The movie misses Henson's good-hearted inventiveness, but there's ample evidence that the second generation of Muppeteers are almost as good at pulling the strings as the first. [17 Feb 1996, p.8G]

The outcome is alternately unsatisfying, meaningless, contradictory and laughable.

Ambiguity can enrich a movie, but artists abdicate their responsibilities if they don't take a stance of any kind.

Intermission is like a creme brulee, invigoratingly grainy when you bite into it but sweet and soft underneath. Director John Crowley and writer Mark O'Rowe infuse this Irish crime drama with such adrenaline that you don't realize how lightweight it is until after it's over.

Bits can be extremely funny. I howled at the ranting, mustard-splotched, wiener-waving Michael Moore.

Dahl has directed half a dozen sardonic noir movies, dating back to "Kill Me Again" in 1989, so he should have been the ideal choice for this material. But even he can't make chicken salad from a pile of beaks, bones and claws.

Often powerful, though presented throughout with British understatement.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Don Cheadle dominates Miles Ahead.

Has its own peculiar, loose-knit kind of charm.

The portrait of Elizabeth Sloane grabs your interest, partly due to the presence of Jessica Chastain in the title role.

Bardem delivers the kind of performance the director might have given himself: subdued, thoughtful, wry, sometimes a bit too detached.

This installment substitutes psychological action for physical thrills.

Certainly satisfies our hunger for a light, bright dessert, yet it may leave you hungry for more.

Call it "Talladega Ice," and you can be nearly certain whether or not you want to see it.

As dense as a Watergate-era newspaper and as immediate as a blog, State of Play is an absolutely riveting state-of-the-art "big conspiracy" thriller.

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

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 plucks ceaselessly at our heartstrings to play a sad song indeed.

The mountain, grim and unforgiving, remains the star.

Balances brains, brawn and heart in ideal proportions. The actors - some first-rate, all enjoyable - never get overshadowed by the special effects, which dazzle us without gory excess.

The wigs, hats and gowns look realistic, gorgeous and utterly right. In a vapid confection like Stage Beauty, perhaps that's what really counts.

Watching Wedding Crashers is like stuffing yourself with raw cookie dough. It's a guilty pleasure that goes down easily, but you can't help wondering what it would've tasted like if someone had finished the job.

There's an extraordinary subplot in Blood Diamond, sandwiched between a main story meant to arouse outrage and a Hollywood-clumsy finale meant to provoke a standing ovation.

The movie is based on the life of California high school teacher Erin Gruwell, played with captivating honesty by Hilary Swank, yet it feels like the usual Hollywood exaggerations.

The stars have chemistry, which may be all that we can hope for in factory-line fluff. But why stack the deck so clumsily?

It's gay in the old-fashioned sense, a giddy whirl for the senses, from chilly English drawing rooms to lush Neverland jungle. It's innocent in believing love banishes all ills, even physical ones, and inspires unthinkable heroism.

Jim Broadbent is the wild card in the cast; he screeches and growls his way through Madame Gasket's lines in the best traditions of British drag.

Eastwood has two knacks as a director/producer: He casts smaller roles well, as he did here, and he can establish an atmospheric mood, often an ominous one. But he hasn't much visual style -- for an action star.

At times, the animatronic effects used to create the wolves are too obvious, and the one-by-one kill-off plotline employed in so many horror films gives The Grey a plodding predictability. At nearly two hours, it's also too long.

Can be unbearably moving or annoyingly mawkish, sometimes in the same scene.

16 Blocks is a burger movie, served by an old pro: 76-year-old director Richard Donner, who hasn't done work this interesting since the other Bush was president but who knows his way around a thriller.

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

Larry Clark's documentary-like direction and Harmony Korine's undeviatingly dull screenplay make it possible to believe these useless lumps of flesh exist. [1 Sept 1995, p.3F]

Director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson argue that everyone deserves the love that makes them happiest, and that these two will remain miserable until they stumble upon each other.

The final drum-off (c'mon, you knew it would come down to that) resembles a combination of music, gymnastics and martial arts, and I don't think I've seen a more pulse-pounding scene this year.

Except for Sanaa Lathan, who sears the screen in a brief appearance, director Carl Franklin and his cast seem to realize they're making a second-tier thriller.

The best movie I've seen about the Revolutionary War.

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

A fairly ordinary (for Wilder) adaptation of a play with a great performance by Lemmon as a French cop who falls for hooker Shirley MacLaine. [18 Jul 2003, p.11E]

Bloom finally comes into his own as a man here, somberly thoughtful and melancholic. The elfin archer of "The Lord of the Rings" and the trivial boy-toy of "Troy" have been forgotten.

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

Except for the irritating Rockwell, the cast suits the characters.

The movie doesn't need to preach a "we're all equal" message. When we watch the boys bond with their new kin over food or music, then see the lines of Palestinians plodding through armed checkpoints to reach jobs or visit Israeli friends, we get the point.

