Steven Rea

Yes, it's stupid. But sometimes it's stupid with a capital S, and it's in those moments of transcendent idiocy that you can't help liking Saving Silverman. At least, a little bit.

Mongol is great cinema, great fun.

A wide-screen wildlife documentary in which the cycles of birth and death, migrations and seasons, are captured in stunning - absolutely stunning - ways.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Billy Bob Thornton, wearing a succession of toupees, wigs, fake facial hair, and funny hats, and twitching more than a horse's behind, is the best reason to see Bandits.

Must-see stuff.

Deliberately paced, with an eerie, country-ish score from the Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly, Jindabyne is definitely a mystery. But it's not about who killed the woman - audiences know that practically from the outset.

Tomorrow Never Dies sticks to the Bond formula without bringing anything new, or particularly inspired, to the proceedings. (Besides a lot of shameless product placement, that is.)

Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

As a piece of filmmaking, What the Bleep isn't exactly transcendent stuff. But as an entryway into new ways of thinking about the self, the universe, and the vast infinite whatnot of whatever (you know what we mean, oh wise one), this little movie is big.

It isn't frightening. Sometimes, in fact, it's laughable.

Carpenter, an old hand at this horror stuff, delivers some convincingly creepy effects, but the narrative lacks any sustained dramatic pulse - its gallery of hallucinogenic scenes doesn't add up to much more than, well, a gallery of hallucinogenic scenes. [03 Feb 1995, p.5]

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

Offers a sometimes lyrical, sometimes gut-turning portrait of war seen through the eyes of children.

Mild but engaging romance.

This beautiful, unfolding film is an antidote to the high-velocity, maximum-volume world most of us find ourselves immersed in, offering a glimpse into a rigorously spiritual alternative. Its calmness, its reflection, is full of allure.

A conventional, button-pushing but emotionally affecting tale.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

A satisfyingly screwy New York story.

It's nothing if not predictable.

At times soppy, sentimental and shamelessly romantic, at other moments bursting with clever barbs -- and now and then zooming in on something telling and poignant -- Love Actually is just about impossible to dislike.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.

Closer, in the end, lacks a certain heft. The language and the actions of the characters are brutal and devastating. The movie itself, a little too nice.

Quiet, quirky gem.

Funny and not-funny, slapstick and slapdash, Welcome to Collinwood is a seriously uneven caper comedy in which a bunch of really fine character actors get to act really, really silly.

Bayona's moves are deft, the atmosphere oozes with anxiety and grief, but the big payoff - like the big payoff in The Sixth Sense, another film The Orphanage has more than a bit in common with - never comes.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

Fused with paranoia and almost unbearable suspense, The Hurt Locker is powerful stuff.

While the characters are B-movie thin, the dialogue standard-issue, and the CG and matte effects only passable at best, it's undeniable fun to behold the likes of serious thespians Hawke and Dafoe slumming around in this cheeseball stuff.

At once guileless and profound.

Fans of Brooks and his wry, dry neuroticism will not be disappointed as he whines and whimpers around New Delhi.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

As a commentary on gender roles, maternity, paternity and test-tube fertilization, Junior does manage to get in a few good yuks - but far fewer than you'd expect given the story's, um, fertile premise. [23 Nov 1994, p.E01]

Reaches breathtaking lows of incoherence, sexism, racial stereotyping, and -- did I say incoherence?

A crowd-pleaser of immense proportions.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

The real reason to see this slight but interesting documentary is to watch and listen to the radiant Aury.

This based-on-real-life tale of artistic aspirations and international politics is packed with more corn than an Iowa silo.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

Not as consistently or uproariously funny as "American Pie," but it does have a Zen zaniness that gives it center as well as edge.

One of those movies where it's impossible not to find yourself cheering for the scruffy underdog hero.

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

A chick movie? Well, yes, but it's a whole lot cooler than that one with the "Ya-Ya's" in the title.

Somewhat fleeter and more engaging than its predecessor.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

Fast Food Nation picks up, and drops off, various members of its cast, sometimes without a satisfying resolution. But its final scenes, inside a real working meatpacking plant, on the killing floor, are brutally to the point.

