Ty Burr

Yet Crudup does good, mercurial work despite a silly surfer-dude haircut.

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Proficiently filmed and utterly uninspired.

The joy is in the details, and they are unrelentingly comic.

On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

Murphy gives a reined in performance that, every so often, shows a spark of the ''Shrek''ish donkey within.

Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.

Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.

Even the portrayal of the Hasidic community comes to feel like window-dressing, welcome for its exoticism but never truly understood.

You may have to be from Iceland to take dialogue like ''You can't freeze love like a gutted fish'' with a straight face.

The movie's cheap, it's clever - it's even a little scary in places.

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles as the '60s writhed to a close, it's very much a product of its time: unsubtle, psychedelic, truly weird, occasionally very funny. [08 Dec 2002]

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

This charming, bittersweet 90-minute monologue consists of the actor telling tales of his childhood and early years, when he was an ugly duckling from an uglier family. The anecdotes are bruisingly funny and delivered with clarity and light mockery.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

Almost but not quite as obnoxious as its title. Little kids will love it. You’ll need a hazmat suit.

The man inside that legend has yet to come into focus 40 years on. Morrison wanted the world and he wanted it now, and he got it. What When You’re Strange can’t admit is that he had no idea what to do next.

As luscious as the filmmaking craft here is, it lacks the rude vitality, the unpredictability, the pure American craziness of the films that should have won him (Scorsese) the Oscar: "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "GoodFellas."

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

You can bet your parrot "Pirates" will be back, even if "At World's End" hasn't the foggiest idea when to quit.

What makes Cheri’ worth your while is that its true subjects are women and age, and its observations apply to both 19th-century France and the modern film industry.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

This is one of those follies that go beyond pesky, bourgeois notions of ''good'' and ''bad.''

The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

The film bears a resemblance to such multicharacter dramas as Robert Altman's ''Short Cuts" and Paul Thomas Anderson's ''Magnolia" -- like them, it's a portrait of a society straining at the seams -- but it manages the neat trick of being both charming and bilious.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead.

This is frostbitten Fellini -- a film that finds fresh beauty and contentment in the wake of centuries of conquering armies. The great joke of Vodka Lemon is that the conquerors missed what was there all along.

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

Watching these pint-size Astaires and Rogerses practice the fox trot, tango, rumba, and swing is the immediate hook to Mad Hot Ballroom.

Giuliani Time has an ax to grind and wields it with dull-edged force.

Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

A chick flick of a particularly intelligent, ruthless, and loving sort.

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.

A broader work than Baumbach's last movie, and it's funnier, too, even as you gasp at the misbehavior.

The Orphanage gets by on mood and a mournfulness that's not easily soothed. Sadness and loss, it says, are the threads connecting the spirit world and our own, and women, who bring life into the world, understand that far better than men ever will.

It’s rooted in observed reality and idiosyncratic individuals. It’s possible, Silva is saying, to live among people and still be terribly, crushingly isolated.

All thing considered, MacGruber’ is a lot better than it should be. That still doesn’t mean it’s all that great.

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Filmed with panache, wit, chic amorality, and an inexhaustible supply of Micro Uzi ammunition, ''Killer'' nevertheless represents a baroque dead end for the Hong Kong action genre.

Like its hero, the movie doesn't flinch for most of its running time.

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

Any movie that shows its heroes firing up a joint between stints as high-school anti-drug crusaders is true to its black little heart.

As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.

It's an "Annie Hall" for the iPod generation: über-designed, pleasing to the touch, making up in generic sweetness what it lacks in bite.

This gulf between a woman's public and private faces is an intensely rich subject that Rapaport glosses over.

It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.

Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.

A lukewarm thriller.

The point of "the official Muslim comedy tour" is that these guys are ordinary Americans just like you and me. Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of the jokes.

The most consistently funny of the ''Austin Powers'' films.

Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

Once the cat is out of the bag, "Incident" becomes simultaneously entertaining and disappointing.

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

Isn't a first-date movie. As a third -date movie, though, it's just about perfect.

In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.

Reiner's penchant for hip little riffs -- Billy Crystal as a yiddish wizard, etc. -- dilutes primal power in favor of genial fun.

8- to 12-year-olds will have a good time, and you'll have a good time watching them have a good time. Otherwise, the film's an oddity.

