Shawn Levy

Alas, while the verbiage bubbles, the plot slogs. You feel that there's a big pile of deleted scenes waiting to appear on the DVD -- and that a good bit of what's here should have joined it. Funny is good, but it requires sharp if it's to rise to true greatness.

It's a Ritalin-deprived sensibility, but it keeps you skating over the dull spots, in which the film unfortunately is rich.

An altogether astounding testimony to the band's longevity, vitality and verve.

Delirious. Hilarious. Absolutely one-of-a-kind.

The film holds charms for everyone but in a very unusual way: If some audience members feel cheated at the halfway mark, others will feel that the film is finally getting started. Nifty!

Richly frightening film.

It's a film for those people -- and they are legion -- who recoil in horror from the very notion of Christmas cheer. If you're in that crowd, and you know who you are, you'll love it.

It's got some great action sequences and is peppered with genuinely dazzling images. It's also subtly infused with Mann's favored themes of men-at-work and the high price of loyalty to duty. But it hasn't got sufficient meat to warrant its draggy length.

It's an agreeable, sometimes hilarious picture that looks at the world of comedy from many vantage points, chiefly the apex.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

A unique look behind the curtain, yes, but what's behind the curtain is almost unendurable. Just know that a bad guy got his comeuppance and you don't have to join the legion of his victims by watching it.

Disconnected and even disoriented, Assassination Tango is an atmosphere in search of a reason.

It’s not earth-shaking, but it’s diverting and polished.

In absorbing drama and staggering emotions, it renders an issue too often seen as black or white in heartbreaking gray.

This is Hollywood Hornby: not terrible, but not worth crossing a busy street for, and nowhere near as memorable as what the Sox did last year.

While it lacks the experimental razzle-dazzle of "Lola," the film is a similarly confident and fetching look at love, coincidence, tragedy and fate among the young, the bored and the beautiful.

The snaky cinematography pulls you through even when the writing doesn't, and the best performances keep you hoping that you'll feel the next one or the one after that just as powerfully.

It's an entirely conceived work of art, dark and hopeless and maybe even callous, but glittering and wonderful in its determination and in its craft.

Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.

Phantom may not be the best entry in the series, but it's the most technically accomplished, and it makes you as hungry for the next film as you've been for this one.

The film is somewhat scattered in construction, but it's an eye-opener.

It's Herzog-light, in a way -- more travelogue than dissection. But it's filled with small riches, not least of which is the director's amazing narration. Can't you just imagine him reading "Green Eggs and Ham"?

This Diary of a Wimpy kid is too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point.

For the most part, The Last Kiss engages and pleases with its shaggy earnestness.

Still, there's a decency at the film's core and a desire to do the predictable thing in a generally unpredictable fashion. Those traits make it impossible to reject "Happyness" out of hand.

It does a nice job of balancing stillness and action, but it hits weakly when it hits at all and falls short of the small grandness to which it aspires.

There is greatness in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York: titanic acting, violent poetry, moviemaking on a grand scale, a real air of daring. And there is flab in it as well, and confusion.

Because there was anarchy and randomness in Thompson's life and work, you find it in Gonzo.

Hilarious mixture of Greek tragedy and Aaron Spelling soap opera that spews nasty one-liners and winking '60 signifiers like a slot machine that's paying out.

Leaving aside politics, it's quite an achievement in art.

An engaging chronicle not only of a memorable game but also of an era that seems at once more innocent and combustible than our own.

With its sweet soul and sharp mind, it's one of the most heartening films of the year.

Something of an unforgettable experience.

Exciting spectacle of a master director reining in his abilities to create a work that is etched in acid, burnished in smoke.

Shot to shot, scene to scene, The Social Network nearly never puts a foot wrong or, really, does anything to make you feel less than compelled.

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.

The laughs in Adventureland aren't as outlandish as those in "Superbad," but they seem more based in experience and truth. You could want something more raucous, I suppose, but that wouldn't necessarily be an improvement.

