The weirdly exhilarating thing about Wicker Park is the reckless abandon with which it embraces the convenience of coincidence, and then the extreme measures it takes to reassure the audience that it's not a movie about coincidence at all.

Celebrates heroes without turning them into saints.

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.

The best part of Little Women is that it tells a great big story. [24 Dec 1994]

There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.

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

It's plenty thrilling, and it appeals to the flag-waving patriot in all of us.

A lively, compulsively watchable but ultimately sobering film about the men who make their living off prostitution.

Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are so good in Something's Gotta Give, it's a shame writer-director Nancy Meyers couldn't rein herself in a little more.

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

It inverts the typical Hollywood boy-meets-girl formula into something somehow menacing and yet ultimately moving. [29 Oct 1991]

Spurlock's movie is the real-life slapstick record of a kamikaze Mac attack. Schlosser's book is the contemporary equal of Upton Sinclair's classic meatpacking muckraker "The Jungle."

The giddy excitement of Startup.com comes from feeling as if you're inside the bubble as it soars into the stratosphere - and pops.

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

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.

The result is a charmer that boldly marches where lesser movies - at least since the heyday of John Hughes - fear to tread.

While the film is obviously meant as a call to arms, the very single-mindedness of the approach could work against it.

There's an honesty to the film that elevates it a cut above standard slasher fare.

It rarely strikes the right tone and ultimately falls short of what one would expect from a collaboration between director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard.

The film is the work of a visual genius who may have overextended his storytelling ability, but with fascinating results.

Costner does something difficult: In the middle of a tepid comic whirlpool, he finds the humorous aspect of inertia.

It's like a Harlequin romance trying to pass itself off as something deeper and more profound.

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

You never believe that Paltrow's character is insane, even when she herself does. She has too sturdy a core.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

Step Brothers at its best is a smarter "Dumb and Dumber."

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

A mangy-looking mongrel with a lot of familiar markings and a little more on the ball than you'd expect at first glance.

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.

At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

Alpha Dog may well go down as the most dispiriting film of 2007.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated performs a great service, though not especially well.

White throws in a dog-in-peril shot to ensure the audience's sympathies. The ploy works, perhaps too well, turning Year of the Dog less into the askew character study it wants to be than a showcase of lovable-dog shots.

Unlike so many movies directed at teens, ATL is not interested in exploiting its audience.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

[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]

There's tremendous energy in How She Move, so much that the audience can't help but be swept up.

Refreshingly, the movie never wavers in the importance it places on friendship over just about anything else.

There's more than a trace of James Dean in Gosling, except that he's a rebel with a cause.

Engaging though flimsy, lively though occasionally tone-deaf, it's a movie that thrives on the strength of its affable co-stars and a sense of adventure that provides just enough brio to get audiences through some energy-sapping rough spots.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

It may not advance the art form, but it's a movie with pleasures for the whole family, and nowadays that's saying something.

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

Comes across as more willfully clever than profound, leaving us to applaud the message while pondering why the messenger had to strain so hard to get it across.

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

No matter how good-natured, The Holiday ends up a glutted farce.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

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

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

As great as the film looks, the story, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, never quite comes into focus.

At over two hours, Breakfast on Pluto is too much of a merely pretty and pretty good thing.

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.

The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.

It's not exactly thrilling, and it doesn't cover much new ground. But young audiences will lap it up like ice cream.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

The film may not be art, but it's got a beat and you can definitely dance to it.

Things may work out predictably, but The Ultimate Gift does not yank on the heartstrings so much as pluck them gently.

Anna Faris, her deadpan comic timing still a joy to watch, returns as Cindy Campbell, one of two main holdovers from the first three movies.

Jerry Seinfeld's foray into feature animation will delight young kids and leave their elders alternately amused and bemused.

What it does have is the laughs.

Blethyn's performance belongs in another movie, not this bipolar comedy-drama.

It's a thrill ride not to be missed.

The sprawling canvas ultimately dwarfs the plucky title figure and makes him seem too small in every way.

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

The timing couldn't be better for a thriller that focuses on assassination, international war scandals and U.S. agencies of enormous influence and wildly varying competence.

What makes RV work are some genuinely funny bits (one of which is not an overlong sequence in which Bob has trouble emptying the R.V.'s toilet) that should ring especially true to any parent forced to cajole a recalcitrant child into having a good time.

Apart from the movie's moments of flesh and fantasy, it lacks the lyric impulse that would make the swank fantasy take flight.

A derivative little tale with enough good intentions to recommend it, but not enough substance to embrace it.

If the movie were as funny as it is well-meaning, this would be one for the ages.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

The emotions seem genuine enough, even if Sandler is not a talented-enough actor to always pull them all off.

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

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.

Generally, this writer-director is too sensitive for his own good. He never lets his boy-hero lose himself fully in his new world - or relinquish hope that his parents will return.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

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

The real strength of Return to Me is Hunt, who knows just when to retreat from the film's overriding sweetness and inject a cynical moment or two.

A smart comedy about a smart blonde -- that would be a sensation. But a dumb comedy about a smart blonde turns out to be not bad.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

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

The one thing most sorely missing is movie magic.

You know the line about paying to hear a great actor read a phonebook? I'd pay to see Channing just leaf through one.

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

Novocaine is neither funny enough to be a comedy, nor dark enough to be a true film noir. Like the drug of the title, it just kind of leaves you numb and anxious to taste the good stuff once again.

Director Andrew Bergman (Honeymoon in Vegas) has a deft comic sensibility, but less skin and more speed would have served him better.

Tear-inducing feel-gooder that only a curmudgeon could find fault with.

David Hyde Pierce is hilarious as Drix, a take-charge dose of medicine. No performer is better at wringing laughs from an unflappable --- make that semi-flappable - delivery.

It's hard to stomp on a movie that pulls together a rich lay-about, hippies, a punk girl and an Amnesty International worker in a sort of Peaceable Kingdom, but About a Boy shows the limits of affability.

It's lumpy, odd and tonally all over the place, but its vision gets to you, and its payoff delivers a tough kid's catharsis.

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

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]