The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

A vibrant emotional epic.

The Clearing reminds us what a riveting presence he (Redford) can be.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.

Despite the cunning mixture of live-action footage and animatronic effects in Two Brothers, there's more imagination and wonder in a good old Sabu picture like "The Jungle Book" (1942). Two Brothers is more like a tacky jungle comic book.

When Crews is onscreen, White Chicks is a film that fears nothing and no one. When he's not, it's a film too tentative and soft-hearted to scale the farcical heights to which it aspires.

The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.

Pointed and satiric. Best of all, one must hasten to admit, it's pretty funny.

Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

The movie annoyingly waits until the end to reveal the names of those experts who have been doing all the talking; it would have been nice to know these folks' qualifications first.

Heaven knows what the suits at Disney were thinking, for what they ended up with was a bland Jackie Chan movie and a lifeless travelogue.

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

Garfield the comic strip stopped being funny about 10 years ago. Garfield the Movie makes it to about the 10-minute mark before tedium sets in.

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.

Remarkable documentary.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.

Better than his previous films, The Day After Tomorrow plays to Emmerich's strengths, making for a thrill ride that rarely disappoints when it matters.

Baadasssss is about feeling pain and frustration, about having a sense of purpose that overwhelms everything else, about great cost and great risk, the pain of isolation and the intoxicating effect of fighting against the odds.

Some of the most affecting moments in the film show Bukowski walking the streets of his Los Angeles, a barren suburban hell, as he reads his poems and the words appear on and then fade from the screen.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

By the end, this movie's balancing act is the equivalent of network news' equal-time laws. The "fairness" becomes deadening.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.