It IS a film that deflates you too often, despite its efforts to impart a sense of soaring. In the end, where the Wild Things are is in your imagination and in Sendak’s pages, not in this big-hearted but ultimately faint simulation.

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

When the picture hits high gear, your qualms vanish one by one, and the script, credited to four writers, grows into its own.

Agreeably entertaining, peppered with rich laughs and very nice actorly touches.

Atmospheric and genial, and you've got to love the spectacle of a dog driving a car or parading around town like the unofficial mayor.

Is it a silly movie? At times, yes. Is it creaky and blatant and obvious? Quite often, absolutely. But should you miss it in this splendidly colorful restoration? Not on your life.

An attractive, charming film that has fun with its period settings, its goofy plot and its off-kilter performances.

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.

This is harsh and acid stuff, but it's exhilarating on a number of counts. For one thing, Jenkins moves with real authority between scenes of low life, tender intimacy and gripping violence; made on the cheap, her film has the iron certainty of the best art.

A tender and affirmative movie, if never a transporting one.

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

It's a good movie, mind you, with great bits in it, but it still falls short of rapture.

An exquisitely mounted and achieved film (shot, as it so happens, on Paris sound stages), it tells a story so protracted and uneventful that you wonder if writer-director Tran Anh Hung isn't pulling your leg. [08 Apr 1994, p.AE15]

It's awful. Awful. That's all. Keep walking. For the love of all that's holy. Keep. Walking.

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

There are nice bits throughout, and your heart can’t help but go out to these impassioned young lovers whom you know are doomed. But Bright Star is too often tarnished by the ordinary.

A dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring.

The problem here is we never get much more than the pretty, the quaint and the comfortingly familiar. There's a place for such stuff in the world, yes, but that doesn't make it art.

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.

In the main this is a muscular, exact and thrillingly cool movie.

Bouncing giddily from subplot to subplot and wisecrack to wisecrack, Mamet and company (and this is one of the truest ensemble works in years) satirize the slippery morals of the film racket and the surface-only decency of small town America.

Crowd-pleasing, feel-good stuff.

Alan Arkin is charm itself as the girls' dreamy father. Indeed, director Christine Jeffs coaxes only good work from the whole of her cast.

There’s a lot of hate in this film. But a lot of talent, too. It borders on despicable, but you can’t ignore it.

There's so much to say, but let this suffice: See it; it's a sweet taste of the best of what cinema can do. [16 Mar 2007, p.28]

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

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

While the film has visual verve, its faux-Fellini finale only underscores how remote, repetitive, uninvolving and contrived the whole enterprise is.

This one is shot, recorded and edited without so much as a pinch of craft -- it's one of the ugliest big studio films in a long while.

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.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

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

Mathieu Amalric, best known as an arms dealer in "Munich." In a role that strips him entirely of vanity and denies him virtually every expressive tool, Amalric makes a genuinely touching impression.

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

Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.

The convoluted story is an excuse for comical tricks of the camera, fractures of chronology, acid punch lines and amusingly excessive performances. (In this latter category, Pitt, so deep into his character that you can smell him, wins the day gloriously.)

Still, if it doesn't go down in film history as a key moment in Roberts' career, it might very well be remembered as a breakthrough for one of its trio of rising stars.

[Murphy] makes a thrillingly flesh-and-blood creature of Kitten, with her yearning, her droll, self-deprecating wit, her breathless romanticism and her puckish vibrancy. It's easily the most fun bit of screen acting this year, and as rich and nuanced as the lead in any drama.

It's a brave film, particularly on the part of Allen, and in many ways an accomplished film. But it's so bookish and clever that you can never fully embrace it, even when you wish you could.

Leconte's signature on the film alone makes it worth seeing.

As it stands, the film is more often self-absorbed than self-aware.

The film sometimes feels like the kid brother of “Fog of War,” Errol Morris’s far more compelling account of the mind of Robert McNamara, Ellsberg’s one-time boss. There’s reality and depth here, but a chill, too, that the filmmaking never quite manages to melt.

