in a genre where so many movies struggle to lift themselves from zero to one, it's about, oh, a six point five.

The movie doesn't understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it's not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.

A surprisingly effective film.

In D.J. Caruso's Two for the Money, you can see Al Pacino doing something he's done a lot lately: Having a terrific time being an actor.

Michael doesn't set up big drama or punch up big moments. It ambles.

Because their work is so varied, the director Winterbottom and Boyce, his frequent writer, are only now coming into focus as perhaps the most creative team in British film.

The Edge is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet, which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet. It's subtly funny in the way it toys with the cliches of the genre.

Songwriter is one of those movies that grows on you. It doesn't have a big point to prove, and it isn't all locked into the requirements of its plot. It's about spending some time with some country musicians who are not much crazier than most country musicians, and are probably nicer than some. It also has a lot of good music.

Here is an entire movie about looking cool while not wiping out. Call it a metaphor for life.

A funny screen version of a very funny (if not very significant) Broadway comedy. It does well as an evening's entertainment.

In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.v

The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.

Broadway Danny Rose uses all of the basic ingredients of Damon Runyon's Broadway: the pathetic acts looking for a job, the guys who get a break and forget their old friends, the agents with hearts of gold, the beautiful showgirls who fall for Woody Allen types, the dumb gangsters, big shots at the ringside tables (Howard Cosell plays himself). It all works.

This is a fairly bad movie, and yet at the same time maybe about as good as it could be. There may not be an 8-year-old alive who would not love it.

Going All the Way is a deeper, cleverer film than it first seems.

The documentary shows outrageous behavior, none more so than when they and many others are directed to a nearby Navy base for refuge.

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

A comedy, but a peculiar one. Peculiar, because it never quite addresses the self-deception which causes Christiane to support the communist regime in the first place.

Pleasant, harmless PG-13 entertainment, with a plot a little more surprising and acting a little better than I expected.

A brave film in the way it shows two people who find any relationship almost impossible, and yet find a way to make theirs work. The problems with the film come because it overstays its welcome.

Boxcar Bertha is a weirdly interesting movie and not really the sleazy exploitation film the ads promise.

My Left Foot is a great film for many reasons, but the most important is that it gives us such a complete picture of this man's life. It is not an inspirational movie, although it inspires. It is not a sympathetic movie, although it inspires sympathy. It is the story of a stubborn, difficult, blessed and gifted man who was dealt a bad hand, who played it brilliantly, and who left us some good books, some good paintings and the example of his courage.

If you require that you "like" a movie, then Rick is not for you, because there is nothing likable about it. It's rotten to the core and right down to the end. But if you find that such extremes can be fascinating, then the movie may cheer you, not because it is happy, but because it goes for broke.

There is a lot of nudity in the film but no pornographic documentary quality; the camera does not linger, or move for the best view, or relish the spectacle of nudity. The result is some of the most poignant, almost sad, sex scenes I have ever seen - sensuous, yes, but bittersweet.

The point is not really what is said, but the tone of voice, the word choices, the conversational strategies, the sense of life going on all the time, everywhere, all over town.

This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope.

De Palma's Untouchables, like the TV series that inspired it, depends more on cliches than on artistic invention.

I'm not sure the movie should have pumped up the melodrama to get us more interested, but something might have helped.

Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure.

During the course of Failure to Launch, characters are bitten by a chipmunk, a dolphin, a lizard and a mockingbird. I am thinking my hardest why this is considered funny, and I confess defeat.

Starting Over actually feels sort of embarrassed at times, maybe because characters are placed in silly sitcom situations and then forced to say lines that are supposed to be revealing and real. When the gags do work, and occasionally they do, it's more a matter of acute social observation than good writing.

The movie is lightweight, as it should be.

Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!

There's not much wrong with Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, except that there's not much really right about it.

An unreasonably entertaining movie, causing you perhaps to revise your notions about women's Roller Derby, assuming you have any.

The director, Jared Hess, who made "Napoleon Dynamite," a film I admit I didn't get, has made a film I don't even begin to get.

