Examines Muslim family's religious warfare.

Picks up steam from the ominous opening scene and ends as a quietly suspenseful thriller.

A documentary that's as chaotic, rude and funny as the band could be.

The setup doesn't make sense from the get-go.

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

Heavy on cheap, dirty humor (Gordie and Sean clean septic tanks for a living, a fact that is milked frequently for laughs), but it's never substantial enough to truly offend or delight.

A loosely woven crazy quilt of other, better movies.

(Cusack) has never been more effective onscreen.

Aspires to rise above the conventional drugs-and-action genre and succeeds about half the time.

Trying to make sense of this shaggy dog story is like climbing a mountain with glass-smooth sides and quarter-inch toeholds.

A taut, consistently surprising political thriller with a sting in its tail.

[Jarmusch's] most accessible film after "Night on Earth," yet it's still elliptical and enigmatic.

Characters behave arbitrarily and incredibly, and a clumsy resolution brings the film to a thudding halt.

Except for moments of labored symbolism and a too cozy ending, the movie stays sharply focused on its well-chosen targets.

Affleck simply wasn't meant to play action heroes or tough guys. He's about as tough as tapioca pudding.

Hank Greenberg was to Jews what Jackie Robinson was to African Americans: a great athlete, handsome and hard-working, who took the first line of abuse from bigots and proved that his people belonged at the highest level of professional sports.

A sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy movie.

Writer-director Ben Younger has sketched the foreground of this picture but never gets around to filling in the details.

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

DiCaprio is up to all but the heaviest emotional lifting; when he enters a maniacal phase, you wish for Martin Sheen, who did the "back to the jungle" thing better in "Apocalypse Now."

Cowardice and cliché - not a tasty combination.

Easy to like.

It's gently funny, modestly scary in spots, full of valuable but low-key observations about life.

It took four years to come up with this? Someone needed that long to assemble this patchy, recycled collection of gags about stinky butts, superfreaks, finger-wide blunts and racial cliches?

State-of-the-art.

The rest of this well-intentioned picture never reaches (Washington's) level of subtlety and intensity.

A punch-drunk lightweight. Inside the ring, it lands some forceful punches. Outside the ring, it stumbles around, swinging wildly at nothing, until it collapses.

The good-hearted Galaxy Quest delivers fun and confusion in equal measure, as it gently tweaks the fanaticism of "Star Trek"/"Star Wars" fans while validating it at the same time.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.

It really gets gloomy.

Reflective, deliberate, building gradually to a climax that left me touched.

They have turned a brief, appealing, honest autobiography by Susanna Kaysen into a long, appealing, rather dishonest film.

A tribute to anyone who ever picked up a score, a pen, a paintbrush or a grease pencil - or a movie camera.

Foster and Yun-Fat each show about three-quarters of their characters.

Charming Stuart Little improves on original tale.

Atmosphere goes only so far in a story where the major characters fade from memory.

May wrestle with big ideas, but it does so through a succession of small emotional moments.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

To adapt it for a 130-minute movie, Irving ruthlessly cut away subplots, eliminated supporting characters and pared down the traits of the ones that remain.

It's packed with such passion, humor, fine acting in small roles - there are no big ones - and vitality in the storytelling that the lesson comes across entertainingly.

It's choppy and cheap-looking, and it has dead spots like the Sahara, but it also has a surprising number of genuinely funny bits, most of them slapsticky and gleefully rude.

A conventionally violent, do-or-die ending on such an unconventional movie.

It flies apart when it clumsily introduces humor at a funeral or an application for death benefits.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

Wrestles with big questions, gets the upper hand during the first hour, then loses its grip. By the end, it's flat on its back on the mat.

The film isn't quite as striking as its star, but it's just as honest.

I do have one overpowering Y2K fear: that Hollywood will keep belching out movies as excruciatingly dull, brutal, mindless and overlong as End of Days.

The sequel is faster, funnier and wilder, with more cunningly contrived computer effects.

A long, slow pity party full of characters who constantly bemoan their fate while telling other people not to pity themselves.

Fair, overlong James Bond from the second shelf.

The film, though seldom sleepy, is often hollow.

Almodovar still populates his work with characters you'll see nowhere else in movies.

A love story more involved than I can easily explain.

A scathing, scurrilous, sometimes silly but often searching comedy about the nature of faith in the 21st century.

Deep as a Canadian lake: Below the placid surface, menacing creatures swim around unseen.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

Foggy allegories and misty metaphors.

Rarely connects with reality.

It's among the most inventive, screwily funny and consistently surprising movies I've seen in years.