Too often monochromatic, programmatic and just plain lost.

Even with Paul Green's invective echoing in the back of your mind, nothing's quite so heartwarming as the sight of a young person blossoming.

One of the greatest films about the civilian experience of war ever made anywhere.

Ultimately well-made but only intermittently gripping.

It's a funny thing: On the one hand, you fault Taymor for going out of her way to create some of the more disposable sequences. On the other, you can forgive her: Who wouldn't get carried away given the opportunity she has been given here to play with one of the world's greatest song catalogs?

While his star, Jude Law, is infectiously watchable, Shyer's version of the material is tone deaf and splotchy.

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.

V for Vendetta puts its ideological intent first, and happens to provide smashing entertainment only as a vehicle for delivering its message.

A gorgeous, engrossing, utterly alien and fresh movie that has the human truth and impact of classic Greek myth and the overwhelming beauty and mastery of the greatest epic films.

At once spare and dense, chilly and thrilling, literate and visceral, it feeds in gray areas, teasing ambiguities and conundrums out of shadows and making strengths of inconclusiveness and uncertainty.

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

Creaks and groans with pat emotionalism and rickety storytelling.

It's a strange, uneven film, hilarious in moments and tin-eared in others, alternately subtle and hammer-handed, acid and dull, as schizophrenic as "Signs" and probably, like that film, best enjoyed in discrete chunks rather than as a whole that needs to be digested equally all at once.

Adventuresome, melancholy and exhilarating.

In all that empty space, the film gets a bit lost.

Children of Men has some magnificent moments of moviemaking and is thoroughly infused with just the atmosphere Cuaron has aimed for. But it's so streamlined in its storytelling and unvarying in its tone that it's more deadening than transporting.

There's little that will surprise anyone who's seen or read Grisham's work before, but it plays with slick competence, and there's that killer-diller showdown in the middle as a payoff.

If it happens to lose you as you wander through this strange land, at least it does so to the accompaniment of captivating visuals and music.

Passingly engaging. But you emerge from the film knowing as much -- or, indeed, as little -- as when you went in, and that's not exactly what documentary filmmaking is all about.

This isn't an ordinary film built on a remarkable performance; it's a poor one with a gem at its core. Penn can elevate it to mediocrity, but he cannot make it fly.

So shapeless, pointless and witless a film that it can be explained only by surmising that the people who made it were bombed at the time.

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

The film is filled with fascinating, static set-ups, beautiful but never fussy or artificial.

It's a wonderful debut, despite all the pain you may feel watching it.

Feast is set and was shot in Portland, and if nothing else it makes the case that we live in one gorgeous city.

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.

There are moments here so out of whack that you almost wonder if David Lynch isn't snickering somewhere at having fooled everyone into thinking someone else made the film.

Loaded with fine performances, traffics in audacious images and generally comports itself with a great deal more grace and gravitas than most movies with roots in fantastic themes.

Isn't a bad movie so much as one that feels like an amateur version of material from more accomplished works -- a movie that not only isn't sure what it really is but doesn't seem terribly much to care.

It's witty, gripping good fun.

A handsome picture, with lots of nifty borrowings from the "Star Wars" galaxy, but it's never particularly compelling as a story or as a vehicle for emotions, and when it's over you have a feeling of still waiting for it to get started.

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

Brick is kinda brilliant and kinda demented, and you love it for the former far more than you hold the latter against it.

Refreshing and disorienting movie.

A pure, sweet romance that moves along with bouncy comedy and a touch of grown-up realism and rue.

An engaging if overlong documentary.

It's part action film, part buddy movie, part love story, part political tract and, in sum, much less: a meandering, preachy, condescending mess that only occasionally bursts into life and even then at such a tepid level that you can hardly call it living.

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

Manages to tell the story in generally taut, credible fashion, rising frequently on the strength of a gallery of fine performances even when the screenwriting becomes ordinary and Schumacher's touch becomes, as so often, crude and obvious.