This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think.

Just babies. Wonderful.

This material is intriguing enough that I wish there had been more of it. Comedy consists of the application of logic to the absurd, and there are many more opportunities here than the screenplay takes advantage of.

Mired in a plot of such stupidity.

Connery labors mightily. There is still the same Bond grin, still the cool humor under fire, still the slight element of satire. But when he puts on his cute little helmet and is strapped into his helicopter, somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we're left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.

The movie doesn't crank up the volume with violence and jailhouse cliches, but focuses on this person and his possibilities for change.

Will no doubt be a hit and inspire the obligatory sequels.

Crush is an Aga romance crossed with modern retro-feminist soft porn, in which liberated women discuss lust as if it were a topic and not a fact.

I am not British, was born 14 years before the subjects, and yet by now identify intensely with them, because some kinds of human experience -- teenage, work, marriage, illness are universal. You could make this series in any society.

A Bronx Tale is a very funny movie sometimes, and very touching at other times. It is filled with life and colorful characters and great lines of dialogue, and De Niro, in his debut as a director, finds the right notes as he moves from laughter to anger to tears. What's important about the film is that it's about values.

There is a kind of music to their conversations, now a lullaby, now a march, now a requiem, now hip-hop, and they play with one another like members of an orchestra. The movie's so good to listen to, it would even work as an audio book.

BAT*21 was shot on location in Malaysia, however, and it looks authentic and gets us involved through the energy of its performances.

Like most British family films, Water Horse doesn't dumb down its young characters or insult the intelligence of the audience. It has a lot of sly humor about what we know, or have heard, about the Loch Ness monster.

Tells the kind of story that would feel right at home in a silent film, and I suppose I mean that as a compliment.

Those hoping to see a "vampire movie" will be surprised by a good film.

A surprisingly effective film, touching and knowing and, like Deneuve, ageless.

A certain genre of thriller depends more upon style and tone than upon plot; it doesn't matter if you believe it walking out, as long as you were intrigued while it was happening.

As for Coppola and his world, it's difficult to say whether his film is successful or not. That's the beautiful thing about a lot of the new, experimental American directors, they'd rather do interesting things and make provocative observations than try to outflank John Ford on his way to the Great American Movie.

It's poignant to watch the chicks in their youth, fed by their parents, playing with their chums, the sun climbing higher every day, little suspecting what they're in for.

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

There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

The Legend of Zorro commits a lot of movie sins, but one is mortal: It turns the magnificent Elena into a nag.

Everything about the film -- its casting, its filming, its release -- is daring and innovative.

It brings the fantastic into our everyday lives; it delights in showing us the reaction of the man on the street to Superman's latest stunt.

The movie was directed by Perkins, in his filmmaking debut. I was surprised by what a good job he does. Any movie named Psycho III is going to be compared to the Hitchcock original, but Perkins isn't an imitator. He has his own agenda.

The Queen is a spellbinding story of opposed passions -- of Elizabeth's icy resolve to keep the royal family separate and aloof from the death of the divorced Diana, who was legally no longer a royal, and of Blair's correct reading of the public mood.

Murder on the Orient Express is a splendidly entertaining movie of the sort that isn’t made anymore: It’s a classical whodunit, with all the clues planted and all of them visible, and it’s peopled with a large and expensive collection of stars.

Through superhuman effort of the will, I did not walk out of The Hot Chick, but reader, I confess I could not sit through the credits.

The investigation itself must remain undescribed here. But its ending is a neat and ironic exercise in poetic justice.

It involves teenagers who have never existed, doing things no teenager has ever done, for reasons no teenager would understand. Of course, it's aimed at the teenage market.

Maybe I've lost touch with silly, brainless entertainments like this. Let's hope so: One of the purposes of growing up and getting an education is to learn why movies like Spaced Invaders are a waste of time. And yet, a small, far-away voice inside of me says there once was a time when I would have liked this movie, when I was young and open to wonderments.

