Roger Ebert

Luke Ford's performance as Charlie is a convincing tour de force. You may recall him as Brendan Fraser's heroic son in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." Rhys Wakefield, in his first feature role, is a good casting decision, suggesting inner turmoil without overacting.

A sweet, innocent family movie about stray dogs that seem as well-trained as Olympic champions. Friday, the Jack Russell terrier who's the leader of the pack, does more acting than most of the humans, and doesn't even get billing.

The movie is the latest horror show from Stuart Gordon, whose Re-Animator was one of the great trash pictures of 1985. From Beyond doesn't quite measure up - it's not trashy enough and it doesn't have the insane tunnel vision of the first movie - but in its own way, this is quite a job.

Walter Hill's Streets of Fire begins by telling us it's a rock & roll fable ... from another time, another place. The movie is right on the rock & roll, but the alternative time and place are mysteriously convincing -- especially if, like me, you believe the most beautiful post-war American cars were Studebakers.

Some women are simply sexy forever. Helen Mirren is a woman like that. She's 64. As she enters her 70s, we'll begin to develop a fondness for sexy septuagenarians.

We can enjoy the suspense of the opening scenes, and some of the drama. The performances are in keeping with the material. But toward the end, when we realize that the entire reality of the film is problematical, there is a certain impatience. It's as if our chain is being yanked.

The whole movie has a winning sadness about it; take away the story's sensational aspects and what you have is a study in loneliness.

Clever, done with skill, yet lacking in the cerebral imagination of the best science fiction.

Sayles' film moves among a large population of characters with grace, humor and a forgiving irony.

The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules.

A delicious pastry of a movie -- You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile.

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk.

It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction'' and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.

It's a showcase leading role for Parker Posey, who obviously has the stuff, and generates wacky charm. But the movie never pulls itself together.

Director Gillian Armstrong finds the serious themes and refuses to simplify the story into a "family" formula. "

Hollow Man can think of nothing more interesting to do than spy on his girlfriend and assault his neighbor.Too bad. Really too bad, because the movie is supported by some of the most intriguing special effects I've seen.

A lot of rock stars and other showbiz heroes have the notion that because they’re successful in other areas, they can direct a movie, too. Usually they’re wrong. But Mellencamp turns out to have a real filmmaking gift.

The kind of movie beloved by people who never go to the movies, because they are primarily interested in something else--the Civil War, for example--and think historical accuracy is a virtue instead of an attribute.

Jacques Perrin's Oscar-nominated Winged Migration does for birds what the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos" did for insects: It looks at them intimately, very close up, in shots that seem impossible to explain.

The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.

Mike Hodges' gritty new film noir I'll Sleep When I'm Dead begins in enigma and snakes its way into stark clarity.

The movie has been both attacked and defended on feminist grounds, but I think it belongs somewhere outside ideology, maybe in the area of contemporary myth and romance.

I laughed often enough during the screening of Harold & Kumar that afterward I told Dann Gire, distinguished president of the Chicago Film Critics' Assn., that I thought maybe I should rent "Dude, Where's My Car?" and check it out.

A well-made movie. I cared about the characters. I felt for them. Liberate them from the plot's destiny, which is an anvil around their necks, and you might have something.

I enjoyed a lot of A Star Is Born. I thought Miss Streisand was distractingly miscast in the role, and yet I forgave her everything when she sang.

The mechanics of the final showdown are unexpected and yet show an undeniable logic, and are sold by the acting skills of Willis and Pollak.

A silly, high-spirited chase picture that takes us, as they say, from the canyons of Manhattan to the steaming jungles of South America. After all the Raiders rip-offs, it's fun to find an adventure film that deserves the comparison, that has the same spirit and sense of humor.

Bright and zesty.

Not at the level of "Finding Nemo" or "Shrek," but is a lot of fun, awfully nice to look at, and filled with energy and smiles.

After months and months of comedies that did not make me laugh, here at last is one that did.

It alternates between graphic, explicit sex scenes and murder scenes of brutal cruelty. You recoil from what's on the screen.

[Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key.

