Shawn Levy

Price of Glory won't make anyone forget "Raging Bull" or "Rocky."

Is it dreary, stingy and strained? Well, yes: it's Jane Eyre, after all. But it's also robust and full-blooded and forceful: it's Jane Eyre, after all.

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

The result is minor Gilliam: still more engaging than most moviemaking, but nonetheless a letdown after such a long wait.

Fact is, Starting Out is pretty dry stuff as a movie, even as it's enlivened by vivid acting.

It's a film that's at once too much and not enough, laughable and groovy, dead serious and a total joke. And I mean no disrespect by any of that.

It's a breezy and charming film in all, well-acted, playful and filled with real joie de vivre.

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

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.

You can imagine a better adaptation of The Hunger Games, but you can much more easily imagine a far worse one, and all in all that's not a bad outcome.

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

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.

Alas, Robbins is far more interesting than Cruise, and you wonder what the film would have been like if their roles were reversed -- if Robbins were the loser in search of redemption and Cruise the agitated freak in the basement.

The actors are all perfect and yet not. Christie, most obviously, is simply too gorgeous, even when she's meant to be rattled and lost; Pinsent is too credibly stolid; Dukakis never vanquishes an impression of sourness. These may be quibbles, but they add up.

Frequently gory, often talky, almost always watchable, never quite thrilling, Gladiator is a cold and big film that mixes solid acting with cheesy digital effects and sweaty action with stultifying chatter.

It's amusing enough and breezy enough not to disappoint. But it never dazzles or challenges or truly delights. And that leaves me fairly certain that whatever Bart Simpson would say about it probably couldn't be printed in a family newspaper.

Gives us a fresh way to think not only about movies but about the town in which so many of them are made, and in that regard it's kind of amazing.

Lebanon isn't as resonant as the haunting mix of autobiography and animation in "Waltz with Bashir," which dealt with the same war. Still, the film's fresh craft promises more from a director who turns the tiniest possible of settings into a sobering metaphor for the madness of a larger world.

It has a dickens of a time telling a story.

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 lot of what happens is gross, puerile and gratuitous, granted, but Helms and Galifianakis are truly funny in offbeat fashion, and the script allows Phillips room for some brilliant slapstick. You will not be ennobled. But you will be entertained.

It's a melodrama, but played with rigorous and surehanded spareness, and it never panders, even as it gets a mite hysterical near the end.

Clever and charming.

It's not great moviemaking -- it isn't as accomplished or funny as the best of the Farrelly brothers' films, say -- but it's got real appeal.

It starts as clever, but it ends in real feeling.

It's hard to overestimate what a job of work was accomplished here to keep this from being a catastrophe. But The Lake House, despite its dubious foundation, proves surprisingly sturdy.

It's best seen as a breezy entertainment and a reminder of how potent some of these performers -- many of whom are dead -- were in their primes.

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]