In an astonishingly assured film debut, Coppola captures the poetry and sweetness of Eugenides' novel without allowing any of the standard rites of passage -- first dates, high-school dances -- to feel trite.

The fact that the blatantly thumbtacked-on happy ending plays as unvarnished fairy tale adds a definite bittersweet tang of irony.

Ultimately a fluffy bit of caper-noir, the success of Where the Money Is rests heavily with Old Blue Eyes.

A disarmingly enjoyable film.

A pleasure to watch for the cast alone and their accomplishments should not be obscured by underwritten characters and overwritten jokey set-pieces.

A hackneyed police story, rife with clichés, implausibilities, and weak performances.

Neither bloodthirsty enough to trigger the gag reflex of anyone but the most anemic viewer nor clever enough to yield much in the way of particularly engrossing insights.

Sympathetic to the core but not to be believed.

A challenging concept conveyed here most impressively onscreen.

Solid performances, capable visuals, and the honesty of the interracial subject matter make Restaurant stand out from the typical "I'm an artist, not really a waiter" pack.

Infused with enough infectious charm to make us forget how dopey the plot is and become swept up in its breezy countenance.

It's amazing the filmmakers never really concern themselves with satisfying the audience's rules of engagement.

Although it's interesting and well-performed, East-West never locates its crux: It's all over the map.

Anyone who can watch this film and deny that the Sex Pistols were one of the four or five most exciting and indelibly brilliant rock groups ever is pumping formaldehyde, not blood, through his veins.

I'm sorry. I laughed...There's something pleasurable about a comedy that has no pretensions about where it's coming from.

It's nasty, brutal stuff, but it's also unlike anything else out there.

Fascinating, perplexing, amusing, and irascible.

The film is a TKO before it even had a chance to get off a decent hook.

The DreamWorks team continues to give Disney a run for their money.

An exercise in unintentional farce.

A smart, funny, and youth-savvy relationship film.

A stunning work of beauty, mystery, contemplation, and grit -- and like sands through the desert hourglass, these are the days of our lives.

It sounds as ridiculous as a "Pokemon" episode gone horribly awry.

Less a film than a lyrical, naturalistic tone poem.

Somewhere along the road to becoming teens idols, these actors got confused between being the bomb -- and getting it.

Drivel of the purest ray serene.

The film is one of the more adult offerings out there in a spring movie season peppered with martial arts and superheroes. It may be just what you're looking for.

The fight scenes are splendidly choreographed...but they're shot in that grating, thoroughly American flashcut style that leaves you wondering just who the hell is hitting who.

The most memorable David vs. Goliath courtroom showdown in recent memory.

Flawed but often entertaining teen horror flick.

A center ring extravaganza of smackdown movie entertainment

Well-intentioned but hardly well-executed.

De Palma's film is a mess from its anxious start all the way through to its new-agey end, relying heavily on cribs from Kubrick and Cameron and even the recent "Apollo 13."

Most of the actors seem to have been issued one facial expression at the beginning of the film, along with pain-of-death instructions not to change it under any circumstance.

If only someone had taken away that disastrous third act we'd have one of the better mainstream films dealing with the impossible societal demands put upon gay parenting yet made. No such luck, though.

It's the kind of movie you wish you had more time to absorb and could see more than once before reviewing.

Each of the characters is dull and boorish instead of witty and urbane.

Quite possibly, this could have been a hit back in 1975 or so, and almost certainly for Blake Edwards, but here and now it's just a puzzling aberration.

Reeks as badly as it sounds.

A gorgeously crafted love poem.

Curious and effective.

You could do worse.

Breathtakingly gorgeous but ultimately thematically unsatisfying.

By the time the closing credits roll, you're wondering if anyone else noticed that nothing made much sense.

Plenty of fun while it lasts, but its aftereffects are mighty fleeting.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

It's an audacious, affecting, and unexpectedly hilarious debut, and most definitely the most original film I've seen all year.

Remarkable debut feature by New Yorker Ben Younger.

It's hard to imagine anyone ---coming away from Hanging Up with any sense of revelation, soul-enlargement, or even the simple pleasure of a compelling tale well told.

No matter your standard of measurement, this production falls short.

In many ways, Not One Less resembles the socialist-realist dramas of the early Communist regimes.

Say what you will about the story, but Pitch Black at least looks and sounds stunning.

Nothing but tarted-up melodrama.

