Stephen Hunter

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

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.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.

Stunningly acted by Liam Cunningham and Orla Brady as the Cloneys.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

So phony it makes your gums ache.

Smashingly stupid.

If the movie were merely unfunny, one might dismiss it with an airy wave of the hand in a paragraph or two without breaking a sweat or digging into the old adjective tool box, but "Car 54, Where Are You?" is actively repulsive.

It's an astonishing movie, with a real-life feel.

It's a movie with the exciting parts cut out.

Now, they're together. You can't look at them, but you can't look away either. So it goes.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

From the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in Downfall.

The result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

The movie simply delivers too many colorfuls for its own good, none of whom establish a true emotional identity, and thus it isn't moving, it's busy. Busy, busy, busy.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

As a piece of journalism then, Boiler Room is first class.

A greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly.

The movie is fussy and organized rather than moving. It follows a pattern so precisely, it's as if Lahti thought points would be taken off if she colored outside the lines.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

So tame and limp, it may actually give mothers-in-law a good name.

In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.

It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.