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

Guggenheim, contends the American educational system is failing, which we have been told before. He dramatizes this failure in a painfully direct way, says what is wrong, says what is right.

The movie resembles Mad magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" series, elevated to labyrinthine levels of complexity.

On the basis of Gigantic, Matt Aselton can make a fine and original film. This isn't quite it, but it has moments so good, all you wish for is a second draft.

Chronicles doesn't pause for much character development, and is in such a hurry that even the fight scenes are abbreviated chop-chop sessions.

Clive Owen can be a likable actor, but the character is working against him...And please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.

Thieves doesn't have the Hollywood kind of ending, where everything is sorted out by who gets shot. It is about the people, not their plot. It is about how the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and the grandsons.

Under the cover of slapstick, cheap laughs, raunchy humor, gross-out physical comedy and sheer exploitation, Get Him to the Greek also is fundamentally a sound movie.

Not a war film so much as the story of a personality who has found the right role to play. Scott's theatricality is electrifying.

Walkabout is a superb work of storytelling and its material is effortlessly fascinating.

Comforting, even soothing, to those who like the old songs best. It may confuse those who, because they like the characters, think it is good. It is not good. It is skillful.

If Wayne and Garth ever grow confident of their success, the series will be over. Everything depends on the delighted disbelief with which they greet every new victory.

A glorious romantic fantasy, aflame with passion and bittersweet longing.

There comes a time in some movies when sheer spectacle overwhelms any consideration of plot, and Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction is a movie like that. It has a plot so unlikely and confused that we can't believe it for much more than 15 seconds at a time, but its action sequences are so absorbing and its mountaintop photography so compelling that we don't care.

It takes a lot of patience to watch The Russia House, but it takes even more patience to be a character in the movie. To judge by this film, the life of a Cold War spy consists of sitting for endless hours in soundproof rooms with people you do not particularly like, waiting for something to happen. Sort of like being a movie critic.

Sports movies have a purity of form. They always end with the big game, in triumph or heartbreak. So does The Heart of the Game, although the lawsuit still hangs over the team after the final free throw.

A movie that is not only ingenious and entertaining, but liberating, because we can sense the story isn't going to be twisted into conformity with some stupid formula.

The film is pitch-perfect in its decor, music, clothes, cars, language and values. It takes place during those heady years between the introduction of the Pill and the specter of AIDS, when men shaped as adolescents by Playboy in the 1950s now found some of their fantasies within reach.

The movie is as intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year.

Most audiences will find it baffling and unsatisfactory. Those who are open to its flywheel peculiarities may find it bold, funny, peculiar and delightful.

This movie, for all its noble intentions, is a bore.

Ruffalo plays the character with that elusive charm he also revealed in "You Can Count on Me."

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

At the end of The Man Without a Past, I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I'd seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.

Wild Orchid is an erotic film, plain and simple. It cannot be read any other way. There is no other purpose for its existence. Its story is absurd, and even its locale was chosen primarily for its travelogue value...What is relevant is that I did not find the movie erotic.

The movie is forgiving. But the search for happiness is doomed by definition: You must be happy with what you have, not with what you desire, because the cost of the quest is too high.

A lightweight rom-com elevated by its performances. It is a reminder that the funniest people are often not comedians, but actors playing straight in funny roles.

Whatever he did, Cagney came across as one of the most dynamic performers in movie history--a short man with ordinary looks whose coiled tension made him the focus of every scene.

There are good lines of Wayne dialog and good exchanges with Ben Johnson (as the cook) and some scenes in which you can see that even Wayne thinks Gabriel looks ridiculous as an Indian. And these scenes help pass the time and help you forget how wooden and uninteresting Hudson is. Which is pretty wooden and uninteresting indeed.

Wicked and cheeky.

I would have loved to see a genuine love story involving Ice Cube, Nia Long, and the challenge of a lifelong bachelor dating a woman with children. Sad that a story like that couldn't get made, but this shrill "comedy" could.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

Penn and Nicholson take risks with the material and elevate the movie to another, unanticipated, haunting level.

Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful.

The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.

