Cotillard brings honesty to histrionics. She makes Piaf - "the little sparrow" - soar.

Zellweger has a ticklish furriness reminiscent of Jean Arthur in her screwball comic prime.

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

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

As a movie, Heist is merely an amiable time-killer. But it presents a terrific argument for federalizing airport security.

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.

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.

A film that climaxes in Shanghai shouldn't go down like a meal in Shanghai. But an hour after you see M:i:III, you may be hungry for a real movie.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

A misstep or two aside, you don't have to belong to Mensa to know kids will enjoy it.

Sometimes sly and witty, sometimes dull and forced, Coffee and Cigarettes is Jim Jarmusch's testimony to the difficulties and delights of communication.

Great book, great cast, average film: Les Miserables is all pedigree, no passion.

The basketball sequences are the most magical in the film -- both Harrelson and Snipes can play -- but more to the point, he also has a great gift for evoking the needling hostility of athletes, the way the games aren't just about talent but about ego, will, self-esteem.

All it lacks are the crucial things an inspired director could have provided: spark, soul and magic.

The word "yuppie" has fallen out of favor from overuse, but Closer's young urban professionals are so vain and superficial they may bring it back as the ultimate putdown. This movie is a yuppie nightmare.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

Let's get Sarandon and Jones into another movie soon; they're wonderful. Schumacher can direct and there's probably even a part for Brad Renfro. As for Grisham, he needs a course in remedial plotting.

About a third as funny as it thinks it is. Still, that's pretty funny and about twice as funny as most American comedies these days.

Even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Bening's performance makes up for a lot of deficiencies.

Read like a long, anguished prayer, but on screen it looks an awful lot like blasphemy.

Nothing of much surprise happens and nearly everybody will feel twinges of the familiar. It's very specific, but also universal in the gentle way it watches two people who are attracted to each other, and what they do about it. [14 Mar 1997]

Ends up neither fish nor fowl. It's a misanthrope's "E.T."

Despite the merry duo of Ford and Connery, The Last Crusade offered a familiar pursuit of the Holy Grail. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes a better move: It goes back to the future. Once again, the Indiana Jones series is the rare franchise that treasures knowledge and embraces the unknown.

Although the structure is clunky, the ensuing parliamentary machinations prove witty and fascinating.

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

[Poitier] is indeed so good that he almost enables one to forget that "Buck and the Preacher" is simply a standard Western with a slightly different twist. [10 May 1972, p.17]

In the end, the movie proves to be, like Brosnan's character, a tarted-up cliche: a whoremonger with a heart of gold.

The kind of joyless, over-calculated hit that may leave viewers feeling not haunted but headachy.

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.

Once you get the hang of Figgis' own brand of coercion -- one based on an intricate sound design and musical score -- you find yourself happily going along for the ride.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

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.

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

Has buoyancy to spare. It's filled with bumps and scratches. But in the manner of a nicked old LP, its gnarly surface and warps-and-all sound evokes real life.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

Yes, the characters in Clerks II hardly qualify as role models, but they can be blisteringly funny in an in-your-face, to-heck-with-taste way.

A delirious surprise .

Find Me Guilty flat-lines early.

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.

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.

An uneven, if lively, diversion.

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

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.

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.

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.

This would be an excellent movie from a first-time filmmaker, but from one of America's premiere directors, it's a disappointment.

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.

Gloriously retro, unashamedly celebratory of the joy of moviemaking and the love of old-fashioned heroism.

Despite the dominant air of foolishness, the filmmaking is lush, lively and intelligent, but the gap between the direction and the script is appalling.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

It's one big miss.

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.

Laura's histrionics sometimes seem forced, and Hines has to struggle to be the heel the screenplay sometimes asks him to be.

Gory but lifeless.

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

What's bleakly hilarious about the whole movie is that Bekmambetov directs the nonaction scenes just as hyperbolically.

Outbreak is fast on its feet and simple in its head.

Add McKay's stylish direction (his experience in music videos is evident) and the pounding soundtrack, and you have a movie that young women in particular will really connect with. [20 Sep 1996]

This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol.

Clockwatchers has a terrific, submerged feel, in keeping with its themes of corporate lassitude, isolation and paranoia. [24 Jul 1998]

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.

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.

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

The best moments in Paper Clips - and there are plenty - come when it doesn't resort to mundane cliches or calculated emotions to make its point.

This is a video stroll through a family scrapbook.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

The determinedly cynical needn't bother, but just about everyone else should love Eight Below.

Director Daniele Thompson gets the point across so airily and pleasantly, in a film cast to perfection, that it's no problem accepting the message with a shrug, while profoundly enjoying the messenger.

Enigma, named for the Nazi secret-coding machine, has everything going for it except a pulse.

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

In their formidable quest for junk food, Harold and Kumar end up redefining what the all-American protagonists of Hollywood movies should look like - and prove this comedy is not quite as brain-dead as it originally appeared.

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

Love, however implausible, is simply beautiful in Venus.

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.

A withering condemnation of a culture where greed is a virtue, a culture that you don't have to feel guilty for laughing at.

Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.

You Kill Me kills you softly with its smiles.

Jarrold's reduction of the story is so archetypal that it's indistinguishable from soap opera.

Long on style and technique, short on substance and plot.

Best of all is Jeff Bridges as the voice of Geek, a laid-back philosopher-penguin who becomes Cody's low-key guru, mentoring him in the ways of the wave.

Handsome and well-acted, yet it can't hold a pawn to Nabokov's harrowing and moving character study.

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

Tykwer made Potente a star in Run Lola Run, and here she repays him 10 times over. Without her force of gravity, this film would waft into the ether.

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

Has been designed to make gentle hearts soar beneath neo-grunge exteriors. It's a mixture of high-SAT humor and high-jinks so crude they're really low-jinks.

This movie is both sad and inspiring. It offers proof that Lennon's wit and art are everlasting.

Has an unerring capacity for going soft whenever a hard edge is called for.

This is Ferrell's movie, and one's tolerance for it will most likely be in direct proportion to one's tolerance for its star's vanity-free fearlessness.

Nothing is as it seems in State of Play, a crackerjack political thriller in which no individual, profession or institution gets away clean.

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

The basic trouble with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is that it goes on far longer than it should. A film of this sort should be no longer than 85 or 90 minutes. This one is 110 minutes long, which means we have to wait much longer for the mouse to turn on the cat.

The movie's best moments belong to Bill Murray,

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

The movie is edited and, worse, narrated in ways that sabotage the magic and even undercut the movie's message.

X-Men flies to the rescue with superheroes who have real substance.