A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

What's frustrating is that the movie should be so much better, or at least more entertaining. With Baldwin, Macy and Bello, director Kramer is holding three of a kind.

Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.

The Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

Replete with so many wisecracks, puns, double entendres and visual jokes that you almost need a flow chart to keep up with them all. But try; the effort is definitely worthwhile, and the results are hilarious.

Watching The Gospel of John is like listening to a religious audiotape while working a picture flip-book of the Bible.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

Elf tries so hard to be a holiday classic, to be a sweet-natured, charming little piece of holiday gloss, it's tempting to declare it so and simply go with it.

If you feel yourself glowing after Love Actually, you might be suffering from sugar shock.

The Matrix Revolutions blends feather-brained, starry-eyed camp and rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle -- so it's at least more entertaining than the second Matrix film, which hung in the air like a noxious cloud.

Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.

Taken together, the sum of so many parts is too schizophrenic to be wholeheartedly embraced -- the movie is played for parody, but with a veneer of respectability that leaves the whole endeavor betwixt and between.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

The highest compliment I can pay Pieces of April is that it brings to mind a Paul Simon lyric: "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Undeniably charming -- a dog movie that's more lovable mutt than stately pedigree.

The fault isn't Clooney's alone. The Coen brothers contrive a few spectacularly funny bits and pieces but rarely get into a flow. Too often they mistake facetiousness for slapstick invention or wit, and they don't follow through on their best ideas.

"His eye is incredibly sharp and amazing, in regard to visceral cinema," says Uma Thurman, who has worked with Tarantino on both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. "He's a great storyteller. He's very seductive as a filmmaker."

Girls Will Be Girls thinks watching outrageous people acting outrageously is its own reward. It isn't.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Like the particular brand of music Dewey espouses, this is a movie more concerned with exploiting rock than understanding it.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

An action-adventure flick that could turn into this generation's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

With Anything Else, Woody Allen proves himself an old dog capable of thinking up some new tricks.

What the film needs is more heart, humor and maybe some honest-to-goodness humility, not energy. And unfortunately, that's about all Gooding seems able to bring to it.

Entertaining, thrilling and honestly sentimental, it's an equal-opportunity crowd-pleaser.

A hollow, relentless mess.

Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

Unless you think "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was the height of genius, there's little reason to sit though another version.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

Cabin Fever may not be a horror classic, but it's definitely an ideal midnight movie.

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

Needs a story.

This movie registers like a pop song that enters the mind only in fragments because, as a whole, it lacks the style or substance to be memorable.

There's a funny movie struggling inside of Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Too bad it never gets out.

Like its predecessor, Jeepers Creepers 2 is that rare modern horror film that remembers audiences are scared far more by what they don't see than by what they do. For that alone, horror fans should be thankful.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

The supernatural stuff is ho-hum, the dubbing is sloppy and the action will only make you pine for the younger, hungrier and more injury-prone Jackie.

The movie doesn't complete itself, in the sense of filling in our knowledge of its people (who are more like passengers). It simply comes to a stop.

The setup is bad even by slasher-film standards: poorly acted, atrociously written and unimaginatively directed. But once Freddy and Jason have at it, the movie takes on a recklessly kinetic energy that finally delivers on its title's promise.

It's supposed to be funny watching these two characters and wondering who'll be the first to start acting her age, but it's really just pitiful, watching two talented actresses...given so little to work with.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

The movie has dual strengths that silence most objections. Even more than "X-2" or "American Splendor," it is, in a good way, the most comic-booky movie of the year. It's also the human Winged Migration.

The movie bobbles along on a weird, soft-edged sarcasm.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

Offers plenty of honest, good-natured laughs in the process. That's something young and old can appreciate equally.

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

The cinematic equivalent of a beautifully wrapped gift box with nothing inside.

Campbell Scott creates a new movie anti-hero -- the weak silent type -- and goes all the way with it in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

There's much more than a little Stifler here. Still, there's a recklessness to the character, as well as Scott's performance, that almost engenders respect; he's so determinedly unregenerate, so outrageously lewd, so unrelentingly grating, one almost looks forward to seeing just how far he'll go.

Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.

It moves so confidently and brightly that it's ticklish as well as chilling - and, in its own dark way, enthralling.

There's a dignity to Mondays in the Sun that manages to keep the film buoyant, helping to keep all the despair at bay.

Good intentions are no substitute for good filmmaking, and Spy Kids 3D is nothing more than a retread in flashier clothing.

Angelina Jolie focuses her wild energy into outlandish heroics, and emerges with more attractiveness and credibility than all three of those silly Charlie's Angels combined.

Seabiscuit revives the sweeping pleasures of movies that address and respect the mass audience, raising the common denominator instead of pandering to it. This crowd-pleaser rouses honest and engulfing cheers.

It's impossible not to be exhilarated by the energy and determination that infuses every frame.

A crackerjack thriller, laced with labyrinthine mysteries, moral quandaries and unspeakable evil.

There's pleasure to be had in a film that suggests teen life can be hard without necessarily being tragic.

The apotheosis of adolescent junk. Every sequence spews or splats carnage-filled effects. It's over-the-top, but not pleasurably so -- it's calculatedly over-the-top. The only way to get off on it is to revel in its prodigal waste of materiel.

Johnny English never builds any momentum, and Atkinson simply isn't a good enough actor to mine continued laughs from repetitive material.

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

American art movies rarely come fancier or emptier than Northfork, a down-home arabesque made of angel fluff.

A first-rate sail into Adventureland.

A misfire in almost every direction.

A hollow excuse for an erotic mystery.

Not since Rocky II has there been a more blatant attempt to recapitulate a box-office hit without adding any new attraction or appeal.

The good news is that Schwarzenegger is more entertaining than ever as the Terminator T-101 cyborg.

It's a zombie flick that moves -- no stumbling, staggering living dead here -- in an atmosphere that feels like a Gothic docudrama, and it's freaky beyond all reason.

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

Alex & Emma is a literary-minded romantic comedy that barely passes English, and flunks chemistry.

The only bits worth watching are the scenes where Olsen is in full Carrey mode and Richardson is doing his best Jeff Daniels. The spot-on impersonations take the mind off the plot, the poo-poo gags, the clunky chase scene and the ripped-off finale.

Its pleasures are slight and fleeting, and so many movies have done what it does, and done it much better, that there's nothing to get even remotely excited about - much less to draw audiences into theaters.

It's the ideal capper for a cop comedy with a refreshingly wry, adult and humane attitude.

Stars Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno give Jet Lag everything they've got. Too bad the movie doesn't better reward their effort.

Steadily, stealthily, The Eye works its way into your psyche, playing with your mind and always keeping a surprise or two up its sleeve.

So what do we have here? Lots of cars going very fast.

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

Offers a welcome perspective, reminding us that extremism in the name of a values system is nothing new -- not even on these shores.

A spellbinder of the rarest kind and quality. It opens audiences up to an infinite variety of emotional and intellectual nuances.

Fits squarely into the "exciting" category; it's a white-knuckler of the first order.

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.