Sunshine can be seen as a story about science and religion, about the rational mind and the mad. But at a certain point, like a dying star about to pop into eternal nothingness, the movie can't be seen as anything - it just implodes.

But the ending, at once ambiguous and obvious, is a letdown -- a frustratingly literal-minded, or literary-minded, conceit.

It is the more satisfying of the two installments - less over-the-top, arterial-gushing violence and more investigation into character, motives, back-story.

Morel and his crew certainly know how to stage action: the fight scenes and shootouts, the stairwell pursuits and motorway mayhem, are as good, if not better, than anything to come out of Hong Kong in a long time.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

An extraordinarily perfect little film: A bittersweet drama that explores sexuality and love, and their reverberations across the landscape of human emotions.

Premonition is an odd little thing, with a protagonist in a protracted fugue state and a plot that doesn't know whether its coming or going. Or maybe it does.

This violently comic caper has some spunky charm going for it -- but has a lot of self-consciously hip, studied wackiness going against it.

Push has a cool, sinewy style, energy to burn.

Impossibly charming and impossibly French.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

Nasty stuff. It's xenophobic (message: Americans, steer clear of the Third World); it's photogenic (the Sports Illustrated-likeswimsuit issue beach scenes, the colorful villages, the lush landscapes); it's gruesome (operating table POV shots); and it's violent.

A smart, sensuous and sensory mind trip that caroms around a universe of thought.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.

Betrayal is at the heart of this story, but also dreams of liberty and a life where all people are treated with respect.

The cast is uniformly good. In the end, though, as Stiller's Stahl does the rounds of the talk shows, plugging his book and his newfound sobriety, Permanent Midnight fails to deliver a true story of redemption, of someone who has come through the dark side and conquered his demons. The guy is still feeling sorry for himself, and the residue of narcissism - the lifeblood of the entertainment industry - is caked all over the place. [18 Sep 1998, p.03]

An edgy, disturbing drama.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

A bubble-brained comedy with as much bearing on the real world as a Pokemon cartoon.

A gloriously tacky horror movie with an inclination toward the occult, The Mother of Tears hails from the Italian schlockmeister Dario Argento, who photographs his Euro movie star daughter, Asia Argento, with something more than paternal pride.

This is no "Raging Bull."

Someone should check Joe Carnahan for performance enhancement drugs. Smokin' Aces, the wild ride of a movie he scripted and directed, is so pumped up, manic and mayhem-packed that it practically shoots sweat off the screen.

Filmmaker Kormákur orchestrates all this with broad strokes and winking intrigue, although the line between hambone melodrama and irony-tinged satire gets walked across a few too many times.

A beautiful, appropriately loping little gem about growing older, daring to take risks and follow your heart. That probably sounds corny, and The Straight Story is.

Microcosmos is a Zen version of an old Disney True-Life feature: the hokum and phony palaver of those '50s pics supplanted by a wide-eyed sense of wonder. [08 Nov 1996, p.05]

An old-style mob movie based on a real court case and a real character - a colorful character - Find Me Guilty is about loyalty, family, and a bunch of good fellas.

It's Greengrass' way of asking a question that looms large in these post-9/11 days: Are we all praying to the same God, or is one man's God better than another, and one man's God vastly more terrifying?

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

As he's done in such otherwise diverse pictures as Lone Star, City of Hope, and The Secret of Roan Inish, in Limbo writer-director Sayles circles down into a community of friends, colleagues, strangers - and shows what happens when paths cross, and sometimes double-cross. [04 Jun 1999, p.03]

War is hell, war is cruelty, war is toil and trouble, war is just a shot away. But is war a snooze? Well, by the time Enemy at the Gates has run its course — it sure seems that way.

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar.

Sure, it's a skewed view through adolescent eyes, but it's one that still speaks to the aspirations, agendas, image-making and spin control behind a real, grown-up political election.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

Forte and company have managed to make crude and lewd dunderheadedness laugh-out-loud funny here and there, and that, I guess, is something of an achievement.

A weird fusion of blaxploitation and American indie, built on a template of old-style, follow-your-dream Hollywood drama. But it works - sometimes magnificently.