If you think the "Star Wars" prequels are a disease, then Serenity is the cure.

Tupac may not have been Denzel Washington as an actor, but he deserved a better sendoff than this film, which, by the time the silly climax rolls around, is barely worthy of Wesley Snipes. [8 Oct 1997, p.D04]

An impressive work in many regards -- the acting, the photography, the pace -- but it would've been even more so had Egoyan gone with his gut and been less indulgent of his brain.

Moves at a stately pace; it's a long film, to boot. But there's real drama and pathos in the story, in the blend of matter-of-factness and potential catastrophe, in the depiction of innocence imperiled.

In many ways, a smashing success. It's built not only on a casually clever script but on two expertly balanced performances.

Music aside, what finally puts Once over and makes it a film you can watch more than once is its slight but thoroughly credible realism.

In Almodóvar and Cruz we have a real collaboration of artist and inspiration that only seems to improve and deepen over time.

You can only kick against it so long before you succumb to its sheer energy and verve. Waters and company simply have too much fun for some of it not to reach out and touch you through the movie screen. If you can stand the pace, you'll likely leave happy.

This is Mel Brooks' finest hour. [28 Jan 2005, p.11]

It does a splendid job not only of introducing newcomers to a vital artist they might have missed, but of reminding rabid fans of Earle's stripe why they were infected to begin with.

Does nothing right and, blessedly, vanishes swiftly like the aroma of a nasty belch.

Moon doesn't arrive with a train of ballyhoo, but its quiet charms easily drowns out the clatter of bigger, dumber pictures.

Full of life, wit, smarts, thrills and sheer gratifying entertainment that it launches the mind on a stream of merry somersaults.

After a cheeky, campy start, The Ninth Gate leaves you with a bitter and dull aftertaste.

We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

Audacious, gorgeous and unique.

With so much potential, The Valet is disappointingly flat and wan, with few of the moments of cringe-and-laughter-inducing mortification that are Veber's stock in trade.

Yet another witless, listless outing by the alleged comic minds behind such dubious treats as "The State," "Stella" and "Wet Hot American Summer."

A modest little caper film that satisfies chiefly because of its relative familiarity and lack of ambition.

The sheer volume of amazing things that del Toro is able to mine from his unconscious and render plausibly on the screen is remarkable. Hellboy II feels pretty sequel-y, as these things go, but there's a lot in it that has no precedent of any kind, anywhere, ever. That stuff makes it worthwhile.

Never dull visually, but it's certainly monomaniacal and heartless thematically.

A genial and watchable film.

Tired, clumsy and appallingly ugly to look at.

Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.

The liveliest thing here is the keen sense of regret you feel at seeing two TV icons reduced to supporting characters in a lame movie that trades on their good names.

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.

It's old-fashioned, sometimes accomplished, syrupy and, at its intermittent best, absorbing.

Red isn't edifying, ennobling, or artful. It's just an utterly satisfying combination of big kicks, cheap thrills and real laughs.

The story is slight and somewhat less than engaging, despite nice supporting turns from Emily Blunt and Ricky Jay.

Sirk freighted this material with surprisingly delicate art: gorgeous photography and staging, a fluency of camera work rarely seen even in A-level movies, and an earnest tone evident in the music, dialogue and acting. [17 Oct 1999]

Like a dog walking on its hind legs across a freshly waxed floor -- awkward, slow, deliberate, seeking approval -- the action thriller Reign of Fire gets from start to finish, somehow, without tumbling into complete disaster.

Teems with pot smoke, body parts and profane outbursts -- you ride a giggly wave throughout, jokes and turn-ons and shocking sights alternating in buoyant fashion.

Incomplete, shrill and smug.

It's a handsome film, and made with verve, but too often the tone wobbles and far, far too many of its jokes hit with a splat.

This film insists on being taken on its own terms -- the sort of demand, in other words, that defines the best art.

