Stephen Hunter

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

Lung-bloatingly funny.

The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.

The movie isn't funny in any big way so much as recognizable in its patterns of dysfunction, delusion and futility. But you believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

You can make a good movie about a bad marriage, as countless directors, the latest being Ozon, have discovered.

Superb.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.

The acting is superb, particularly from the three principals.

It's like an enema to the soul as it probes the ways of death ? some especially grotesque in a family setting. You leave slightly asquirm. You know it will linger.

It's not a great film, but in its reckless audacity -- an American director working from a British novel set in Latin America, dealing with the largest themes of Latin American art, politics and history -- it's reassuring. Someone's still willing to take a big chance.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

A lot of bigger movies won't provoke you half as much.

It gets frenetic, in the French way, but it never stops getting amusing. This is what happens when you let grown-ups make movies.

You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

As glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a GOOD Big Stupid American movie.

All in all, A Good Woman retains ye olde Wilde's zing, his sense of pace and place, but most of all his snappy one-liners, and it finds a new way to showcase them brilliantly.