The tapes of the TV episodes are in heavy rotation at our house, and the movie is not. And that’s because even a 4-year-old can tell when something has gotten a little too big for its Huggies.

The Dreamers isn't that bad -- actually, it's funny, affecting, interestingly twisted, and seriously erotic before it heads south in the final stretch.

A "great poet" movie, the poet in this case being Dylan Thomas, and it's utter bollocks.

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

Everyone here is obsessed with finding "the real thing" - the next hot actor, the next revealing paparazzi shot, the lover or the friend who'll make it all worthwhile. Everyone settles for the illusion of reality instead. It's prettier, and it doesn't hurt so much.

Stealing the movie, however, is rapper Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear, the pimp/informant originally portrayed by Antonio Fargas on the TV show.

The whole thing's weightless: An upscale date-movie bonbon that keeps yielding pungent aftertastes.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

The lead character has been aptly renamed Walker, and, as played by Marvin in what may be the actor’s most emblematic performance, he strides through Los Angeles like a gangland golem: watchful, unstoppable, frighteningly silent.

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

Pirates offers something for everyone: Bloom and Depp for the ladies, big action and Knightley for the men, self-aware gags for the postmodern crowd, Depp and Rush for fans of top-rank scenery chewing.

For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

It’s rife with fey, unintentional camp like the scene in which a newlywed couple pledge eternal love on the deck of an ocean liner — only to move away and reveal a life preserver labeled Titanic. Cavalcade really won its Oscar because of Hollywood’s raging Anglophilia — the insecure sense that if a character says, ”Let’s all have a cup of tea!” the movie must be art.

Son of the Pink Panther isn’t an unwatchable mess like 1982’s Curse of the Pink Panther; it trots along quickly with series veterans like Herbert Lom adding needed class. But there’s a void at the center of this film about Inspector Clouseau’s long-lost son, and its name is Roberto Benigni. Where Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had a blissfully out-of-it officiousness, the Italian comedian’s sole shtick is to beam idiotically. He’s that ruinous oxymoron: an unsurprising clown.

For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.

Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

Despite a similar setting-the never-never land of the Arabian Nights — the new movie is hipper, faster, more topical.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Ostensibly a road-trip farce, Chair really depicts the highway to man-child hell: The laughs come from the gulf between how mature the characters think they're being and what emotional toddlers they are.

A proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.

Works hard to give quirk a bad name.

If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun.

Genuine, artful simplicity may be an impossible quality in a modern children's movie, so Curious George opts instead for mayhem under a blanket of sweetness. The little ones understand.

A conventional New York-lonely hearts story made watchable by one element and one element only: Parker Posey.

When the cast starts clomping atop a car, their synchronized bodies joining with the booming cross-rhythms, we're sold.

A movie only a copyright lawyer could love. It strip-mines at least three Hitchcock classics - "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man," and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - then commits unlawful assault on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" just for the heck of it.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

Immense, mystical, and deranged beyond immediate comprehension, Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is an apocalyptic allegory of Mother Russia and its current state of squalid exhaustion.

Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.

It's maddeningly chowderheaded, simplistic, pretentious, and not a little silly. You can't take your eyes off it.

If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.

Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

A gracefully subtle metaphor about life's Deep Magic has become a war film; what was a one-chapter battle toward the end of the book is now a ripsnorting Armageddon that looks like something Hieronymus Bosch might dream up after a heavy meal.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act.

It is an honest, dumbstruck, not particularly deep demonstration of how insanely difficult it is to make a movie, any movie, no matter how blithe the end result may appear on screen.

Both despite its familiarity and because of it, Nothing Like the Holidays brings it home for Christmas.

A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.

I wish Hotel Rwanda felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie.

At its strongest cataloging the sheer sensory overkill of the festival -- the faces, the food, the many roads to bliss. Only the slightest historical information is offered and no spiritual background whatsoever.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

One reason World Trade Center is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.

Watching Arthur and the Invisibles is like sticking your head in a Gallic pinball machine: It's hectic, technically impressive, and your skull starts to pound after a while.

The longer it takes for the eldritch glop to hit the fan, in fact, the less true the movie may be to King. For better and for worse, Dreamcatcher is true to King.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

At a certain point, The Duchess stops attending to the topiary and becomes a women's melodrama instead.