Fuzzy, feel-good movie about baseball, babes and believing in yourself.

A slow-burning, character-rich study in desperation, grief, vengeance, loyalty, and love. It's the sort of arthouse entry - in German, mostly - that gets you thinking about an English-language remake.

Has a glorious good time satirizing the extravagant lengths to which the military and intelligence establishments will go if they think there's a payoff at the other end.

Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.

Dedication works anyway, thanks to Theroux's jumping visuals and Crudup's jumpy performance.

Isn't exactly fraught with psychological depth and nuance, but as a stalker-stalkee suspenser, the pic has some nice things going for it.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

How much is shaman and how much is showman is hard to tell. Some of Levitch's staccato soliloquies have the ring of truth, and some have the ring of jive. Either way, though, The Cruise is a journey worth taking. [27 Nov 1998, p.03]

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

What a mess.

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

It's a charmer.

Rodriguez is riveting, with a drop-dead cynical charm.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

Quietly and keenly observed, Summer Hours nods to Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (a country estate, a family reunion, an impending sale). Assayas displays a lucid sense of how personal history and family identity are inextricably linked to a physical place - here, to a house that is still busy accumulating its memories.

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

Connoisseurs of giant, gnarled chunks of charred flesh, rejoice! There's plenty of it -- or stuff resembling it -- in the slasher-fest convergence of two killer franchises.

Chan's signature mix of screwball comedy and gymnastic derring-do landed him his own cartoon series a few years back, and The Medallion -- with its bumbling spies and bounding star -- is about as cartoonish as live action gets.

The movie's main purpose seems to be to make audiences squirm uncomfortably. Yelp and shriek in armchair-clawing glee? Not likely.

A muscular, no-nonsense genre pic (well, two genres: prisons and boxing), Undisputed isn't going to score points for originality, and the climactic bout is a bit of a letdown. But Rhames, as the cocksure millionaire pugilist, seethes brute force.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

One of the film's cleverest devices is a "Personality Diagnostic Checklist" that equates corporate "serial behaviors" - exploitation, deception, greed, lack of empathy and guilt - with the antisocial makeup of a certifiable psychopath.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

Cold and stylish, slick and violent.

A cartoon that's truly cinematic in scope, and a story that's compelling and heartfelt - even if the heart belongs to a big, four-legged herbivore.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

This low-budget, high-gore sequel can be effectively frightening at times, and just plain boring, too. The suspense builds, the blood gushes, the momentum dissipates. It's an unsatisfying mix.

Coolly crafted crime thriller.

The script is boilerplate, the wit pretty much witless.

Painfully cute drama.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

The Return of the King is too long...The various story lines...come together in stilted, episodic ways. The narrative is less-than-seamless.

Gritty and compelling up to a point, but cheaply exploitive as well.

Yes, bestiality in a PG-13 movie. It's the end of life as we know it.

A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

Classy but ultimately unsatisfying film.

Visually, taking its cues (mostly) from Van Allsburg's Hopperesque art, The Polar Express is eye-popping. Storywise, however, it can be eyelid-drooping.

Moves along the way its leading man walks along - steady and sure.

A noisy, not particularly charming collection of skits and skirmishes.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

The Farrellys manage to have their cake and scarf it down, disgustingly, too.

Rourke and Roberts! Dueling kings of B-movie excess and cable-TV schlock, together again on the big screen! Talk about chemistry!

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

Boasts exceedingly high levels of improbability and an embarrassment of continuity and character shortfalls, but still has a certain bubbleheaded charm.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

Gripping, sobering, inspiring stuff.

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

The Getaway isn't going to bore anybody, but it's not going to do anything else either. [11 Feb 1994, p.03]

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

It's low-grade Casablanca - an ill-fated love affair, rife with murder and deceit, with World War II as a backdrop and a farewell scene that has something to do with getting to Paris.

It's old, old hat.

There are winning scenes between Wilson and the three teens as they train in various martial arts (like Mexican Judo - "as in Ju-don't know who you're messing with!") and get tips from clips of "Fight Club" and "The Untouchables."

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

Nicely filmed and acted.

A mopey meditation on family and its dysfunctions, Winter Passing is in fact of more than passing interest.

