Certainly merits attention, although it shouldn't be mistaken for one of Eastwood's greatest works.

This is joyful filmmaking, imbued with an infectious, giddy enthusiasm.

Succeeds as a moody, evocative, and pleasing film, one that underscores its indie roots in sentiment as well as style

Breaks down before it gets out of the driveway.

Fails because it takes itself so seriously, and because it is itself so seriously dull. Soderbergh's straining to give us a wink -- come on, guys, this is fun -- but really it just feels like some awful eye twitch -- a spasm of yawning self-indulgence in a mostly captivating career.

The film's "never grow up" refrain plays like a broken record, until, in an abrupt (but not unexpected) turnaround at film's end, it fixes itself.

A gimmick in search of a movie: how to get Carvey into as many silly costumes and deliver as many silly voices as possible, plot mechanics be damned.

Parcels out information like a triage medic doling out morphine; every tiny bit is carefully considered and then rationed out as though he were terrified he might exhaust his supply before the closing credits.

This is classic Hollywood, at its best and worst, sticky rich and scabrous. It may not be the truth, per se, but it sure sounds good.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

Much to cheer here, from its treasure trove of early and alternate versions of songs to the triumphant finale.

This is either one of the best “head” films of all time or one of the worst examples of Disneyfied opportunism to come down the pike in years. I'd like to think it was the former, really I would, but somehow I suspect otherwise.

The latest installment in the Austin Powers series has stopped making much sense at all, but it sure gets its giggle on, and good.

This is a film strictly for hardcore sentimentalists, despite its straight-ahead depiction of the harsh urban landscape in contemporary China.

Remains an above-average and affecting descent into both heretofore unknown Soviet naval history and the always popular submarine-in-peril genre.

It's easy enough to forget there are special effects involved, so convincing is Stu's rippling fur and big beamy eyes filling up with tears.

An occasionally charming mix of campy fun and dodgy computer-generated effects.

In the end, one's appreciation of My Wife Is an Actress may depend on the extent to which you like the character of Yvan and relate to his anxieties.

Nothing more than an extended version of the syndicated television program, with the unkempt Irwin spending most of the movie excitedly shouting at the camera as he taunts something venomous.

Will make monster fans ache for what might have been.

Medem's film is a bleached-out beauty, hitting our most commanding human emotions -- lust to love to grief to rage and back again -- while only occasionally striking a wrong chord.

Forget this dreck: Where's that Michael vs. Jason grudge match we've been hearing about for the last decade?

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

Exciting to watch: The audio disruptions of Carla putting in or taking out her hearing aids and the inventiveness of the way the heist plot is revealed are just a couple of the film's treats.

Like Mike is a slight and uninventive movie: Like the exalted Michael Jordan referred to in the title, many can aspire but none can equal. Even "Space Jam" was better than this.

It's a welcome and nicely goofy bit of sci-fi froth with the occasional hint of genuine comic smarts.

Brilliant, wacky, and utterly charming fluff, with millions of mad monkey minions to boot.

You simply want the story to go on and on. Let's hope that Holofcener's movies do: Her peregrinations through the lives of contemporary women know few screen equals.

Cue the footage of Cockettes in spangles and glitter, high-kicking and belting out show tunes at the top of their lungs. Damn, it looks grand.

She's funny, she's feisty, she's a flabulous, fat-positive “fag hag,” and Margaret Cho isn't apologizing for any of it.

Inoffensive and sporadically funny, its chief charm is Arnold's ridiculous noggin, and that's not saying much.

There's the shell of not one but two excellent films in Pumpkin, but as it is the one we have here is just too bewildering to puzzle out.

Nothing about this movie works.

This is one that, like a 1am rerun of a late-season Cavs-Grizzlies matchup, deserves to play out in darkness and obscurity.

The whole of it plays like a dark and dreary tone poem, only marginally interested in explaining the ticking, bloody clockwork of the inner beast and only occasionally touching on his fractured humanity.

The dialogue is scattered with so many beautiful gems that conversations glitter.

This movie is by no means a classic in absolute artistic terms, but as a reaffirmation of all but forgotten verities it's an unqualified success.

It's not the crowning achievement in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre, but Minority Report stands on its own sturdy sci-fi legs, and there's no sign of that little imp Haley Joel Osment, to boot, thankfully.

The images this war photographer shoots are beyond awful, but there's just no looking away.

All's fair in love and war, I know, but really now.

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics.

Scooby's just so dang cute, what's the point in grousing?

Like its protagonist, it never hands you explanations on a silver platter, and it makes you think a bit, something far too few thrillers do these days.

In many ways, this is the thinking-person's teen movie.

Lacks the bite that can equal the Bruckheimer bark.

The soundtrack is a boisterous blast from the past, and there's a quiet pleasure to watching Zoe and Daly let their composure loose like scrambled eggs, but there's little else to hold dear here.

For those enamored with Wells' books, however, this film version will likely meet their expectations, and it undoubtedly will spawn more Ya-Ya chapters throughout the country.

The perfect antidote to the summer heat in Austin, more refreshing even than a dip in our chilly holy waters of Barton Springs.

Feels awfully rushed, as Ryan flies from the Ukraine to Moscow to the Russian hinterlands and back to Baltimore to make sweet, sophomore agent love to his physician girlfriend (Moynahan). It has the feel of one of 007's globe-hopping adventures, but without any of that franchise's giddy sense of fun.

