Shawn Levy

Balanced precariously between a horror film and a war movie, but it's so sly and assured that you can't dismiss the allegorical, even satirical undertones that Cortés teases out of Sparling's conceit.

Hardcore might have been confused and crude, but it was never guilty of being tepid, like this film.

Fight Club -- cue the blurb machine -- is a knockout.

Franco is rather astounding, looking and sounding plausibly like Ginsberg and talking about complex ideas in a genuinely relaxed tone.

Mikhalkov plays the jury foreman, allowing himself a bit of business that eventually erases itself, amounting, effectively, to nothing. Alas, too much of this splashy film is just like that.

It's played with real zest and energy, and if you can stand the heat it gives off it may charm you despite yourself.

If you feel, like me, kinship with this essential building block of music, you owe it to yourself -- and to the Ramones -- to see this film.

This is a grim, often lifeless tale played with such humorless intensity that watching it is far more like an endurance contest than a love affair.

A handsome, somewhat draggy and abrupt film that's more memorable in snippets than as a whole.

Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.

Shot on location in New York by director Ted Tetzlaff, it's tense and fresh and, at 73 minutes, remarkably taut. [14 Sep 2012]

Thoroughly unique work of art.

There's a sense of self-satisfied naughtiness to the film that undercuts any claims it can make to being transgressive.

A sequel that never rises to the giddy pitches of skewed humor that the original managed to toss off with such unexpected glee.

It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.

As the struggle toward something new and different overwhelms the film, it becomes less and less human, less and less funny and less and less worth the effort to meet it on its own terms.

Dotted with real laughs and held together by some solid acting, but it's built of a fairly flaccid narrative and some really amateurish sequences.

Witty, treasure-filled and nostalgic in the best sense.

Comes to be dominated by the acting, and this is an unfortunate fate.

There are strange variations in the mood of Three Burials that may strike some viewers as flippant. As gritty and real as the business of toting a corpse at gunpoint gets, the tone occasionally veers into farce. But it's never too long before the focus returns to Jones' weathered eyes.

Funky, scrappy, dishy, screwy story of that star-studded, gilded squad.

For all its flaws, Hitch largely comes off as a light romp.

Awfully sloppy entertainment, built on a script with only a glancing acquaintance with logic, filled with uneven performances and staged with a near-amateur touch for comedy.

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

Watching skinny-armed little Will pretend to be the spawn of Sly Stallone in a series of botched feats of derring-do is a treat, as is much of this film.

For the most part it's dull, bland and unsatisfying: a food-court version of home cooking.

Babies will capture your eye -- and, probably, your fancy.

Coogan makes tremendous sport of himself, taking on a role as an adulterous, vain, anxiety-riddled, alcoholic and truly comic creep. Brydon is exquisitely droll as the straight man to this ugly comedian act.

For a ripped-from-reality film about love and death and family strife in the face of the war in Afghanistan, Brothers is awfully artificial.

It's not that The Beach is a stinker, exactly. It's that nothing in it -- and that includes the gifted DiCaprio -- ever feels other than perfunctory.

A fine and sturdy picture, capable of standing alongside the many such films made when Westerns were one of our chief entertainments.

The film that results from Jacquet's application is gorgeous and even inspiring, a tale of loyalty hard-tested and hard-earned, a sumptuous travelogue, and a reminder that some of the critters with whom we share the planet are, in ways, as complex in their feelings as any human being.

It's never subtle or clever, but it's big, loud and clear.

It's possible for a despicable heart and mind to make great art. And if Gibson hasn't quite done that with Apocalypto, he's nevertheless made an impressive and engrossing film. If you choose out of hand to miss it, which is your right, you'll be missing something.

There's a lot of pleasure in seeing a mature filmmaker put together something so intricate with what seems like so little strain.

There's a nifty shootout at the Guggenheim Museum and a lot of scenic travel, but little in it compels.

Noisy, random and hard on the eyes.

Packs the power to make you see at least a few corners of the world in a new and bracing light.

The movie swings back and forth from awesome to awful so regularly and rapidly that it's like a jai alai match.

One lucky guy, on a roll with rock.

Strictly for boys -- grown-up boys -- the more boyish and less grown-up the better.

It's a refreshing sensation, even if it makes you feel a touch seasick at first, and the fittingly eerie conclusion to a lavish and unsettling movie.