Stylish, intriguing, and very violent.

Breakdown is a fine thriller, and its ending is unworthy of it.

If you want to see a great movie about a couple of kids endangered by a sinister guardian, rent "Night of the Hunter." Watching The Glass House has all the elements for a better film, but doesn't trust the audience to keep up with them.

This is a movie of substance and thrilling historical sweep, and its three hours allow Szabo to show the family's destiny forming and shifting under pressure.

Think of how we read the thoughts of those closest to us, in moments when words will not do. We look at their faces, and although they do not make any effort to mirror emotions there, we can read them all the same, in the smallest signs. A movie that invites us to do the same thing can be very absorbing.

What we remember with Red River is not, however, the silly ending, but the setup and the majestic central portions. The tragic rivalry is so well established that somehow it keeps its weight and dignity in our memories, even though the ending undercuts it.

Surprisingly sweet and gentle comedy.

A package like this looks OK on paper, but goes nowhere. It turns all of the characters into chess pieces, whose relationships depend on the plot, not on human chemistry. Since the plot is absurdly illogical, you’re not left with much.

You remember Captain Video. He was a science fiction hero on the old DuPont TV network. He and his trusty sidekick (Bucky? Rocky?) were forever landing on strange planets and sneaking around rocks. After three weeks, you realized that the rocks were always the same. Same here.

A series of well-drawn sketches and powerful scenes, in search of an organizing principle.

So strong, so shocking and yet so audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know quite what to make of it.

It's enchanting and delightful in its own way, and has a good heart. It is the best animated film of recent years, the latest work by Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese master who is a god to the Disney animators.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

One of the qualities I like about this film is that the writer-directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, are aware of the time when Beat scene was new.

If you have seen the masterful 2002 Brazilian film "City of God" or the 1981 film "Pixote," both about the culture of Rio's street people, then Bus 174 plays like a sad and angry real-life sequel.

To the degree that I was able to put aside my questions, forget logic, disregard continuity problems and immerse myself in the moment, The Matrix Revolutions is a terrific action achievement. Andy and Larry Wachowski have concluded their trilogy with all barrels blazing.

I liked the smaller-scale scenes the best, the ones where Hines and Crystal were doing their stuff.

tT never grow up is unspeakably sad, and this is the first Peter Pan where Peter's final flight seems not like a victory but an escape.

The most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema--an "Othello'' for our times.

All of these criticisms exist entirely apart from the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. It is a tribute to them, and to the core of honesty in the screenplay, that Ratso and Joe Buck emerge so unforgettably drawn. But the movie itself doesn't hold up.

All that could redeem this thoroughly foreseeable unfolding would be colorful characters and good acting. Everybody's Fine comes close, but not close enough.

Green takes us to that place where we keep feelings that we treasure, but are a little afraid of.

A documentary about a town of 33,000 so consumed by football it makes South Bend and Green Bay look distracted.

The Boston Strangler requires a judgment not only on the quality of the film (very good), but also on its moral and ethical implications.

Watching Doom is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.

There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

The film takes the form but not the feel of a comic thriller. It's quirkier than that.

It has some of the simplicity and starkness of classical tragedy, but what made me impatient was its fascination with the macho bloodlust of the two families.

Crooklyn is not in any way an angry film. But thinking about the difference between its world and ours can make you angry, and I think that was one of Lee's purposes here.

The performances are all insidiously powerful.

Reviewing The Naked Gun... is like reporting on a monologue by Rodney Dangerfield - you can get the words but not the music.

The movie itself is sort of bland and obvious and comfortable.

[It's] like Tarantino crossed with the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been into chopping off fingers...Fun, in a slapdash way; it has an exuberance, and in a time when movies follow formulas like zombies, it's alive.

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

The Punisher is so grim and cheerless, you wonder if even its hero gets any satisfaction from his accomplishments.

The film is well-acted, with restraint, by Hoss and Sidikhin. The writer and director, Max Faerberboeck, employs a level gaze and avoids for the most part artificial sentimentality. The physical production is convincing.

