Shawn Levy

Flawed though it may be, it's frequently an unaffected pleasure, in no small part because of Depp but also because of a raffish air that's a welcome respite from the heavy going of "The Matrix Reloaded," "The Hulk" and other behemoths.

There are flashes here of a more involving movie, but, as if living up to the cliches associated with her name, filmmaker Lee is content to sit quietly and let others talk.

Indeed, Green Zone plays a little bit like a video game version of the Oscar-winning film (The Hurt Locker)-- which should tell you right off whether it's for you or not.

See it for the star. Penn makes a film that in many respects feels low scale and ordinary into something painfully human and real.

Not much in the way of captivating magic, but all the expected notes are duly played. Hope springs eternal for the next film in the series, though: Columbus is handing the reins over to Alfonso Cuaron, an actual movie director.

Swell when it purrs, when the three top stars are in full form, but it spits and hisses and screeches too often to take full hold.

The story is slight and somewhat less than engaging, despite nice supporting turns from Emily Blunt and Ricky Jay.

The result is a film that's more credible in its building blocks than in its whole.

It's energetic and occasionally inspired. Its gritty, sweaty, shiny feel deepens the case that there's a vital new essence to Brazilian cinema.

They say that history is written by the winners. Well, this is the story of Saint Laurent as told by his surviving partner. And it's, oddly, less about the man than about his things.

For all the flash and sparkle, there's little heat. The Dreamers wants to be "First Tango in Paris." It's more like "Last Tango Under Glass."

Atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.

A sour, deflating and ultimately unlikable black comedy about how awful life can be.

Suffers by invoking better films about similar themes.

It’s not earth-shaking, but it’s diverting and polished.

It's jaunty and bright, but Pray never gets under the skin of things or ever truly questions the essence of advertising as an art or trade.

It's modestly effective at creating a mood and at critiquing both business place mores and the evils of Western hubris. But, chiefly, it's about gory scares and sniffling laughs.

V for Vendetta puts its ideological intent first, and happens to provide smashing entertainment only as a vehicle for delivering its message.

While Coulter and company try gamely to forge two powerful stories, they manage, finally, about one-and-a-half -- which is a lot more than most films, and for which moviegoers should be grateful.

Dotted with real laughs and held together by some solid acting, but it's built of a fairly flaccid narrative and some really amateurish sequences.

The standout is Baldwin, utterly convincing as a gruff cuss whose life has been forever stained by the death of his wife.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

The film has a spry quality, but the jokes are neither funny nor dark enough, the quirky roadside episodes aren't sufficiently outlandish or imaginative, the romantic sparks don't convince and the plotting becomes increasingly silly and tedious. Dukic conjures an air of play and naughtiness, but that's about as deep as he cuts.

It's a movie, finally, that feels longer than its exquisitely brief source material, which is a crime of sorts.

Whatever you make of the film's politics, Luke makes a vivid impression in his most substantial role since "Antwone Fisher," and Robbins resists the temptation to make the thinly written Vos a villainous caricature.

For all its attempts at wrinkles and surprises and sleight-of-hand, Ocean's Thirteen is too direct and plain and pleased with itself to ever feel like a thriller.

Nest of Spies may be a small, subtitled release, but it's also a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the upcoming big-screen adaptation of "Get Smart." See it and you'll have a substantial idea of what a spy comedy should be.

The film has a candy-colored look that stands in well for the books' primitive appeal. And the all-star cast of vocal performers -- Will Ferrell as Yellow Hat, Dick Van Dyke as his boss, David Cross as his rival, Drew Barrymore as his sweetie -- aim squarely and appropriately at a 4-year-old audience.

It isn't art, it's will-o-the-wisp thin, but it might well make you squirt your soda through your nose. And as there seem to be a number of people willing to pay good money for that sensation, there's glory for you!

Filled with skewed humor, inventive animation and earthy jokes.

You go into an Austin Powers movie with a big grin on -- or at least you should. The charm of this one is that you leave smiling even more broadly.

With all its pedestrian moments, the film still has the power to sweep you up.

Feels as true as a documentary, as painful as a blow to the heart.

A genial and watchable film.

It's an agreeable, sometimes hilarious picture that looks at the world of comedy from many vantage points, chiefly the apex.

All you could hope for from a summer movie: dazzling action, jaw-dropping effects, cool clothes, steamy romance and more of the nifty "Matrix" mythology introduced in the 1999 original.

