The bulk of the film merely yearns for lucidity and magic. At its worst, Respiro resembles My Big Fat Italian Nervous Breakdown.

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

Brimming with values that should serve its young audience well: altruism, friendship, self-sacrifice, responsibility.

L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.

As a whole, The Matrix Reloaded is thin on magic, charm, surprise and fun. It's less like an all-out escape, or even a thrill ride, than a sensory workout. At best, it's a treadmill-like bridge to the hoped-for splendors of episode three, The Matrix Revolutions.

The film is hapless. The gap between the moviemakers' ambition and their wit is dizzying. It's as if they thought they were filming The Importance of Being Unimportant.

Man on the Train may be a modest film, but it offers privileged glimpses of transcendence.

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

This may be the quietest addict ever to hit movie screens, as well the most disturbing.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

How much adorable can one person take?

There are no surprise twists, no characters who rise above themselves, no cheap happy endings. There are just people struggling with emotions and situations they think are beyond their control.

The film mixes the psychological with the supernatural, the profane with the ridiculous, the self-indulgent with the understated, and dares you to assume anything. It's all great fun.

Even as trick movies go, Confidence feels surfacey to a fault.

It's so wispy that at the end you wonder: Exactly what runs in the family?

The only question is how many levels of meaning can be plumbed from the phrase "Let's party!"

Malibu's Most Wanted mines a well-worn comedic vein, but does so with a consistent good humor and surprisingly deft touch.

Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture.

Watching this movie, you can dream with open eyes.

No visual style, amateur effects.

The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

With Nicholson and Sandler aboard, we want to love it madly. But instead of a tickle, this big-name comedy just grates.

Has a vitality and novelty rare in any youth movie, let alone one that claps fresh eyes on a cliched vision of a model minority.

In an age when light-and-easy racial farces have become mainstream hits, he remains a tough-love comedian.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

Movie lite, a clueless, formulaic paint-by-numbers comedy.

Phone Booth may not be awful, but it's puny.

Standard-bore action stuff, in which a macho stud superstar blows away lots of bad guys while struggling to make the world a better place.

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

The real obstacle here is a lack of filmmaking imagination.

There's a good heart beating at the core of Victor Vargas, one that belies its R-rating.

Buy your ticket, sit yourself down, and let ol' John take you for a ride. You'll have a blast.

In Head of State, Rock may be verging on becoming a heart-warmer.

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

Relentless in its crudity, so indiscriminate in its pursuit of tasteless laughs, so pure in its determination to offend, one almost has to admire it. It's even funny. Sometimes.

Sort of feel-good lesson kids will enjoy and parents should welcome.

Simply twiddling with the fine-tuning on the central character is not enough to warrant remaking a film. Both Glover and Willard deserve better.

What's more annoying than the screenplay's relentless assaultiveness is its odd, sordid cuteness.

To be fair, Friedkin does amp up the tension when called for. If only it were all for some purpose, or in service to a story that actually went somewhere.

A joyful celebration of spirit and endurance.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

Whenever its noble aims miss, Bruce Willis saves it.

This picture is absorbing -- and eye-filling -- whether the prose and the passion are connecting or running on parallel tracks.

The performers are all keen at expressing different variations on uptightness and with-itness. And McDormand is sensational.

A gut-busting black-and-white culture clash comedy. It's not elegantly done. Some of the acting is too broad to enjoy. It has plot problems and racial-stereotype problems.

Irreversible, though, is not a Kubrickian head trip. All Noe has come up with is a turn-on for sadists.

A violent, dumb, offensive mess.

It's a soaper with a high grade of imported soap.

Dark Blue is one of those totally happy surprises that moves so quickly and curves so sharply that it leaves this era's hyped critical hits looking like beached whales.

The whole plot is a shambles. And yet none of this matters much when you're laughing as hard as this film makes you laugh.

Pious, high-minded and bad history.

The performers are tremendous, particularly Deschanel, who can travel to the end of an emotional tether and then suggest the mysteries of change and growth that lie beyond.

The desert is clean in Gerry, but it's also empty.

Children should enjoy Jungle Book 2 just fine. Adults will wonder why anyone bothered.

How did an embarrassment of comic-book riches become simply an embarrassment as a movie?

The film's strengths can't be separated from its shortcomings. Despite its heavyweight supporting cast, Stone Reader mostly pays tribute to the enthusiasm and purity of the amateur.

It's a gimcrack assemblage of gags, action scenes, favorite moments from the first hit and diorama-like views of high and low Victorian culture.

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

McConaughey and (especially) Hudson manage to make it all work, maintaining their likability even in situations where they inevitably end up acting like jerks.

This documentary could have been a simple downer. Instead, it's a giddy, manic-depressive roller coaster - because it brings us eye to eye with Gilliam.

However you pronounce Bythewood -- I assume it's by-the-wood -- his work here is strictly by the numbers.

By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.

It ain't art. But as a cinematic house of horrors, it more than fills the bill.

Chaos, in miring itself in the inequities (not to mention obscenities) of male-dominated culture, is after greater truths.

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

Oh, this is all so terribly not good.

Fails to meld suspense and farce or to bring even the wildest pursuits and smash-ups any visual sense of comedy.

A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.

There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.

You won't believe the story director George Clooney and his goofball TV host are trying to sell. Really.

Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since "Cabaret."

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Plummer's performance is a miracle: In a movie as flat as a tablecloth, he suggests dimensions as wide, deep and curved as Cinerama.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Spielberg's inchoate attempts at cultural observation stretch the movie out and dilute the giddiness instead of adding a pleasurable spike. When the movie doesn't feel inflated, it feels soggy.

The bottom line is that the studio's marketing strategy is just a tad incomplete. Instead of hiding Pinocchio from critics, Miramax should have hidden it from everyone.

The result may not make for a great adventure, but it's sure a fun ride.

Some might find the whole thing exhilarating, but exhausting is more the word that comes to this man's mind.

Unfortunately, it lacks emotional lift or folkloric fervor.

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

A good film that, with a little extra care, could have been great.

Norton is brilliant in Lee's so-so 'Hour.'

The result is harrowing and inspiring. As escapist entertainment, it's the movie of the year.

Unlike Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," Lopez seems a little too comfortable in her new duds, which prevents the audience from rooting for her with passion, rather than just appreciation.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best Star Trek movies are the even-numbered ones. Nemesis may keep that streak alive, but barely.

I know Empire is supposed to be a movie, but for a while, I thought I was listening to one of those talking books.

Analyze That is no surprise, and pleasant is about the most you can say for it.

Wastes amusing beginnings.

Equilibrium doesn't tread softly on our dreams; it tramples them.

Sokurov, for all his accomplishment, is less a bold innovator than a raider of lost art.

I love Rabbit-Proof Fence as drama, as protest, as moviemaking and as poetry.

It's hard to figure who this picture is supposed to be for. Although a cartoon, it's way too mean-spirited and crass for young kids (parents, be forewarned!). And the idea that any substantial number of adults would find this sort of thing entertaining ... let's pray civilization hasn't come to that.

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an uptight movie -- the opposite of his scintillating "Out of Sight."

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

As a franchise, the James Bond series needs its stomach stapled.