Roger Ebert

There is a real terror in the faces of these kids as they realize that people have died, that guns kill, that your life can be ruined, or over, in an instant.

Julie & Julia is not lacking in entertainment value, especially with the Streep performance. But if the men had been portrayed as more high-spirited, it might have taken on intriguing dimensions.

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably about as good as we could have expected. It lacks the dazzling brilliance and originality of 2001 (which was an extraordinary one-of-a-kind film). But on its own terms it's a very well-made piece of work, with an interesting premise.

This is one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films, a thriller with ideas.

Quaid is just right as the guilty husband who somehow becomes the wounded party.

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

Of all the movies I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies.

He (Walken) is a gifted classical actor...and here he understands Victor Kelly from the inside out.

Doesn't have the theatrical subtext or, let it be said, the genius of Richard Pryor.

Griffin is quick, smart and funny.

I laughed at American Pie 2, yes, but this is either going to be the last "Pie" movie or they're going to have to get a new angle.

It may be that Together only wants to remember a time. That it does with gentle, observant humor. If it has a message, it is that ideas imposed on human nature may be able to shape lives for a while, but in the long run, we drift back toward more conventional choices.

The film is a display of traditional movie craftsmanship, especially at the level of the screenplay, which respects the characters and story and doesn't simply use them for dialogue breaks between action sequences.

There's something cheerfully perverse about filming a thriller and then tossing out the parts that would help it make sense, but Wim Wenders has a certain success with the method in The American Friend.

Eric Bana's performance suggests he will soon be leaving the comedy clubs of Australia and turning up as a Bond villain or a madman in a special-effects picture. He has a quality no acting school can teach and few actors can match: You cannot look away from him.

A milestone in the creation of new idea about young people.

Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.

This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

In today's political climate, this movie and its people all seem to come from a very long time ago.

The kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent.

A fascinating portrait of an almost likable rogue. You'd rather spend time with him than a lot of more upstanding citizens.

The young actors are powerful in draining roles. We care for them more than they care for themselves. Alfredson's palette is so drained of warm colors that even fresh blood is black.

They're so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs.

John Cassavetes' Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!" It would be a triumphant shout.

It's the kind of thriller where it's fun to chortle over the plot--a movie for people who are sophisticated enough to know how shameless the film is, but fun-loving enough to enjoy its excesses and manic zeal.

Funny, in that peculiar British way where jokes are told sideways, with the obvious point and then the delayed zinger.

The warmth of the actors makes it surprisingly tender, considering the premise that is blatantly absurd. If you allow yourself to think for one moment of the paradoxes, contradictions and logical difficulties involved, you will be lost. The movie supports no objective thought.

This is easily the most absurd of the "Star Trek" stories - and yet, oddly enough, it is also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms. I'm relieved that nothing like restraint or common sense stood in their way.

The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination.

Jackson has the usual big speeches assigned to all coaches in all sports movies, and delivers on them, big time. His passion makes familiar scenes feel new.

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre. If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, The Devil's Rejects may exercise a certain strange charm.

This description no doubt makes the film seem like some kind of gimmicky puzzle. What's surprising is how easy it is to follow the plot, and how the coincidences don't get in the way.

All of these films approach their subjects with such irony that we cannot take them at face value; "White" is the anti-comedy, in between the anti-tragedy and the anti-romance.

There are several Idiot Plot moments when a simple line of dialogue (''He has Tourette's syndrome'') would work wonders but is never said. And yet the movie has a sweetness and care that is touching.

This is the third animated feature in a row (after "Curious George" and "Ice Age: The Meltdown") which aims at children and has no serious ambition to be all things to all people, i.e., their parents. But for kids, it's OK.

Morris' visual style in The Thin Blue Line is unlike any conventional documentary approach. Although his interviews are shot straight on, head and shoulders, there is a way his camera has of framing his subjects so that we look at them very carefully, learning as much by what we see as by what we hear.

By the end of the movie, we have been through an emotional and a sensual wringer, in a film of great wisdom and delight.

The film is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity.

The beauty of the film is in its quietness.

Stevie seems destined to end the way it does, and is the more courageous and powerful for it. A satisfying ending would have been a lie.

A rousing adventure, a skillful marriage of special effects and computer animation, and it contains sequences of breathtaking beauty. It also gives us, in a character named the Gollum, one of the most engaging and convincing CGI creatures I've seen.

