Shawn Levy

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.