Elevated beyond its cutesy contrivances and mawkishness by some extraordinarily good performances.

The picture uses humor and a heartfelt conviction to tell a story about discovering your destination in life.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

A wickedly funny, Naked Gun-style parody that conflates old-style private-eye pics with Shaft and, yes, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Despite the jumpy, ride-along camera work and the ever-present threat of engagement, a certain tedium sets in during the film.

It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.

Dull plod.

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

Never mind the cool, convincing effects (and they are cool), The Day After Tomorrow teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences. It's pure escapist fare, a popcorn gobbler.

Strange and gloomy.

So gin-and-tonic dry, so deceptive in its deadpan-ness, that it's not always clear that Julian Fellowes is having fun. But he is.

Has a breezy, Altmanesque air, as it tracks the mini-dramas of its crisscrossing characters.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.

It also boasts one of the funniest, loopiest Woody Harrelson turns in years.

Birth makes its oddball supernaturalism seem completely, compellingly real.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

It is a good hour too long, although it does boast Christopher Walken.

A yawning affair that would be a perfectly fine video rental but doesn't really require the big screen.

A charmer.

Baked and half-baked, Tenacious D does manage to give the term potty humor a new meaning. That's some kind of genius, right?

TMNT has a cool, noirish sheen. There's an attention to detail in the visuals and sound design that pushes it up several notches above most kiddie fare. It's not art, dude, but it will do.

Like Sorkin's D.C.-set TV series, "West Wing," his script for Charlie Wilson's War is full of rapid-fire badinage, with movers and shakers moving smart and shaking snappy as a squad of aides trot along behind, briefcases and coffee cups in tow. A decade - not to mention a war - never went by so quickly.

The film is just middling. A clever line here and there, a debonair Dempsey wink, a cute Monaghan nod, and another Bill and Monica reference to tie things all together.

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

What's not to like?

A spirited, smart-alecky look at the ongoing conflict between a government that wants to eliminate pot and a public that wants to smoke it.

Manages to rocket along at full speed. At the same time, however, the movie feels as if it's not going anywhere at all.

Steeped in attitude - a smart-alecky, insider sarcasm that can be pretty clever at times, but also pretty insufferable.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

At its heart, there's Blanchett, an actress whose instincts are unerring, and dead-on.

Ambiguous in a satisfying, puzzling sort of way, November offers a triptych of scenarios revolving around a grim moment.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

An international caper with James Bond and Tom Clancy overtones - and Austin Powers undertones, too.

What Hannibal Rising is, mostly, is a hoot.

Taut entertainment that juggles brainy ideas about perception, predetermination and free will - and drops things in a messy third act where the vintage noir gets bathed in a bit too much Spielbergian glow.

You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.

It's totally down-to-earth, as real as a trip to the supermarket.

The real Radio, and the real coach -- seen together in the movie's feel-good epilogue -- deserve better.

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Engaging, though certainly not groundbreaking, I Went Down manages to quote from Plato and deploy a cheap joke about masturbation (twice). As gangster movies go, it's a charmer. [3 July 1998, p.3]

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

It's not easy being macho while you're shivering like a frozen puppy, but Kutcher pulls it off.

The story of Donald Crowhurst is not one of remarkable courage or remarkable endurance. But it is remarkable.

A charmingly off-the-wall little tale. Black doesn't do anything he hasn't done before (in fact, he's already done his remake of King Kong!).

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

Scott's reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood has more heft than it does humor, more soulful brooding than snappy thrust-and-parry retorts.

Rize shows how clowning led to krumping, and argues that its practitioners' fierce dedication to dance has saved countless kids from drugs, crime and gangs.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

There are laughs here aplenty, and sexy, goofy, off-the-cuff charm.

It's not a pretty picture. But Food, Inc. is an essential one.

Quiet, rageful indictment of a two-tiered Islamic society.

A riveting documentary.

Isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

A heartbreaking story of true love.

With a bit of Tintin and Tati, Charlie Chaplin and Wallace and Gromit echoing in the pacing and comic sensibility, Triplets of Belleville conjures up a world that's totally surprising and sublime.