It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of The Last Emperor the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy.

Scanners is a new horror film made with enough craft and skill that it could have been very good, if it could find a way to make us care about it.

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world's leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

Moore and Bening are superb actors here, evoking a marriage of more than 20 years, and all of its shadings and secrets, idealism and compromise.

The plot risks bursting under the strain of its coincidences, as Sara and Jon fly to opposite coasts at the same time and engage in a series of Idiot Plot moves so extreme and wrongheaded that even other characters in the same scene should start shouting helpful suggestions.

The gift of Christopher Reeve, in his best scenes and when the filmmakers allow it, is to play Superman without laughing, to take him seriously so that we can have some innocent escapist fun. Helen Slater has the same gift, but is given even less chance to exercise it in Supergirl, and the result is an unhappy, unfunny, unexciting movie.

In trash as in art there is no accounting for taste, and reader, I cherished this movie in all of its lurid glory.

What we sense in the film is the camaraderie among these hopeful dancers. They've all been through the process before, all been disappointed before, all know better than anyone else what it takes, all believe the best candidates don't always win the jobs.

Assembles the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.

These animals aren't catering to anyone in the audience. We get the feeling they're intensely leading their own lives without slowing down for ours.

The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.

One of the problems with Mel Brooks's High Anxiety is that it picks a tricky target: It's a spoof of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves. And satire works best when its target is self-important.

What is finally clear: It doesn't matter a damn what your will says if you have $25 billion, and politicians and the establishment want it.

The Muppets are a wonderful creation, but they lose their special quality in "The Great Muppet Caper." They behave like clones of other popular kiddie superstars -- like the basic cartoon heroes they once seemed destined to replace.

Well written. The dialogue is smart and fresh.

The Grandma is not merely wrong for the movie, but fatal to it -- a writing and casting disaster... I've been reviewing movies for a long time, and I can't think of one that more dramatically shoots itself in the foot.

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

Watching MirrorMask, I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.

The film's title is appropriate. A desperate Catholicism flavors the doomed city.

The real subject of the film is Douglas Bruce sitting on two years of memories and told there is a 95 percent chance that another 30 years may return to him. A lot of people don't want to know when they're going to die. Maybe they wouldn't want to be reborn, either.

Here, as the little cinder girl, she is able to at last put aside her bedraggled losers and flower as a fresh young beauty, and she brings poignancy and fire to the role.

It needs a study guide, and viewing "Citizen Kane" might be a good place to start.

The violence in this movie is gruesome (a scene involving the disposal of bodies is particularly graphic). But the movie has many human qualities and contains what will be remembered as one of Pacino's finest scenes.

It contains the sounds and rhythms of real teen-age lives; it was written and directed after a lot of research, and is acted by kids who are to one degree or another playing themselves. The movie's a rare attempt to provide a portrait of the way teen-agers really do live today in some suburban cultures.

Somehow isn't as exciting as a duel over a woman should be.

"Batman" isn't a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That's because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production.

Above all, it contains characters I care for, played by actors I admire.

It's innocent and sometimes kind of charming. The sets are entertaining. There are parallels in appearance and theme to a low-rent "Dark City."

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to.

In Klute you don't have two attractive acting vacuums reciting speeches at each other. With Fonda and Sutherland, you have actors who understand and sympathize with their characters, and you have a vehicle worthy of that sort of intelligence. So the fact that the thriller stuff doesn't always work isn't so important.

The film, written and directed by Michael S. Ojeda, shows a sure sense of noir style and a toughness that lasts right up to the very final scene, which feels contrived and tacked-on.

The Five Obstructions clearly calls for a sequel, in which Leth would require von Trier to remake "Dogville," despite Obstructions 6 through 10.

Diane Kruger, whose Lisa is subjected to logical whiplash by the plot, always seems to know when it is and how she should feel. Now that's acting.

Because it is attentive to these human elements, Ladder 49 draws from the action scenes instead of depending on them. Phoenix, Travolta, Barrett and the others are given characters with dimension, so that what happens depends on their decisions, not on the plot.