By the time of the fabled match -- which you could swear lasts a full 90 minutes -- it's all you can do to keep your skin from crawling off your body and slinking to the safety of another room. Do yourself a favor: Follow it.

The Queen is all-together remarkable not only for what it is but for what it isn't.

But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.

The most adventuresome element in The Wackness isn't its pop-culture skin but the unlikely friendship of Luke and Squires...As buddies, they're a kick. But you wish they had a kickier picture to support them.

Like "Crumb" or "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," it's remarkably close-up moviemaking, with family secrets laid bare for all the world to see.

The sense of inescapability, the mood of capitulation and resignation, becomes the story. What is being made clear is the thoroughgoing rot of a civilization; there is literally no place to find peace, solace or consolation.

It’s offensive, really, this blatant pandering to emotions.

Eventually, the inconsistency wears, and the film provokes mostly indifference and restlessness.

This is an awesome performance in an outstanding film, a film worthy, if you can imagine, of the book at its heart.

The stick-figure people in the script haven't the slightest chance of making an impression, and you're more excited at the prospect of the next big wave?

One of the most exciting American movies about recent political history since, ironically, Oliver Stone's "JFK."

The film has about five endings, each sillier than the next. Before it's over, the business end of that sniper rifle looks kind of inviting.

The least erotic, exotic, luxurious and sarcastic Bond film ever made. Its hero is haunted, obsessed, merciless, cold. There are no gadgets or flippant one-liners and there's almost no sex.

A middling contender in this summer of gigantoid sequels.

Pieces of April isn't the biggest or best film of the year, but it's touching, witty, smart and well-made. You have to sort through a lot of chaff at the multiplex to find all those qualities in a single movie.

Both deeply weird and charmingly dear.

The trouble is that the film forsakes one sort of energy for another, and the downshift is a drag.

Racy, obscene, spirited and infectious.

The film may have its troubled spots, but its poignant depiction of human tenderness more than compensates for them. [18 Nov 1994, p.17]

For all its attempts at wrinkles and surprises and sleight-of-hand, Ocean's Thirteen is too direct and plain and pleased with itself to ever feel like a thriller.

The film isnt without bumps -- theres something rather gnomish and self-serving about its tolerance for grotesqueries and caricature -- but it presents us with a wholly rendered, largely credible world peppered with witty little moments and wryly chosen details. [19 Jun 1998, p.30]

The film is thus more of a technical showcase than a human drama. It's diverting enough until it gets dumb, but so strong from the start is the certainty that dumb is on the way that you can't get too vexed when it finally arrives.

In breezy fashion, it introduces us to a handful of crossword savants, the history of crossword puzzles, a number of celebrity crossword addicts...

But the human elements -- jealousy, anger, weakness, fortitude, loyalty, vengeance and honor, all acted out by a resolutely realistic cast -- make the movie extraordinary.

Like his (Carrey) early work, it's not a particularly good film -- insipidly staged, inanely plotted, too weak to withstand the weight of any inquiries into logic or continuity -- but Carrey's energetic mugging, particularly early on, makes it relatively painless.

Pretty much the worst recent example of a genre.

A diverting, playful and puzzling documentary.

A unique and masterful film, filled with surprises and felicities and moments of transporting visual power.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

The hearty performances are undone by the forced eccentricity of the sets, the clothes, the music and, especially, the characters. The film is ugly and facile and childish in its love of its own naughtiness. Only Jill Clayburgh, as a creepy woman in whose home Augusten must live, feels human. The rest is no more real than a "Simpsons" episode -- and offers fewer laughs.

A gripping movie about espionage, loyalty and betrayal.

A garish and fascinating little movie that comes bouncing in the wake of Bennett Miller's "Capote" like a yipping puppy trying to keep up with an elegant show dog.

The overall effect is awe and affection -- and a strange urge to get on a board and, uh, shred, dude.

In Be Cool, a wonderful cast essays a lively script and manages to make a decent film out of it.

The film is one of the great portraits of the artist as impossibly gifted young snot. [31 Dec 1999]

It's a lovely film that suffers from an overdetermined structure and a reliance on a sensationalized plot line that, quixotically, is ignored for long periods of time.

The standout is Baldwin, utterly convincing as a gruff cuss whose life has been forever stained by the death of his wife.

Takes a fabulous idea and overplays it, making an average picture out of some truly extraordinary material.