Puts more miles on plot that was worn out long ago.

Tries with intermittent success to juggle two stories.

A smooth, often funny, occasionally thoughtful romantic comedy.

You can get all of this free on television any week, so why pay for it?

(The filmmaker) never does achieve the breakthrough with her father that she and we hoped for.

The most atmospheric thing in the movie is Farnsworth's face.

It's visually surrealistic, acted with integrity, so brutal in spots that I averted my eyes.

(Ford and Thomas) give Random Hearts muscle when the story turns flabby, spine where it sags, wings where it threatens to stay earthbound.

Molly Shannon's peachy-keen attitude and spunky patience win us over to the side of Mary Katherine Gallagher.

For a movie that ends in the profoundest depths of sadness, Boys Don't Cry contains one of the year's purest moments of joy.

If we had a story we could believe, we'd be in stitches.

The whole thing seems to have been faked up for our amusement, like a circus freak show.

So wild an approach demands straightforward performances that don't draw attention to themselves, and that's what the actors supply.

On a simplistic level, the movie works as a revenge fantasy...Yet anybody who thought about the movie for two minutes would have to conclude it couldn't happen.

Kasdan ends up with an intellectually dishonest movie about intellectual dishonesty.

(Mendes') film debut shows he can shock not only with noise and nakedness but with subtle observations.

Repeated lapses in continuity and common sense.

If you're the kind of person who goes to the movies primarily to watch faces melt to pulp, you won't be disappointed.

Just a great, empty wind machine.

Most of the time the movie limps amiably toward its feeble conclusion.

It delivers cop-genre thrills at the pace required and reminds us Omar Epps is a star in the making.

Williamson deals mostly in cliches, as if high schoolers weren't smart enough to appreciate anything subtler.

Grant handles the slapstick humor gracefully and speaks his lines with sincerity and warmth.

Amiable bundle of broad, easy laughs rather than bitingly fierce satire.

Keeps its sense of humor while dealing with serious issues.

The story was primitive, the characters unmemorable, the direction unsophisticated, the writing cliched, the photography and music drab, the pacing uneven, the acting varying from adroitly funny to exaggerated.

Like waves lapping quietly at a beach, After Life makes its subtle effect, as we wonder which memory we'd choose. [8 Oct 1999, p.7E]

The movie fails the credibility test right here. As those of us who were social rejects in high school know, the two qualities that would defeat any prom candidate are extra weight and a blotchy complexion. Laney has porcelain skin and a sveltely curvaceous figure, so she's a candidate for prom royalty. [29 Jan 1999, p.6E]

The movie does have a heart, and Carroll plays by it. But when in doubt, he plays a safe tune we've all heard and enjoyed many a time. [22 Jan 1999, p.8E]

Mighty Joe Young is based on the 1949 film of the same name, and it's nominally more aware of '90s concerns: destruction of the gorillas' habitats, illegal hunting, trade in animal body parts. On the other hand, it's no more enlightened about the intrinsic value of these clever, emotionally complex creatures. [25 Dec 1998, p.13E]

Freeman's understated, deeply-felt acting tops a passel of good performances. [25 Dec 1998, p.7E]

This little piggy's gone to market, and he isn't coming back. Not to suggest the sequel lacks heart or an uplifting message. It has both. But they've been subsumed in slapstick clowning and the introduction of characters with no reason to exist, other than to line the shelves of toy stores. [27 Nov 1998, p.6D]

It's an honorable, straightforward, talking-heads-and-old-clips film that sometimes rises to profundity when it touches us deeply. [23 Apr 1999, p.10E]

This pretentious mediocrity from writer-director Gaspar Noe is "Taxi Driver" without depth or any humanizing of the main character. [25 Oct 1998, p.4F]

It's got a satisfyingly brisk rhythm and two appealing performances by Brendan Gleeson and Peter MacDonald as good-natured ex-cons. But despite the brogues of their bosses, the tough-guy atmosphere is pleasantly old-hat. [10 July 1998, p.12E]

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

Gilbert sets up a rhythm, telling the story in short scenes that proceed at a relaxed pace. The film never hurries, but it moves forward constantly. [26 Jun 1998, p.10E]

Strip away [Hugo's] sociopolitical rhetoric, and you're left with a simple, heartfelt story. The film directed by Bille August and written by Rafael Yglesias does just that, rendering the plot handsomely. It's far from miserable, but it's not "Miserables," either. [01 May 1998, p.10E]

A better-than-average thriller. That's a tribute to director Harold Becker and stars Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin, who stretch the script's one idea almost to its breaking point. [3 Apr 1998, p.8E]