Wesley Morris

Assassination reminds you that Penn can be very funny.

A feat of droll, refractive, melodramatic self-portraiture.

The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.

Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.

This is an old man's movie, without an old man's experience. Despite McGinly's stated affection for Kreskin (the movie ends with a written appreciation of him), there's nothing personal about it. It's the movie equivalent of handing us a business card.

Eden is "Once" after two kids and 10 years of marriage have sucked the music out of life.

Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.

The movie has a dramatic thinness, breezy tone, and unconvincing happy-ish ending that make it feel more inconsequential than anything about killers and imperiled children probably should.

Like all of Jacquot's movies, it's not crazy enough.

If there's true magic to be found in the proceedings, it's in Garai's dexterous performance.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.

A big, silly party.

It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.

One of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

The bliss of Megamind is the way it pursues solutions for tired problems.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

Has the problem of drifting in and out of authenticity.

This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.

Dave is one of the most ineffectual characters ever to have an entire movie built around him.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

Generates very little heat.

Loaded with priceless encounters that would seem incongruous in any other movie but play here as low-comedy facts of some parts of black life.

Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

"Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.

The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.

If we are in the midst of a culture war, as many people proclaim in Jesus Camp, then the left should be concerned. The right's Christian soldiers appear to be extremely well trained.

The film builds into a lurid and suspenseful thriller.

It's too much too-much. The audience I saw it with didn't seem to know whether to clap when it was over or start taking Lipitor.

In Catch a Fire Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

Breezy humor and a dazzling heist keep 'Ocean' franchise in the money.

An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.

The journey's a kick.

Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.

The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.

Actually the problem with Saving Face as a romantic comedy is that its central romance is a drag.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.

As moviemaking, it's monotonous. But its insistence on breaking our hearts proves a reliable weapon.

A squeaky clean, family-friendly comedy that merely sounds like an unreleased Cheech and Chong romp.

Expanded, Major Dundee is still a mess of great scenes sprinkled among some fairly monotonous action.

The movie's few false notes come from Lumet's script, which can be overly explanatory. Because Demme is opting for present-tense realism, the characters are forced to fill us in on who did what when to whom, why, and how.

The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

This engrossing and provocative documentary is also about a tragic kind of liberal guilt.

It's hard not to like a movie like Men of Honor, but it's entirely possible.

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.

The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.

The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.

Zahedi's search for fulfillment is depleting, like throwing good sex after bad. The more we learn about the hole in his soul, the more vivid his misogamy becomes.

A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

While the picture isn't brilliant, it is, at its most entertaining, a kicky, surprisingly astute throwback to bygone Hollywood social comedies.

The film is overripe with erotic symbols.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

Even when the movie is bad -- it's addictively so.

The Poe-like atmosphere in Stolen is such a chilling success that when Mashberg says that Gardner would have cracked this case herself, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't out looking for those paintings right now.

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Gordon made similar lurches all over the map in his previous exercise in grotesquerie, "Edmond," which was based on a David Mamet play and starred William H. Macy as, of all things, a racist misogynist on a grisly bender. Stuck could have used some of that outrageousness.

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. That said, these guys' nakedly neurotic enthusiasm keeps the movie from being a total jumble.

In Mamet's understanding, straight white maleness is the most powerful weapon such men have. It can also be illusory, which is why the last scenes of Edmond are so touching.

It captures a version of our best worst selves.

Slow but rarely tedious.

Without trivializing the disease, the film challenges AIDS' stigma (albeit for heterosexuals) at a moment when it was still considered a death sentence.

What Conviction lacks in characterization (the people here are monochromes - bright ones, but monochromes nonetheless) it makes up for with personality.

Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.

Wonderfully deranged.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Cool It arrives having been labeled the anti-"An Inconvenient Truth." It is. But not in the philistinistic way you'd expect.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

Brown lays out his guiding philosophy up front when he says of the Baja, ''This isn't about a race, it's about the human race."

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

Disappointing.

Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.

It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.

Frances McDormand rescues this role from the throes of cliche. It's as though drippy dialogue and sappy rock were a small price to pay for a part that lets her flash her breasts, get stoned, and join in a three-way.

At some point we're flashed a junkyard billboard telling us that Collinwood is the ''Beirut of Cleveland'' - yes, but here, it's by way of Looney Tunes.

Not the sanctioned wet T-shirt contest you might be anticipating. The Pacific is the hottest body here. And director John Stockwell handles the frivolous material with an integrity that I have to admit I found disappointing. The movie isn't nearly dumb enough to be much beach fun.

Redundant for a filmmaker whose work has always dealt with the dismaying consequences of this country’s profit motive. Isn’t every Michael Moore film ultimately about capitalism? This one just has a more facetious title.

Grace is grace, and however it arrives, there's no denying its presence.

Astonishing.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.

All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract’ feels more like a collection of crumbs.

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

Just as exciting and socially vivid as Bielinsky's. Yet, somehow it's more stressful. The American characters practically sweat desperation.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

It's a lot like a pumpkin spice frappuccino with extra sugar and extra cream. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll leave with foam on your nose. So cute. As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in some of the physical blowouts.

