Like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," The Island is the kind of suicidal high-concept movie increasingly prevalent these days: a film so thoroughly pre-conceived and pre-sold that most audiences know more about what's going on than the characters do for half the movie.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

A pastiche of sadistic horror-movie cliches with minor traces of wit but major overflows of perversity.

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.

Wedding Crashers is unashamedly profane and, for its first two acts, very funny, a classic guilty pleasure that revels in its basest elements.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

This fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

Blessedly unimportant, Fantastic Four cruises along on modest yet genuine comic-book pleasures.

The Beautiful Country is not a happy film by any means, but it does offer a fragile hope, that beauty exists at the end of every journey, if only one has the strength to finish the trip.

Bracingly honest and ceaselessly compelling documentary.

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

Rebound is determinedly lightweight fare that shamelessly resorts to every crowd-pleasing cliche it can think of to wring sympathy and laughs from its audience. To say it succeeds is not meant as a compliment.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

It's the pushiest film around - "in your face" is still in-your-face, even if the dancers are in white-face.

The movie pays tribute to sexual equality and to each gender's agility and strength of character.

Anyone who isn't charmed by the idea of a Beetle crossing the finish line first is either chronically churlish or isn't trying.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

Disturbing, maddening, often confusing, but also charming, engaging and challenging in all the best ways.

Pawlikowski's heart may be with Mona, but his art is closer to Tamsin. He luxuriates in his sensibility without delivering a movie that pays off in originality or insight.

Batman Begins is obvious from the get-go - and almost no fun.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period.

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

There's no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Deep Blue is pure bliss. This documentary about ocean life in all its forms achieves its own tidal pull with visual marvels that conjure a Darwinian delirium.

This is not a great film by any means, too filled with stock characters in stock situations for such praise. But if offers screen time for some fine young actresses, and addresses its story to an audience of teen girls who deserve something to identify with.

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

Madagascar doesn't do much, except make you laugh. All hail such a minimalist approach.

An insightful, clear-headed look at relations within a Chinese-American family.

A pop masterpiece.

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.

While Bresson's insistence on juxtaposing brute force with sublime grace isn't subtle, it is effective.

No great shakes as a documentary, but there are great shakes in the sight of 10- and 11-year-olds learning ballroom dancing in the New York City public school system.

Cheeky, brass-knuckles British crime film.

Barf-bag baroque.

What sucks the wind out of the movie's sails is the vacuum at its core.

New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.

Part irritating, part inspired.

This is a movie about guns blazing, men punching, speedometers straining and explosions exploding. On all those levels, it succeeds just fine - which makes for a great amusement-park ride, but perhaps not much of a movie.

Short on details and long on extreme, unflattering close-ups.

"This Is Spinal Tap" was brilliantly funny. Death of a Dynasty? Well, the movie is just dead.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

While it's certainly too derivative to be a great movie, it's too goodhearted and modest in its aspirations to be denied.

The movie grows richer as it goes along and contrasting pieces click together.

All this is out of the Haunted House 101 textbook.

All the characters are writ in broad strokes, making it impossible to sympathize with, much less relate to, anyone.

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

Sahara doesn't waste time on introductions. It wastes time in other ways.

Baseball, Boston and Drew Barrymore. Certainly sounds like a winning combination.

Kung Fu Hustle is to "House of Flying Daggers" what "Blazing Saddles" is to "Unforgiven."

Despite stellar work from the cast, the movie seems as emotionally distant from its audience as its characters are from each other.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

Everything about this film is drenched in adrenaline.

Look at Me is a virtuoso exercise in domestic tension - with the emphasis on "exercise."

The residents of Beauty Shop never quite gel. Instead of camaraderie, the feeling is one of bare tolerance.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.

Armed with few laughs, this clumsy sequel makes a sloppy mess of its plot ... and star Sandra Bullock.

But the fine performances of all three leads rise above the cliches, giving the film a sense of reality that both impresses and inspires.

Remember mood rings? The Ring Two is a mood movie - a bad-mood movie.

It's disconcerting to see Ferrell, a master of macho psychosis, adopt the stop-and-go dithering of Woody Allen-style neurosis.

Especially discomfiting is the stream of kids in peril.

Full of wit, charm and wonder. It's so hilarious, you might blow a gasket.

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.

Yes, the movie asks hard questions, but it would be better - or at least more honest - if it weren't so insistent that everyone arrive at the same answer.

The people are just a little too calculatedly quirky in Off the Map, an otherwise engaging comedy.

Be Cool proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles.

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

For anyone who has ever had to balance what the heart yearns for against what the head insists must be, this film should hit home.

Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.

Unfortunately for Fox, the softer his movie gets, the more Ashkenazi and Berger grow to resemble Ben Stiller and Ashton Kutcher in some unreleased, homo-erotic comic romance.

This is a movie that falls short only because it insists on grabbing for so much.

It all comes off as a case of filmmakers wanting to have their communion wafer and eat it, too.

Doing a sequel to "The Mask" without Jim Carrey sounds like a really bad idea. As Son of the Mask proves, it is.

That's the problem of Downfall in a nutshell: It provokes insufficient emotional and intellectual responses to a grotesque and atrocious dictatorship. Instead of the banality of evil, it gives us the banality of banality.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

An opportunity to enjoy the pure adrenaline rush that has always been the hallmark of martial-arts cinema.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

When Inside Deep Throat is over, it's tough to say which tragic moment lingers longer.

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

Still, it's hard not to long for the Pooh stories of old, those endearingly anarchic little tales that captured the wonder of a child's world without ever once condescending to it.

There's nothing about The Wedding Date that isn't forced or labored; there's only a stubborn determination to embrace every cliche and make sure the stars photograph well.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

Alone in the Dark will be the worst movie of 2005. The idea that anything could be worse is the only genuine scare the movie has to offer.

Will have most audiences asking, "Can we leave now?"

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

Whatever spark the newer Precinct 13 has comes from its supporting players.

Electric as Elektra, Jennifer Garner does a high-powered, blade-thrusting star turn as Marvel Comics' ninja-inspired superheroine, bringing such unbridled energy and sexuality to her performance, one barely notices the movie itself.