The movie as a whole looks and occasionally plays better than it is.

And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease.

Whom do they make these movies for? What exercise in self-deception inspires them to go to such effort and expense for what is obviously going to be a lame exercise in retreadmanship?

There is a bright spot. He (Poirier) used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture "See Spot Run."

It is a well-crafted movie that works, that entertains, and that pulls us through its pretty standard material with the magnetism of the Ray Sharkey performance.

The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

To Be or Not To "Be works as well as a story as any Brooks film since "Young Frankenstein," and darned if there isn't a little sentiment involved as the impresario and his wife, after years of marriage, surprise each other by actually falling in love.

Most of the running time is occupied by action sequences, chase sequences, motorcycle sequences, plow-truck sequences, helicopter sequences, fighter-plane sequences, towering android sequences and fistfights. It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.

It will appeal to the large Indian audiences in North America and to Bollywood fans in general, who will come out wondering why this movie, of all movies, was chosen as Hollywood's first foray into commercial Indian cinema.

A sad reflection of the new Hollywood, where material is sanitized and dumbed down for a hypothetical teen market that is way too sophisticated for it. It plays like a dinner theater version of the original.

This premise is well-established because of a disturbingly good performance by Daryl Sabara as Kyle, the disgusting son.

[An] extraordinary documentary, nothing at all like what I was expecting to see. Here is not a sick and drugged man forcing himself through grueling rehearsals, but a spirit embodied by music. Michael Jackson was something else.

I have a weakness for actresses like Greta Gerwig. She looks reasonable and approachable.

Eight Men Out is an oddly unfocused movie made of earth tones, sidelong glances and eliptic conversations. It tells the story of how the stars of the 1919 Chicago White Sox team took payoffs from gamblers to throw the World Series, but if you are not already familiar with that story you’re unlikely to understand it after seeing this film.

Like the listeners at the feet of a master storyteller, we find ourselves visualizing what Gregory describes, until this film is as filled with visual images as a radio play—more filled, perhaps, than a conventional feature film.

dot the i is like one of those nests of Chinese boxes within boxes. The outer box is a love story.

Here their hearts are in the right place, but the film tries to say too many things for its running time.

There is nothing I much disliked but little to really recommend. At least the movie was not nonstop slapstick, and there were a few moments of relative gravity, in which Robin Williams demonstrated once again that he's more effective on the screen when he's serious than when he's trying to be funny.

I expected another mindless surfing movie. Blue Crush is anything but.

Pitiless, bleak and despairing -- The Grey Zone refers to a world where everyone is covered with the gray ash of the dead, and it has been like that for so long they do not even notice anymore.

Louis Malle's Pretty Baby is a pleasant surprise: After all the controversy and scandal surrounding its production, it turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie.

A surprisingly entertaining movie -- one of those good-hearted comedies like "Spy Kids" where reality is put on hold while bright teenagers outsmart the best and worst the adult world has to offer. It's ideal for younger kids, and not painful for their parents.

Who is Charles Ferguson, director of this film? A one-time senior fellow of the Brookings Institute, software millionaire, originally a supporter of the war, visiting professor at MIT and Berkeley, he was trustworthy enough to inspire confidences from former top officials.

Not a great movie, but it delivers what it promises to deliver, and knows that a chase scene is supposed to be about something more than special effects.

A formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise. Johnny Hallyday was brought in by To as a last-minute sub for Alain Delon, and could have been the first choice: He is tall, weathered, grim and taciturn.

I mention all of these tiny logical quibbles because I was amused by them. I was also amused by the film. It isn't as good as the original "Under Siege," but it moves quickly, has great stunts and special effects, and is a lot of fun.

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents.

Movies like this work if they're able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.

There are countless comic possibilities in Last Resort, most of them unrealized. The movie seems to have depended on a concept rather than a screenplay. Characters are set up, and never pay off.

It's another overwrought clunker like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," all effects and stunts and CGI and prosthetics, with no room for lightness and joy.

Kate Bosworth holds it all together with a sweetness that is beyond calculation.

Sudden Impact is a Dirty Harry movie with only the good parts left in. All the slow stuff, such as character, motivation, atmosphere and plot, has been pared to exactly the minimum necessary to hold together the violence.

Duvall's screenplay does what great screenwriting is supposed to do, and surprises us with additional observations and revelations in every scene.