Johansson, fittingly, is the focus. In her face, as in the faces of Vermeer's handful of captivating subjects, the viewer intuits whole stories and worlds.

The film is a pleasure that doesn't rank with Allen's best but satisfies far more than most American comedies.

A contrived and sentimental melodrama, the film takes a promising premise and crushes it with mind-numbing repetition, sophomoric conveniences, plastic acting and the worst score, perhaps, ever heard.

While the urban texture and the unapologetic work of Basinger impart a sophisticated air to what is essentially a downtrodden-teen-makes-good film, that is, finally, just what 8 Mile is. That's not a bad thing, but it's nothing to rap home about, either.

With Paul Rudd as the would-be mocker and Steve Carell as the mockee, and all manner of new supporting characters and plot lines thrown in, and much less energy, delight, wit, humor and fun than the original was able to muster without any evident strain. There's the occasional bubble, I confess, but almost no delight.

It's often flat and dull, and it can be heavy-handed with the little acorn-that-will-yield-the-famous-oak bits that so often dot biographical films about the youthful lives of famous figures.

Suffers from sludgy pacing, flat writing and acting, and a strange and puzzling fondness for scatology and coarse language.

One of the most vital and strangely gripping films in recent years, a thriller more opaque, involving and realistic than just about anything that Hollywood is capable of.

Filled with nasty, nasty stuff.

Until it goes off the rails in its final 10 or 15 minutes, Wendigo, Larry Fessenden's spooky new thriller, is a refreshingly smart and newfangled variation on several themes derived from far less sophisticated and knowing horror films.

The problem here is that while some of Mann's work is overwhelmingly great, the sum of it simply never compels.

In exchange for a small piece of your life, you receive an infinity.

A forehead-poundingly bad picture.

It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.

It offers the small delight of watching a master step back from more ardent work to put together a diverting miniature. And in the scheme of things, that's actually more of an accomplishment than it might sound. Minor Mozart, after all, is still pretty darned good.

Made with brisk energy, shot with Powell's limitless ingenuity, written with fairy-tale echoes and steeped in a love for northern Scottish folkways, it's apt to become a favorite film the first time you see it. [02 Mar 2001]

Feels as true as a documentary, as painful as a blow to the heart.

Don't go if "Star Wars" isn't your bag: You'll only resist and resent it. But if you're a fan, it's hard to see how you'd be disappointed. Me? I can't wait for May 2005. "Episode III": Hot diggity!

The result is a true conundrum: You can't say for sure if a scam is in play or if a genuine genius is being smeared. And the brilliance of the film is that it doesn't let you feel secure in choosing either side.

Overheated claptrap that takes an issue of vital national importance and turns it into an inept cartoon that emboldens the worst instincts in our national character.

You can learn about the grand shifts of history from Persepolis, but you learn about a handful of lives as well.

Pierce never pulls these pieces together satisfyingly, and the result is a botched effort to put a human face on a genuinely alarming situation.

It's a testament to Van Sant's way with actors that the performances are better than the lines and that the film tugs undeniably at the heart as the awful finale falls. But a lack of poetry and freshness in the writing nags.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

Despite a strong start, Only Human loses its grip on all that merry energy and comes to feel more like a sitcom than like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" or "Some Like It Hot," to name just some of its forebears.

A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.

It's a goofball of a movie and a throwaway, but it's also completely free of self-import and the slightest hint of sentiment -- a perfect light entertainment that's guaranteed to launch itself as a franchise.

The script doesn't give Bigelow enough human stuff to balance the mechanical. For good or ill, like so many other submarine thrillers before it, K-19 is more about the machine than the men.

Only a shadow -- if an agreeable and harmless one -- of its predecessor film.

Still, when a director of his pedigree and years brings so much life to the screen, inconsistency hardly seems to matter.

Soderbergh's experiments are gripping -- the photography, music, wobbly chronology and so on -- but the movie is more of a curiosity than anything else.

Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist," "Coal Miner's Daughter") keeps things low-key and low-tech, which makes some of the cliched Bondisms a bit easier to swallow.

