Shawn Levy

There's plenty of freshness and skill here, both in front of the camera and behind it.

Something of an unforgettable experience.

The highlights of The Cooler -- the portrait of Bernie-as-schlub, the ecstatic union of two losers, the depiction of shadowy old Vegas confronted with its sanitized corporate future -- are superb. You can easily live with the rest to get to them.

There are laughs and moments of pain and many instances of embarrassing (and deeply human) behavior throughout, but there's also delicacy and grace.

The film moves with strange, creepy energy and is populated by characters who delicately walk a line between charm and grotesquerie. It's a treat.

The result is a totally absorbing and entertaining film, one of the best historical dramas from Hollywood in many years.

It doesn't break ground like "Seven" or "Fight Club"; it's not a thrill ride like "Panic Room." But it's a mature, thoughtful and full-bodied movie that compensates for the demands it makes with the rewards of craftsmanship, rigor, skill and art.

Never quite as resonant as Spielberg's earliest "Indiana Jones" films, in which, for all the clamor, it often feels like something real and vital and human is at stake. But at its best, this film is as joyful as anything in those movies, and that is something of a movie miracle.

The chief problem with Shadow Boxers is that it's too short.

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

Brilliantly colored and passionately acted, Moolaade teems with incidents, personalities and drama and is never less than vivid.

This impressive film feels more like a display, if an often dazzling one, than a genuine experience.

A thoroughly credible and deeply entertaining biopic about a titanically famous film personality.

Filled with personal vignettes and famous-people testimonials, the film has a few too many narrative digressions, but it's a moving portrait of all-too-human personalities and the dogged optimism that keeps them going.

As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it's a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.

Wilson's account is enormously self-serving and self-aggrandizing, but the film makes his ego a virtue and a running joke.

You can't help but share the feelings, many of them subrational, that coarse through the soldiers as they live a hellish year in a hellish place.

You can find movies with better scripts, direction, acting, songs, and jokes than The Muppets -- but you won't find one that's nearly so much fun.

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

It might have poked a bit more into Clash's personal story, but as a story of man and puppet it's grand.

They've made a movie-movie of Sweeney Todd, and if you've got the stomach and ear for it, you'll be grateful.

It's a sports story, yes, because without baseball there's no Beane. But it's far more a tale of a man's triumph over himself and his doubters. And you don't need math to make sense of that.

For a picture about a stalker, Chuck and Buck is rather sweet, funny and winning.

It is well-acted and written with a rigorous effort to skirt cliche, and it has the savor of real life throughout.

It's refreshing that something once considered terribly new and modern can still feel contemporary three decades later.

Refreshing and disorienting movie.

The result is a gripping film about a subject almost too good to be true.

Ferrific fun and rousing proof that there’s still vital life in an aging master filmmaker.