Flynn is sexy, valiant, athletic and true: a movie star in every sense of the term. [13 Sep 1996, p.30]

Within this simple structure, Panahi manages at once to celebrate and critique his nation's passions, sexual politics, sporting heritage, laws, morality and class system. It's a fictional feature but, like many Iranian films, it feels uncannily real, particularly in its final rousing minutes.

A deep and extraordinary film that isn't afraid to look evil in the face -- or, for that matter, to acknowledge that evil can be more complicated and even attractive than we'd want to admit. It's very, very difficult to watch, but you shouldn't miss it.

Why would you watch a film about a creep like Greenberg? Well, aside from the fact that it’s well-done and intense and occasionally funny (in a dark, dark way, mind you), there’s the sneaking suspicion that there’s a little of this fellow in all of us, and self-knowledge of that sort is a gift that, often, only art can give.

Few films so thoroughly lose their way as The Edge. After developing an engrossing plot and mood, it goes frankly bonkers, and the intensity whistles out of it like air from a punctured tire. When it finally limps home -- at least 20 minutes too late -- you're left with a sour, treacly taste where once you had savored something almost exquisite. [26 Sep 1997, p.21]

It's a triumph of the film that it manages to make Jeffrey Dahmer a human being -- at least a member of the species -- without ever bending toward empathy with or excuses for him.

With all its pedestrian moments, the film still has the power to sweep you up.

The film is exquisitely realized, with a tremendous, naturalistic performance by Michelle Williams at its heart and a pervasive, assuring sense that Reichardt and Raymond have distilled everything nonessential from their story and imparted exactly the impact they wished.

The Dardennes are talents, clearly. Watching Rosetta is like watching them flip you the bird.

This much is guaranteed: You won't leave thinking you've seen the like before.

Ullman and May make something intermittently memorable of an otherwise minor film.

In their hands [Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton or even Steven Spielberg], Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone might have made as terrific a movie as it is a book. When Columbus got the job, however, it was guaranteed only to be a commercial success.

The exquisitely exact photography and sound design represent the highest level of craft of Van Sant's career.

If it's meant as a retort to anti-Semitic doctrine, it's far too episodic, anecdotal and lacking in specifics.

As two-dimensional animation, Sinbad is passably attractive, reaching a visual height when it arrives in the surreal, shifting Tartarus.

Its sense of play, its sleek design and Yuen's spectacular action sequences will make it, I suspect, attractive to palates not accustomed to the spicier or cruder forms of this genre.

The result is persuasive but incomplete. Dick is working here as a journalist, and the story is far from fully unfolded. Still, what he proffers will keep you thinking, talking and engaged.

To be fair, there are moments when the film seems better than, finally, it is.

A by-the-numbers recipe that ought to have shot off at least a few sparks, is as drab as the inmates' prison blues.

Studded with sturdy acting.

Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, both of whom work with such subtlety and depth, rescue the film from Rudolph's seemingly native inability to keep it steadily on course.

Spider-Man 3 is a likeable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size.

An engaging if not riveting film based on David Benioff's adaptation of his own novel. It's not nearly Lee's best picture, and it's guilty of a few wrong turns that only a confident filmmaker could make, but it's assured and, perhaps more importantly, reassuring.

Myers' Cat, with a voice that crosses Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion with Mel Blanc's Bugs Bunny, is generally fun, possessed of an anarchic playfulness that balances his sometimes bawdy tendencies.

Witless, tasteless, toothless, pointless, garish, repetitive, obvious, and painfully dull, Pirate Radio is that exceedingly rare film that never, but never puts a foot right.

Somewhat marred by Bruno Coulais' treacly New Age score -- as well as by Perrin's somewhat daft and repetitive narration. But the key word is "somewhat." In the main, Winged Migration is an unforgettable piece of moviemaking.

Now The Matrix Revolutions is here, and a verdict is justified. The death penalty seems a little strong, but can we lock this franchise up and forget where we put the key?

Hogan whips up a high-energy family entertainment that fairly erases memory of the other filmed versions of Barrie's tale.

A light, old-fashioned, likable film that capitalizes on the personae of its three key performers and a sort of playfulness.

It's not orthodox Dahl but it's pure Burton, and, as it's been such a very long time since moviegoers have been afforded that particular treat, it's entirely welcome.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

A feel-good movie that doesn't think it needs to rub people's noses in the happy stuff to get its points across or eliminate all the disturbing shades to make a uniformly glowing whole.