An expensive, exhaustive, 150-mintue odyssey that doesn’t so much conclude as cross the finish line and collapse. It has been outfitted with expensive stars and a glossy production, but it doesn’t really make us care.

An elegant story about an elegant woman, told in an elegant visual style. It moves too slowly for those with impaired attention spans, but is fascinating in its style and mannerisms.

Funny and moving, and more entertaining than some of the movies you are considering this weekend.

That the males play baseball and that sport is their work is what makes this the ultimate baseball movie; never before has a movie considered the game from the inside out.

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.

The Theory of Flying is actually fairly enjoyable. At least it doesn't drown its message in syrup and cornball sentiment.

Most important, I cared about the Jennifer Connelly character; she is not a horror heroine, but an actress playing a mother faced with horror. There is a difference, and because of that difference, Dark Water works.

More about continuing the legend of the irascible but lovable old man into the grave, if necessary.

A sweet and touching film, worth a visit.

No one would ever accuse Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt of being plausible, but it is framed so distinctively in the Hitchcock style that it plays firmly and never breaks out of the story.

There's not a song I wouldn't hear again with pleasure, or a clip that might not make me smile, but as a whole, it's not much. Like cotton candy, it's better as a concept than as an experience.

A perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just plain doesn't work. It's dead in the water. I can imagine it working well in a different time, with a different cast, in black and white instead of color--but I can't imagine it working like this.

Look, this isn't a great movie. If you're not a kid, don't go unless there's a kid you want to take. But if you are a kid, and you have ever for a moment wondered what it would be like to play major-league ball at your age, then take it from the old Little Leaguer and see this movie.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

The poems can be read. The film must stand on its own, apart from the poems, and I'm afraid it doesn't. One admires the energy and inventiveness that Holland, Thewlis and DiCaprio put into the film, but one would prefer to be admiring it from afar.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

An Officer and a Gentleman is the best movie about love that I've seen in a long time.

What the film gains at Bakshi’s hand is a very clever bag of animator’s tricks, most of which serve to make Tolkien’s characters palpable after all those years on paper.

What draws us into Private Property is how so many things happen under the surface, never commented upon.

It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.

The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing.

Aniston, as a sweet kindergarten teacher and fiancee, shows again (after "The Good Girl") that she really will have a movie career.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

It is a great story of love and hope, told tenderly and without any great striving for effect.

A no-holds-barred comedy permitting several holds I had not dreamed of. The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity.

It is a first film by a young British director who exhibits in every scene a complete mastery of the kind of characterization he is attempting. This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise.

There's a high gloss and some nice payoffs, but not quite as much humor as usual; Bond seems to be straying from his tongue-in-cheek origins into the realm of conventional techno-thrillers.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

One of the treasures of 1930s screwball comedy.

The film has always been a favorite of those who enjoy visual and dramatic flamboyance.

But the film is not as amusing as the premise, and there were long stretches when I'd had quite enough of Mrs. Doubtfire.

It is enormously ambitious -- maybe too much so, since it ranges so widely between styles and strategies that it distracts from its own flow.

The film uses a slice-of-life approach to create a docudrama of chilling horror.

Curiously enough, the movie isn't really about what happens. It's about how it feels. This is a story more interested in tone and mood than in big plot points.

It is the first directing effort by Lili Zanuck, co-producer of Driving Miss Daisy, but feels like the work of a more experienced director, especially in the way she gives full measure to the many strong supporting performances in the film.

My deepest objection to the movie is that it is so blood-soaked. When dialogue arrives to interrupt the carnage, it's like the seventh-inning stretch.

Watching Invincible was a singular experience for me, because it reminded me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing.

A complex, deeply knowledgeable story about a truly lost soul and her downward spiral.

What makes Jackson's film enthralling and frightening is the way it shows these two unhappy girls, creating an alternative world so safe and attractive they thought it was worth killing for.

Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.

Sidewalk Stories weaves a spell as powerful as it is entertaining.

3-D is a distraction and an annoyance.

Richard Curtis is good at handling large casts, establishing all the characters and keeping them alive.

Despite all its sound and fury, Legend is a movie I didn't care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can't save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishment.

Tampopo is one of those utterly original movies that seems to exist in no known category. Like the French comedies of Jacques Tati, it's a bemused meditation on human nature in which one humorous situation flows into another offhandedly, as if life were a series of smiles.

