The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.

Adults should find its simmering drama at least as compelling as teens will, even if parental figures are only slightly more present here than in a " Peanuts" comic strip.

Acridly funny.

Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

This prequel has something to appall everybody.

Has a raggy charm, like the dogs, and a solid moral ending. For a late-summer children's film, it does the job.

Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.

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.