Sean Means

Trots out more flag-waving wartime cliches than any movie since John Wayne's "The Alamo."

The surprising part is how, once you get over the crude humor that the teen-movie genre demands, Get Over It is a nice little movie.

It seems like nitpicking to say it, but the weakness of Jerry Maguire is that there's too much to it -- too many things happening at once for a viewer to digest. But with a charming cast like this, having too much isn't such a bad thing.

You just watch one carefully constructed but emotionally vacant image piled up on another - sometimes with regard to an overall effect, but often just for the sake of style over substance.

Disgusting and humorless mess.

A too-familiar road.

The gravity-defying harness maneuvers popularized in the U.S. with "The Matrix" -- ... look really cool, but seem out of place in a realistic gang-style action movie.

Limp direction, laughable production values, accent-heaving acting and dialogue and more lumps than three-day-old oatmeal.

A cool and rather detached movie...Heat generates lots of energy but gives off little light.

I just wanted to rail against the casual homophobia, the senseless violence and the sociopathic cruelty that Ready to Rumble treats as good clean fun.

(Thornton) proves his mettle as an actor, writer and director with this bleakly comic and surprisingly tender movie.

While The Messenger feeds our appetite for visual panache, it starves the soul.

Craven creates his savviest and most frightening movie since the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street" by spoofing the horror cliches and simultaneously reinventing them to scare you all over again.

The warm humanizing element in all the cool stuff is Crowe.

Just another lame slacker comedy.

Shining above it all, like a kewpie-doll saint, is Drew Barrymore -- whose sweet innocence and sexy romanticism have survived movies as bad as this before

Undiluted Jackie Chan, not the watered-down stuff he's been doing stateside.

Drab and depressing.

Fails as a movie, it works OK as a long-form video.

One imagines what the failed farce Drowning Mona would have been like in the hands of the Coen brothers.

Unbreakable shows Shyamalan as a rapidly maturing filmmaker, taking risks and making them pay off.

The textures are detailed, the movements are realistic and the three-dimensional feel even improves on the humor -- you may think you've seen every good "Matrix" parody, but you haven't until you see this.

Aerves up so much visual wizardry and thought-provoking ideas that even the inevitable Silver touch -- a finale with more bullets than the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" -- can't destroy the magic.

Soderbergh and [screenwriter] Frank like these sidekicks so much that they overwhelm the leads — a fairly easy task, since Lopez has all the police presence of a Revlon ad, while Clooney again tries to skate by on his good looks and smirking charm.

It's Lathan -- with her passionate performance, physical grace and drop-dead-gorgeous looks -- who makes Love and Basketball so entertaining.

Eye-popping, exhilarating and occasionally a bit stomach-churning.

An assault on brain cells.

But as objectionable as its subject matter is, the most objectionable thing is that it's not funny.

This is a band that deserves better.

Drop Dead Gorgeous eventually shows that it doesn't like anybody -- in the movie or in the audience.

The insider's view of celebrity in The Insider grabs the spotlight from the real story of Wigand's courage.

Recycled "Steel Magnolias."

A funny, frenetic and surprising comedy.

Another droning formulaic thriller.

Admirers of "The Blair Witch Project" are going to be left high and dry.

A sports movie as distinguishable as one M&M in a bag, working off a formula as easy-to-read as an onsides kick.

I really wish a younger man than Clint Eastwood had directed it.

Chaotic, peurile, loaded with sniggering commentary and obsessed with breasts, Saving Silverman is like a 90-minute walk through a 13-year-old boy's head.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld captures Hollywood in sunny tones, with fluid camera moves providing maximum comic effect.

A cool movie and a must-see for anyone who wants to see the next stage in computer-generated animation. But it could have been so much more.

Althea is a ferociously vibrant character, and Love goes all out to infuse her with a wildness seldom seen on screen. Love holds nothing back, and her energy and her heartache energize the movie.

Big, bold, brash and occasionally brilliant.

It feels like a dream that a movie could have this kind of poetic grace and epic sweep, or could be so faithful to its source and still work so perfectly as a film.

Fast-moving, watertight and firing from all tubes.

Their (Sarandon, Penn) performances and Robbins' drive to ask questions without offering easy answers make Dead Man Walking a thought-provoking drama not to be missed or dismissed.

LL Cool J... is downright scary -- a mix of coiled charm and underlying menace.

Jackman and Judd are sweet together, so much so that you wish they were in a fresher movie than this.

I just really, really, really, don't like this movie, and I don't care who knows it.

Hewitt's twin assets may be enough for a lot of moviegoers -- which may be the biggest con Heartbreakers pulls off.

Tragic and phony, and proof that a contrived sad ending can be as bad as a contrived happy ending.