What we've got is a mixed though certainly entertaining bag.

The issues the film raises are truly profound and discomfiting whether you work in the media or just consume it.

Mendes has extraordinary gifts, but he has leveled them at the Wheelers like a firing squad. Strangely, he evinced no particular moralizing agenda when making films about the mob or the military. But put ordinary people in his sights and he's venomous. It's unbecoming -- and it should be worked out in private, not in a movie theater.

A truly powerful, masterful work.

You should come out of a film like Apres Vous with your heart as light and fluffy as a souffle. But this farce, credited to four chefs, er, writers, is as heavy and leaden as meatloaf.

This is a deeply felt work of art in the form of a big, brassy movie-movie.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of those fat substitutes used by snack food manufacturers: the finished product looks all right but the taste is off, and the aftereffects are embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Freaknomics is breezy, but you can't help but think it belongs on TV, where the filmmakers would have gotten more time with their subjects and the tone mightn't seem so forced.

Gets its hooks into you in ways that are hard to explain or to ignore.

Buscemi shoots with a cloudy, melancholic air that suits the material and does nothing to prettify the setting. But you can't sense any of the surprising energy or subversive wit that characterizes his best performances.

Space Jam is a high-energy comedy that mixes live action, animation, cornball storytelling and rowdy humor into an energetic, gee-whiz confection that will probably delight just about everybody. [15 Nov 1996, p.20]

Beneath its frantic surfaces, Narc is terribly ordinary, built on a mystery that will puzzle only those who have never watched a TV cop drama.

If you might wish the film got deeper under the skin of the characters, you also feel grateful for the fact that you'll never get closer to them than watching it.

You can't help but feel a connection to Downey and Foxx and, to a lesser degree, a rooting interest in the story. But try as Wright might, he never figures out a way to bring us in -- much less manipulate us -- cinematically.

One of the great marvels of the medium, a film that you cannot miss if you hope to be literate in cinema -- or, indeed, if you seek acquaintance with the great works of modern times.

As it stands, this is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.

Moves with terrific energy, alternating riveting action sequences with intimate material in a manner that's pure Woo.

Stirring and haunting.

Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.

A kick to the heart, and Swank is a marvel. Any problems in the storytelling are more than balanced by her wholly committed work.

Stunningly photographed, acted with occasional bravura and structured with exacting precision, it fails to sing more than once or twice, and then only briefly. [2 Feb 1996]

There's real craft here and a vision that's nothing if not unique.

Clever but, alas, largely forgettable.

A fascinating, masterly, frustrating film, it only passingly touches on the heart and sharpness of Anderson's previous work and rather brings to mind the famous complaint of the emperor in "Amadeus": "too many notes."

Icy and elegant, complex and gripping.

So filled with riches that it seems a bit unfair to single out Szabo and Fiennes, no matter how outstanding their work.

Although the plot might sound like the stuff of a soap opera, a smart script, strong performances and an ideologically determined lack of filmmaking niceties result in a shattering, deeply felt work.

For all its flaws, though, Bobby is still moving. Not so much with its indifferent characters, but rather with the overall mood of a common hope crushed into shapeless grief. That painful historical moment is worth revisiting, as is the image of the man whose death occasioned it.

Moore's movies may not always be fully accurate in their details, but they almost always spur vital national conversation.

It's surreal, erotic, creepy, frustrating, absorbing, transporting and torturous in the way only a Lynch film can be.

Affleck is in the middle, engaging in derring-do, pitching woo to Uma Thurman and making the whole thing come off as less exciting than it should have been.

The result is a modestly accomplished, modestly agreeable, altogether forgettable film.

Having heard tell of its wonders for decades, I found the actual movie less transporting than I'd been led to expect. It's clearly a brilliant debut.

I Am Legend has one undeniably cool thing about it, namely the vision of Manhattan as a semi-feral wasteland.

Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.

Frighteningly, grippingly real.