Reeks of a filmmaker who latched on to sure-fire subject matter, but then became lost once his character morphed into a person.

A warm, comfortable, thoroughly inoffensive kidfilm.

It's hobbled by odd plot contrivances and some less-than-stellar acting from DiCaprio.

Where Scream 3 triumphs is in its wacky, take-no-prisoners, I am a Juggernaut of Terror, Hee, Hee attitude, which wisely makes room for some downright surreal moments amongst the carnage.

While never dull, The Cup is a leisurely, quiet film, rife with staid, sometimes ponderous moments reflecting the seriousness of their situation in exile.

Sitting through the film was an exercise in confusion.

An ideal diversion for one of those evenings when low expectations feel more like a state of grace than a surrender to vice.

The confusion it mistakes for true soul-searching is about as realistic a look at the politics of youthful attraction as one of those "Did somebody say McDonald's?" commercials is a look at mainstream American family values. Did somebody say McCheese?

Fails chiefly because it's senseless. How it even managed to bypass the straight-to-video route boggles the mind and is a speculative fiction far more engaging than any to be found onscreen.

A sweet, sweet movie; it's just one that celebrates the bond between a boy and his dog with heart and a heavy, handy hand.

A story disappointingly similar to the original.

Better in theory than in practice.

So ingratiatingly good-humored that it's hard to take it seriously enough to complain. Sure, it's no great triumph of moviemaking, but it is entertaining, and a more or less plausible way to kill 95 minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Feels overlong and underscripted.

Seems more like a subtle, elegiac tone poem than an indictment of human banality and the evil that men do.

The problem with The Third Miracle is that it is thematically ambiguous and never lays out its position on whether it thinks saints are or are not real.

Does not live up to its name. It's more like White Men Can't Box, Either.

A spectacularly imaginative piece of Shakespearean cinema.

It's a one-note gag, but a superior gag performed with a minimum of cheese and a surplus of laugh-out-loud moments.

Just the thing to clear your Capra-glutted holiday movie palate.

Fails to completely engage the viewer at the basic level of story.

For those who adore McCourt's work, Angela's Ashes will most likely disappoint; for those unfamiliar with this inspiring chronicle of a survivor, it will neither impress nor dishearten to any degree.

Just watching the trailer for Oliver Stone's new football epic a few weeks back left me with a grating headache; watching the whole sweaty film practically put me in the ICU.

It would seem the purpose of this movie, if not to deify, is to define -- and in this it fails miserably.

Jolie's explosive performance surpasses all expectations and renders the film a veritable must-see.

Everything about its scale is epic.

A sumptuous yet unexceptional story.

More a meditation on the nature of life itself than anything else, and a welcome respite from Robin Williams, the emotion sponge.

Retelling of White's classic children's book is a spun-sugar treacle-bomb, though a darn good-looking one.

Wildly entertaining, "Shakespeare in Love" minus the Bard and the babe, but with substantive style to burn.

Colorful and a passable drama, one that highlights the difficulties of cross-cultural love affairs and the exoticism of the Third World.

Unlike any other film released this past year, be it from the aspect of its storylines, of which there are many, or its emotional clarity, which is, quite frankly, brutal.

Oddly, most of the elements needed for a good movie are present here, but when added together they equal less than the sum of the parts.

Commands respect as mainstream filmmaking with more of an agenda than just pimping cinematic junk food to the brain-dead masses.

Sellbinding, distressing, and possessed of a dark and terrible beauty.

Marvelous not in its evocation of horror but in the way it slowly chips away at the mundanities of day-to-day urban living.

A touching (and at times horrific) -- albeit overlong -- Christ allegory, that scores not so much on the strength of its convictions as it does on the truly remarkable performances it elicits from the cast.

Mitchell's film would be another example of why former SNL cast members should choose their scripts wisely, except that Schneider wrote this one.

A character-driven piece with a character who seems somewhat hollow.

A forgivable error, but an error nonetheless.

Ultimately feels like a movie whose heart is in the right place, even though someone neglected to flip the 'On' switch.

A literate, sophisticated comedy whose humor and loss and hope linger in our hearts, like the jazz music it reveres, both sweet and lowdown.

One of the truest-seeming movies I've seen in some time and as one of the most odd and haunting.

Not content to whisper its truths; it would rather flaunt its valuable lessons and its good intentions, proudly boasting its sentiments like a (rainbow-striped) badge of honor.

It's a wonderfully nuanced performance in an otherwise un-nuanced narrative.