Waters follows these characters through their 15 minutes of fame without ever churning up very much interest in them.

Unfortunately, the parts of the movie that are truly good are buried beneath the deadening layers of thriller cliches and an unconvincing love story.

The movie is a record by well-meaning people who try to make a difference for the better, and succeed to a small degree while all around them the horror continues unaffected.

Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a perfectly typical example of its type, professionally made and competently acted.

I admired the scenes with De Niro so much I'm tempted to give Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a favorable verdict. But it's a near miss. The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn't pause to be sure its effects are registered.

A bleak comedy, funny in a "Catch-22" sort of way, and at the same time an angry outcry against the gun traffic.

Kaprisky, as the young French student, is an unknown in a role too large and complex for her, and there are times when she seems lost in a scene, looking to Gere for guidance. The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with - and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.

Because the film marches so inexorably toward its conclusion, it would be unfair to hint at what happens, except to say that it provides a heartbreaking insight into the way that fear creates cowards.

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

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

The movie makes no attempt to soften the material or make it comforting through the cliches of melodrama.

To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.

There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander.

This film has few tangible pleasures, such as some somber shots of Demester walking far away in a field. Its achievement is theoretical. It wants to depict lives that are without curiosity, introspection and hope.

What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen. Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control.

It's so clever that finally that's all it is: clever.

A gentle story that involves a great deal of violence, but mostly the violence is muted and dreamy, like a confrontation with a fearsome scarecrow that looks horrifying but is obviously not real --- or real enough, but not alive.

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

Despite its flaws, Pieces of April has a lot of joy and quirkiness; it's well-intentioned in its screwy way, with flashes of human insight, and actors who can take a moment and make it glow.

Gomorrah looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims. That is its power.

Has just a little too much of the whodunit and the thriller and not enough of the temper of its clash between cultures, but it works, maybe because the simplicity of the underlying plot is masked by the oddness of the characters.

The Prince & Me has the materials to be a heartwarming mass-market love story, but it doesn't assemble them convincingly.

Recycles a plot that was already old when Tracy and Hepburn were trying it out. You see it coming from a great distance away. As it draws closer, you don't duck out of the way, because it is so cheerfully done, you don't mind being hit by it.

Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity.

These fears explain why in its scenes on the Eiger itself, North Face starts strongly and ends as unbearably riveting. They also explain why it was a strategic error to believe this story needed romantic and political subplots.

Some movies seem born to inspire video games. All they lack is controllers and a scoring system. How to Train Your Dragon plays more like a game born to inspire a movie.

It is also a rarity, a patriotic film that has a liberal, rather than a conservative, heart. It made me feel good to be an American, and good that Vladimir Ivanoff was going to be one, too.

A Hollywood-style romance between beautiful people, and an honest story about recognizable human beings.

This material is wearing out its welcome. I have mastered all of the lessons The Karate Kid movies have to teach and all of the surprises they have to spring. I am also intimately familiar with the plot formula, so that nothing in this third film comes as the faintest surprise. Perhaps it is time, as Mr. Miyagi might say, to study something else.

It's a kid movie, plain and simple. It didn't do much for me, but I am prepared to predict that its target audience will have a good time. I'm giving it two stars. If I were 8, I might give it more.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

Suffers from a fatal misapprehension. It thinks it is about date rape, when actually it is about alcoholism.

There is a cool, mannered elegance to the picture that I like, but it's dead at its center.

The Wizard of Oz has a wonderful surface of comedy and music, special effects and excitement, but we still watch it six decades later because its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them and then reassures them.

More reverie and meditation than reportage.

The message behind all of this is difficult to nail down. Mars and Venus? Adults who haven't grown up? The last fling syndrome? Doing what you want instead of doing what you must?

What we get in Analyze That are several talented actors delivering their familiar screen personas in the service of an idiotic plot.

What saves this movie, which won this year's audience award at Sundance, from being boring are performances by two actors who see a chance to go over the top and aren't worried about the fall on the other side.