If Plympton is making pastiche, he's also having a laugh at a universal experience that for a lot of people was probably pretty crummy. Apparently, it was a little crummier for him.

Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.

Technically outstanding and the performances are strong.

Partly impressive, partly inane buck-banging toy of a movie.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

Cannon actually is funny -- not to mention funny-looking. Plastic surgery has left her physically absurd, like a vaguely glamorous R. Crumb cartoon.

Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.

Each player in this love rhombus keeps the Martin Ritt-directed affair from scatting off into period nonsense. [01 Jul 2001]

A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.

This native send-off is robotic enough to leave you eager to see what an artist might do with a reboot.

Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.

Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.

Engrossing and provocative.

Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

The film doesn't amount to an emotionally palpable experience. Most of the stops it attempts to pull out are rusty. The movie ends with a gigantic lump in its throat, one that would take a tall glass of Barbara Stanwyck to wash down.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

The movie's no good: It's written, directed, performed, photographed, edited, and marketed on a fifth-grade reading level; despite that and its twin stars' saucer eyes and ropy limbs, it's no Muppet movie either.

The movie does offer intriguing, perceptive glimpses of the everyday difficulties of being both a survivor and the child of a survivor.

Whether this movie works for you largely depends on whether you're willing to work for it. To which I say: Bring your gym clothes.

Doesn't have its heroine's conviction. It'd be better if it had.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

A passable, sometimes skillful farce.

With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.

The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.

A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese. I just couldn't hate this movie, and I really, really tried. It's tightly made and well written in deceptive ways that don't reveal themselves until past the halfway point.

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

It's the most liberated and alive [DeNiro]'s been since his deluded Rupert Pupkin tried to kidnap Jerry Lewis in "King of Comedy."

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

At its most compulsive, this is the only action flick you'll need this summer.

More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.

The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.

The best moments come when Robb's all-purpose toughness experiences vulnerable doubt. These moments are flickers, but they're bright and human.

This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.

Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

Comes on like a runaway Humvee.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

Ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.

Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

As documentary, it’s low concept. But it’s never dull.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

The endearing and cheeky ensemble works hard, and Ken Scott's script finds ways of wringing irreverence from the apparent good nature of the situation.

The film is built to quaver and buckle along with its victims and martyrs. In an almost soulful way, it bespeaks the reality lingering when the final fantasy ends.

There's enough sexual manic depression to justify house calls from Dr. Laura.

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

Luckily, the movie has Scott Thomas. She knows her radiance can't be helped, so she uses it here like a searchlight.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

The sort of smutty scandalmongering the average moviegoer can really get behind.

This is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a coldblooded assassin.

The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.

Actually, everything in Bowdon’s rant about America’s woeful public school system is important, including Bowdon.

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

This is a movie whose cynicism in the name of idealism might have appealed to Billy Wilder.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.

A collection of arbitrary sketches, bits and improvs jammed into a locker room-style variety show masquerading as some semblance of a narrative.

The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.

The first half of Moonlight Mile feels like the runaway trailer for a movie that can't wait to jerk your tears. But to quote Joe in a moment of epiphany, there's a ''truth enema'' out there, and, boy, it really brings this movie around.

Showing up for Molière eager for the story of one of the theater's greatest comedy writers would be unwise. It's not that kind of party.

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

The movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced.

The documentary is primarily a work of whimsy.

The violence in the final 45 minutes of Mr. Vengeance is tough to watch.

Basically an addiction thriller in which the thirst is for the acquisition and execution of knowledge. So you need an actor who seems surprised by how smart he is but not afraid to be charmingly intelligent. Cooper turns out to be perfect for the part.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

A movie that seems to have been made mostly on the hard drive of a Power Mac G4. But whatever, we get it: Technology destroys everything.

No one around this beauty-first rendition of these addled artisans and their brief, obsessive affair really understands the attraction, so most people just get out of the way.

Takes a dedicated and true snapshot of African-American life. But so little of its presentation is memorable. This is a haircut movie that redefines ''fade.''

The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.

Thompson adapted the screenplay from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books, and she and director Kirk Jones balance the slapstick and levity with darker enchantments. At its most enjoyable the film feels like Roald Dahl's idea of "Mary Poppins."

Hot-blooded.

Wimbledon is refried "Notting Hill" with a Teen People glaze. The latter movie also gave us an American star cheering up some tired British guy. Wimbledon is blander and far less worth rooting for.

The movie has a great time playing with ideas of scope and perspective, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

As it is, LaBute has cleverly repurposed his creepy source material. This Wicker Man, which wasn't screened for critics, is a nutty atonement for the gender assaults of his filmmaking and playwriting past, including "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things."

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

The happiest news about the third (and final?) X-Men movie is actually quite sad: headstones. Yes, The Last Stand brings the lamentable deaths of several major characters.

This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

Brown Sugar fails to produce an image of hip-hoppery as fascinating and complex as the moment when Halle Berry set her tongue wagging during a ghetto-fabulous grind with Warren Beatty in ''Bulworth.''

Doing nothing special, Freeman manages to make the picture seem wiser, funnier, and more eloquent than it is.

