Wesley Morris

What's most remarkable about it is the way Bong builds real suspense and plays the chilling moments straight while leaving himself room for nonsense and horseplay. He seems completely at ease with the marriage of the silly with the serious. Only time can reveal whether he's a master filmmaker, but this, at least, is a masterful performance.

Generates very little heat.

Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

What makes the film such a guilty pleasure is how Williams's righteous self-pity is perfectly matched to Collette's nuttiness and despair.

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

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

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

The latest Guy Ritchie shoot-em-up, is a joke. You laugh with it but mostly at it.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

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.

Fun here is fleeting.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

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.

If this is an unusually sentimental outing for Jia, it’s also characteristically tinged with woe. He’s just added a touch of sweetness to these otherwise sugarless lives.

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.