Steven Rea

In the end, you just feel good about these people, and that's a nice sensation these days.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.

Windblown, with a sage and playful Zen vibe, Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Redux is a color-saturated, slo-mo martial arts piece about time, memory, love, regret, betrayal.

Kilcher is lovely. But sadly, Ka'iulani is a perfunctory biopic of the sort one might encounter on television during Women's History Month.

Lacks the visceral sweep of "Saving Private Ryan." But Spielberg's story, for all its gut-wrenching intensity, was a fiction. Dahl's movie, slower in pace and conscious of its own artifice, addresses the same issues of courage and sacrifice - and tells a true story. That's worth something. In fact, it's worth a lot.

Cronenberg's movie is eerily compelling and darkly humorous. And chilling - to the bone.

Nicely run through its paces by John Gatins, who also wrote the screenplay (it's his directing debut), Dreamer is, not surprisingly, about daring to dream the big dreams. It's about family, and faith, and facing hard times together.

Bale is extraordinary, grinning like a kid, displaying wily intelligence, sinewy resolve and spirit - and a bit of craziness, too.

There's a sign on the way into Norway, or at least a sign that somebody from the film crew put up: "On the eighth day, God created baseball." If amen is your answer to that, then The Final Season is the movie for you.

There's no quick fix for a culture "addicted to debt," as one wag puts it in the film. But watching I.O.U.S.A. is a good place to start.

All four performances are strong and nuanced, which makes the film oddly compelling. At the same time, all four characters are hard to like, difficult to care about. They're like car-crash victims in a demolition derby of narcissism and lies.

A likably energetic star vehicle for English sports god Vinnie Jones.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

A meditation on art, life, loneliness and the links between friends and strangers, the movie has a grace and humor that's wonderfully inviting.

Around the Bend doesn't inspire one to care.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

A first film with a deft comedic touch and a trio of charming stars, Saving Face isn't deep - but it doesn't profess to be.

Whether or not Street Fight wins the Academy Award Sunday night, Curry's picture is must-see fare for any and every observer of the curious world of American politics.

It's the old cliche, but (like most cliches) it's true: It's impossible to imagine this picture without this actor.

What this arid and arty exercise offers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.

In the end, The Last Kiss holds less a cynical view of the matrimonial state than one of considered irony.

Take "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," throw some "Antz" on it, and you have The Ant Bully.

Crafty, cutting movie.

A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG, T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

If the film itself isn't brilliant, its star most definitely is.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

A powerful indictment of Russia's illegal adoption industry - and a story of pipsqueak resolve and resilience - The Italian is clear-eyed and tough in its depiction of a corrupt, atrophied social order.

The playwright, actor, director and drag queen (yes, his bewigged and be wild Madea makes a brief and totally gratuitous appearance in his new film) knows how to give human dimension, and a dimension of humor, to the cliches and stereotypes.

There's a lot of rambling and shambling going on in these overlapping stories, often to the point where Explicit Ills no longer feels like it has a point.

"Kill Bill" without irony, and without Quentin Tarantino's flair for cool dialogue and chop-socky action (and without Uma Thurman, for that matter), Elektra is a pretty-looking, pretty dull adaptation of the Marvel Comic about a dishy, deadly assassin.

Question: Is life still like a box of chocolates if you're going in reverse? The answer, in the case of the curiously Gumpian The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a gooey yes.

That the film, directed in swift strokes by F. Gary Gray from a screenplay credited to Kurt Wimmer, doesn't really work - unrelentingly grim, unintentionally funny - is almost beside the point. It's a wild concept.

Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.

Wang's young actors are impressively natural, and his documentary-style camerawork captures the rhythms and cacophony of the big city, all its crazy-quilt comings and goings.

Oleanna is Mamet's form of intellectual hazing, and we seated in the theater are, alas, his victims. [11 Nov 1994, p.05]

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Thoughtfulness and artistry ...raise this small, quiet picture to moments of pure epiphany.

A massive compendium of youth-movie/pedal-to-the-metal cliches. But man, is it fast!

That's exactly why Heavenly Creatures is the small masterpiece that it is: because the film roots so deeply and eagerly into the psychology - and pathology - of its characters. It takes us to a lush place, defined by passion and imagination, where reality intrudes with surprising, gruesome results. [25 Nov 1994, p.03]

A smart and creepy fable in which the myth of the vagina dentata - yes, a toothed sex organ - is transplanted to teen suburbia.