So spectacularly bent that it exudes a contact cough-syrup high all its own.

The first "Candidate" was inspired pop art, a two-dimensional coloring book about 1962 America's subterranean political fears. Demme's film is more nuanced, less crazy-brilliant and, yes, probably less necessary, but it's still a confirmation of all the anxieties out there on the table and festering in our heads.

Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.

The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.

Illusionist is like an overupholstered wing chair in the corner of a men's club -- you settle in only to be startled by how ridiculously comfy you are.

The only victims in Paid in Full are the dealers and their families -- and the only word for that is one this paper can't print.

You can’t make this stuff up, but you can botch the telling of it, and that’s what sinks this satiric drama.

To paraphrase the old ad for Levy's rye bread, you don't have to be Jewish to love "Keeping Up With the Steins," but it helps.

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.

There's a great movie to be had in the notion of a busybody whose advice keeps blowing up in his face, but Dan in Real Life merely sets it up and walks away.

Preposterous, luridly entertaining.

Charming, if terribly overstuffed, vision of romantic London gridlock.

The top-secret message this pigeon is carrying reads ''Wait for the DVD."

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.

It's a merry deconstructive delight and easily the best party in town.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

Run the game, bow to the movies that did it better and before, keep the dialogue on the line between hard-boiled and hokey, and throw one last curveball before the lights come up. It's a con in itself, but the reward's in the playing.

Often as noisy, dippy, and enjoyable as 2004's "National Treasure," and when it's not, it's just another sequel, more absurd than most.

A reasonably watchable sci-fi B movie, a case of a good director and some intriguing ideas struggling to overcome formula plotting, limp dialogue, and a serious case of the sillies.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

The plot -- it's inspired and ridiculous at the same time -- is best described as "Groundhog Day" meets "Memento."

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.

Winter Passing plays like two indie movies trapped in one film, and Zooey Deschanel is in the better of them. Will Ferrell is in the other one.

One comes away from Interview exhausted and a little unclean, entertained by the acting equivalent of a pit bull fight but needing a hose-down. The movie confirms that in every relationship "there are winners and losers." True enough, but for the audience this one's a draw.

Rudely silly rather than transgressively shocking, Zack and Miri is the sort of bawdy but fundamentally decent farce you could take Grandma to, provided Grandma were familiar with the oeuvre of Traci Lords.

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

The most original thing about Lucky Number Slevin is that it lets Lucy Liu play a screwball heroine.

The thrill isn't gone from the sequel, but the surprise is, and it hurts more than you'd think.

Fascinating, like a car wreck seen through a rearview mirror.

Babel is a ziggurat of brilliant pieces built on sand. It's also this season's "Crash," a movie you know is Important because it never stops telling you so.

These actors offset the modern-day ordinariness of the leads -- Jackson, especially, seems as if he's just driven over from a mall tour -- and so, ultimately, does the exquisite moral dilemma of Tuck Everlasting.

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.

An inspirational sports movie, soccer subdivision, and it stops at every expected station of the cross on its road to the triumphant against-all-odds finale (in sudden-death overtime, yet). Yet it also feels appealingly handmade in a way most jock dramas don't.

An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

Depressingly, and in keeping with the stringent rules of bad-boy shock-comedies, all the women here are bimbos, shrews, and slutburgers except for one cool chick -- Cusack’s love interest, played by Lizzy Caplan -- who acts like a guy.

Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.

What's missing here is the one thing any duffer knows you need: Focus. The Greatest Game Ever Played works so hard to convince you of the truth of its title that it never settles down to address the ball.

An attempt to turn the 2005 nonfiction bestseller into a high-energy docu-romp, Freakonomics is a misconceived botch.

Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.

Blistering and brilliant work.

More predictable than it ought to be - you can set your watch by the appearance of the mournful Nick Drake song on the soundtrack.

From the neon-sign opening titles to the derivative angst of the dialogue, it's a touchstone of '80s pop culture, and a schizophrenic one, too.

Mad Detective is equal parts gonzo inspiration and overwrought indecision. It could be called "The Lunatic From Kowloon."

All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful.