Cronenberg has, as Guillermo del Toro did in "Pan's Labyrinth," crafted both a drama and a fairy tale -- and he's done it in an entertainment as cracking as you could wish for.

Gosling, who was amazing in "The Believer" but hasn't yet connected substantially with a big audience, continues to impress.

It's so steeped in the coldness and inhumanity of its protagonist that it's ultimately more clinical than absorbing.

The bitterness of the film is a far cry from the peppy young Godard's embrace of life -- and a very far cry indeed from either praise or love.

There's a lot of fascinating talk here and a genuine passion for ideas and words. But it's also a case where the messenger is so grating that we feel the perverse urge to kill the message that he carries just to spite him.

No other sporting figure has ever been afforded so much screen time for self-revelation: just another instance of Iron Mike's one-of-a-kind status.

It’s a fascinating story about ambition and vanity and pride, and in Sheen’s performance and the atmosphere capture by Hooper it contains truly fine and rare things.

It's peppy and cheesy and filled with life and humor in just the way, you imagine, that Susann might have enjoyed.

An unsteady and uneven film, which bangs up against its ambitions gracelessly and distractingly.

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away.

The first "Barbershop" was no classic but, as so often with sequels, if this were the first there would be no second.

If Leo's situation seems like a typical opening gambit by the director of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!", little else in this tight, quiet, razor-sharp film will feel familiar. [12 Apr 1996]

In the main, this is powerful and comely filmmaking, and the decision to shoot it with virtually unknown actors and a variety of unfamiliar tongues is commendable.

Grim, sordid and, as it progresses, increasingly dunderheaded.

An assured and gripping political drama filled with remarkable performances and razor-sharp writing and editing.

It's a film that triumphs in small ways and satisfyingly demonstrates how our human nature is based on both the eccentricity of our hearts and the quirky workings of our heads.

It's a gorgeous picture and features three substantial performances, but the material is chatty, forced and excessively arch.

A masterfully varied set of images, paces and moods.

When it all comes to a head, what seems ordinary blossoms into something deeply complex and emotional.

The plot is like a sudoku puzzle with all but one square filled in.

Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.

Remove the razzle-dazzle provided by Azaria, Hoffman, Baldwin, the gross jokes and that ferret, and you wind up with a pretty dull and ordinary face.

An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."

Filled with skewed humor, inventive animation and earthy jokes.

Sincere, delicately funny, a little staid, a little precious, and more interested in the ebb and flow of the heart than in the dubious rewards of sensational narrative twists.

Crude both in form and content while at the same time capable of evoking explosions of shocked and, often, shamed laughter.

There's enough realism to keep a soccer buff like me happy, but the film is aimed at the young at heart, and I think they'll love it.

The film is big and sprawling and moves with fiery energy -- there's little or no exposition or explanation between scenes or episodes, yielding a breakneck pace.

It's a visual feast that only a crack director could provide, and it's mounted within a story and setting that, played utterly straight, might still have made a good movie.

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

This is the first full-length movie about his painting and his being that gets anywhere near close to comprehending both.

An audaciously unique and exciting film, not as successful as an A-to-Z story as it is mind-expanding as a vision of what the cinema can do.

Frightening stuff, and made all the more so because of how matter-of-factly by writer-director David Michôd plays it.

Among the many documentaries about the Iraq war, this one stands our for its intelligence, variety and measured emotionalism. [06 Apr 2007, p.26]

The little film is made uniquely engaging by the performance of its young star, Chris Marquette.

Ladybird, Ladybird is a scathing indictment of a meddlesome social-service sysBased on a true story, and set in a large English city, it is wrenching viewing, guaranteed to make complacent audiences reconsider their attitudes toward social welfare, single parents and the lot of battered, state-dependent women. [27 Jan 1995, p.12]

You'll laugh and cry at the film, but you'll bridle, too, at Brooks' clumsy technique.

It's possible to be dazzled by a movie and still not like it very much.

It's gory, really gory, gratuitously and often inelegantly.

You're guaranteed never to have seen anything like it; objectively speaking, it's a wonder.

Merry Christmas is long and ponderous, but for a few moments, its heavy hand is refreshingly light and agile, and you feel something other than frustration.

A big-hearted French movie that shines with wit, beauty, humor, sunshine and the love of love.

It's a moderately compelling historical record, but of far more interest as an artifact than a film.

