Wesley Morris

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

It would be a stretch to call The Simpsons Movie more than a crisper, livelier-looking episode of the series. The change in mediums changes nothing.

A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.

What ought to be a bittersweet movie about a woman's momentary unraveling feels like a workout class: Cardio melodrama.

The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling. You feel Majidi's hand much more than you do God's.

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

This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.

They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."

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

What he's (Brooks) come up with is one of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

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

Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.

The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.

Little Nicky is but a meek gross-out cousin of "The Waterboy."

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

Waist Deep is a cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition. It's as if he watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " and thought, "It needs more palm trees."

It's a grand outdoor spectacle (the only real interiors are within tents, and those are hard to come by) and a perfectly juicy melodrama.

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

Not about crashing into walls or crashing into other people. It's about crashing into yourself and living to tell the tale.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

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.

A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.

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.

A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.