Wesley Morris

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.

We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.

The best there is to say is that it's better than ''Troy."

A lot of the problem is that the picture's protagonist is both naive and foul.

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

The emphasis here is less on cuteness and romance and more on the "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style adventure.

A tall glass of hogwash that's terrified to declare itself the racial-healing melodrama it is.

The movie has to twist your arm to get you to feel for these people. But you wouldn’t be wrong to think it’s been broken.

A shamelessly dumb movie.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

The musician is candid about his own demons and gives the filmmakers access to his wife, two very different daughters, and, for a nicely done montage, his family photographs.

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

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

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.

A cheap, greasy time at the multiplex. You leave annoyed at having been hungry enough to have ever wanted it in the first place.

The moviemaking is driven only by contempt; he (Roth) wants to nauseate us into submission.

Leconte's writing is tight and nimble, and while the tests of the duo's friendship are facile, under the circumstances, they make sense. The bond between Francois and Bruno approximates the real thing; Leconte seems to be arguing that you can grow a flower from fake soil.

Had Stealing Harvard merely been a stupid movie about people stuck in a string of silly moments, it could have gotten by on charm. As written by Peter Tolan and directed by Bruce McCulloch (''Kids in the Hall'') it's a stupid movie about stupid people.

Formally, the effect is like watching really cinematic confetti.

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

This new movie is crazier, scarier, funnier, and more bewildering. It's the strangest movie I expect to see from a Hollywood studio for the rest of the year.

Perrier’s Bounty is all stock material, full of characters that deserve more than the cliched shootouts and showdowns that befall them. Even the movie’s most natural impulses seem to come from a can.

It's a startling, speedy, gracefully executed indictment.

Deal doesn't really care about the characters as much as it does the World Poker Championships, where Tommy and Alex end up. Once we get there the movie becomes interesting because Cates understands the game and its dramas a lot better than he understands people and theirs.

Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.

Slow and ultimately distressing.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.

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

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

Less a documentary than a PR package with a chip on its shoulder.

This is a disarming and, in its own way, delightful vehicle for its star and executive producer, the comedian and actress Mo'Nique. Who could hate this movie?

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.

It's intriguing. To be honest, though, there is less to it all than meets the eye.

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.

Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.

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.

There's more gymnastic yammering in Loving Jezebel than in a season of "Dawson's Creek."

This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject.

For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.

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.

As amusing as it is, the comedy here consists mostly of predictable potshots.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

Eddie Murphy in another mediocre family comedy? Imagine that.

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

Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.

What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.

The director has concocted a tragedy that actually feels tragic.

Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.

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.

The movie is always entertaining and frequently smart about the new ground one girl will break to humiliate another.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

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.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

Harmless enough, but "indie comedy" sounds like something better seen at Urban Outfitters than at a movie theater.

At the heart of most of these encounters is talk about the nature of relationships -- cousins, twins, and peers. Mostly, though, Jarmusch displays an unexpected interest in the ironies and banalities of fame.

The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

The laserdisc of media movies - it plays fine, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

The film's insistence on the men's innocence is matter of fact. But it's also an urgent corrective to the suspicious eye the movies so often cast on Arabs and Islam.

Just as you're ready to give up on Chasing Papi, Paul Rodriguez shows up, and the movie goes from plotless to wildly overwritten in just one scene.

Debbie gets away with being such a cauldron of extremes because the airy-voiced Mann is extremely good at playing them. She happens to be Apatow's wife (the kids in the movie are theirs), and with the possible exception of Téa Leoni , it's hard to imagine who else could get away with this combination of needling and affection.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

A brutally inane movie.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

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

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.

Breaking and Entering is a bourgeois movie full of bourgeois problems presented bourgeoisly.

Collapses under its own contempt.

It's scenic, confidently directed and performed, dutiful, faithful, revelatory, informative, and largely involving. Rarely, however, is it any <I>fun</I>.

A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.

Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.

A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

Such a well-meaning but unambitious work that it's tempting to take it seriously even as you dismiss it.

It's hugely entertaining.

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

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.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

Banderas slums through this dollar-bin action flick wearing the same look of wiped-out exasperation that Danny Glover's Sergeant Murtaugh sports in each installment of ''Lethal Weapon.'' And like Murtaugh, Banderas might be too old for this, too.

The movie's enthusiasm is as indelible and shiny as the lip gloss its star wears to bed.

It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.

The average Bollywood routine is passionately cheesy. This movie seems cursed with a lactose intolerance.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.

Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.

Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.