The dialogue rings tinny in the ear, as if enunciated in the phony arc of a stage light.

A thuddingly dull remake of the 1971 crime drama starring Michael Caine.

Laceratingly funny Hollywood comedy.

A wonderful, witty mix of horror and social satire, The Host takes its simple, time-tested premise - menacing creature terrorizes the populace - and runs with it.

The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.

Terminator 3 moves at not-quite-breakneck speed, and the shape-shifting, metal-melting special effects aren't exactly spectacular.

Offers a gripping mix of sexual heat and nasty menace. It's "Dead Calm" meets "Very Bad Things," with English accents.

There are tiny glints of humor and intelligence at work, and the action and animation rockets along slickly and stylishly. But unlike the protagonists of almost any and all of the Pixar titles, Astro Boy's namesake lacks even an iota of soul.

A squirmingly strange and brutal study of sexual power, masochism and mother-daughter madness.

35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

Somehow, this rollicking day in the life of a band of skateboarding Latino punk-rockers doesn't exude the voyeuristic smarm of previous Clark forays.

Inspired by the grand Technicolor epics of Hollywood yesteryears, First Knight, despite its flaws, is engaging fun. [07 Jul 1995, p.03]

A handsomely staged and craftily constructed tearjerker.

Exhilarating, alternately funny and horrific film.

Throw in some business with the CIA, add a small army of Serbian thugs and a mysterious Croatian beauty, and The Hunting Party picks up speed, careening through the forests where the Fox may or may not be hiding out. Whatever fate awaits, it can't be good. But it can be fun.

Beautiful to behold but lacking in any kind of palpable dread or suspense.

Epic piffle.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

Has an odd magic about it - the magic of Darger's singularly peculiar dreamworld.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men.

The Chamber of Secrets -- darker, scarier and somewhat better than "Sorcerer's Stone."

With so many good Austen adaptations out there (the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, Emma Thompson and Ang Lee's splendid Sense and Sensibility), Becoming Jane seems a bit flimsy by comparison.

Aimed at tweenage girls and mushy romantics of all age and stripe, Penelope has a quick gait and a nice comic tone.

Pray has a great story here, but it's much more than just "The Brady Bunch's Endless Summer."

It's still a submarine movie, confined by the ship, the sea, and a convention-laden script.

An effectively unsettling mix of Southern gothic and Old Testament hugger-mugger, with shades of "The Exorcist" and even "Rosemary's Baby" thrown in.

Presented with an economy and emotional cool that add to, rather than subtract from, its dramatic impact, The Girl on the Train reverberates with a quiet, seductive power.

A downer of a drama.

It's "The Deep" reimagined as an Abercrombie catalog.

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of the BP disaster in the gulf: It's a big-screen oil spill, a needless gushing of macho bluster and wild set pieces, and a waste of millions and millions of dollars.

Still stands as a gloriously silly and twisted send-up.

Gyllenhaal, in the pivotal role, brings a scruffy, boyish charm to the proceedings, but his big scenes with Hoffman and Sarandon are one-sided - he's not in the same league, and comes off as a bit of a cipher.

Has a dreamy ominousness about it, and a sorrowfulness that speaks to the artificial intimacies of cellular communication, digital images and dial-up porn.

A tale of horror, heroism, unimaginable physical challenges, and, yes, cannibalism, Stranded offers the kind of real-life drama that can't help but bring up notions of God, fate, and nature's imposing will.

Although it's fascinating, intelligent and scathingly accurate in its depiction of a certain milieu, The New Age is a more problematic picture than 1991's The Rapture - where Mimi Rogers played a sexually adventurous woman who finds spiritual succor in fundamentalist Christianity. [23 Sept 1994, p.03]

No great shakes, The Baxter nonetheless has a quiet loopiness going for it. And it has the absence of a laugh track going for it, too.

A forced-march comedy.

He emerges stinking, and so, alas, does Fathers' Day. [9 May 1997, p.03]

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action, Outlander boasts a super-serious Jim Caviezel in the title role

An entertaining, occasionally illuminating autodocumentary.

Harry Connick Jr. acquits himself best of the lot.

"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.