It wants to make Stuart Sutcliffe the focus of the film, and it’s never able to convince us there’s a story there.

America the Beautiful carries a persuasive message, and is all the more effective because of the level tone that Roberts adopts.

Matilda doesn't condescend to children, it doesn’t sentimentalize, and as a result it feels heartfelt and sincere. It's funny, too.

Besson has a natural gift for plunging into drama with a charged-up visual style.

The movie's heart is in the right place.

The movie has nowhere much to go and nothing much to prove, except that Stephen King is correct and if you can devise the right characters and the right situation, the plot will take care of itself -- or not, as the case may be.

Tokyo Story moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's precise, uncanny performance as Capote doesn't imitate the author so much as channel him, as a man whose peculiarities mask great intelligence and deep wounds.

This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.

An endlessly fascinating movie.

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

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

A very funny, sometimes very sad documentary.

It is great for an hour, good for about 25 minutes and then heads doggedly for the Standard 1980s High Tech Hollywood Ending, which means an expensive chase scene and a shootout.

But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn't the film's flaw, but its style.

A passionate and explicit film about sexual obsession.

I felt too much of the movie consisted of groups of characters I didn't care about, running down passageways and fighting off enemies and trying to get back to the present before the window of time slams shut.

There are moments in All or Nothing of such acute observation that we nod in understanding -- The closing scenes of the movie are just about perfect.

The beauty of the Wolfe book was the way it saw through its time and place, dissecting motives and reading minds. The movie sees much, but it doesn't see through.

The film is filled with spot-on performances, by Harris, Glenn, Phoenix, and by Paquin, who has grown up after her debut in "The Piano" to become one of the most gifted actresses of her generation--particularly in tricky, emotion-straddling roles like this one.

The material never really takes hold. It seems awkward. It lacks fire and passion. Watching it was like having a pale memory of a vivid experience.

It is not a film for most people. It is certainly for adults only. But it shows Todd Solondz as a filmmaker who deserves attention, who hears the unhappiness in the air and seeks its sources.

Like "The Godfather," it shows him (Makovski) as a crook with certain standards, surrounded by rats with none.

It is not a compelling documentary (too much exposition, not enough on-the-spot reality), but it is instructive and disturbing.

I admired Intacto more than I liked it, for its ingenious construction and the way it keeps a certain chilly distance between its story and the dangers of popular entertainment.

Kurosawa was a great artist and so even his lesser work is interesting -- just as we would love to find one last lost play, however minor, by his hero Shakespeare.

This isn’t a breakthrough movie, but for what it is, it’s charming, and not any more innocuous than it has to be.

The visual style is all Zeffirelli, and it is interesting that the opera-within-the-film is not skimped on, as is usually the case in films containing scenes from other productions.

Gardens of Stone is content to be a slice of life, a story that says some of our best young people went to Vietnam and died there, and those who knew them missed them. We knew that already. Perhaps there is nothing else to be said, but this movie seems to give promise of seeing more deeply, and then it doesn't. Every moment is right, and yet the film as a whole is incomplete.

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.

You can freeze almost any frame of this film and be looking at a striking still photograph. Nothing is done casually.

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

Too bad the movie relies on special effects to carry the show, and doesn't bring much else to the party.

Max is played by Jean Gabin, named "the actor of the century" in a French poll, in Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a 1954 French crime film that uncannily points the way toward Jean-Pierre Melville's great "Bob Le Flambeur" the following year.

I didn't much like the first film, and I don't much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks.

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

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

It is happy to be goofy.

A cheerful, life-affirming film, strong in its energy, about vivid characters. It uses mental illness as an entertainment, not a disease.

Here's a movie with a plot spun out of thin air. That doesn't matter, though, because the movie is acted and directed with such style that we have fun slogging through the silliness. And part of the fun comes from watching Tom Selleck, the hero of Magnum, P.I., in a movie that does him justice.

The strangest thing about Birdy which is a very strange and beautiful movie indeed, is that it seems to work best at its looniest level, and is least at ease with the things it takes most seriously.