Clumsiness follows clumsiness -- the acting, the staging, the details of the plot -- until you reach the point of cool indifference. There's a lot more wrong here than can be corrected in a small space in the newspaper.

That rarest of movie biographies: a warts-and-all exploration of the life and times of its subject.

Watching this tender little movie with its teasing humor, its deeply felt performances and its focus on slight moments rather than gigantic sea changes is like hearing a tasteful sonata instead of the usual vulgar symphony that the cinema offers up.

It's long, like life, but like life it continually fascinates.

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.

A clever and affecting thriller/comedy about a subject that absolutely cannot be written about in a daily newspaper or website that's for a general audience. The film is a giddy pastiche of styles -- slasher picture, faith film, social satire, teen romp, '50s atom bomb monster movie -- and it makes you laugh and squirm and grin in appreciation.

Inventive, droll and sharp, the film is rich in comic darkness but quite humane and genuine as well.

The pleasures of Buffalo Soldiers mainly come early on, before the film becomes a sloppy mixture of tones and story lines. Afterward, you're left mainly puzzled and looking for a way to wash a bitter aftertaste out of your mouth.

Few movies feel quite so perfunctory or needless or pointless as this one.

Long and sometimes grueling, but it never feels indulgent or excessive. In order to be subtle about the horrifying transformation he records, Audiard needs to let it unfold slowly, so that only when we reach the end can we see Malik as a new man who has come unimaginably -- and terribly -- far.

Not much in The Man From Elysian Fields resembles life on Earth, but there are a few moments with Jagger that feel desperate and human -- stuff from another movie entirely, in other words.

Pure, light entertainment.

The second action melodrama released in the United States this year by director Zhang Yimou, and if I prefer the previous one, "Hero," it's partly a matter of degrees.

What's left is a husk with all the superficial features of a Scream movie and none of the heart, brains, guts or laughs.

The Coens have often been accused of coldness toward their characters, but the verve and wit of their films reveal genuine compassion and heart. Based on the evidence of this film, the Pangs aren't quite there yet.

It would've been nice to hear Robinson or Wonder reciprocate the affection of the band, and it would've been even more interesting to hear Gordy try to defend himself -- as if he could.

It's not a happy film, but it feels true.

Mostly, constant little reminders show that Breillat knows the business of movies in her bones. You can learn from it and enjoy it -- two things I never thought possible to say about a Breillat film until now.

See Casino Royale for a Bond you've never seen before, and then imagine him in a film two-thirds the size. Here's hoping the writers of the next Bond movie employ the same personal trainer that Craig did to keep the script tight and lean.

Letters isn't a fun night at the picture show. It's slow and gloomy and achingly tragic. But it's a truly impressive achievement both in moviemaking and in its understanding of history.

Feels like a lost film from the '60s in the very best way: unstructured and intrepid and free. As a result, it's sometimes a little indulgent and overlong. But, like its hero, it's never less than sincere in its search for truth and beauty, even as it stares death in the eye.

It's a film that gently spoofs such cultural staples as ranchera music, illegal gambling, labor exploitation and tabloid media. And it's the sort of film that sneaks serious themes and emotions in just when you think it's about to dissolve into farce. Small but largely satisfying.

Some things in Sin City are almost too much to watch: the violence, the cruelty, the irredeemable evil. But it's irresistibly magnetic because it serves as a barely distorted mirror to our world.

A frustrating combination of inspiration and routine, acuity and dullness, originality and fashion. Part web-of-life indie film, part troubled teen drama, part suburban satire, part comic book fantasy, it vacillates between the engaging and the silly, buoyed by energetic performances but pulled underwater by self-satisfied writing and direction.

Wide-eyed, deadpan and, more often than not, note-perfect.

You will be heartened by the amazing sensation of watching one of the greatest works in the history of the medium unfold in front of you, piece by piece, year by year.

Effectively cast and shot with exciting immediacy.

By now, you know exactly what to expect, which is both good and bad. To my mind, Anderson reached the acme of this formula in the first go, in "Tenenbaums," and has now replicated it twice, evoking smaller pleasures each time.

A movie built on one joke -- an old one -- and an incoherent, even idiotic plot.

A masterful treasure trove of hilarious gags and inventive moments. It's so good that a single viewing it might awaken you to the charm of snails, frogs legs and -- heaven help us -- Jerry Lewis. [14 Jul 1995, p.E01]

Possesses a tone that wobbles masterfully between whimsy, dread, affection and horror, building on rich performances and an understated showiness to cast a queer and tingly spell.