A thriller that goes from pretty good to absolutely ludicrous in the time it takes one actor to recite about four sentences of dialogue.

The result is typical Mendes: accomplished, calculated and uncommitted. Maybe it's because his talent comes to him too easily, but I've yet to sense his heart and soul in a film.

The protagonists have subsumed their identities to the collective, and they rise and fall in their hearts as the collective prospers or suffers. Their effort is absurd, but their intent is pure. Watching it evokes a combination of pity for their naive idealism and awe at Melville's uncanny brilliance.

It's no insult to the rest to say that this is one of those films that sells itself on the strength of a single performance.

If the movie is largely familiar, its passion and craft are noteworthy.

There are flashes here of a more involving movie, but, as if living up to the cliches associated with her name, filmmaker Lee is content to sit quietly and let others talk.

Oacks more heat, acid, danger and drama into its brief running time than most films of nearly double the length.

A slick and exciting film

One of those gratifyingly nostalgic works of art that accept the present day but remind us, as well, that the past wasn't necessarily worse.

Strictly texture, a romp over the surfaces of Andy Kaufman's life with not much insight into its core.

Funny and appalling, doting and possessive, petty and selfless, raunchy and righteous, Jeannie is the pivot of the charming, garish, somewhat overwritten Australian comedy Introducing the Dwights.

There's a touch of second-rate playwriting about it that imparts a flattened feel to the end of an otherwise crackerjack picture.

It's a thriller, and a large one, and it's got a couple of terrific performers in the center.

Wonderful performances and the director's continual inventiveness make Junebug a particularly promising first feature.

Capable but not transporting, never unraveling the mystery of its hero's genius or, worse, making us care enough to look deeper.

It's got a bust-out performance from Eckhart that's worth remembering.

If you're not a Beasties fan, you'll get almost nothing out of this after about two minutes. But if you like the band and want to see them rock hard in front of their oldest fans, it's a tasty treat.

Effortless fun: It plays like a giddy horror movie with its laughs wrapped in couture gowns.

There are real thrills here, especially as the Bang Bang starts touring and becomes a minor sensation. But it's a little too hermetic and goopy and humorless and cool to invite you to wrap your arms around it. The Howes shared a single liver, but what this film version of their lives needs is more heart.

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

If an animated movie isn't competing with Pixar to dazzle the eye, it had darn well better hit the heart or the funny bone. With its wee little stinger, Bee Movie misses both.

The 155 minutes of Watchmen are studded with inspired spectacles: fights and flights and imaginary creatures and reworked bits of history.

Hollywood used to make a fair number of films like The Escapist (sigh: remember grown-up dramas?), and it's a satisfying variation on a once-familiar theme.

It's as full a movie as you can imagine -- exhausting and exhilarating and continually fascinating.

What it plays like is a trifling story strung out to great length without much narrative drive, tinged with some disturbing racial undertones.

Starts with a flourish, staggers along for a bit and finally collapses -- even die-hard De Palma fans, will be left hungry.

A man can be a treasure just as a work of art can be, and O'Toole is one of the handful of living film actors worthy of a museum of his own. Venus would make a brilliant final exhibit.

It's a yawn for the most part, depending on dull characters and uninvolving twists.

A worthy and compelling look at a unique and essentially American figure.

Miyazaki is a genius, and this film is a masterpiece; go see it.

May not be as successful as it is ambitious, but you could do worse than to spend a few hours there.

Its got a deliciously audacious and cheeky tenor.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

I reckon that for everyone who's enthralled by the film there will be others who wish they'd heard about it rather than seen it.

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

Among the film's highlights are an interview with Grand Wizard Theodore, who is generally uncontested in his claim to have invented the idea of scratching vinyl.

Dick works best as a catalog of style: It's the story and the acting that are the window dressing.

It's a purely winning film.

Director Steven Shainberg makes something draggy out of something that wants to be light. It's got wit, but it's also earnest, and in proportion to those two traits it wins and loses you.