Sean Axmaker

The film is inoffensive, and Baldwin is fun and engaging.

An old-fashioned Western with all the classic elements -- buddy loyalty, stalwart heroes, despicable villains, plenty of gunfights and marvelous wind-scoured desert landscapes -- marked by some modern ideas about relationships.

This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.

The impressive marriage of CGI backgrounds and traditional hand-drawn characters gives Oshii more tools to sculpt his vision in color and light.

The simple, unpretentious storytelling of Unleashed is a rarity in the glut of underwritten and overproduced action films that dominate American screens today.

The three stars communicate the fears and dreams and frustrations of teenage girls with subtlety, sensitivity and dignity.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

The contrast of the naive assurance of youth with the confusion and ambiguity of adulthood is sweet but simplistic and the wandering script hasn't much else to offer.

For all it's warmth and wonder, it carries little more power than a storybook fable.

It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.

Though a hypnotically beautiful film, it's dramatically listless and dull, and completely lacking in passion.

Drowns promising ideas in a sea of missed details and unconvincing motivations.

Michell captures the awkwardness of real-world behavior with gentle, unforced humor.

Director Wayne Wang stumbles through the awkward script without finding its shape or its tone, steering it toward maturity while the script falls back into slapstick sports gags and adolescent social politics.

The film is thrown off balance by the weight of Norton's compassion for this troubled soul.

See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

A sports empowerment fantasy of the best kind.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

It's smart, instructive political cinema that tackles complex issues of the globalization with practical examples and vivid images and presents its effects in immediate human terms.

As exasperating as it is conventionally satisfying.

Doyle's handheld camerawork is intimate and curious and his hazy colors radiate off the screen.

Competently directed by Christian music producer Steve Taylor, it's a sincerely (if not exactly subtly) performed spiritual drama with a faith-based lesson in humility and the practical charity of offering a helping hand.

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse...Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob.

One of the Coens' more playful projects, much lighter and significantly slighter than "No Country for Old Men" or "Fargo," but it's put together with such perfection that you can't help but be won over.

The new parody from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, takes another swipe at the corpse armed with the same old weapons. This time, rigor mortis has set in.

Think of this corrective to Kipling as "The Longest Yard" meets "The Seven Samurai" with cricket bats, choreographed dance numbers, romantic triangles and a rousing call to solidarity.

It's all quite deftly played with a maturity and introspection that may take you by surprise, though Sachs is perhaps too restrained in parts.

Emitai (1971) remains Sembene's masterpiece and his most important achievement. [03 Aug 2001]

No style, no irony and no smarts, just a vicious streak that lasts 90 minutes.

Stephen Brill's flat-footed script begins as an idiot comedy with the gross-out gags of a Farrelly brothers film.

The result is like a "Waiting for Godot" for the video-game generation.

All that's left are cute animals with animated mouths spitting out fitfully inspired one liners, sophomoric sexual innuendo and enough poop gags to last a lifetime.

Too bad the film, which Kennedy spun from a stand-up skit, remains as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as B-Rad is of his absurdity.

Coupled with the flavorless dialogue of the inane script and a leading man who registers all the glow of a black hole, there's nothing to anchor this mindless mess of a film.

The Divine Intervention of the title lies somewhere between hope and fantasy. In a world in which Santa Claus is assaulted in Nazareth, what do you have left?

Has neither the raucous energy and impudence of "Animal House," the defiance of "If ...," nor the grace and wit of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

Part treasure hunt, part disturbia.

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

It's filled to overflowing with mischievous gags for kids and adults alike, tickling the periphery of the story and crammed into every frame with playful abandon. It gives potty humor a good name.

Splashy and sweetly romantic, if hopelessly unimaginative.

A deliciously vivid adventure fantasy.

It's funny. Dumb, yes, but funny.

Danny Aiello is right at home as owner Louis, a paternal Italian father to all but his own son, reigning over the throng from his corner table like a benevolent lord and maybe underworld gangster.

Gunnarsson masterfully weaves these strands into a bold, multilayered tapestry surrounding a powerful story.

Sensitive and vivid response to the tangled issues of teen violence, race and self-esteem.

To call the haphazard string of gags a story is to give it far too much credit, but it is funny in a blunt, profane frat boy way, thanks to the bulldozing energy of Ferrell, the smarmy manipulations of Vaughn and the anything-for-a-laugh excess of Phillips.

For an ostensibly personal film, this plodding portrait of the self-involved flailing for meaning in a mercenary world has little of Soderbergh's insight, empathy or generous personality.

It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.

Never quite transcends its origins as a high-concept action thriller, but the clean professionalism of Donner's direction, the low-key turn by Willis and the street-level heroics make it a satisfying piece of genre filmmaking.

Mühe's performance is brilliant, communicating more turmoil and pain with the droop of a lip and a flicker of the eye across an otherwise intently passive face than all the emotional storms of the cast.

It feels like a peek into the closet of a pedophile and it's genuinely discomforting.