A flat and peculiar film.

Ritt directs with a steady hand, and the dialog by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Flank bears listening to. It's intelligent, and has a certain grace as well.

If Depardieu seems right at home in My Father the Hero, perhaps that is because only two years ago he made a French film called "Mon Pere, Ce Heros," with exactly the same plot. I saw it, and would say it was more or less exactly as appealing as this English version.

There are some moments in The Witches of Eastwick that stretch uncomfortably for effects - the movie's climax is overdone, for example - and yet a lot of the time this movie plays like a plausible story about implausible people. The performances sell it. And the eyebrows.

This movie is knowledgeable about the city and the people who make accommodations with it.

Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut.

Reflections is a better film than we had any right to expect. It follows the McCullers story faithfully and without compromise. The performances are superb.

The Flower of My Secret is likely to be disappointing to Almodovar's admirers, and inexplicable to anyone else.

The point is, adults can attend this movie with a fair degree of pleasure. That's not always the case with movies for kids, as no parent needs to be reminded. There may even be some moms who insist that the kids need to see this movie. You know who you are.

The screenplay by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames and Samantha Shad contains dialogue scenes so well-heard and written it's hard to believe this is a Hollywood movie, with Hollywood's tendency to have characters underline every emotion so the audience won't have to listen so carefully.

Dumb as they (allegedly) are, the characters in Small Time Crooks are smarter, edgier and more original than the dreary crowd in so many new comedies.

It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

A delightful surprise because despite all the backstage drama, this is a movie that tells stories that work -- is charming, is moving, is funny and looks professional.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

Sweet and kind of touching, and I liked it. The difference, I think, is that the new one is lower on cynicism and higher on wisdom, and might actually contain some truth about the agonies of high school insecurity.

The movie makes no attempt to really imagine what it would be like to inhabit another body; it just springs the gimmick on us and starts unreeling its sitcom plot.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

It closes a chapter in history, but scarcely brings it to life.

The film has an odd subterranean power. It doesn't strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic.

It's a feel-good film, warm and good-hearted, and as it was heading for its happy ending, I was still a little astonished how much I was enjoying it.

One of those movies where the audience knows the message before the film begins and the characters are still learning it when the film ends.

The movie is in the naughty-but-nice British tradition in which characters walk on the wild side but never seem to do anything else there.

Miss Hepburn is perhaps too simple and trusting, and Alan Arkin (as a sadistic killer) is not particularly convincing in an exaggerated performance. But there are some nice, juicy passages of terror, and after a slow start the plot does seduce you.

There won't be a person in the audience who can't guess exactly how it will turn out. Yet it goes through its paces with such skill and charm that, yes, I enjoyed it.

It's an astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic.

The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

The Madness of King George tells the story of the disintegration of a fond and foolish old man, who rules England, yet cannot find his way through the tangle of his own mind. I am not sure anyone but Nigel Hawthorne could have brought such qualities to this role.

City Heat is a movie in which people almost obviously don't have a clue.

A fresh, quirky, unusually intelligent comedy.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

It simply looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses to supply reasons and assign cures, so that we can close the case and move on.

Although we find out a lot about this virtual hermit and develop an admiration for his cantankerous principles, the movie leaves some questions unanswered.

The movie is uncommonly absorbing.

It isn't a successful movie but is sometimes a very interesting one, and there is real charm and comic agility by the two leads.

Among the better things in the movie, I count Vaughn's well-timed and smart dialogue.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

Walter Hill's "Geronimo," a film of great beauty and considerable intelligence, covers the same ground as many other movies about Indians, but in a new way.

The Forgotten is not a good movie, but at least it supplies a credible victim (Moore).

The characters deserve a better movie, but they get a pretty good one.

A preposterous plot, but it's not about a plot, it's about acting.

Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run has some very funny moments, and you'll laugh a lot, but in the last analysis it isn't a very funny movie. It isn't really a movie at all. I suspect it's a list of a lot of things Woody Allen wanted to do in a movie someday, and the sad thing is he did them all at once.

The Tenant's not merely bad -- it's an embarrassment. If it didn't have the Polanski trademark, we'd probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.

The story is sometimes overwritten, often overwrought, includes an overheard conversation on the "Nancy Drew" level, and yet holds our attention and contains surprises right until the end.