Even 007 is a big old queen. Yes, Roger Moore's on board as a lusty codger, who, unlike the rest of us, can't get enough of Sanz.

It's a fact that becomes riotously evident in the reel of outtakes that caps the picture and incites wonder about why no one thought to give us 90 minutes of those instead.

Where the average Japanese horror flick is petulant and nasty, Pulse is dolorous, shivery, and surreal.

If filmmaking has ever been less thrilling and more disengaging, I'd like to see it.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.

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

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

For a film about the power of speech, it's the quiet moments of rapture that say everything.

Like so many movies with a keypad for a brain, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is another exercise in making us feel the irritation associated with having to stand behind some game hack for our turn to play.

If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.

The single worst movie David Lynch never made.

Bay's strength as a filmmaker, the reason his superficial yet entertaining productions can never be completely ignored, is that he appears to lack shame. He'll blow anything up and run anybody over. The moral complexities don't matter to him. He just wants to stage spectacles, appreciate very good-looking people, and assert his cowboy aesthetic.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

A slick but dull new shoot- ' em-up from Jamaica, doesn't penetrate the mysteries of high-rolling, high-risk thug life.

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

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.

Thompson - his brilliance, his self-destruction, and the ground he broke - is always at the center, but the film occasionally loses its focus.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.

Any movie that opens with a Goo Goo Dolls song and ends with a line like "I'm going to live -- just not as long as you" is bound to leave somebody reaching for a Kleenex.

Revelatory.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

The bodies are athletic, young, and white, and yet this is not the sport sex we usually see in Hollywood movies. It's the sex of adulation. Sometimes the director Robert Benton goes heavy on the hydraulic positioning, but his movie is scarcely mechanical.

Miracle at St. Anna is not work of outrage or joy. It's something distressingly new for the filmmaker: a work of obligation. It feels like a movie Lee made in order to say he did it.

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

The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.

It's not remotely as luscious or half as bold as Malick's movie, but it is shorter and more educational.

It's called Queens and, no, silly, it's not about six gay men who want to get married. It's about their MOTHERS. And this being a Spanish comedy of the lowest Almodovar-ian order, the moms are a lot more flamboyant than their sons.

About a moron - oxy and otherwise.

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

Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.

Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.

Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.

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 a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

In Robot Stories, technology hasn't colonized human life, it's finding ways to make living (and loving) better.

While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.

I'm afraid this is one of THOSE movies, one where ''plot" is another word for ''gratuitous sex scene."

Anyone looking for a more practical horror film than ''The Fog" should try The Future of Food.

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.

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

Loose and funny with verve.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

Here's all you really need to know in order to determine whether Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris is something you need to experience for yourself: Her blond hair is often all frizz, and she prefers glasses with a big black frame. She's Mia AND Woody.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

It's a gas, dude!

This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.

For most of Not Easily Broken, I wondered why the movie wasn't worse. Then I remembered it was directed by the veteran Bill Duke, who applies ample TLC.

The latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

Comes on like a runaway Humvee.

The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.

The only thing sadder than Jonah Hex is what appears to have happened to his movie.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

As Changeling strains toward its mawkishly optimistic conclusion, the old-fashioned moviemaking that Eastwood settled into doesn't suit either him or his star. It feels like a corny joke.

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 film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.

The movie puts us so close to so much yet keeps its emotional distance -- as if to say, no matter how much we see, we'll never truly know.

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

Ideological disaster!

If Pulse is unsurprising as a horror movie (come on: chalky, soul-sucking freaks again?), as a campaign against the Internet, digital piracy, cellphones, and anything that computes anything (like laptops or brains), it's a riot.

If unused spit takes, flubbed dialogue, and extra improvisation are so uproarious, why not give us 90 minutes of that? License to Wed is tolerable for about five.

For what it’s worth, Tooth Fairy is a somehow dimmer cousin of those Tim Allen “Santa Clause’’ movies.

A moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap.

A rarity for documentaries. The movie is a full-tilt farce, and were it not completely true, it'd be a piercing satire that Preston Sturges might have polished into a resonant screwball.

It's a tale of two missused Academy Award winners trying to justify their participation in a moribund, noisome redux of any disposable prison movie you care to remember by lobbing Oscar clips at each other.

The deft, hilarious Notting Hill finds Grant's dour-droll-deprecating affliction at its most dead-on.

Never has a movie so soberingly made the fight to save life and the struggle to hold on to it seem so futile.

Boy A comes frustratingly close to succeeding as tragedy.