Think of it as a buffet of romantic comedy comfort food: the good old American standbys complemented by bland international dishes.

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

It's more theatrical pageant than action movie, with the showy but rudimentary martial-arts action coming off like just another ritual with the players going through the motions.

Steel and Morris are simply a couple of ordinary citizens who stand up for their ideals and their rights in the face of intimidation. Which is what makes this underdog story matter.

There's no conviction among these self-involved folks who sidestep commitment with a quip and a grin.

Captures the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotional assault of loving and living through captured moments and sensuous images.

There's no particular tragedy or triumph, merely another step in the lives of two fallible people finding a little comfort while stumbling toward happiness.

It's the warmest, most generous portrait of American hospitality you've seen from a European movie in some time.

Despite the cat-and-mouse games between cop and criminal, this is less a battle of wills than one man's battle for his own soul. Nolan bravely treads where few American films dare to delve -- into the world of ambivalence and ambiguity -- and emerges with a compelling portrait.

Iliadis is more visually sophisticated than Craven was in 1972 and works hard to sustain the mood and tension while still hitting the audience with blunt scenes of wincing violence. (It gets grisly and grotesque enough for gore hounds.)

Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.

Eight Legged Freaks is a B-movie-and-proud-of-it thrill ride, probably the best of its kind since "Tremors." It does just what a good creature feature is supposed to do: It entertains with laughs, gasps, gooey spectacle and a bemused sense of fun.

At times it gets lost in the backwaters, but the eccentric characters and offbeat humor make it an entertaining detour.

Achieves its social commentary through passion and poetry.

It's a tricky tonal dance that Watt, minor missteps aside, glides through with feeling.

Behind the narrative twists and contrived dramatic complications is a searing and scary look at dysfunction.

For all of the credibility of the performances (or at least the teens), it all feels like recycled social commentary.

The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what may have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery.

Scott, whose sensitive turn as a priest inspired by Ralph's conviction and commitment gives the film a touch of grace at the cost of revealing McGowan's drab direction of every other actor.

This isn't the Bollywood blast of color and song or the brassy razzle-dazzle of "Chicago," but a quieter, sweeter approach that works against the chaotic comedy while humanizing the characters.

The insistent crosscutting suggests there is something powerful between the two stories, but apart from vague connections of jealousy, emotional tension and conversations that constantly dance around the real issues, they don't resonate across the years.

When it was released in the United States more than 30 years ago, its distributor hacked away 40 minutes of its precise structure. This rerelease restores every meticulous second of Melville's cinematic fantasy.

One of the most hilarious and engaging films from producer Judd Apatow's often inconsistent comedy factory, thanks to inspired dialogue, dynamite chemistry between Rogen and Franco and perfectly pitched stoner gags (undoubtedly the result of copious research).

This isn't a movie, it's a marketing ploy. Would you like a plush Garfield toy with that popcorn?

An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.

It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.

It simply isn't that funny or clever. For a comedy, that's about the worst that could happen

This is an unmistakably Asian variant on the action movie, a sleek, slick, entertaining espionage thriller in the John Woo mold.

The result is a heartfelt film brimming with ideas and passion but hampered by a literal approach that douses the emotional heat.

Salva spins a backwoods serial killer setup into something really scary.

Less a story than a film of emotional textures, this is a study in stasis.

A potentially interesting idea deflated by the absurd proclamations of an arch screenplay and smothered under the ponderous gravity of M. Night Shyamalan's dreary direction.

It's weird, clean, good-natured fun, and it's far too subdued for its madcap milieu.

The film never earns the irony of the title or offers anything profound in its observations of fractured family dynamics in an atmosphere of lingering resentment, but Allen and Costner enrich and elevate the film and give the growth of their characters a hard-earned gravitas.

A thoroughly ordinary drama of temptation, dubious redemption and easy revenge.

It's Treadwell's contradictions and controversies that fascinate Herzog the filmmaker, inspiring him to create this enthralling documentary portrait, his best film in years.

Though he's foggy on the specifics, Angelopoulos makes the tides of history felt through each painterly frame.

Offers precious little inspiration, and the only irony it manages is surely unintended.

Oregon-born and Seattle-based director James Longley profiles three lives in his impressionistic portrait of Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurd communities.

In this brand of comedy, nothing succeeds like excess, and this film is seriously deficient.

At once an elegy for the communal experience of cinema-going and another quintessentially Tsai portrait of loneliness and isolation.

Hartley's soft spot for offbeat romances is trumped by irony and sloganeering dialogue.

The restraint so magnificently applied in "The Remains of the Day" has simply fallen into disconnection.

Director Mohammad Rasoulof has fashioned the ultimate metaphor for a society adrift from its culture.

At 140 minutes, the film becomes a humorless, long-winded spectacle.

It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness.

The most emotionally rich and cinematically thrilling film I've seen all year, a film that pulses with human life in all its terrible and beautiful irrationality.