Ted may not be profound or deft, but when it hits the sweet-sour spot, which it does regularly, it can win you over.

Baghead has a nearly documentary quality that infuses it with a sense of heightened stakes and real peril. In a characteristically offhanded way, it's cunningly skillful.

Despite the whiplike pace of events and the compelling realism of the martial effects, the film is dead in the water whenever it pauses to make a human gesture or consider, heaven help us, an idea.

It's splendid period filmmaking, grown-up and luxurious and gossipy without ever feeling fussy.

Comedy means different things to different people, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone agrees that it's best when it's quick and funny. The Five-Year Engagement is neither.

Clever but, alas, largely forgettable.

In addition to being a funny movie about the movie business, it's a cheeky, ingenious motion picture puzzle.

There's something personal going on, something deeper than slapstick. It makes a sometimes flat film shimmer.

Leaves you exhausted and even bored.

Watching it is like filling up on baklava: Later you may feel really guilty, but you don't exactly complain while it's going on.

Agreeably entertaining, peppered with rich laughs and very nice actorly touches.

An exquisitely crafted film filled with little shocks and deep echoes of humanity. It'll stick with you.

An impressive work in many regards -- the acting, the photography, the pace -- but it would've been even more so had Egoyan gone with his gut and been less indulgent of his brain.

A fascinating, masterly, frustrating film, it only passingly touches on the heart and sharpness of Anderson's previous work and rather brings to mind the famous complaint of the emperor in "Amadeus": "too many notes."

It's a thriller, and a large one, and it's got a couple of terrific performers in the center.

Effortless fun: It plays like a giddy horror movie with its laughs wrapped in couture gowns.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

It does a nice job of balancing stillness and action, but it hits weakly when it hits at all and falls short of the small grandness to which it aspires.

Slight but winning.

Pierce never pulls these pieces together satisfyingly, and the result is a botched effort to put a human face on a genuinely alarming situation.

It's contrived, but that doesn't keep it from being kinda nifty.

It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.

There's little that will surprise anyone who's seen or read Grisham's work before, but it plays with slick competence, and there's that killer-diller showdown in the middle as a payoff.

There's almost nothing to grab onto. It's like a gorgeous graphic novel with a protagonist and story that vanish utterly from the mind as soon as the last page is turned.

Schlesinger's adaptation of Nathaniel West's classic novella, the Hollywood of the 1930s is decidedly as ruinous for its denizens as the Hollywood of the 1970s. [28 Jul 2000]

Alan Arkin is charm itself as the girls' dreamy father. Indeed, director Christine Jeffs coaxes only good work from the whole of her cast.

A genuinely handsome film, and it tells a story that is well worth knowing. It's a kind, gentle and sweet holiday confection. But my Christmas wish is that the DVD comes packaged with the book.

The most adventuresome element in The Wackness isn't its pop-culture skin but the unlikely friendship of Luke and Squires...As buddies, they're a kick. But you wish they had a kickier picture to support them.

Doesn't make the case that watching truly bad movies is worthwhile. But it does make you realize that nobody gets up in the morning, showers, breakfasts, dresses and goes to work thinking they're making the worst film in history, either.

Like many things about Brick Lane, this story is dealt with in too cursory and pat a fashion. The film's heart can't be faulted, but its head is working in a regrettably low gear.

Almost nothing that's said or done here is convincing. And the energy is set at near-coma level.

For all the beauty it struggles to bring forth, Snow Falling on Cedars is painfully prosaic.

The film drags and lingers and goes more or less nowhere, imitating its protagonists' lives so exactly that you want to give them both a good smack.

Despite a cast of solid actors and a director with one of the most exquisite visual sensibilities in the business, the film is too often flat when we want it to dazzle us.

The result is an experience of painful awakenings, gorgeous textures, committed acting and silences filled with moment -- a lovely balancing act

The single most impressive thing about the film, in fact, is the taste that this shotgun technique gives of the mass simultaneity of the race.

Fiercely acted but made with indifferent craft and no palpable feel for its subject matter, Trucker takes you on a ride from intrigue to indifference.

While the script of Frida struggles at times to be something more than an ordinary and-then-this-happened biography, there's a buoyancy to the direction and acting that make the film special.

You can't help but feel a connection to Downey and Foxx and, to a lesser degree, a rooting interest in the story. But try as Wright might, he never figures out a way to bring us in -- much less manipulate us -- cinematically.

