This is one schlockfest that may be enjoyed more by casual viewers than by hard-core fans, since writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson breaks with the established mythology of both properties whenever he feels like it. Like it matters.

You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.

With its lifeless animation, characterless characters, and plotless plot, Yu-Gi-Oh! is so flat as to make the card game on which it is based seem positively three-dimensional.

What you might call conditional whimsy, predicated on the audience overlooking so many plot implausibilities that it might get tuckered out from all the charity.

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

Choppy, cheesy historical war epic really has only a couple of things going for it, and its biggest asset remains the heroic popular legend that inspired its making.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

What this dystopia doesn't do is shock. In truth, Code 46 traffics in notions of speculative social fiction that are so familiar by now as to feel disconcertingly normal.

Actually an above-average farce, at least as featherweight chick flicks go.

Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.

Preposterous without being much fun about it. That's a shame: How often do you get to see Cruise play a professional assassin with Bill Clinton's hair?

There's no gore in Campillo's tale, just a group of emotionally remote but otherwise seemingly healthy undead who inexplicably wander back into the world a world unsure how to reassimilate them, be it in the workplace or more intimate fronts. The complications he imagines are achingly smart; witness the grieving parents feeling even further despair at the realization that their returned little boy isn't truly all there. The film does, ultimately, lack closure, but maybe that's part of the point. [26 June 2005]

Extraordinary.

The latest and most creatively unhinged film from director Takashi Miike.

When all is said and done, the movie's a steaming plate of corn -- and, indeed, that's part of the pleasure. Myles, though, delivers a fine comic performance with no strings attached.

Spellbinding if ponderous.

There's a thin line between the subtle and the dramatically inert, and Intimate Strangers pitches a tent on it.

Penn's Kumar could become Jeff Spicoli for the generation of college kids who've never seen "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" but always seem to have a copy of "Dude, Where's My Car?" cued up at a moment's notice.

The first "Candidate" was inspired pop art, a two-dimensional coloring book about 1962 America's subterranean political fears. Demme's film is more nuanced, less crazy-brilliant and, yes, probably less necessary, but it's still a confirmation of all the anxieties out there on the table and festering in our heads.

A belligerent little sex farce roiling inside an otherwise inconsequential lampoon of corporate America, the movie is rude and ridiculous, fearless up to a point, and breathtakingly hungry to provoke.

A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.

Watching [Berry] run around in that getup I felt embarrassed, the way I do for people who put on makeup before climbing a StairMaster -- it's too much.

The director's cut has been getting a much warmer critical reception than the original release, but not necessarily because it's significantly better.

The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective.

Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

Gets on your nerves.

The way Greengrass lets you feel the violence is impressive. Most movie heroes punch through armies without scraping their knuckles, but Bourne's a believable wreck by midpoint.

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

The actors give it their best, Thomsen and Werlinder in particular.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

Sloppy, crude, pursuing the most far-flung tangents in hopes of a laugh, Anchorman still gave me more stupid giggles than I'd care to admit.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

''Bonjour" is especially lucky in having Shlomi Bar-Dayan, the 16-year-old misfit of the title, played by a young actor named Oshri Cohen, who's able to convey the impossibility of ever making sense of the world with a single bruised gaze.

Schwartzberg does stumble upon some pretty fascinating people.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead.

Turns out to be thoughtful, creative, and generally worthy of its subject, with sins that are more of ambition and miscalculation than of execution.

Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

Honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.

The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. The racial kitsch goes nowhere.

One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary.

It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

The endearing and cheeky ensemble works hard, and Ken Scott's script finds ways of wringing irreverence from the apparent good nature of the situation.

Where a lesser movie from a lesser director might sink into its own ponderousness, Sokurov uses the ambiguity of the father and son's relationship to craft a sort of erotic puzzle.

The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.

Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

Artful, especially in the ways it avoids sentimentality and employs vintage film clips of truly riveting performances...But Maximilian's narcissistic examination of his theatrical family -- can be boring, and his creative license with the truth is kind of troubling.

Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. That said, these guys' nakedly neurotic enthusiasm keeps the movie from being a total jumble.

It's the videotaped equivalent of a primary research data dump. But to quote Bette Davis by way of Edward Albee: What a dump.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.

An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.

Imelda is at its most acridly useful when comparing the former first lady's recollections with others' less sanguine memories.

The mother-child dynamic here is the fraught stuff of any worthy melodrama.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

[Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.

For fans of African music, "Sing" is a rich archeological dig; for newcomers with open ears, it might be a revelation.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.

If Saved! sinks into formula -- any movie with a showdown at a prom is treading a well-worn path -- you're grateful for its forgiving spirit.

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

Part of what hooks you to this movie is how Leth outsmarts his taskmaster, and how the two men have divergent, almost incompatible aesthetic ideals.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

We do learn that love heals and that the movie's title makes a terrifically lewd little rock song. (Thank you, Sol.) But that's about it.

For every line of dialogue that's truly, glitteringly acid, though, there are five that are merely clever, and Lee, likable as he is, never really taps into the misery of the teen misfit.

French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.

One of his (Bergman's) most life-affirming films.

About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.

What works best in Shrek 2 are the smaller roles, the pile-driving pop-culture jokes, and the moments of weird, early-Mad-magazine comic invention.

The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.

Hardship and suffering don't drive this movie so much as a romantic's gloss on the two.

At the heart of most of these encounters is talk about the nature of relationships -- cousins, twins, and peers. Mostly, though, Jarmusch displays an unexpected interest in the ironies and banalities of fame.

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

A definitive, low-tech stomping of every sci-fi clone that has sprung up in the original's wake.

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.