The movie wails in pain. And it's that sort of grand empathy that makes Iñárritu both impossible to dismiss and impossible to live with.

You're left with an inert, politically neutral movie, a satire that can't bring itself to properly satirize anything.

The trouble with Quantum of Solace is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

A relentlessly serious action movie, characterized by, of all things, sorrow.

The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.

Despite the appearance of numerous free-speaking conservatives, the movie's partisanship leans nakedly to the left.

This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

These movies are more about the experience of hearing girls and women who should know better holler at the screen. They could just as well be at a concert.

Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.

Walking the line between the movie’s broad strokes and its near-perfect pitch is the art itself, which has been designed and constructed by a team of smart designers.

The film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people.

A fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.

The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.

This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.

Yes, Younger has made an update of the ''shiksa who changed my life" story in ''Annie Hall." But Prime is missing the psychological acuity and scabrous cultural wit of Woody Allen at his best. These lovers meet standing in line to see Antonioni's ''Blow-Up" and never mention the movie.

It's a resplendently basic, lovey- dovey and inside-out "King Lear."

After an hour or so, Ask the Dust seems to have said everything, and the air starts to seep out of its hermetic atmosphere.

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

The journey is not very exciting, but the destinations are inspired.

An unremarkable comedy-drama.

This is an easy movie to watch. If only Julie Bertuccelli had more trust in her most interesting stuff.

There are moments when Hill and Giler dare to turn Undisputed into an episode of ''Oz'' - albeit an insipid, belligerence-, and sex-free episode.

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

The film Soderbergh's made is about promiscuous stargazing. And you don't need a brain for that, just two eyes and a mammoth appetite for heavenly bodies.

In tone and plotting, Away We Go feels like a fairy tale built on an aggravating collection of attitudes. It's condescending, judgmental, righteous, yet sincerely searching.

This is a movie you could watch in your sleep.

Daybreakers has unexpected flashes of brilliance.

Lila is all come-ons without any charm.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

The film's most endearing trait is that these people sincerely love movies, and they truly love their own idiosyncrasies. And is that not the greatest love of all?

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

Osmosis is really an occasion for the brothers to take their culture- debasing scatology to a PG crowd.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

It's more like a cartoon with a body count.

The best parts of Flicka are its pinch-me optimism and its old-fashioned-movie flourishes.

Queasy comedy.

In a summer in which every blockbuster is zealous to be a video game, Rodriguez, with a wink, has produced his own.

This tired little movie got on my last nerve. If Driss is so charismatic and so full of ingenuity, why isn't he using any of that skill to help lift up his family?

Teeth is the "Incredible Hulk" of sex satires.

The cast is strong. Kudrow and Gyllenhaal provide the movie's emotional center.

Mac's TV show seems to have trained him to settle for feel-good tack-ons that cut against the prickly nature of Mr. 3000. The actor has such a serious and wise bearing that it's hard to believe Stan as a shallow jackass, which is why several of his scenes with Boca seem phony.

It's looking for comedy and romance in the obvious places.

A richer movie might speculate on McGartland’s life now. How does a local hero survive in an anonymous void?

Not since ''Mannequin on the Move" has a flamboyant black man brought so much fabulousness to stiff white heterosexuals.

Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

A defective poker comedy where the poker is a lot more interesting than the people playing it.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

On screen something happens that goes beyond Monk's powers of description and Fanning's way of seeming 14 and 44 at the same time.

Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.

This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

Still comic, but bigger isn't better.

The most powerful moment in the film is a tiny one. Anker and his Irvine, Leo Houlding, plan to reenact most of Mallory's climb wearing gabardine and hobnail boots instead of North Face and Gore-Tex.

The film's good humor is often betrayed by its low-budget roots, however, as though it couldn't afford to be more original or ambitious than its premise.

Who's it for? How do you put this message across without it seeming medicinal? Sure, MTV is among the movie's producers, but what 11th grader wants to spend a Friday night being hit with such a blunt instrument?

The whimsy Greenebaum wants to construct can't match the terminal sadness that naturally takes over the film. Perhaps in accidental tribute to Todd, the whole thing feels half-baked.

Somewhere in this movie, amid the ponderous exchanges and unfortunate O. Henry-style coincidences, there's American tragedy.

A modest but extremely enjoyable movie.

Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.

The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

Die Another Day is still as professionally mediocre as its predecessors.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

Effortlessly entertaining romantic comedy.

The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.

What's astonishing is that the movie is not a half-baked production. The spectacle now LOOKS spectacular.

A big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex.

A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.

American Violet feels less like life and unreasonably more like the movies.

The film has a habit of cutting away from interviews for Maher's commentary during the drive to the next location. You can see him trying to work the car for a laugh.

It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.

The movie is a holiday romantic comedy that wants to put the holiday romantic comedy out of business.

Is a man with Asperger’s boyfriend material? It’s difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it’s strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.

The crime of The Chorus isn't that it's corny. (I like corny.) It's that its corniness seems programmed.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

The film moves slowly and steadily, but it's never exactly dull, just mild.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.