It confronts the relationship between Fonda and Voight with unusual frankness -- and with emotional tenderness and subtlety that is, if anything, even harder to portray.

Jack Frost is the kind of movie that makes you want to take the temperature, if not feel for the pulse, of the filmmakers.

Made me feel like I was sitting in McDonald's watching some guy shout at his kids. Price of Glory gives us two hours of that behavior, and it's a miscalculation so basic that it makes the movie painful when it wants, I guess, to be touching.

If you have ever wondered what kind of person volunteers to become a human bomb, and what they think about in the days before their death, this film wonders, too.

An ideal first movie for infants, who can enjoy the bright colors on the screen and wave their tiny hands to the music.

It says something for Robert Downey Jr. that in a movie where a man becomes a dog, Downey creates the weirdest character.

What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make Lawrence of Arabia, or even think that it could be made.

The movie is not intended to be subtle. It is sweaty, candle-lit melodrama, joyously trashy, and its photography wallows in sumptuous decadence.

True Romance, which feels at times like a fire sale down at the cliche factory, is made with such energy, such high spirits, such an enchanting goofiness, that it's impossible to resist. Check your brains at the door.

This movie is awake. I have seen so many films that were sleepwalking through the debris of old plots and second-hand ideas that it was a constant pleasure to watch House of Games, a movie about con men that succeeds not only in conning the audience, but also in creating a series of characters who seem imprisoned by the need to con, or be conned.

A bad movie indeed.

As the final hour approaches for the characters in Last Night, there are moments of startling poignancy.

I laughed, yes, I did, several times during Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. That's proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity.

Unstrung Heroes has been directed by Diane Keaton with an unusual combination of sentiment and quirky eccentricity.

Oh, God! is lighthearted, satirical, and humorous and (that rarest of qualities) in good taste.

The real surprise of the movie is Eddie Murphy, who finds his character and stays with him.

The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing.

Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah is built on Tommy Lee Jones' persona, and that is why it works so well. The same material could have been banal or routine with an actor trying to be "earnest" and "sincere."

You hear some nostalgia, but with most of them you don't get the idea that if they had the chance they'd do it all again.

You know a movie's got problems when you find yourself wishing the heroes would agree with the villain.

This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.

I watched the movie with interest, yes, but not emotional involvement, and my appreciation of Moore was based more on her essence than on her character.

Like the work of David Lean, it achieves the epic without losing sight of the human, and to see it is to be reminded of the way great action movies can rouse and exhilarate us, can affirm life instead of simply dramatizing its destruction.

Lighthearted fun.

Dead Snow, as you may have gathered, is a comedy, but played absolutely seriously by sincere, earnest young actors.

A cheerfully energetically and very vulgar comedy.

It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.

It looks great. The technical credits are impeccable, and Clooney and Kidman negotiate assorted dangers skillfully. But it's mostly spare parts from other thrillers.

It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

The formula is obvious: Die Hard Goes to Sea. I walked into the screening in a cynical frame of mind, but then a funny thing happened. The movie started working for me.

Starting with Mick Jagger, rock concerts have become, for the performers, as much sporting events as musical and theatrical performances. Stop Making Sense understands that with great exuberance.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

Someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form, Easy Rider is the picture.

These astronauts are still alive, but as long as mankind survives, their journeys will be seen as the turning point -- to what, it is still to be seen.

The movie leaves no heartstring untugged. It even has a beloved old dog, and you know what happens to beloved old dogs in movies like this. Or if you don't, I don't have the heart to tell you.

As a source of information about his life and work, this interview is almost worthless, but as an insight into his style, it is priceless.

[Keaton and Nicholson] bring so much experience, knowledge and humor to their characters that the film works in ways the screenplay might not have even hoped for.

I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film's philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn't it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?

It is astonishingly original.

Payami has a visual style that is sometimes astonishing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes both.

The most interesting part of the film for a non-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan is the production design - the sewers and the city streets above them. Roy Forge Smith is the designer, and seems inspired by a low-rent vision of Batman or maybe Metropolis.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.

In its quiet and murderous way, it is like the delayed final act of an old movie about drugs, guns and revenge.