The plot is tired, the energy sputtering, the jokes less manic. "Spy Kids" was a shot out of nowhere; Spy Kids 2 feels like a shot from someplace tiresomely familiar.

Despite the film's inevitably downbeat tone and occasional repetitiveness, there is that heavenly music to remember -- or to encounter for the first time. You will leave the theater singing, if with a touch of melancholy.

The darkest, most operatic, and technologically richest "Star Wars" movie to date, "Sith" is grim, stirring entertainment and a nearly complete vindication of everything its creator has been saying for six years about where the series was heading and what its final shape would be.

So sloppily and unabashedly sentimental that it can make you laugh and cry at the same time -- and often at the same things.

An unsteady mishmash of snot-nosed humor and treacly Hollywood sentimentality.

To quote a source as authoritative as Francis Bacon -- namely a "New Yorker" cartoon: "On the internet no one knows you're a dog."

The film is like a lot like Effie: It occasionally vexes or disappoints, but -- I am telling you -- it dazzles.

Gross, sophomoric, offensive, nasty, cheap and mean -- and so funny again and again that you plumb near forget all that's reprehensible about it.

It's first-rank filmmaking, through and through, even if it struggles to find closure.

Phoenix makes an interesting case of Leonard's twitchiness and mooning, but neither Paltrow nor Shaw is particularly credible as a Brooklynite, and Rossellini and Moshonov seem like they've wandered in from another film altogether.

Between the tart dialogue, the compelling lead performances, the vivid violence and the stunning cinematography, it's complete and satisfying all on its own.

Like "Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers," it fills in our sketchy impression of that famously reticent generation of ordinary young men who were asked by a frightened world to accomplish an extraordinary feat. In this case, the homage takes the form not of a photograph or a statue but of a deeper, more sympathetic understanding of their experience. A finer tribute is hard to imagine.

The result is a film that's more credible in its building blocks than in its whole.

There aren't many works of art out there that so rupture your sense of the familiar. It may play slowly, but it blazes its way into your head. [14 Jul 2000]

Despite buoying our hopes that it might be a new-fangled sports film, ``The Program'' devolves into a doltish drama about Triumph Over Adversity, all but forsaking the pure, thrilling bloodlust of its early moments. [24 Sept 1993, p.AE16]

The result is an experience of painful awakenings, gorgeous textures, committed acting and silences filled with moment -- a lovely balancing act

What Machete does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment.

Tasty, but, finally, a little unfulfilling.

Director Ang Lee displays enormous verve and flair. He creates ingenious transitions between scenes, deploying split-screens in a clever variation on comic book panels and, as ever, drawing coolly impassioned performances from the cast.

A tiresome, didactic and, once the novelty of the graphics has worn off, charmless film.

fFat, dull drag.

All in all, it's hard to dispute that House of D declares its own worth on arrival.

It's ambitious, sharply observed and spectacularly well-acted like so much of Sayles' canon. But it's also overstuffed and underdeveloped.

It's a movie of charm and insight, well-acted and carefully observed, but it's also one that lacks any real heights to offset the generic competence that characterizes it. There's no real drama to follow, no surprises of sufficient magnitude to enliven the experience.

The man has gifts -- but acting and, it's increasingly clear, storytelling aren't among them.

For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years.

It's often a vivid film and paints its small niche well, but only in the final passages, when AIDS changes everything, does it feel full-blooded.

While they've managed to make a funny movie, they haven't made a great comedy.

Lennon's story is so remarkable and the footage assembled here so fresh and fascinating that the film engrosses despite its formal failings. Give it a chance.

It's a little depressing to see such a thrilling talent deployed in such an ordinary and sordid movie. Training Day isn't awful, but it's absolutely nothing special.

A special-effects-and-chase-to-the-death movie, with little special about it.

There's quality, wit and emotion throughout.

iI’s a film more content to amuse than truly to probe or feel.

It's Cronenberg's most mainstream work, and yet it has all the power of his creepiest nightmares.

Perhaps Following Sean is as much of a cultural oddity as "Sean" itself turned out to be. But it's a decidedly interesting one nonetheless.

As you can reliably expect of a work by Alan Bennett, The History Boys is bubbly, witty, sneaky-smart entertainment with the additional virtues of heart and cunning.

Long and slow, granted, but it's so peppered with moments of realism and nuanced craft that it continually rewards careful viewing.