Wincer shoots the whole thing - which is dressed up with cherry-red vintage fighter planes and boxy Pan Am Clippers and offers a few sequences in Thai lagoons of gloriously shocking turquoise - in a manner that renders even surefire stuff (collapsing rope bridges, horseback rides through crowded Manhattan streets) ho-hum. Kids of a certain age may be distracted by the bright colors and broad acting - the film is, at least, devoid of any gratuitously nasty violence - but most audience members who find their way into the theater will wonder when the Ghost Who Walks is going to walk off into the sunset. It ain't soon enough. [7 June 1996, p.03]

An entertaining foray into a world of spy guys, stakeouts and secret government machinations, Spartan teems with the kind of terse crypto-speak that is the playwright and filmmaker's stock-in-trade.

A Raimi-esque mix of gross-out madness and sick laughs.

Just a big chunk of waste flushed from a Hollywood studio.

Just a few barrels short of being a masterpiece.

An OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

A beautiful eyeful of puckish whimsy and dark-humored mystery, Hukkle (it means hiccup in Hungarian) is a little gem in which nature and humankind commingle, where coincidence and causality collide in a chain of odd, even murderous, events.

It's hilarious - in a Scandinavian Sartre-esque sort of way.

A torn-from-the-headlines tale of institutional racism and injustice in the Lone Star State of not-so-long-ago, American Violet might not be subtle, but it's certainly powerful.

If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in "The Godfather" saga, well . . . he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous.

How bad is Prince of Persia? Whether or not director Mike Newell is to blame, the action sequences lack verve and scope.

What Touch of Evil is really about, though, is filmmaking: evoking a mood of sweaty despair, of sour, sinister doom, using the vocabulary of a crime picture and a group of remarkable talents, in front of and behind the camera. [Director's Cut; 25 Sept 1998, p.04]

The best stuff in this dopey, intermittently amusing live-action cartoon is the look that the film's effects and computer crews have given New Angeles - the ruined urbanscape of Southern California after an 8.5 quake and a massive tidal wave have sundered the city. [04 Nov 1994, p.05]

Mostly about delivering thrills, and chills, and this it does with moderate success and a bunch of fast, no-nonsense edits.

Eye for an Eye's filmmakers have climbed on some high horse of social commentary, pretending this stalk-or-be-stalked suspenser is a meaningful drama about a wayward justice system where the rights of criminals supersede the rights of victims and their families. But what about the rights of moviegoers? We deserve better than this. [12 Jan 1996, p.05]

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

A feel-good movie, in the absolute best sense.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

This drag-queen melodrama, like its star, perseveres.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

In the film, the music, beginning with a muted a cappella ballad, is from Eastwood himself.

One of the great war movies - or antiwar movies - of all time.

A throwback in style, pace, and storytelling to the 1970s and the downbeat mood pieces of directors like Bob Rafelson.

Devilishly delightful.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of - and look at - movies.

The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.

For high-speed action, eye-popping locales, and chopsocky fight-fests galore, watch The Transporter - on video.

Illuminating and unsettling.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

Never mind Hollywood's big-star, big-budget hand-wringing about Africa - Bamako is the real thing.

Down Periscope is not, alas, a wacky Naked Gun-style parody of submarine movies. It's more a mild-mannered comedy in the triumphant-underdogs vein, pitting Dodge and his USS Stingray crew against a high-tech Navy fleet and its high-strung general (Bruce Dern) in a series of maneuvers off the Atlantic coast. [01 Mar 1996, p.14]

A roiling, boiling mix of blaxploitation, sexploitation, Tennessee Williams and the Tennessee outback.

Safe, disturbing and edgy and grounded by Moore's riveting performance, resonates with uncertainty.

The ads for The Sweetest Thing promise that if you loved "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," then you can't miss this latest Cameron Diaz vehicle. Well, miss it.

With the likes of Nicholson, Keaton, Reeves and Peet -- and a fleeting, funny few minutes with McDormand -- Something's Gotta Give is never less than entertaining. And once in a while it's sweetly, and extremely, funny.

In the engaging Looking for Eric, Loach, the master of British kitchen sink social drama - tries a bit of imaginary whimsy.

