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]