Wesley Morris

Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.

Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.

Nicely shot and edited, but the movie is a narrative mess, which wouldn't be so bad if all it were up to was depicting Lucia's ups and downs. But the film takes too many illogical detours to be of much use.

Isn't as trippy, scary, handmade-looking, or environmentally aware as some of Miyazaki's pictures. But it shares their dreaminess. Even at its most ingenious, not even Pixar does that.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

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

Tom Six's movie has the freakiness and sadism of its genre, but it's so heavy with self-appreciation -- Dude, we had the craziest premise for a movie! -- that it can't lift off into the perverse ecstasy of decent exploitation. That was also the problem with "Snakes on a Plane.''

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

Another gorgeous and immensely satisfying reminder that there are few better directors than Téchiné when it comes to capturing the vagaries of the heart.

Nothing momentous happens here, but Philibert has a magical sense of how to find the simple poetry lurking in the universal routine of being a kid. A lot of the film's lyricism is extracurricular.

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.

A patient, suspenseful exercise in genre craftsmanship

The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.

Breaks new ground both as an abominable enterprise in guy-talk and as no-budget hackwork.

A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.

Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.

Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.

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

The movie sets Ferrell's assaultive and juvenile physical comedy in a less-combative playground, and the result might leave the Ferrell-intolerant exiting the theater on a high.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."

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.

Studding your movie with friends, admirers, and sycophants is having a ball; it does not bring us to question the illusory power of cinema or the politics of entertainment.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

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.

The film has a persuasive murkiness and one extended mythopoetic final sequence that's almost moving in its silence.

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.

As Diesel says, ''I like something fast enough to do something stupid in.'' Mission accomplished.

Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.

We do learn that love heals and that the movie's title makes a terrifically lewd little rock song. (Thank you, Sol.) But that's about it.

National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.

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.

If you want to watch a gaggle of pretty faux-neurotic people hang out and throw quips, you're probably better off watching "Friends."

The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

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.

It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal.

An archaic rail-ride into the heart of boredom.

I wish I could say there is something pleasurable in watching John Goodman reminisce about the good old days while impaled on a steering wheel in the Volvo he's crashed on a California freeway, but I can't find what it is.

Spellbinding.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

You might cheer. You might cry. For a minute, you might even wish it were you on that medal stand.

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

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.

On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

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

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

The movie feels incomplete and uncentered. It's like a grand magazine profile that's all reportage and absolutely no prose.

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