This thoroughly modern movie pulls off a classical feat. It elicits the searing combination of pity and terror that leaves a viewer feeling purged.

Drags on and on and could frighten little kids. But Kenneth Branaugh is one bright light in Chamber of Secrets.

Stupid. Illogical. Simplistic. Pandering. And those are its good points.

It's a documentary about acknowledging genius, about just desserts, about artistic muses that refuse to give up. It's about great camaraderie and great music.

Would have been better served if Carrera had spent a little more energy developing his story and less on emphasizing his message.

A star is born in 8 Mile, all right, but his name is Mekhi Phifer.

The Bread, My Sweet is not for the cynical, who will doubtlessly find themselves gasping for air before the film's over and demanding a reality check of anyone who actually likes it. Their loss.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

Isn't perfect, but it's fun, and Tim Allen shines

Up against the wit and teamwork of the sparkling TV original, this lame vehicle sputters and fades.

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

A gorgeous flirt of a murder movie.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

Paid In Full's performances - especially by the always-engaging Phifer -- are strong, its message worthwhile and its sincerity doubtless.

Ghost Ship would have been so much better if they'd just let the ship do more of the acting.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Abandon tags Katie Holmes as a talented actor with surprising range and vast, untapped potential - so much, in fact, that watching her, one can almost overlook the film's many flaws. Almost.

Passionately acted and grittily convincing.

It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.

What we have here is a suburban-legend movie stripped of rough edges and cut off from any depth that might have made it insidiously haunting.

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

Breaks no new ground in romantic comedy. But it finds ways to make the tried and true scenes -- a hilarious break-up in a restaurant, a nearly disrupted wedding -- new and funny.

Avary has taken a pig's ear of a book and turned it into a pig's ear of a movie.

Malkovich acts as if he's doing Shakespeare, pontificating, enunciating and generally overreaching.

Shallow and one-sided.

Cut above this genre's usual industrial sludge, even when the chops and kicks are too fast to follow.

Charming has devolved into almost a pejorative these days, but Tuck Everlasting is the sort of film that could change that.

Seinfeld is the perfect figure to center a documentary called, generically, Comedian.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

Overall, you're left wondering why every big novel needs to be a movie. White Oleander would work better as a four-part miniseries -- or at least as a less conventional screenplay.

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

Clearly a spiritual descendant of the old Looney Toons cartoons; it's not hard to imagine Daffy, Bugs, Porky and their pals in the starring roles here. And that's a cinematic pedigree worth cherishing.

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

Veggie Tales is one amusing salad.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

Has the grisly appetite, if not the execution of the original. What it also has are monstrously good Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton, plus a fine young Hannibal to save it.

If it weren't for a few genuine Chan novelties and the presence of the goofy Jennifer Love Hewitt, this much-delayed and re-edited mess would be a total loss.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

Moonlight Mile leavens the mood occasionally, but it cheapens things by insisting that everybody onscreen and in the audience leavethe theater smiling.

The movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

The Banger Sisters stands as proof that no movie is so bad it can't be redeemed by a single stellar performance. That performance is by Susan Sarandon.

Because this Four Feathers is an utter botch, it might make savvy viewers feel that the subject matter is hopeless.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

8 Women would probably be a looser, giddier salute to show-biz ideas of femininity if it were performed by eight drag queens.

A visual masterpiece about a scared little girl's breathtaking journey of self-discovery. All of the fun is getting there.

Too bad this movie is more tepid than the average Snipes potboiler and even rustier than his mindless Blade pictures.

This is a marvelous film, a look at the strange, exasperatingly labyrinthine process of adolescence and the diverse ways people find to deal with it.

Not everyone is going to appreciate the politics of Barbershop, but you've got to admire it for having a political view at all.

Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.

A great cast can't quite pull City by the Sea out of the drink.

Few directors are able to showcase actors with fast-cutting techniques. Hill is an ace at it because everything about his action is organic.

This movie doesn't play; it just lies there, waiting to be kicked around by anyone unfortunate enough to have shelled out good money to see it.

It's also unclear just what Niccol wanted this film to be: a satire? a spoof? a black comedy? a pointed social commentary? Perhaps all of the above - way too many hats for a movie this slight to wear.

Romanek does such a nice job of calibrating his film's squirm factor, it's possible to overlook some flaws that would sink a lesser film.

Blue Crush is such a blast to look at, it seems a shame to talk about its formulaic plot, cliched dialogue and absolute predictability.

It's unfortunate that none of the principal actors is able to convey the passion the characters are supposed to have for each other.

The heartbreak comes not from watching her fail, but from realizing how easy it would be for her to succeed. If only she knew better how to try.

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

The movie's own style is strictly an anti-style, all pre-packaged post-punk.

If you put the word Tired first, it would perfectly describe the movie.

It's a deft sleight-of-story Aniston, White and Arteta pull off, giving us a character who seems more than she is, but is really less than she appears.

In Spy Kids 2, Rodriguez tries to hold his family-spy saga together with the digital equal of rubber bands and chewing gum.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Stops your heart and keeps your belly jiggling with laughter. It's an improbably sunny tragicomedy.

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

Hands-down, the best James Brolin-in-an-Italian-accent movie ever.

Fantasy, not honesty, is the point of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

Swimming is perceptive and, ultimately, embraceable. Like the adolescent it so lovingly depicts, this is a movie you want only the best for.

Austin does have a psychedelic buoyancy and Dr. Evil an addle-pated sadistic goofiness that are original and engaging, but Myers doesn't build on their best stuff. That's where a real plot would help.

Manages to pretty much ignore all the strengths of the earlier film while exacerbating all its faults.

It took guts to bring this story to the screen, but at its core it has the wrong stuff.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

Even at its most enjoyable, Eight Legged Freaks is disappointing -- it grazes your funny bone instead of tickling it like crazy.

At times, Sex and Lucia is too precious for its own good; a movie that demands its own flow chart isn't always a good thing. And events turn on one coincidence too many. But Medem's exquisite craftsmanship and full-throttle eroticism make his film a morass worth the attempt to unravel.

The script gives the actors less of a chance than the dragons give to Homo sapiens.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Combine the title with the image of a dazzling female and a frazzled male, and you've got the movie perfectly.

You won't want to miss it if you care about movies that dare to chart intimacies in our age of spectacle, or about up-and-coming female performers and underused male veterans finding roles worthy of their gifts.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

The most refreshing thing about the original Men in Black was that it was relatively small - a modest, slapdash, 98-minute special-effects farce. The most refreshing thing about Men in Black II is that it is 10 minutes shorter.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.

The Cockettes is a grand place to visit, even for those who wouldn't want to live there.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

We'll never know what might have been, as eye candy and food for thought replace real thrills in the cool but cold Minority Report.

A celebration of movie-studio ohana that should warm the hearts of moviegoers everywhere.

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Foster is strident, Vincent D'Onofrio has little to do but chain-smoke thoughtfully as an accessible priest, and the physical atmosphere is hazy.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

Bland, inoffensive, formulaic and occasionally amusing - just like the animated kids' show that inspired it.