Shawn Levy

Like "In the Bedroom," the film is studded with brilliant acting, and it's all rendered with gorgeously fluent technique. The result is a film that skirts cruelty and easy satire for deep, troubling realities -- a nearly thorough triumph, in short.

This edition -- clean and tight as Scott would have it -- presents a strong case for Alien as both the greatest horror film and the greatest science-fiction film ever made.

It's a terrible picture: ugly and illogical and clumsily staged and peppered with crude, witless humor.

Marnie is merely a marginal work by director Alfred Hitchcock, meaning, naturally, that it's superior to all but the best works of almost every other director ever. [02 Jun 2000]

You'll gasp appalled and laugh outraged and possibly, watching the spectacle of a promising young lad treading desperately in a nasty sea, shed an errant tear.

In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.

At one and the same time it feels like a decent-but-not-great film of his '70s period and a perky and tart entry in his modestly successful revival in the last half-decade. Neat trick.

It’s not a great film, but parts of it are outstanding.

A frequently transporting depiction of the early and middle life of Ray Charles, the film soars on remarkable performances, a convincing sense of time and place, and, of course, the glorious music for which Charles was rightly billed as The Genius.

There are bits of this film that titillate, undeniably, but mainly you wait for the comic to bring out the big guns, and then he leaves you feeling more teased than tickled.

If there's a calmer, more self-collected star out there, then he or she has hidden the fact pretty well.

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 highlights are the writing and the performances. There are real laughs to be had -- several scenes end on sharp, witty shards of dialogue. And whenever Eckhart, Northam or Ehle is the focus, the thing soars.

In the end, the intelligence of the dialogue and crack acting are wrestled to the ground by the zealous politics, the formulaic narrative and a wan and flaccid air unusual from the reliably nifty Parker.

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.

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

A movie that tells -- or rather, circles -- the story of the band's formation and abortive career.

In the wake of everything we've seen on TV and in movies in recent decades, it's amazing that something as harmless as language can still stupefy us. As The Aristocrats demonstrates, there is real humor in the confrontation of taboos.

Marcus, like the real-life Jackson, survives being shot nine times. But this film is dead on arrival.

It's a film that can leave you on the fence. There's great facility with non-pro actors, with unusual locations, with both intimate and epic-scale scenes. Yet at the same time, Takata's reserve overwhelms the picture and makes its efforts to elicit emotions seem clumsy.

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

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.

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

While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.

If The Good Thief isn't up to the work that inspired it, it's nevertheless fresh and distinct, a shot of citrus in a movie season far too often tasting of pablum.

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.

It romps along with infectious good humor but continually imparts a sense that underneath all the surreal frivolity lurks a scathing allegory of modern-day Balkan troubles.

I give the slight edge to the first movie because I prefer Boyle's craft to Fresnadillo's, but the action is more intense here, and I greeted the thought of a third film -- virtually assured in the closing shots -- with a little yip of "Yes!" Likely you will, too.

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.

It's exactly the film Jarmusch wanted to make, but it's also smug, excruciating, borderline pointless. You could call it a deliberate effort to invert the conventions of the thriller; you could also call it, more rightly, a self-deluded disaster.

Best laugh at the movies all autumn.

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.

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]

For all the inactivity and resistance that mark the plot, there's beauty in the filmmaking and a kind of dazzling inevitability to the unwinding of the tale.

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

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

It's a raw and honest film, and it keeps its feet firmly on the ground, even as The Ram flies through the air to deliver -- or receive -- another beating in the squared circle of life.

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.

Something like a finely-written and -acted soap opera. That isn’t death, but it’s less like life than you’d hope.

It's nonetheless a fascinating, thirst-inspiring, thought-provoking journey. Just one request for the lengthier version: fewer shots of dogs' swimsuit areas, please.

A vile, stupid and ugly movie lacking utterly in pep, thrills, humor, finesse or morals, a dissipating waste of time, money and human resources.

Mournful and moody, crepuscular and poetic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns one of cinema's most rehearsed tales into a dreamy inquiry into the nature of sadism, hero-worship and betrayal.

The Road walks a tremendously daring and delicate line between inspiration and horror, and it does so not only in the events it depicts but in its very air and atmosphere. It was unforgettable on the page, and it impresses equally, or at least it does so remarkably often, on screen.

The longer it goes on, the less your mind settles. You may not believe in a hell in which a lake of fire rages, but we live in a nation and at a time when many people have little lakes of fire in their heads and hearts. Kaye is determined that we never forget that truth or its price.

If you thought "Boogie Nights" blew it in its final third, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Emotionally brutal, ferociously acted, crafted with unflagging expertise and relentlessly locked in its vision of human darkness, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is as grim and despairing as any tragedy by Sophocles or Shakespeare.

Reigns as the most assured, provocative film so far this year.