Eastwood’s two-film project is one of the most visionary of all efforts to depict the reality and meaning of battle.

It moves us on a human level, it keeps us guessing during scenes as unpredictable as life, and it shows us how ordinary people have a chance of somehow coping with their problems, which are rather ordinary, too.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a reminder of what movies are for. Most movies are not for any one thing, of course. Some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting about "E.T." is that, in some measure, it does all of those things. [2002 re-release]

This is a fresh and cheerful movie with a goofy sense of humor and a good ear for how teenagers talk.

Just plain fun. Or maybe not so plain. There's a lot of craft and slyness lurking beneath the circa-1960s goofiness.

It's a film you enjoy in pieces, but the jigsaw never gets solved.

Catch That Kid respects all of the requirements of the genre, and the heist itself is worthy of "Ocean's Eleven" (either one; take your pick).

The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends quasi-credibility to a story that is entirely preposterous.

An ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary.

Savoca's subject is larger: She wants to show how, in only three generations, an Italian family that is comfortable with the mystical turns into an American family that is threatened by it. And she wants to explore the possibilities of sainthood in these secular days. That she sees great humor in her subject is perfect; it is always easier to find the truth through laughter.

I stared at A Nightmare on Elm Street with weary resignation. The movie consists of a series of teenagers who are introduced, haunted by nightmares and then slashed to death by Freddy. So what? Are we supposed to be scared?

The film is a visual feast of palaces, costumes, wigs, feasts, opening nights, champagne, and mountains of debt.

The Fury is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy.

A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

The director, Peter Cattaneo, takes material that could would be at home in a sex comedy, and gives it gravity because of the desperation of the characters; we glimpse the home life of these men, who have literally been put on the shelf, and we see the wound to their pride.

While no reasonable person over the age of 12 would presumably be able to take it seriously, it nevertheless has a lighthearted joy, a cheerfulness, an insouciance, that recalls the days when movies were content to be fun.

The plot is completely confused, and kids, who are much better at these things than adults, will enjoy its twists and turns. Ustinov is fine as the rum swilling, yo-ho-hoing Blackbeard, and there are several good scenes as he invisibly meddles with the big track meet. Jones and Miss Pleshette are amusing without being insufferably sweet.

This is a good film, but it would not cheer people up much at a high school reunion.

It's a film filled with wicked satire and sex both joyful and pitiful.

This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.

It's not particularly funny to hear women described and valued exclusively in terms of their function as disposable sexual partners. A lot of Connor's dialogue is just plain sadistic and qualifies him as that part of an ass it shares with a doughnut.

Here is a movie that was made more than 25 years ago, and it feels as if it were made yesterday. Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin. [Re-release]

To be sure, Scorsese was occasionally too obvious, and the film has serious structural flaws, but nobody who loves movies believes a perfect one will ever be made. What we hope for instead are small gains on the fronts of hope, love, comedy and tragedy. It is possible that with more experience and maturity Scorsese will direct more polished, finished films--but this work, completed when he was 25, contains a frankness he may have diluted by then.

The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.

The movie gets the feel right, and there's real energy in the concert scenes, especially the tricky debut of Buddy Holly and the Crickets as the first white act in Harlem's famous Apollo Theater.

Beaches begins on a note of impending doom, and that colors everything else with an undertone of bittersweet poignancy and, believe me, there is only so much bittersweet poignancy I can take in any one movie.

As for Beatty, Reds is his bravura turn. He got the idea, nurtured it for a decade, found the financing, wrote most of the script, produced, and directed and starred and still found enough artistic detachment to make his Reed into a flawed, fascinating enigma instead of a boring archetypal hero. I liked this movie. I felt a real fondness for it.

It is the kind of movie one enjoys more at 8, or even 12, than at 16 and up.

You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.

Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.

Foster directs the film with a sure eye for the revealing little natural moment.

I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it.

A disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

A good-looking movie with hard-working performances and a bubble-brained script, which nevertheless stumbles over a truth from time to time. Class Act could be a trial run for something really relevant.