If they ever give Dolly her freedom and stop packaging her so antiseptically, she could be terrific. But Dolly and Burt and Whorehouse never get beyond the concept stage in this movie.

The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.

You watch, you are absorbed, and from scene to scene, Henry Fool seems to be adding up, but then your hand closes on air. I am left unsure of my response - of any response.

The very best thing about the movie is its dialogue. Paul Brickman, who wrote and directed, has an ear so good that he knows what to leave out.

The movie works well on its chosen level. The big action scenes are cleverly staged and Eddie Murphy is back on his game again, with a high-energy performance and crisp dialogue.

The Cutting Edge is a marriage of two durable Hollywood genres: It's an Underdog in Training sports film, crossed with that most beloved of all romantic formulas, the Incompatibles in Love. There is essentially not an original moment in the entire film, and yet it's skillfully made and well-acted.

It feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home.

The Dream Team is essentially a formula picture filled with missed opportunities. The fact that it has several passages that really work, and that the actors create characters we can care about, only underlines the bankruptcy of its imagination.

It's one of those extraordinary films, like "Hoop Dreams," that tells a story the makers could not possibly have anticipated in advance. It works like stunning, grieving fiction.

Honey doesn't have a shred of originality (except for the high-energy choreography), but there's something fundamentally reassuring about a movie that respects ancient formulas; it's like a landmark preservation program.

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie.

Stupefying dimwitted.

Avoids all sports movie cliches, even the obligatory ending where the team comes from behind.

What is perhaps most interesting about Wolfen is that the story remains plausible given its basic assumptions, of course. This is not sci-fi, fantasy or violent escapism. It's a provoking speculation on the terms by which we share this earth with other creatures.

If only one of Charles Chaplin's films could be preserved, “City Lights” (1931) would come the closest to representing all the different notes of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp--the character said, at one time, to be the most famous image on earth.

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.

A valuable, heartbreaking film about the way those resources are plugged into a system, drained of their usefulness and discarded.

Has no ragged edges or bothersome detours, and flows from surprise to delight. At the end, when just desserts are handed out, it arrives at a kind of perfection.

Projects like this bring out the best in actors, who take salary cuts to work in Chekhov (even at one remove). What we can guess, watching the film, is that the same players would make a good job of "Three Sisters" but are undermined by the faculty club, which works like a hotel lobby. There's no way to sustain dramatic momentum here.

This film is delightful in the way it finds its own way to tell its own story. There was no model to draw on, but Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who wrote and directed it, have made a great film by trusting to Pekar's artistic credo.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level.

A meandering documentary, frustrating when Moskowitz has Mossman in his sights and still delays bagging him while talking to other sources. But at the end, we forgive his procrastination (and remember, with Laurence Sterne and Tristam Shandy that procrastination can be an art if it is done delightfully).

Hilary Duff is beautiful and skilled, and I hope she finds something worthwhile to do with her talent before she truly does become the next Britney Spears and has to start worrying about the next Hilary Duff.

If the plot and screenplay are juvenile, the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting.

Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed.

Many of the parts of City Hall are so good that the whole should add up to more, but it doesn't.

A demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break.

It's pleasant and amusing. If I had seen it before I was born, I would have loved it.

A documentary with no pretense of objectivity. Here is Mike Tyson's story in his own words, and it is surprisingly persuasive.

Farewell My Concubine is a demonstration of how a great epic can function. I was generally familiar with the important moments in modern Chinese history, but this film helped me to feel and imagine what it was like to live in the country during those times.

There's a point at which its enigmatic flashes of incomprehensible action grow annoying, and a point at which we realize that there's no use paying close attention, because we won't be able to figure out the film's secrets until they're explained to us.

Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

Lost in America is being called a yuppie comedy, but it's really about the much more universal subjects of greed, hedonism and panic. What makes it so funny is how much we can identify with it.

We laugh, that we may not cry. But none of this philosophy comes close to the insane logic of "M*A*S*H," which is achieved through a peculiar marriage of cinematography, acting, directing, and writing.

It is a film of our time. It is about how even moral victories are corrupted. It will make you weep and will make you angry. It will tear your guts out.

Dante's Peak, written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Roger Donaldson, follows the disaster formula so faithfully that if you walk in while the movie is in progress, you can estimate how long the story has to run. That it is skillful is a tribute to the filmmakers.