The result is a handsome but deeply fractured tale.

Capitalism lacks the surprising wit of “Roger & Me” and the sobering comparative journalism of “Sicko,” and it isn’t nearly as heartfelt as “Columbine,” which poignantly and repeatedly circled back to Moore’s beloved home state of Michigan.

As in so many films directed by actors, there's a generosity shown to performance that results in many lifelike moments.

A stylish and unnerving thriller that sucks you into surreal scenes of horror with the chilly confidence of a nightmare.

In the main, this is powerful and comely filmmaking, and the decision to shoot it with virtually unknown actors and a variety of unfamiliar tongues is commendable.

An often pedestrian film, one that never inflates to the epic grandeur to which it aspires or transfers its own emotional trajectory off the screen and into the viewer.

Atmospheric and genial, and you've got to love the spectacle of a dog driving a car or parading around town like the unofficial mayor.

This is a grim, often lifeless tale played with such humorless intensity that watching it is far more like an endurance contest than a love affair.

The film is never less than beautiful, but it's never truly absorbing.

If you love the genre, you'll likely be engaged. But if not, there's not much point.

An utterly convincing portrait of the sort of person willing to strap ordnance to himself and decimate scores of strangers in pursuit of his religious and political ideals.

The result is a newly revived spy movie franchise -- and the best big-budget action film of the summer.

You find yourself wishing that Apatow had managed a script that was either really funny or about real people instead of this half-baked pseudo-memoir that's neither.

Starts with a flourish, staggers along for a bit and finally collapses -- even die-hard De Palma fans, will be left hungry.

At barely an-hour-and-a-quarter in length, it's one of those very rare feature films that you wish were longer.

So emotionally overwhelming that its aesthetics seem almost beside the point.

A unique look behind the curtain, yes, but what's behind the curtain is almost unendurable. Just know that a bad guy got his comeuppance and you don't have to join the legion of his victims by watching it.

With all this raw material, it's a puzzlement and an annoyance that Parker feels so obligated to interpose fantastic elements and comic action sequences and other tacky touches. As a result, while this "Earnest" is lively fun, it never quite feels sufficiently important.

Ultimately, The Adjustment Bureau shifts from paranoid dystopia to a more hopeful tenor, and that weakens it slightly.

A thriller that goes from pretty good to absolutely ludicrous in the time it takes one actor to recite about four sentences of dialogue.

What the picture doesn't do is make sense of the world it tries to depict, or even, truly, depict it. Biggie -- and, for that matter, Woolard -- deserved better.

It's old-fashioned, sometimes accomplished, syrupy and, at its intermittent best, absorbing.

The film is built as a series of (possibly tall) tales that don't add up to a plot, a theme or a purpose.

What Machete does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

If it's meant as a retort to anti-Semitic doctrine, it's far too episodic, anecdotal and lacking in specifics.

Red isn't edifying, ennobling, or artful. It's just an utterly satisfying combination of big kicks, cheap thrills and real laughs.

There's a touch of second-rate playwriting about it that imparts a flattened feel to the end of an otherwise crackerjack picture.

An absorbing film, acted with real force by all parties and directed with competence and assuredness if something less than inspiration.

The result is an overly long, overly cute film that is far too tickled with its own naughtiness. It truly is an instance of if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film.

A diabolically well-made film about a 14-year-old girl who's raped by a pedophile who grooms her with online chats and sexts.

The picture's strength is comedy -- but the love and crime stories too often drag, falter or just plain frustrate.

A handsome picture, with lots of nifty borrowings from the "Star Wars" galaxy, but it's never particularly compelling as a story or as a vehicle for emotions, and when it's over you have a feeling of still waiting for it to get started.

There are fine actors at work here. Chow is quiet and cunning, Gong Li is haughty and cold-eyed, Chen Jin is sturdy as a ghost who appears out of the past, and Gin Junjie is vividly bratty as the youngest, and most underappreciated, prince.

Agreeable and warm, is content for the most part merely to allude to complexity and darkness in the lives of its subjects.

The stick-figure people in the script haven't the slightest chance of making an impression, and you're more excited at the prospect of the next big wave?

For the record, it's truly puzzling that this film has been rated PG-13; it's much stronger than that. The monsters of "Beowulf" have haunted human imagination for more than a millennium; the ones in this film will easily provoke a few nightmares.