The film drifts along on a stream of humiliation jokes - physical, emotional, sexual, hairpiece-ial.

It's action opera, sword-and-sorcery song-and-dance, and it's a heart-pumping, jaw-dropping thrill. OK, so I kind of like the thing.

Bold, ambitious -- and ambiguous.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

Roth, who has taken more than a few cues from Raimi, David Lynch (whom Roth worked with), and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), is working in a horror tradition that goes way back -- and he's working it with nasty glee.

An entertaining history lesson. That is, a history lesson that synopsizes and simplifies a complex life and complicated times into easily digestible panels of action, intrigue, martyrdom and sticking it to the papacy.

An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.

Directed with an easygoing grace by Campbell Scott, has the feel of a coming-of-age novel.

Apted opts not to show the horrendous cruelty inflicted on thousands upon thousands of captive Africans, shackled and chained, making their way to the Americas in ships. Instead, he has Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists describe the inhumane conditions - in the precise, passionate language of legislators who believe that human decency is more important than money and power.

A tale of childhood innocence and adult corruption - and the point where the two intersect - I'm Not Scared is a lyrical thriller inspired by the run of kidnappings that befell Italy in the 1970s.

A Very Brady Sequel isn't quite as successful as its big-screen forerunner. The contrast between the time-warped Bradys and the '90s world around them seems a little forced here, and the sexual double entendres - and there are lots of them - are almost painfully arch. But the cast is dead-on in its impersonations of the original Brady gang, great pains have been taken to re-create the cheesy pop furnishings and fashions of the 1970s, and the writers have crafted some inspired bits of lunacy, even if more than a few of the gags are destined to rocket right over the heads of non-aficionados. [23 Aug 1996, p.03]

Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment.

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

Stay home and watch Friends. It's cheaper, funnier and mercifully shorter. [8 March 1996, p.08]

A baseball movie, a stranger-in-a-strange-land movie, a movie about real people facing real challenges in the real world, Sugar is all that and more.

Béart, too beautiful for words, brings a complex swirl of emotions, elegantly restrained and marked with pain, to this finely wrought work.

It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.

Nunez's dialogue, and the paces he puts this threesome through, just don't ring true. Coastlines is the stuff of pulp, seriously at odds with what the writer-director has always done best. That is, show the inner workings of people, their needs, their fears, their small dreams.

A beautifully strange movie.

That the fantasy comes crashing back to earth seems all but inevitable. That Rudo y Cursi doesn't crash in the process - that's muy bien.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

A slow and knotted-up film, but one imbued with a keen sense of what motivates people beyond mere avarice.

Travolta, a bit portly (or is it starboardly?), phones in his performance from his place in Maine; Vaughn is ice-cool but not especially convincing; the kid is OK, and Polo is a blank.

It's not just Hollywood convention that gets in the way of the story, it's the lack of depth, heft and heart at its core.

In Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith wears his heart on his sleeve - and on his pants, socks, boxers and backward-facing baseball cap.

There's probably not much of an audience for Elmo in Grouchland beyond the toddler crowd.

Simplistic and jingoistic. But it's also explosively fun.

Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.

There is a lot of shield-your-eyes ickiness in District 9, a lot of violence and gore. What there is not a lot of, however, is humanity - even in the film's depiction of the inhumanity humans are capable of.

It is at once inspiring and troubling.

Despite all the stock characters and scenarios, Fox and company manage to bring things to life. And cut some hair.

With rich, detailed, cinematic animation and terrific sound effects, WALLE pulls this unlikely love story off.

Anderson, who's turned Brit in a number of TV series and films, including "Bleak House" and "The Last King of Scotland," is compelling in her white lab coat and surgical scrubs, and she brings some real tenderness to her tete-a-tetes with Mulder.

A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

A meditation on guilt, remorse and redemption -- is unrelentingly heavy.

A messy fish-out-of-water gangland romp.

This sweet, yet unsentimental film is about growing up, losing innocence, and longing for a place, and people, to call home.

A fascinating, albeit self-congratulatory, account of how Disney's fabled animation department was reenergized and reimagined between 1984 and 1994.

The Conformist has a decadent visual beauty about it that's breathtaking. But as striking as Bertolucci's classic looks, there's even more powerful stuff in the storytelling.

A tad more character development would have been nice.