There is a deep embedding of comedy, nostalgia, shabby sadness and visual beauty.

The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

We get the sense of a live intelligence, rushing things ahead on the screen, not worrying whether we'll understand.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

There has to come a time when inspiration gives way to habit, and I think the Pink Panther series is just about at that point. That's not to say this film isn't funny -- it has moments as good as anything Sellers and Edwards have ever done -- but that it's time for them to move on.

Mermaids is not exactly good, but it is not boring. Winona Ryder, in another of her alienated outsider roles, generates real charisma. And what the movie is saying about Cher is as elusive as it is intriguing.

The film's anti-Semitism is articulate but wrong, and the conflict between what the hero says and what he believes (or does not want to believe) is at the very center of the story.

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

Last Chance Harvey is a tremendously appealing love story surrounded by a movie not worthy of it.

It's a nine days' wonder, a geek show designed to win a weekend or two at the box office and then fade from memory.

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

All the time Phil and Claire seem like the kind of people who don't belong in a screwball comedy. That's why it's funny. They're bewildered.

The word that occurs to me in describing Kubrick's approach to Johnny and the film, is "control." That may suggest the link between this first mature feature and Kubrick's later films, so varied and brilliant.

The problem may be that the movie isn’t nearly tough enough. It needs to be more hard-boiled, more merciless in its dissection of egos, more perceptive about the cutthroat nature of show business.

One of the movie's intriguing qualities is that its horrors take place within a world that is not as cruel and painful as we know it could be.

Now this is strange. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which should have been the high point of the movie.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

Here is a film where God does not intervene and the directors do not mistake themselves for God. It makes the solutions at the ends of other pictures seem like child's play.

Sugar Hill is a dark, bloody family tragedy, told in terms so sad and poetic that it transcends its genre and becomes eloquent drama. [25 Feb 1994, p.33]

The whole movie is quiet, introspective, thoughtful.

Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.

One of those joyous films that leaps over national boundaries and celebrates universal human nature.

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

Here is a movie that will do for cheerleading what "Friday the 13th" did for summer camp.

After I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It's that good a movie.

Red Riding Trilogy is an immersive experience like "The Best of Youth," "Brideshead Revisited" or "Nicholas Nickleby."

North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.

This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids.

The story, based on an 18th century French play by Pierre Marivaux, is the sort of thing that inspired operas and Shakespeare comedies: It's all premise, no plausibility, and so what?

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

Has too much docudrama and not enough soul.

The movie is passable as a story but fascinating as a document. It gives a more complete visual picture of the borders, the Palestinian settlements and the streets of Jerusalem than we ever see on the news.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

There is a lot of plot in this movie - probably too much. The best thing to do is to accept the plot, and then disregard it, and pay attention to the scenes of passion. They really work.

Goya's Ghosts is like the sketchbook Goya might have made with a camera.

What is best about the movie are the sequences where it permits itself to establish a child's-eye point of view, in which comic books, fantasy and reality are all combined into a terrific adventure.

This remake was a bad idea that only got worse.

Evil Under The Sun is not, alas, as good as Beat the Devil, but it is the best of the recent group of Christie retreads.

If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the artifice of the rest.

A high-speed, high-tech kiddie thriller that's kinda cute but sorta relentless.

It's more of a melodrama, a film that doesn't say priests are bad but observes that priests are human and some humans are bad.

Weekend at Bernie’s makes two mistakes: It gives us a joke that isn’t very funny, and it expects the joke to carry an entire movie.

It's a comedy, but there's more in it than that; it's a movie about the ways we pursue, possess, and consume each other as sad commodities.

Lumet is exploring the clichés, not just using them. And he has a good feel for the big-city crowd that's quickly drawn to the action.

I Went Down is a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else. It takes the form of a road movie and the materials of gangster movies (do real gangsters learn how to act by watching movies?), but what happens is beside the point. It's what they say while it's happening that makes the movie so entertaining.

The Bad News Bears is, in a way, [Ritchie's] most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent.

What it doesn't have is a narrative magnet to pull us through - a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot.

To watch Samuel L. Jackson in the role is to realize again what a gifted actor he is, how skilled at finding the right way to play a character who, in other hands, might be unplayable.

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent.

Not many movies like this get made, because not many filmmakers are so bold, angry and defiant.

What's strange about Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is that it abandons most of what people liked about the first movie and replaces it with a formula as old as the hills.