[Murphy] makes a thrillingly flesh-and-blood creature of Kitten, with her yearning, her droll, self-deprecating wit, her breathless romanticism and her puckish vibrancy. It's easily the most fun bit of screen acting this year, and as rich and nuanced as the lead in any drama.

Spider-Man 3 is a likeable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size.

Moves with terrific energy, alternating riveting action sequences with intimate material in a manner that's pure Woo.

Doesn't demand much of the audience, sure, but it doesn't provide much, either. It's as if an all-star gang of would-be crooks got together to rip off...moviegoers.

An assured and gripping political drama filled with remarkable performances and razor-sharp writing and editing.

Eastwood never manages to bring the past to life, even as DiCaprio and company dive gamely into the material.

For long stretches, the film is just as funny as the first -- which is saying something, since the first is one of the funniest comedies of the decade, the only film in years to truly infiltrate our communal language and sense of humor.

A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.

What we've got is a mixed though certainly entertaining bag.

Stone seems to take a little vicarious pleasure in making these relative lightweights squirm in fear and confusion.

It's a film that casually mixes comedy with dread more or less deftly until faltering near the end. Up to then, however, it imparts the sensation that, along with Lonnie, you are being cooked alive in a pot of water that's slowly but steadily heating up toward the boiling point.

The combination of emotional anemia, predictable plotting and tepid language makes what might have been a crackerjack treat play like a soggy piece of popcorn.

Rubber is engaging, brisk and smart enough that the audience wins, too. It's grand, mindless fun that makes a thoughtful point.

Reggio, who is sufficiently eager for a large audience that he has allowed his film to be distributed by Miramax, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co., surely one of the villains in his piece, is neither so honest nor so bold (as Moore's "Bowling for Columbine").

The first "Barbershop" was no classic but, as so often with sequels, if this were the first there would be no second.

The movie isn't uniformly taut, but it's funny, acid and clever, the work of a fine craftsman working in a comfortable metier.

The film is a lively and absorbing document, filled with jaw-dropping materials, such as an actual audio recording of Kesey's first LSD trip in a Stanford University lab.

An ascerbic swipe at family counseling, holiday dinners, small-town mores and baby-boomer marriages, ``The Ref'' is acted and written with such pleasure that its meanness becomes cleansing, a stripping-away of the sentimentality that suffocates most Hollywood films about families. [11 Mar 1994, p.AE15]

A handsome, somewhat draggy and abrupt film that's more memorable in snippets than as a whole.

Alas, none of it, save Kristin Scott Thomas giving a peach of a performance as a political operative, smacks of real life or vitality. Even when it evinces spasms of life, this film is, more or less, a dead fish.

The film is filled with cool little scenes of fighting and shape-shifting, and gloomy atmosphere. Subtitles themselves have morphed into gimmicks -- sometimes they float, sometimes they dissolve, sometimes they appear in unexpected places in the frame. It's all darned nifty.

Time to retire OSS 117's license to kill before any more innocent people suffer.

It's a remarkably intimate look at the man and his thinking, and you wish for more history to flesh out the biographical aspects of his life.

It's a gorgeous picture and features three substantial performances, but the material is chatty, forced and excessively arch.

For all its flaws, Hitch largely comes off as a light romp.

It's woeful as a documentary history -- a real missed opportunity.

The result is typical Mendes: accomplished, calculated and uncommitted. Maybe it's because his talent comes to him too easily, but I've yet to sense his heart and soul in a film.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

It hardly needs to hang its head around the original, and it bolsters Brewer's standing as a talent of note.

Witless, tasteless, toothless, pointless, garish, repetitive, obvious, and painfully dull, Pirate Radio is that exceedingly rare film that never, but never puts a foot right.

One of the greatest films about the civilian experience of war ever made anywhere.

Yet another, albeit sparer, Iñárritu gloom-fest.

The Dictator has a few laughs along its bumpy path, but not enough of them to indicate that Cohen has found a means to escape the shadows of his early career and forge a second act for himself.

The least erotic, exotic, luxurious and sarcastic Bond film ever made. Its hero is haunted, obsessed, merciless, cold. There are no gadgets or flippant one-liners and there's almost no sex.

It's never more than an intro to a man who merits volumes.

The script doesn't give Bigelow enough human stuff to balance the mechanical. For good or ill, like so many other submarine thrillers before it, K-19 is more about the machine than the men.

There's a sense of self-satisfied naughtiness to the film that undercuts any claims it can make to being transgressive.