The important thing about "The Importance" is that all depends on the style of the actors, and Oliver Parker's film is well cast.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."

The most curious thing about Hiding Out is that the plot continued to intrigue me even after I'd more or less given up on the movie's ability to find anything interesting in its material. What would it really be like to be in high school again? To revisit your past, knowing what you know now? Hollywood ought to make a good movie about that idea. In fact, Hollywood has: Peggy Sue Got Married. This one fails by comparison.

Odd is played by Baard Owe, a trim, fit man with a neat mustache, who may cause you to think a little of James Stewart, Jacques Tati or Jean Rochefort.

This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.

It haunts you, you can't forget it, you admire its conception and are able to resolve some of the confusions you had while watching it.

It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

If this movie had been a satire, it could have been deadly.

There is a long central section in the film which is a triumph of narrative technique.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is Sam Peckinpah making movies flat out, giving us a desperate character he clearly loves, and asking us to somehow see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he's trying to write about the human condition.

Clever in the way it avoids most of the cliches of the vampire movie by using cannibalism, and most of the cliches of the cannibal movie by using vampirism. It serves both dishes with new sauces.

Guilty by Suspicion is about a period that is now some 40 years ago (although some blacklist members did not work again until the 1970s). But it teaches a lesson we are always in danger of forgetting: that the greatest service we can do our country is to be true to our conscience.

And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.

They talk warmly and with enthusiasm about certain titles, but I have the eerie feeling that they must be at a movie whether they enjoy it or not.

The film is a sharp disappointment to those who have been waiting for 10 years since the master's last film. The best that can be hoped is that, having made a film, Coppola has the taste again, and will go on to make many more, nothing like this.

There are laughs in the movie, and a lot of good feeling, but it seems more interested in its Italian stereotypes than its gay insights.

The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.

The bottom line is, all these people chase the same money around with the success of doggie tail-biting, and it's a lot of fun, and it's not often in these con films that everybody is conning everybody, and they're all scared to death, and nobody knows which cup the pea is under.

This is not a film most people will enjoy. Its qualities are apparent only if appreciates cinematic style for itself.

The film's buried message is that there is a reservoir of admiration and affection for America, at least among the educated classes in the Arab world, and they do not equate the current administration with America.

Seen simply as a film, The Motorcycle Diaries is attenuated and tedious. We understand that Ernesto and Alberto are friends, but that's about all we find out about them; they develop none of the complexities of other on-the-road couples, like Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde or Huck and Jim. There isn't much chemistry.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

Muppet Treasure Island, directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppet genius, will entertain you more or less in proportion to your affection for the Muppets. If you like them, you'll probably like this.

Prelude to a Kiss is the kind of movie that can inspire long conversations about the only subject really worth talking about, the Meaning of It All.

The movie is sure to be appealing to younger viewers (they may find it more accessible and certainly less frightening than "Jurassic Park"), and it's smart enough to keep older viewers involved, too.

Here is a strong and simple story surrounded by needless complications, and flawed by a last act that first disappoints us and then ends on a note of forced whimsy.

Troche's tone is so relentlessly, depressingly monotonous that the characters seem trapped in a narrow emotional range. They live out their miserable lives in one lachrymose sequence after another, and for us there is no relief.

So extreme is his mad dog behavior, indeed, that it shades over into humor: Washington seems to enjoy a performance that's over the top and down the other side.

Luckily, there's enough of the domestic comedy to make the movie work despite its crasser instincts. One of the big surprises in the movie is Selleck's wonderful performance as the bachelor architect. After playing action heroes on TV and in the movies, he now reveals himself to be a light comedian in the Cary Grant tradition - a big, handsome guy with tenderness and vulnerability

A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.

Cage and Shue make these cliches into unforgettable people.

A documentary that is beyond strange, follows two arch-enemies in their grim, long-term rivalry, which involves way more time than any human lifetime should devote to Donkey Kong.

How this all finally works out is deeply satisfying. Only after the movie is over do you realize what a balancing act it was, what risks it took, what rewards it contains. A character says at one point that she has grown to like Bianca. So, heaven help us, have we.