If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture View From the Top were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.

It's fitting that Black Knight, the new time-travel movie with Martin Lawrence, should arrive at the start of the Christmas season, because the season gives us the perfect word to describe it: humbug.

It's built of such exquisite craft -- the acting, the decor, the photography, the music -- that to refuse it is to refuse the very sensations that draw us to art, romance and maybe even life itself.

It more or less plays like a five-episode arc of the series, which is a strength and a weakness.

Like "Red Road" it's slow-moving and sometimes grueling, but it's more of a chronicle than narrative, a series of slices-of-life rather than an unfolding and increasingly engrossing enigma.

The new film is a nauseatingly unsteady medley of brilliance and foolish nonsense.

With its weary introductory and concluding passages, it announces itself as the most typical of fare, a real letdown after that stirringly fresh central part.

No doubt this is a sincere film. But its wobbly technique prevents it from ever reaching a point.

A hard and bright and tough film in all the best ways.

The film combines farcical and sinister tones, as well as textures of high polish and captured-in-the-raw neorealism, and it simply brims with energy and surprises.

For its sheer visual gusto alone, Coraline is a wonder.

One of those American independent films with two chief points to recommend it: the earnest good will of its creators and its determination to be unlike any studio film.

An intermittently engaging and confused blend of biopic, chop-socky, dopey mysticism and, oddest of all, melodramatic weepie, is no ``JFK.''[7 May 1993, p.AE15]

There are levels of complexity and nuance and intellectual rigor in The Hours -- it's clearly a film into which you could gain continued insight after several viewings.

Hilarious. And more proof that Pixar is in a class of its own.

It’s an eye-opening and modestly funny look at a massive business and a culture with its own signifiers and language.

It's so spry and lively and warm that you want to dance to it.

More than just a good crime story about the guilt or innocence of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. It's also a fascinating portrait of a seemingly normal middle-class family crumbling before our eyes.

The film features some fine performances and explores an intriguing set of themes, but it fails to ever take life, causing its laudable message to fall on deadened ears. [12 Oct 1993, p.C1]

A deliriously entertaining field report from a historical moment when porn darned near became mainstream.

Absent the real sense of creepiness and highly honed film craft of De Palma, or the strong visual and emotional sensibility of Woo, M: I III feels like one of the more forgettable James Bond films -- saddled, moreover, with a star who's sliding into self-parody.

The film is never less than beautiful, but it's never truly absorbing.

Filled with energy and visual pizzazz and at least strives for something more than dumb entertainment.

It's so by-the-numbers and clumsy that it will only appeal to that little sect that's managed to wear out their "Evil Dead," "Friday the 13th," "Halloween" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" DVDs.

If you love the genre, you'll likely be engaged. But if not, there's not much point.

The result is a rare and precious work. The Motorcycle Diaries is an epic road movie with everything you'd want from such a film: laughs, kicks, adventures, pathos, poetry, natural beauty, strange encounters and friendship tested and strengthened.

There's a daring to Everything Is Illuminated that commends it somewhat more than its achievement deserves.

For all the beauty it struggles to bring forth, Snow Falling on Cedars is painfully prosaic.

A gripping account of grown-up sensuality, obsession, loss and hope.

This isn't much of a plot, but as in the "Toy Story" films the combination of a varied cast of characters and a vision of the human world from an unlikely perspective make for consistent amusement.

It's a small-minded and jejune film, and it feels strangely out-of-date considering how loaded it is with right-here-right-now signifiers.

Del Toro presents one dazzling visual spectacle after another.

For the most part it's a completely ordinary, completely familiar, professionally executed film. Nothing truly awful, but nothing unexpected, either.

An unexpectedly charming little film.

How pleasant to report, then, that a new romantic comedy -- small, smart, funny, tender and dear -- should emerge from a pair of filmmaking brothers still in their 30s and with a distinct indie film pedigree that informs, while not dominating, their work.

A handsome film, an earnest film, a film with taste in music and photography and a real sense of intelligence. But too often it feels like an exercise. And even when you're impressed by it, you know you're being played.

In effect, Caden's life passes before his eyes while he is living it. And Kaufman shares this effect with us through a strange process he achieves with invisible strings; it's a knockout.

This is a delicious premise, and Blomkamp, who first played with it in a 2005 short called "Alive in Joburg," has magnified and improved it with ferocious energy, wit and style.