With its knowing take on men, messed-up romance and music, is like one long, hook-filled pop song for the eyes.

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

It's strong stuff.

Although its tone is generally genial and jovial, Good Hair touches on some tricky issues, at times complicitly.

Remy, the little rat who stars in the big, beautiful, funny Ratatouille, isn't gross at all. In fact, he's adorable.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

An ingenious blend of sci-fi and mystery.

Offers a diverting tale of erstwhile indie filmmaking and the power of porn to generate change - both at the box office and in the bedroom.

Bale brings intense energy (and a convincing American accent) to the proceedings, and the film manages to make this borderline Travis Bickle into a sympathetic character - with a sweetheart, and a sweeter life, beckoning from south of the border. Strong stuff.

An intelligent romance that cuts against the grain of the youth-pic genre, crazy/beautiful boasts a scarily good performance from Dunst.

Smart screwball comedy that upends the stereotype of the airhead towhead.

A by-the-numbers extravanganza that journeys from London to Venice to Siberia to Cambodia without ever really going anywhere.

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

Laced with a venomous wit, and turning progressively creepier as it unfolds, writer-director Jon Reiss' movie offers a black-humored study of suppressed rage, sexual gamesmanship, domination and subordination.

Icky, incoherent thriller.

A rich, beautifully detailed espionage thriller that captures the bygone days of Shanghai - and 1940s Hollywood noirs' romantic evocations of same - Lust, Caution is also one of those rare movie experiences: Its scenes of the trysts between Yee and Mak, from their rough-stuff first encounter to the long, tangled love-making sessions of subsequent meetings, are truly erotic.

The Rocker can be amusingly dopey, with its "Spinal Tap"-ish lampooning of rock idioms - and idiots.

All the running, the hiding, the escaping (from giant moles, from giant Murray) are decidedly less exciting, and compelling, than City of Ember wants to be.

The good thing about The Company is that nothing much happens. The bad thing about The Company is that nothing much happens.

In The Business of Strangers the right words are hard to come by, but the truth of them -- and the lies -- cut to the quick.

CQ is a movie for movie-lovers, by a movie-lover: Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford and a successful commercial and video director in his own right, making a witty, whimsical feature debut.

There's a melancholy sweetness here, a gentle humor that speaks to the angst and awkwardness of girls turning into women, and the awe of boys watching the transformation from afar.

Ultimately, Evan Almighty is too sappy, too sanctimonious.

Terrifically satisfying film.

It's a heartbreaker of a coming-of-age tale, even if there's a string of exsanguinated corpses to be accounted for.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

A steady, soulful film experience. It's got poetry to it - the poetry of humanity.

For a while, Firewall whips up the accordant dollops of suspense and dread, but it's not long before the timely issue of identity theft takes a backseat to old-fashioned Hollywood villainy, unnecessary (and nonsensical) red herrings, and STUFF THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Buscemi has pulled off a deft feat: He doesn't romanticize his characters, but he doesn't condemn them as losers either. They're just people. [25 Oct 1996, p.12]

Facing Windows is rich stuff. Maybe too rich. But thanks to fine performances and a grounded script, the pieces of this intriguing little puzzle all manage to fit.

Despite all its roiling melodrama, Head-On has its moments of sharply observed humor.

If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.

Silverman is wickedly fast. Her timing kills.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

It's inspired fun.

An engagingly knuckleheaded comic vehicle for former Saturday Night Live trouper Will Ferrell.

Reiner, who demonstrated an affinity for storybook yarns with The Princess Bride and sensitively addressed coming-of-age issues with Stand By Me, has trouble getting beyond the episodic nature of Zweibel and Scheinman's screenplay. [22 Jul 1994, p.03]

A squirmy mix of therapy-session slogans, pop psychobabble, and lots of crying, yelling and pouting on the part of its two stars, who appear in various alarming hairpieces.

With deft and subtle performances and an uncomplicated but savvy script, Autumn Tale gets to the inner lives of its characters.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

Funny People turns out to be fairly predictable, and not so rough. In a thoroughly satisfying way.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.

Occasionally clicks into full-speed farce mode, but never for long - or for long enough.

The Situation deserves credit for not trying to reduce the events in Iraq to facile equations. There is corruption and cynicism on all sides: the U.S. diplomats and military, the Sunni leaders, the thugs in cop uniforms, the local powerbrokers.