It's far from perfect -- as many jokes fall flat as succeed -- but like Undercover Brother himself, it's smarter than most, and twice as solid.

It's a cuckoo's nest that's nicely feathered.

Comes across as stiff and uneven.

I'd be lying if I said this movie wasn't a hoot. Sure it's silly, but it's also campy, brainless fun, and just how often to get to see stuff like this on the big screen anyway?

It may not be art, but it's vastly more entertaining than anything Coppola senior has done in far too long.

For a movie about happiness, Thirteen Conversations is terribly joyless. Thirteen Conversations tries hard and its ambitions are provocative, but its conversations often fall like that Zen tree in the forest.

Can barely limp to its final CinemaScope sunset shot.

The senseless violence of a Jean-Claude Van Dammer, no point to that, but this, this has purpose. This is an ass-kicking a girl can get into. So why do I feel like crying mea culpa?

Nolan creates an effective thriller, although he keeps his stylistic pyrotechnics to a minimum.

In all his misguided enthusiasm, Parker has mustered enough bluster to fill up a zeppelin, blowing harder and harder, for something more and more fanciful. But with so much hot air, the bubble is bound to burst, and so it does in Parker's blundering adaptation.

The overall execution add up to a film of beautiful, ultimately heartbreaking honesty.

The film's greatest strength undeniably lies in Gosling's revelatory portrayal of Danny.

About a Boy knows exactly what it wants to do: It wants to make you smile, and grin, and then laugh with recognition, and it manages all three, again and again.

Attack of the Clones' final 35 minutes very nearly makes up for the preceding 105, featuring as it does the jaw-dropping spectacle of the entire Jedi Council battling it out with not only clones, but also lumbering monsters, space ships of all sorts, and each other.

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.

Lyne's excesses are usually the kind of thing I love to hate, but Unfaithful found me pretty much following along in step with his rhythms and dramatic choices.

In an inspired bit of casting, Lyle Lovett plays the dad of the goofy-looking Diz/Gil. That these two could be related might be the only believable touch in this whole misfired thing.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

Smith's film is a celebration of quirkiness, eccentricity, and certain individuals' tendency to let it all hang out, and damn the consequences.

It's worth seeing the action scenes on the big screen, and to get in the mood for the World Cup opener later this month.

That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.

With centrifugal force on his side, Spider-Man dips, weaves, and whooshes past, up, and around the camera -- it's a rush, and it plasters a grin on your face even after you've left the theatre.

It's too bad Shafer spent his budget making a fiction feature instead of just shooting a documentary about the scene. So much of the film is melodramatic kitsch, but there's still a movie in here.

The whole thing still reeks of voyeurism -- and not the fly-on-the-wall voyeurism of a vérité doc, but rather the dirty-old-man-in-the-peep-show-booth kind. Might as well just wait for it to hit late-night cable.

That they were just hormonally blitzkrieged kids at the time, unaware of their role in history, only makes Peralta's superior doc that much more winning.

Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

It had a little originality, unlike the other sequels, but not much.

For all its faults, is a solid piece of dirty work.

Not only the best date movie of the year, it's also a -- dare I say it twice -- delightfully charming -- and totally American, I might add -- slice of comedic bliss.

Never inspires more than an interested detachment.

Mutant Aliens would have been brilliant as a short; there's just not enough story for a full-length feature, so the film seems strung together.

In context, it's utterly, dismayingly typical.

It's done with such a wonderfully dry style and wit that you don't mind having to stop to catch up now and again.

For all the swords 'n' sandals hoodoo that makes up the wilting backbone of Jonathan Hale's script, the Rock is, nevertheless, fun to keep an eye on.

All icing, with a few crumbs devoted to the notion that it is futile to resist the heart's desires.

As a period mystery, however, it's as muddy and swirling as the actual record of that fateful, deadly weekend cruise.

Pure unadulterated animal fun.

Chills to the bone -- and beyond, but for pure excitement it's best not to look far beneath the surface.

Rarely have I seen a film so willing to champion the fallibility of the human heart.

90 minutes of ridiculous, silly fun. Of course, it's still a very bad movie.

Christina Applegate, of Eighties white-trash pinup fame, is a comic foil par excellence, delivering a snazzy, self-assured performance that lands the biggest laughs in a movie made mostly of hollow chuckles. She, in fact, is the sweetest thing in this sour, sucky film.

Franklin injects life into a flat format and has in the process done something nearly unheard of in Hollywood as of late: He's brought class back to the genre film.

A gleefully overplotted crime yarn that channels in sanitized form the perverse subtropical-noir sensibilities of Carl Hiassen.

The laugh-out-loud jokery is in short supply, and Reynolds and Reid's kicky charm only goes so far. Bluto Blutarsky, we miss you.

The kind of movie that gives "chick flicks" a bad reputation.

Doesn't break any new ground in the baseball movie playbook. However, it does bring it all back home with the assurance of seasoned pro.

Although little is ultimately “solved” or demystified in The Piano Teacher, the movie allows a chaperoned peek into the mind of one of civilization's “discontents.”

Faultlessly truthful in its observations.

It's good -- no, great -- to see Williams as a mean rat bastard.