Wesley Morris

The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.

Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.

Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.

The Others is great as a collection of acknowledgments, but a ghost story made of a bunch of ghoulish thank-yous isn't that haunting.

One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.

For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching Serenity is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.

The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.

A big, silly party.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.

Broadway-sized performances.

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.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

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

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

Exacting but disappointing thriller.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.