Stephen Hunter

The movie is hilarious...there's Rock's encounter with Viagra, which I can't describe but has to be one of the funniest scenes of the decade.

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

A somewhat formulaic if nevertheless crudely effective manipulation of the figure skating themes that all of us girls love so much.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes

Is there anything new here? Honestly, not really. The content is the same, the plot the familiar litany of ordeals leavened by soapy interludes. But the fight that develops is taut, tough and extremely bitter; it's never showy in the grinding, big-movie Spielbergian way, but a portrait of the war's daily interface with hell in a very small space, as the four stand against a much larger unit.

Despite its generic title and flat ending, tickles most of the way through.

So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.

For the first half-hour, the movie is pretty crummy. Even Spielberg appears bored with the script's lame setup, its quick evocation of the first movie and its wan establishment of human villains and heroes. Like any 50-year-old adolescent, he can't wait for the dinosaurs. And when he gets to them, the movie ceases to bear any relationship to conceits of narrative and becomes a sheer adrenalin spike to the brain stem.

The result is a panorama of European radicalism. Depending on your politics, you may think "long live the revolution" or "curse the day the CIA ended its assassination program."

This one has crossover hit written all over it.

The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.

It's fast, slick, stupid, violent fun and, despite the cynically high body count, without serious intention in this world.

Far from great, but much farther from awful, Troy offers several popcorn buckets' worth of good old-fashioned time at the movies.

You may find some of the story developments melodramatic -- I did -- but the film itself is quite powerful.

Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

Some of the tropes of The Lost City are ineffective. What does work is the sense of loss. The late Cuban novelist and screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora (Ines Sastre), his sister-in-law, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba.

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.

It's tough, astringent, darkly funny and . . . well, it's also generic, untidy, condescending and mild of impact rather than stunning.

It's not without moments of wit and powerful emotion, but somehow Stepmom never feels either real enough to move us deeply or bubbly enough to make us forget our woes.

A brisk, entertaining and even moving exploration of the sometimes frayed intersection where Christianity meets homosexuality.

Incisive and possibly a bit melodramatic as it lays out the reasons and the results of the violent campaign and marshals indignation on behalf of the victims while crying out for Western engagement.

If you love the theater, you've got to see the film.

It believes, in the end, in the decency of most people.

Funner, biggerer, brighterer, bolderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not only okay, it may even be close to good. A lavish spectacle illuminated by Johnny Depp's swishing pirate captain, the movie has its dull moments, but not many.

Cameron captures the majesty, the tragedy, the fury and the futility of the event in a way that supersedes his trivial attempts to melodramatize it.