A cheerfully energetic horror film of the slam-bang school, but slicker and more clever than most, about an evil doll named Charles Lee Ray, or Chucky.

Bright, lively and entertaining, but it's no "Shrek." Maybe it's too much to expect lightning to strike twice.

By telling the whole story from Hurt's point of view, the movie makes the woman into the stubborn object, the challenge, the problem, which is the very process it wants to object to...This objection aside, Children of a Lesser God is a good but not a great movie. The subject matter is new and challenging, and I was interested in everything the movie had to tell me about deafness.

This is a jolly, slapstick comedy, lacking the almost eerie humanity that infused the earlier “Toy Story” sagas, and happier with action and jokes than with characters and emotions.

Without a great Bond girl, a great villain or a hero with a sense of humor, The Living Daylights belongs somewhere on the lower rungs of the Bond ladder. But there are some nice stunts.

You might be tempted to think that Arthur would be a bore, because it is about a drunk who is always trying to tell you stories. You would be right if Arthur were a party and you were attending it. But Arthur is a movie. And so its drunk, unlike real drunks, is more entertaining, more witty, more human, and more poignant than you are. He embodies, in fact, all the wonderful human qualities that drunks fondly, mistakenly believe the booze brings out in them.

The first hour of this movie belongs among the great filmgoing experiences. It is described as an epic, and earns the description.

This is an uncommonly intelligent film, smart and amusing too, and anyone who thinks it is not faithful to Austen doesn't know the author but only her plots.

Strangers on a Train is not a psychological study, however, but a first-rate thriller with odd little kinks now and then. It proceeds, as Hitchcock's films so often do, with a sense of private scores being settled just out of sight.

Where it succeeds is as the story of a chapter in history, the story of how one coach at one school arrived at an obvious conclusion and acted on it, and helped open college sports in the South to generations of African Americans.

Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life.

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is actually funnier and more charming than the first film.

The movie is put together in a sort of disjointed way; there are too many characters, and some of them disappear for so long, we forget them. But that doesn't matter much; the idea is to string together scenes that entertain, and Cleopatra Jones does that nicely.

It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.

Here is a film that engaged me on the subject of Christ's dual nature, that caused me to think about the mystery of a being who could be both God and man. I cannot think of another film on a religious subject that has challenged me more fully. The film has offended those whose ideas about God and man it does not reflect. But then, so did Jesus.

One view of what happened that day, a very effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.

Now we have an American film with the raw power of “City of God” or “Pixote,” a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave.

What I did appreciate is that City of Angels is one of the few angel movies that knows one essential fact about angels: They are not former people. ”Angels aren't human. We were never human,” observes Seth. This is quite true. Angels are purely spiritual beings.

Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.

This is the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly. It's a 1950s crime movie, but with a modern, ironic edge: The cops are just a shade over the top, just slightly in on the joke.

Cadillac Records is an account of the Chess story that depends more on music than history, which is perhaps as it should be. The film is a fascinating record of the evolution of a black musical style, and the tangled motives of the white men who had an instinct for it.

A horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke.

A tight, taut thriller with a twist.

A dreary experience.

The problem with a story like this is that it's almost too perfect. It tends to break out of the boundaries of the typical sports movie, and undermine those easy cliches that are so reassuring to sports fans.

This is a movie that surprises you. The setup is such familiar material that you think the story is going to be flat and fast. But the screenplay by John Lee Hancock goes deep. And the direction by Clint Eastwood finds strange, quiet moments of perfect truth in the story.

Needful Things is yet another one of those films based on a Stephen King story that inspires you to wonder why his stories don't make better films. The movie only has one note, which it plays over and over, sort of a Satanic water torture. It's not funny and it's not scary and it's all sort of depressing.

It's a reminder of the days before films got so cynical and unrelentingly violent. A Knight's Tale is whimsical, silly and romantic.

Why do they persist in making these retreads? Because RoboCop is a brand name, I guess, and this is this year's new model. It's an old tradition in Detroit to take an old design and slap on some fresh chrome.

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.