Best of all are the supporting players. Everett (who played the Prince of Wales in "The Madness of King George") is smartly urbane, giving a polished refinement to the stereotypical "gay best buddy'' role.

A biting satire of military myopia and political double-dealing -- possibly the best wartime comedy since Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Sly, slick and slow.

Alas, when Rounders lays out its cards, the results aren't as much as you'd been led to believe. But the movie's style and authenticity run a good bluff.

Kat's English assignment, which provides the movie's title, is a sweet finish to an entertaining movie -- and makes 10 Things I Hate About You quite likable.

In the pantheon of cinematic train wrecks, from "Ishtar" to "Waterworld," set a place at the table for Battlefield Earth.

Vertical Limit has its share of intrigue, but there ain't no mountain high enough to make O'Donnell look deep.

An offbeat delight.

Atrocious comedy.

Mud-stained, blood-soaked and completely useless.

A bad movie about a great man.

What Smith does best in Chasing Amy is write clever, raunchy and emotionally true-to-life dialogue.

Darabont follows King's book fairly closely, allowing the audience to steep itself in the setting and characters slowly, like reading a good novel.

A brilliant and daring film.

A fireworks show with plenty of "oohs" but not a lot of "aah" -- the story is needlessly convoluted in places and storybook-simple in others, and the characters never make the leap from drawn figures to flesh-and-blood people.

Watching Seven is like cracking open a safe, only to find it crawling with eels

It earns an "Incomplete'' -- because we won't know the results until we see Lucas' next chapter.

Lets Jackie Chan have some fun, ride a horse and frolic in the American West. And when Jackie's having fun, at least some of it trickles down to us.

Raucously funny.

So you'll laugh during Big Momma's House -- but the laughs are so negligible you'll probably forget them before you get to the parking lot.

Costner's serious-as-a-heart-attack performance...slowly kills the movie's energy in a gooey morass of forced sincerity.

It's a high-wire act without a net, and Benigni pulls it off with astounding grace and sensitivity.

Mostly he's (Fraser) trapped in a sequel that's too wrapped up in a desire to top itself.

Hogan's rough-and-ready charm remains intact, but it's not enough to salvage this instantly forgettable movie.

Works so beautifully because Davis doesn't try to turn Eads and his friends into walking soapboxes for transgendered people.

Has some good throwaway gags -- but far too often, the moviemakers don't throw them away soon enough.

But it's the boy and the dog who make My Dog Skip resonate. The formula may be an old one, but it's still a good one.

Once L.A. Confidential gets rolling, it hits with power, stunning in its sweep and surprising with its plot twists.

Isn't a bad action movie -- it's just an utterly forgettable one.

When your characters are only skin deep, so is your message.

Parts of this three-hour World War II epic are brilliant -- especially the 40-minute sequence in which the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor is stunningly re-created.

He's hilarious, but through the jokes, you get the sense Foxx knows he deserves better.

As the movie plods on, the jokes start to fall flat...Worst of all is a centerpiece scene, when Ben has to pretend to be a mafioso (but sounds more like a cross between Martin and Lewis), when Crystal is so unfunny that you almost feel sorry for him.

That rare movie, a clever and unabashedly fun adventure that has as many winning moments as it has hen's teeth -- which is quite a lot.

A hilariously entertaining movie.

Kids -- may like this movie. But kids like green ketchup, so what do they know?

Isn't quite enough to save the Bond franchise -- but it does prove that 007 is Y2K-compliant.

The single best thing about Stuart Little is Nathan Lane.

Delivers its humor with clockwork reliability.

Gibson's raw energy and storytelling power in Braveheart are undeniable. If the film doesn't meet his ambitions, it's because he set the bar so high.

The cast of To Die For is perfect all around, but Kidman trumps them all with a gutsy, uncompromising performance...It's an audacious performance for a movie that dares to be nasty.

It's hard to root against Death when the people involved are never brought to life in the first place.

Isn't bad as summer action fare goes -- big and loud, impressively staged by Hong Kong action auteur John Woo, a combination of special effects and eye-popping stunt maneuvers threaded by a plotline that doesn't make sense in the slightest.

Armitage, Cusack and his Evanston chums have their work cut out for them to turn a stone killer into a sympathetic romantic character. That they succeed in such a shrewdly funny way is downright amazing.

It's so good, so jam-packed with delights, that it leaves you gorged -- and bemoaning the fatty glop that passes for moviemaking these days.

For fans of science fiction...Galaxy Quest is a sweet, funny valentine to their obsessiveness.

Human Resources resonates because it restores the humanity to that dehumanizing title phrase.

All the Pretty Horses may end up being a good movie to watch on DVD, when all the footage is restored and we can see the subtle shadings Thornton jettisoned.