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

A movie of such rank stupidity and appalling taste.

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.

To follow up his superb "The Host," director Joon-ho Bong has crafted a remarkable film about love, faith, determination, guilt, and honor, a full-blooded, constantly inventive movie that enthralls, entertains, horrifies and never lets go its grip.

The film does leave you with the lingering regret that you missed a hell of a good party. It is, as the kids used to say, a trip.

A handsome work of impressive sweep dotted with fine performances. It offers a few fine moments of wit, fear and emotional intimacy. But it rarely pulses with vital life.

If it touches up against the syrupy at a very few moments, it's nevertheless consistently clear-eyed and convincing.

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

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.

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.

There's no reason to actively dislike the film, but that's not enough, not at today's ticket prices. Just because you're not despicable, after all, doesn't mean you're the pick of the litter.

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

In many respects, it's Kurosawa's most sumptuous film, a feast of color, motion and sound: Considering that its brethren include "Kagemusha," "The Seven Samurai" and "Dersu Uzala," the achievement is extraordinary. [01 Dec 2000, p.26]

The animation is even more mind-blowing, if that's possible. The characters and objects seem even more palpable and real than last time. There's a thickness to bodies of the human characters and an amazing attention to detail throughout.

Made with disarming craft and cunning. Intermixed in the memories it leaves of horror and disgust are glimpses of impressive technique and savvy psychological insight.

If you loved his (Gilliam) older work -- and if you can stand the twinge of pain that beholding the lamented Ledger will surely evoke -- it’s worth a visit.

Gets under your skin without you quite being able to say when or how. It has the tact to let you draw yourself in to it.

Mostly it's inspiring: to think that a man of Antonioni's years and talents is still capable of producing such vital work.

The problem is that so little in this version of All the King's Men speaks to the here and now or even speaks clearly. It feels like a repertory exercise -- and not a very successful one at that.

The notions of sacrifice, patriotism, race and self-identity are compellingly questioned, and the battle sequences are realized with stirring intensity.

Fuqua has made three films before his newest, Tears of the Sun, and they've all begun well enough but then collapsed under the weight of his heavy-handed visual technique and his indifference to plot, character and logic.

The best thing about the film is the acting of the guys.

Lacks the poetic and romantic resonance of "Crouching Tiger," but it's got kicks aplenty -- of both the physical and the sensational kind -- and it lands them again and again.

Sometimes the best way to relate history is to tinker with it and make it feel like a living thing.

The result is a genuinely pleasing kung fu movie that kids and grown-ups can enjoy.

Films don't get more essential than this.

Handsome, professional and dutiful, but it never feels inspired.

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

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

Some truly memorable moments, but they come early and, as the film wears its way along, become increasingly hard to call to mind.

With the grounded performances, a pleasant look and feel and the brains to refrain from anything more than a quiet portrait of life, The Housekeeper makes for the sort of well-seasoned meal that's so refreshing in the summertime.

Amazing as Penn is, Morton is his equal, creating a complete personality out of gestures, glances and unadorned bits of actorly business.

All the hammy acting and meandering storytelling in the world can't drown the essential appeal of the story.

It's so full-blooded, smart, sexy, tense and absorbing, so cleverly written and shot and cut, so filled with superb acting and music, so perfect in its closing moment, that it surely ranks with the most impressive debuts in world cinema.

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.

Washington can't save a picture that spends so much time worrying about a heart that it loses its head.

There's no doubt that Tarsem's a visionary director. Now he needs to envision a worthwhile script for himself.

It's dull and crude and silly and without a lick of quality.

Scott's cast is like a grand orchestra with various performers filling the roles of instruments: Thewlis a wise, ironic oboe; Neeson a stout cello; Norton a slightly battered flute. As it happens, the piece they're playing is a piano concerto and the keyboard -- that is, Bloom -- isn't big enough to match.

Isn't sexy, funny, smart or fun.

If Look Both Ways has a familiar form, this sort of emphasis on humanity, with which the film refreshingly pulses, is rare.

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").

About as good a movie as you could have hoped for. Really good. Hole-in-one good.

And that ultimately may be the problem with the Polanski version: by bringing Oliver forward, you push the drama backward.

A carnival of stupid coincidences, paper-thin characterizations, and inept staging, lighting and montage.

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

Even though it largely succeeds in putting a civil face on some unpalatable material, it lacks the heat and suppleness of the best Shakespeare on film.

The resulting film is a labor of love with all the strengths and weaknesses you might expect from such a designation.

It's not life-changing stuff, but it's brisk and clever and funny and avoids some of the predictable pitfalls that hobble so many films of its ilk.

If you've never seen any anime, set your sights on fun and leave your hard nose for drama and fine dialogue at home.

The film's best sequences -- the troubles of the young woman -- are gems adrift in a sea of Jell-O.