Shawn Levy

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 all passes quickly, as far as that goes, but when it’s over it passes entirely. And something that sells for a premium price ought to linger.

They have been true to a classic source, using Adams' language and finding just the right actors, sets and costumes to flesh out his vision. Only the most persnickety cultist won't appreciate the effort.

Salt is hooey, but in a medium in which hooey is the stock-in-trade, it's effective hooey, and hooey with admirable craft, and, most of all, breezy hooey.

Offers a lot of laughs, a heartwarming core.

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.

A stunning film.

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

Feels like a tonic for its makers, a means of clearing the palate after a series of rich meals. For viewers who appreciate risks, it should be just as refreshing.

(If) you're one of those killjoys who demands logic, coherence and a semblance of human life from a movie, this one will leave you cold.

It's a film with a silly story, and it's been dubbed laughably into English. Yet it's a transporting bit of fluff, full of zest, miraculous physicality and cheeky humor.

An ugly and insipid film.

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.

A terrible, terrible movie. Its creators have a swell idea at the core, a wonderful leading lady, and several stalwart comic players in support, and they make of all of that a picture with the wit of an armpit fart, the verve of a boxwood shrub, and the appeal of a long night in an ER waiting room.

Built on an absolutely marvelous idea but manages to make only about two-thirds of a good movie of it.

A purely cinematic experience. You've got to see it, in other words, to understand.

Almost more valuable as a piece of foreign policy than as the highly accomplished work of cinema it is.

That it's based on a true spying case seems almost incidental. The heart of the picture is the human drama.

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.

Bounces along magnetically even when the storytelling goes a bit flat.

As a brief introduction to Belle and his amazing gifts, District B 13 is a treat. But as a movie its feet are dully planted on the ground.

It's a movie about having a sibling and all of the pain, joy, love and anxiety that that entails: a movie, in other words, for almost everyone.

A murky, turgid work that is no doubt exactly the film Malkovich wished to make but is so indirect and affected as to border on incoherent.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

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.

They were fast, they were sexy, they were clean, they were the future -- and they're already gone.

Like a picture postcard vision of his life and work: absolutely accurate as far as it goes but not too keen on looking too close for fear of uncovering anything untoward.

Burstyn is astonishing, forsaking all vanity to make silly biddy Sara a fully dimensioned human being.