Despite the rich, atmospheric textures, Norton's artificiality, Watts' unlikability, and a plot comprised of one melodramatic wrinkle after another all contrive to frustrate our empathy.

Strictly texture, a romp over the surfaces of Andy Kaufman's life with not much insight into its core.

So did the world need another "Men in Black"? No, not at all. But if there had to be one, then it's certainly a relief that it should be one as agreeable as this.

Too well-made and well-acted to be entirely cute -- but the result is fairly tepid in comparison to the overheated highlights of Burton's career.

For a ripped-from-reality film about love and death and family strife in the face of the war in Afghanistan, Brothers is awfully artificial.

Passingly engaging. But you emerge from the film knowing as much -- or, indeed, as little -- as when you went in, and that's not exactly what documentary filmmaking is all about.

Miscast, constricted, loose in tone and meandering in intent, it has far fewer moments of inspiration than unintended laughter.

It's professional, smart, quick-footed and snappy -- enviable traits in both a prizefighter and a nice little B-movie.

Distinct from others of its lowly stripe because of the credibly real-feeling performances by much of its youthful ensemble.

Freaknomics is breezy, but you can't help but think it belongs on TV, where the filmmakers would have gotten more time with their subjects and the tone mightn't seem so forced.

Heart and verve in surfeit makes the film rise above its flaws often enough to win you over.

There's a daring to Everything Is Illuminated that commends it somewhat more than its achievement deserves.

There are hints lately that De Niro is trying to build a fourth, restorative act to his wayward film career, and he brings some real fire, without which Stone would be helpless.

A work of incompleteness, might-have-beens and moral subtleties befitting a filmmaker named Gray.

It's a heavy, moody film, mimicking in its form something of the mental state of its central character, which is a nifty trick. But the quality of the craft doesn't draw you in, nor does Gosling's aloof and inward performance.

Toothless, limp and clumsy.

A modest little caper film that satisfies chiefly because of its relative familiarity and lack of ambition.

The crudeness with which Mottola made "Superbad" suited that film; here, a similarly rudimentary technique detracts and distracts.

Isn't profound or dazzling or groundbreaking. But it's a pleasant, clever and sincere little romp, proof that you don't need to harbor heroic ambitions to create something satisfying.

It's an often lovely, constantly assured film that now and again burps forth a really remarkable vision. But it's also half-nuts -- maybe three-quarters.

Never quite catches fire. They take a crackerjack premise and a comely, committed leading lady and turn in a merely OK film.

Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist," "Coal Miner's Daughter") keeps things low-key and low-tech, which makes some of the cliched Bondisms a bit easier to swallow.

A clever and affecting thriller/comedy about a subject that absolutely cannot be written about in a daily newspaper or website that's for a general audience. The film is a giddy pastiche of styles -- slasher picture, faith film, social satire, teen romp, '50s atom bomb monster movie -- and it makes you laugh and squirm and grin in appreciation.

Space Jam is a high-energy comedy that mixes live action, animation, cornball storytelling and rowdy humor into an energetic, gee-whiz confection that will probably delight just about everybody. [15 Nov 1996, p.20]

It's fine ensemble work, but you nevertheless grow itchy wishing Roos had focused it a little better.

May not carry great emotional or intellectual weight, but, in a slim and fetching way, it's peachy.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.

The chief attraction of Albert Nobbs is the acting.

A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

It's gory, really gory, gratuitously and often inelegantly.

It may not add up to a narrative, but it's a fascinating compilation -- a mixtape you may want to hear more than once.

Only a shadow -- if an agreeable and harmless one -- of its predecessor film.

You're looking for the mammoth home run, and the film is merely a bloop single.

Despite the film's claim to be an anatomy of a pop culture craze, it's deeply parochial and has an opportunistic feel at its core.

It's the sort of sophomoric exercise that will be appreciated chiefly by viewers already convinced they love it even before they've bought their tickets.

If you've a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of Snow White and the Huntsman.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

For the most part, The Last Kiss engages and pleases with its shaggy earnestness.

Not much in The Man From Elysian Fields resembles life on Earth, but there are a few moments with Jagger that feel desperate and human -- stuff from another movie entirely, in other words.

For all its handsome decor, tasteful restraint and old-fashioned look-and-feel, is a stiff, lacking tension, sizzle, drama, energy, appeal and, finally, purpose.