Very little of it is as persuasive or enveloping as its beloved English counterpart. But it works very hard to distract 11-year-olds from thinking about the November arrival of “The Deathly Hallows.’’

Too much of Taxi is just tired.

Plays like a holy, erotic mood piece, steeped in so much subdued jungle fever that it practically runs on photosynthesis.

It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry.

Marshall reveals himself to be a terrific showman of chaos and comic savagery. This is Baz Luhrmann's "Mad Max."

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

This sequel, with the return of the first movie's insatiably slutty Los Angeles collegians, is as vulgar as its predecessor and just as almost-smart.

Needs a gritty intervention.

The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.

When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.

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

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

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.

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.

A fine film of few words and very little motion.

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

A cheery version of a darker, grislier movie, one in which people like Daniel beat up people like Charlie, girls like Vicky end up in far more compromising positions, and women like Celia turn to Scotch and prescription drugs to cope with their pain.

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

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

An undernourished exercise in pop critique.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

Spellbinding if ponderous.

They're still fighting in this sequel. But this is a more visually inspired, muscularly made movie than its predecessor.

Like a Bond picture with no spies or villains or car chases or gadgets or explosions.

Thurman is bespectacled again for Motherhood, and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.

Every moment... is a cleverly constructed live-action joke on aloofness: The world is ending, and these people are too self-centered to notice.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

Stinks from the Earth to the moon.

A watchful, winding-down tragedy of a movie that delivers what it promises. As commentary, it's grim. As filmmaking, it's a powerfully disturbing odyssey through the Bucharest health care system.

For most of Lady Vengeance, Park is playing with us. But the jokey atmosphere dissipates and the fun turns inside out in the movie's last act.

This is a movie that's built around characters the audience is bound to find more insufferable than anyone does in the movie itself.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

The movie's glee is contagious.

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.

To Live and Die in L.A. is as urgent and exhilaratingly paced as anything William Friedkin's done.

The movies rarely gives us a woman as fascinatingly complex as Lisbeth Salander, and the happiest news about the two sequels is that she’ll be back.

Disappointing for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.

It has the wild, rancid atmosphere of a garbage bag that a raccoon has ripped open.

An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

In an eco-horror show that politely masquerades as a documentary, the former vice president effectively warns of man-made cataclysm.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

Taken? You bet.

Well-meant though it may be, the movie has an advertorial gloss.

When the film ends, we're haunted. We've been driving with a ghost.

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

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

As murky and derivative-looking as the film is, it moves with an authority that pummels you into submission.

Gathers a sort of darkness as it comes to its oblique conclusion.

The movie is also more extraordinary than a mere scenic slideshow.

It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

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

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

An unremarkable comedy-drama.

Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.

Aileen is Broomfield working compassionately. Perhaps it's only because he knows he can't save Wuornos that he can offer her as she might have been: part wounded animal, part self-destructive martyr, and all tragedy.

The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.

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 movie partners all the cliches of the inner-city school drama with the cliches of the dance instructional, and the two keep stomping on each other's toes.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?

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

It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.

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

Perry is a playwright, and his dialogue here is usually entertaining.

The Sentinel isn't an entire season of ''24" smushed into a bland two hours of movie? Does Kiefer Sutherland know?

A sorry excuse for a ghetto SOS.

Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.

There is a lot to recommend about James' Journey to Jerusalem. Its people are not among them. This searing little parable contains some of the more deplorable folks you're likely to see in a movie about faith.

A hip-hop cousin of Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which had braver fashion sense and better original songs.

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

The filmmaker invites us to reconsider the author as someone warmer and less intimidating than his body of work. On that count, Wrestling With Angels succeeds.

No one here is prodding you to laugh. It just happens.

This movie can't commit to a genre, let alone a logical sequence or complete idea. But there is a wisdom in its blasé assessments and frivolous air: What's the point; where's the wine?

So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.

At its core, a perceptive satire of the interpersonal boiling points in buddy-cop pictures.

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

Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

Takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food - to heal, unite, exasperate.

Lopez smiles, whines, and blinks her way through this movie. She seems more relaxed than she ever has. And yet it seems like she’s hiding in romantic comedies, lest we discover that she doesn’t have a “Monster’s Ball’’ or even a “Blind Side’’ in her.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

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

A dinner-from-hell comedy about a pretty Jewish Spaniard who brings a nice Palestinian guy home to her outspoken Madrid family.

It captures a version of our best worst selves.

The movie's queer delight is contagious. You'll exit lip-synching.

There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.

Veronica Guerin hardly trusts you to follow its story, opening with the murder, then a series of titles that explain what's to follow.