The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

Equal parts fantasy and cautionary tale, a film that manages to be uplifting and off-putting simultaneously -- fortunately, more the former than the latter.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

Paycheck is one of those movies in which all the ingenuity went into the original idea and none into its execution.

Even at its most hyperactive, Peter Pan has a core of good and bad feeling that will hit home to kids and to adults with honest memories.

Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

Put simply, Mona Lisa Smile is too much of a stacked deck -- a movie too concerned with ensuring that audiences feel a certain way to risk anything like nuance or interpretation.

A chilling reminder of the precipice the world stands on nowadays, from a man who looked over the edge more than once.

What makes the movie potent, though, has nothing to do with metaphor or parable. It's that the story provides Connelly, Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife with all the tools they need to resurrect, flesh out, revamp and criticize outmoded male and female roles.

A film as clever and embracingly ribald as this shouldn't have to resort to cliche in the end; director Nigel Cole should have kept his girls in Britain and kept the mood light.

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.

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.

Stuck On You is proof that sweet and funny don't always make for the best mix.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

It's relentlessly dumb and relentlessly humorous, and those aren't the adverbs it was after.

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

In America is the most unexpected and personal triumph yet from Jim Sheridan.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

A return to form -- bad form. Lifeless, unimaginative and almost determinedly uninspired, it's paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its dreariest.

Timeline lacks potency, drive, wit and personality -- all the things that make escapism worthwhile.

What's frustrating is that the movie should be so much better, or at least more entertaining. With Baldwin, Macy and Bello, director Kramer is holding three of a kind.

Luckily, Penn, Watts and Leo carry more weight than that; they keep this movie's two hours and five minutes from seeming like lost time.

Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat is gorged with shtick and gadgetry. When it comes to highlighting everything better left in the dark, it makes even the Matrix sequels look like works of genius.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.