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

The story, as so often in bad farce, treats them all as idiots, so it's almost impossible be engaged by anything other than the pretty rooms, gondolas and costumes.

Despite some arresting visual flourishes and Downey’s inherent likeability, it’s nearly incoherent both as cinema and as story. No, this isn’t your grandfather’s or your father’s Sherlock Holmes, but if theirs featured Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett in the lead, it was better by miles.

For good and ill, there is only one John Waters.

The pleasures of Buffalo Soldiers mainly come early on, before the film becomes a sloppy mixture of tones and story lines. Afterward, you're left mainly puzzled and looking for a way to wash a bitter aftertaste out of your mouth.

Hollywood used to make a fair number of films like The Escapist (sigh: remember grown-up dramas?), and it's a satisfying variation on a once-familiar theme.

What's left is a husk with all the superficial features of a Scream movie and none of the heart, brains, guts or laughs.

This is Hollywood Hornby: not terrible, but not worth crossing a busy street for, and nowhere near as memorable as what the Sox did last year.

It's a funny thing: On the one hand, you fault Taymor for going out of her way to create some of the more disposable sequences. On the other, you can forgive her: Who wouldn't get carried away given the opportunity she has been given here to play with one of the world's greatest song catalogs?

Both deeply weird and charmingly dear.

You can only kick against it so long before you succumb to its sheer energy and verve. Waters and company simply have too much fun for some of it not to reach out and touch you through the movie screen. If you can stand the pace, you'll likely leave happy.

The most famous and (naturally) least engaging film on the subject, John Sturges' melodrama about the friendship between Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Holliday (Kirk Douglas) is handsomely mounted and as dull as a dish. [02 Jan 1994, p.D06]

Offers a few laughs and a moment or two of drama, but it's finally more of a conceit -- and a familiar one -- than a film.

It's so by-the-numbers and clumsy that it will only appeal to that little sect that's managed to wear out their "Evil Dead," "Friday the 13th," "Halloween" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" DVDs.

The 155 minutes of Watchmen are studded with inspired spectacles: fights and flights and imaginary creatures and reworked bits of history.

In the end, it's a perfectly decent, perfectly vaporous film, pretty but slight, predictable but never incompetent.

Though the fiction doesn't quite equal the documentary in razzle-dazzle impact, it's a credible, handsome and engaging entertainment.

This Diary of a Wimpy kid is too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point.

Football, they say, is a game of inches, and so can be moviemaking, and Leatherheads is a completely charming film that comes a few inches from being a great one.

It's a lovely film that suffers from an overdetermined structure and a reliance on a sensationalized plot line that, quixotically, is ignored for long periods of time.

You ride along with a movie like this with a big, dumb grin on your face and no guilt. Not one of this summer's megabucks movies felt this frisky or fun.

The film, bleeding its central character of all shades but black and darkest gray, fails as both biographical chronicle and filmed narrative.

As the film builds toward a ludicrous finale, it poses a question: Foster is a far better actor than Charles Bronson, and Jordan a much better director than Michael Winner, so why is The Brave One so much less satisfying than "Death Wish"?

Strip off the superfluities, and it's a chamber play about people with nothing in common talking about what, at their core, they have in common. A film meant to remind us of our shared humanity mainly unites us in frustration with its thick, gummy progress.

Schumacher's depictions of street life are cartoonishly ludicrous and riddled with cliches -- a pair of garish hookers, for instance, can't be excused simply because one is played with engaging vigor by Paula Jai Parker.

With Paul Rudd as the would-be mocker and Steve Carell as the mockee, and all manner of new supporting characters and plot lines thrown in, and much less energy, delight, wit, humor and fun than the original was able to muster without any evident strain. There's the occasional bubble, I confess, but almost no delight.

For the most part it's a completely ordinary, completely familiar, professionally executed film. Nothing truly awful, but nothing unexpected, either.

If you've seen more films in your life than you have fingers, much of it will be forgotten by the time you floss the last popcorn skin from between your teeth.

Pure, light entertainment.

What it plays like is a trifling story strung out to great length without much narrative drive, tinged with some disturbing racial undertones.

In many ways, a smashing success. It's built not only on a casually clever script but on two expertly balanced performances.

Because there was anarchy and randomness in Thompson's life and work, you find it in Gonzo.

Wide-eyed, deadpan and, more often than not, note-perfect.

Carrey’s Scrooge is deliciously pinched and credible. As, indeed, is this film -- that is, when it feels like Dickens and not a theme park ride.