The film's most natural appeal is to adolescent athletes -- in particular, cleat-wearing young ladies who will bask in its hard-won girl-power message. This is a movie with bruised shins and a huge heart.

Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.

It's nearly unwatchable, a farrago of confusing direction, stupid plot coincidences, and banal dialogue.

It's an honorable attempt, but there's still no genuine need for this film to exist.

Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

Arctic Tale has a very precise audience in mind: Young children who aren't yet ready for the graphs and sociopolitical alarm bells of "An Inconvenient Truth."

An overly constructed little thriller that squeezes a fair amount of suspense out of its far-fetched plot.

It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed afterward.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.

After a long run of baroquely plotted crime dramas like "Layer Cake'' and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,'' it's a little depressing to come across a vigilante drama whose sole twist is its protagonist's advanced age.

Daniel Anker's Music From the Inside Out is so intent on divining the mysteries behind the creative act that it comes up frustratingly short on specifics.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

In the new comedy Hamlet 2, Coogan comes perilously close to wearing out his welcome. It's actually a pretty fascinating sight.

What makes Shop timeless, ironically, is the specificity of its setting: a small department store in Budapest at the end of the global Depression.

What Zombieland’ has instead - in spades - is deliciously weary end-of-the-world banter.

An effective, no-frills gruel-a-thon if that’s your cup of Swiss Miss, and it explores such burning questions as: What happens if you’re dumb enough to leave your bare hand on a metal safety bar overnight?

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

One for the fans, even though writer-director Rodger Grossman and co-writer Michelle Baer Ghaffari labor mightily to spin it into something larger.

The filmmaker’s uncertainty shows itself in drably functional camerawork and an over-reliance on Christophe Beck’s tasteful piano-and-violin score.

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

All that's missing is coherence. Call it Blunderbuss Satire.

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

Extremely watchable, even if it never goes as deep as it should.

Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

Panettiere, I’m sad to report, is a dud as the title character, a supposed wild thang who never rises above the level of runty, obnoxious mall chick, down to the roll-on tan.

We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.

A manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.

Steven Spielberg overcame the lumpy plotting of Peter Benchley's novel to create an efficient, graceful fright machine in Jaws.

You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.

Anne Hathaway's Jane is headstrong and clever, balanced and true.

But it's Polanski who pries the genre open until it goes metaphysical.

In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.

It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.

Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.

The movie makes the case that the best American filmmakers may be the uncelebrated ones who helplessly turn life into art simply as a means to get out of bed every day.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

You've seen dozens of movies like this on cable in the wee hours.

Luhrmann is working a tricky game: He's trying to come to terms with modern Australia's racist legacy while telling a ripping yarn while also making fun of ripping yarns - but not too much.

Starts with savvy concepts (televised mind control and man’s reliance on robots, respectively) and quickly devolves into sour, overwritten diatribes.

An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.

The main characters may be refreshingly cliché-free, but almost everyone they meet in Beverly Hills is a stilted cartoon.

There's conspiracy here, as there is in all of Dick's books, and it wraps the film up with a moving but somewhat neat bowtie.

Moves the franchise even closer to Indiana Jones territory, with bloodcurdling action scenes and a passel of climactic computer-generated slime beasties unparalleled in their potential ability to -- I'm quoting from both book and film here -- '' rip, tear, rend, kill. ''

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

A miniature masterpiece of documentary observation.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

Astro Boy alternately soars and sputters through a story line that’s not quite sure who it’s aimed at.

A strident, contrived, surprisingly lovable Noo Yawk City family farce.

If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.

Indeed a rip-off - a rehash of Hong Kong superstar Chow's greatest celluloid moments with an overlay of Hollywood action cliches, youth-flick silliness, and ah-so stereotypes.

Fans of the animated wildlife adventure show will be in warthog heaven; others need not necessarily apply.

Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.

Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.

Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.

Expect Demonlover to become a midnight-movie staple in the coming years. And expect shards of it to roil your dreams for weeks.

The film's a propulsive international espionage thriller, built on the hurry-scurry bones of the "Bourne" movies.

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

"Dead" isn't a horror film but a study of human character under pressure, with Karloff's flawed, imperious General Pherides torn between rationalism and a homicidal belief in elder gods. [23 Mar 2014, p.N]

Maybe it's the era we're living in, but the new film is as much fun as a shroud.