It's a brave film, particularly on the part of Allen, and in many ways an accomplished film. But it's so bookish and clever that you can never fully embrace it, even when you wish you could.

It's a handsome and spry movie, and it might even have managed to be a good one if there were even the least chance of believing that Wood, who can't weigh 145 pounds dripping wet, had the slightest chance of hurting anyone with one of his wee fists.

Somehow Lee fails to make it speak to us. His heart is in the right place, but like many of the crowd that swarmed Yasgur's farm, he has rather lost his head.

It's a handsome film with a palpable core of piety, but it isn't as successful in depicting secular events as spiritual ones.

A hodgepodge of bits cribbed from such films as "Centurion," "Apocalypto," "300" and "Gladiator."

Clumsiness follows clumsiness -- the acting, the staging, the details of the plot -- until you reach the point of cool indifference. There's a lot more wrong here than can be corrected in a small space in the newspaper.

'Bloodless' is the word for the whole enterprise.

The film is thus more of a technical showcase than a human drama. It's diverting enough until it gets dumb, but so strong from the start is the certainty that dumb is on the way that you can't get too vexed when it finally arrives.

For what's essentially a bad movie, Street Kings is fairly tight and energetic.

The film is sugary, simplistic and riddled with cliches -- yet it still manages to absorb you in its story and even carry you with some of its emotions.

Manages to tell the story in generally taut, credible fashion, rising frequently on the strength of a gallery of fine performances even when the screenwriting becomes ordinary and Schumacher's touch becomes, as so often, crude and obvious.

In a world in which "Borat" is a global brand, there's certainly a place for Tenacious D -- who, after all, are merely the greatest band in the world: Just ask 'em.

With its lackluster surfaces and thin core, his (Russell) film displays neither heart nor brains enough to earn its whimsy.

Overheated claptrap that takes an issue of vital national importance and turns it into an inept cartoon that emboldens the worst instincts in our national character.

There's plenty of blood and screaming and mayhem, and it's not particularly well-staged, shot or cut -- though I suppose actually caring about film craft denotes one as a spoilsport in this context.

A painlessly light introduction to Bollywood moviemaking, but it far too often feels like run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare.

Though the film occasionally rises to moments of genuine emotion and wit, it slips appallingly into corniness and hokum before coming to an abrupt and unconvincing end.

A seedy little movie with little in the way of theme, purpose, energy or wit, 'R Xmas is the latest slice-of-death drama from that earnest maestro of grub, Abel Ferrara.

The film is as one-sided and overstacked as anything her prosecutors dreamed up. And the craft of the thing is so pedestrian as to crawl.

There simply isn't enough footage of their protagonist just being Bill Hicks the guy and not Bill Hicks the comic. Surely he had some interviews or other artifacts they could have used along with all the comedy routines.

The result is a modestly accomplished, modestly agreeable, altogether forgettable film.

Alas, the drama surrounding him (Caine) rarely rouses anything but yawns.

The convoluted story is an excuse for comical tricks of the camera, fractures of chronology, acid punch lines and amusingly excessive performances. (In this latter category, Pitt, so deep into his character that you can smell him, wins the day gloriously.)

Though serious, well-crafted and handsome, lacks most of the pungency of the epitome of the genre, "Lawrence of Arabia."

Silly, simple and sophomoric -- and also intermittently hilarious and, surprise of surprises, directed with unexpected craft.

There are moments of levity throughout the film, but it’s made with pedestrian craft and feels more like a set-up and a series of vignettes than a compelling yarn. Chiefly, it demonstrates just how accomplished the Coens are even when their films seem offhanded and easy.

Director Ang Lee displays enormous verve and flair. He creates ingenious transitions between scenes, deploying split-screens in a clever variation on comic book panels and, as ever, drawing coolly impassioned performances from the cast.

Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.

Buscemi shoots with a cloudy, melancholic air that suits the material and does nothing to prettify the setting. But you can't sense any of the surprising energy or subversive wit that characterizes his best performances.

Among the things made vividly clear here is that Jeremy cannot act.

At times an uneasy mix of cold-eyed neorealism and soft-headed sentimentality, but after its initial struggles it presents itself as a moving film, made with loving craft, a painterly eye and luscious language.

Don't go if "Star Wars" isn't your bag: You'll only resist and resent it. But if you're a fan, it's hard to see how you'd be disappointed. Me? I can't wait for May 2005. "Episode III": Hot diggity!

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

A tiresome, didactic and, once the novelty of the graphics has worn off, charmless film.

It's breezy enough, though, as a romantic comedy. And the stakes at risk in it are more grown-up and weighty than those in most Hollywood fare. Like Allen himself, you could do worse.

Hilarious mixture of Greek tragedy and Aaron Spelling soap opera that spews nasty one-liners and winking '60 signifiers like a slot machine that's paying out.

Deeply strange, oddly shimmery movie.

Occasionally sloppy, with a finale so abrupt and incoherent that it feels like something is missing. But it's also pleasantly odd and truly funny, and it builds in strength as it goes along.

Crude both in form and content while at the same time capable of evoking explosions of shocked and, often, shamed laughter.

At once breezy and substantial, but it could have been more powerful if it were, paradoxically, sharper and blunter.

For the most part it's dull, bland and unsatisfying: a food-court version of home cooking.

A tug-of-war between a bracing vision of a truly infernal crime spree -- complete with engaging whodunit storytelling -- and a sometimes clumsy period drama.

For all its flaws, though, Bobby is still moving. Not so much with its indifferent characters, but rather with the overall mood of a common hope crushed into shapeless grief. That painful historical moment is worth revisiting, as is the image of the man whose death occasioned it.

A rousing and agreeable movie that resurrects a small but important episode in baseball history that parallels the larger history of the nation.

So sloppily and unabashedly sentimental that it can make you laugh and cry at the same time -- and often at the same things.

If an animated movie isn't competing with Pixar to dazzle the eye, it had darn well better hit the heart or the funny bone. With its wee little stinger, Bee Movie misses both.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

A strangely passive film, dutifully ladling out its bits of filmic wizardry and expanding Lewis Carroll’s fantastical mythos in a promising new direction without any palpable sense of glee or verve.

Had the film been more tempered in its textures, had Cassavetes chosen a surer attitude toward his subjects, it might have been devastating. As it stands, though, it's far more showy than substantial.

It more or less plays like a five-episode arc of the series, which is a strength and a weakness.

There's enough realism to keep a soccer buff like me happy, but the film is aimed at the young at heart, and I think they'll love it.

Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.

A contrived and sentimental melodrama, the film takes a promising premise and crushes it with mind-numbing repetition, sophomoric conveniences, plastic acting and the worst score, perhaps, ever heard.

The delicacy of the film might frustrate some audiences. As if watching a listless young relative do nothing in particular with his or her life, you sometimes want to shake these folks by the shoulders and tell them to get in gear. But then you realize that life has many gears and that moving slowly and somewhat aimlessly is no sin.

There's handmade and then there's amateurish. This, alas, is the latter.

They almost got it really right with Lucky Number Slevin, but they also almost got it horribly wrong.

The film has about five endings, each sillier than the next. Before it's over, the business end of that sniper rifle looks kind of inviting.

There’s quality throughout, but, visual verve aside, the enterprise is dull, heavy-handed and dispiriting.

Goes on too long and doesn't have much to say.

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

You should come out of a film like Apres Vous with your heart as light and fluffy as a souffle. But this farce, credited to four chefs, er, writers, is as heavy and leaden as meatloaf.

Developing late in the film, the romantic subplot has the effect of retarding the war story, stretching it out and adding unnecessary elements of sentimentality and sensationalism.

Rent isn't nearly as transporting a film as the Oscar-winning adaptation of "Chicago," but its energies and passions compensate for a lot of its deficiencies.

The Killer Inside Me isn’t for everyone, and even some people who think it’s their sort of thing might be offended. But it’s too well made to dismiss outright for its twisted cruelty. Maybe that’s a compliment, maybe not.

This is some of the finest acting you will see on-screen, maybe ever. Single-handedly, Washington turns The Hurricane from so-so to must-see.

Yes, you can enjoy bits and pieces along the way, more than a few, even. At the end of this journey, though, you feel more exhaustion and relief than catharsis or satisfaction.

Strictly for boys -- grown-up boys -- the more boyish and less grown-up the better.

Stunningly photographed, acted with occasional bravura and structured with exacting precision, it fails to sing more than once or twice, and then only briefly. [2 Feb 1996]

Sufficiently resembles the first film that the heartiest fans should be content.

The people behind Eight Legged Freaks were absolutely correct not to make it too loopy or too dark. But they ought to have made it too something. Real fun is never this tame.