The movie has been shot with love and wisdom, and its implausible premise doesn't get in the way of a sweetness and honesty too rarely seen.

When the movie becomes pure fantasy, it's impossible to swallow. (No landlord rents an apartment to a 12-year-old with no adult in sight.)

Choreographer Hi Hat and director Ian Iqbal Rashid kick the film into high gear every so often with dance sequences, climaxing with a dance-off in Detroit that seems too short.

The arc of the 800-page novel, crammed into 130 minutes, becomes a line as flat as the heart monitor of a dead patient. A story that ought to possess the mad grandeur of an opera acquires the tedious regularity of soap opera.

Where the musical falls short is – well, music. Hooper's quest for realism leads singers to sob, choke off sentences or drop into inaudible whispers during grand melodies. A musical ought to convey emotions too large for speech: sorrow, joy, love that can't be expressed in ordinary ways. Turning songs into vocalized dramatic monologues misses the point.

Gripping, improbable plot marked by exciting sequences of action.

Watching them, you realize how far computers still have to go in accurately depicting the play of muscles as beasts run, crouch and leap. Though Annaud doesn't cut to them for cute reaction shots, as weak directors do, the tigers show near-human fears and affections.

I can't help but feel that a funny movie was waiting to be unearthed amid all this self-congratulation and juvenile prankishness.

A brazen title card declares this " true story." (Wow, not even "based on.") However many facts may be accurate, the movie feels contrived, with climax piled upon climax.

Stallone doesn't pander to audiences with unearned sentiment. He believes in his story, in the inspirational element that has sent thousands of folks running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art over 30 years.

A film that dares to be smart, reasonably complicated and scary while swashing its buckles.

What surprises us most is the picture's topicality, and not just because terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon three years ago.

Plusses and minuses work out about evenly, if you compare the sequel to "Sorcerer's Stone." The three young leads act with more assurance; Radcliffe emerges as a leader, rather than one leg of a triangle. (Too bad he no longer expects to make all seven of the proposed pictures.)

In the end, your reaction to "Hour" may depend on your feelings about humanity's collective common sense.

Bogdanovich adds touches to appeal to serious film fans.

I longed for something - anything - unexpected to occur. What I wouldn't have given for Wilson, the "Cast Away" volleyball, to float past with his bloody "face" print grinning at the pair!

The honesty outweighs the hokiness by a fair margin.

The three leads all played these characters over multiple seasons on the TV show; they're comfortable in these skins, and they show that. (Confusingly, all three appeared in "City of God" under other characters' names.)

The reason to see the movie is Field.

Has its heart in the right place and its head shoved well down into a box of clichés.

It's different from the usual fare in one obvious way -- most of the cast are African Americans -- and, more importantly, in its willingness to leave some problems unsolved and volatile or unhappy people unchanged.

The real surprise is not that the high-strung Key and grounded Peele have rapport – their sketches demonstrate that – but that it can be used to anchor a full-length comedy.

It's as pitiless and brutal as any of their pictures and funnier than any except "Raising Arizona."

Another surefire sports biography from Disney.

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

When was the last time you had to wait until the final sentence of a film to understand all the details? When was the last time you went to a genre movie – or what looked like one in spooky trailers – and realized the director had fulfilled that promise and meditated on his favorite topic? Shutter Island does just that.

Director Chris Robinson moves his camera aimlessly, cutting in and out of speeches as if he were just as bored as I.

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

Portman doesn't catch fire until the second half, then heaves herself into emotional action; this suits her initially passive, mostly unthinking character. Weaving, who acts entirely with his voice, is V's ideal embodiment: witty, rueful, pitiless, visionary and mad.

Is it a bad thing that Disney has commercialized, denatured and inflated the story to make it indistinguishable from any handsome sword-and-sorcery epic? Perhaps not, for it IS handsome on its grand scale.

The balance between human interaction and mechanical mayhem works well until the end, when flying suits and exploding bodies fill the screen.

Lane, perhaps the most underrated actress of those deemed employable in their 40s, wonderfully embodies the mogul's wife.

Executive Decision, a film as generic as its title, follows its 'subdue the terrorists' template by the numbers - but they're numbers that can work over and over, when handled as competently as they are here by director Stuart Baird. [15 Mar 1996, p.8E]

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

It’s just a popcorn movie – but it’s loud, smashing fun, if you accept it as a high-tech piece of silliness.

I felt depressed when I realized all 87 minutes had passed without one word about forgiving sin or reaching out to the image of God in neighbors who don't think as you do.

Fire shows what happens when a government systematically denies rights to one racial group for decades, but its message is more current.

Blethyn glides through the proceedings elegantly, a comic swan among ducks.

If you're fond of wigs, you may be in heaven. If you're more interested in Whigs, you may wish the movie had dug deeper under the lovely powdered surface of Lady Georgiana Spencer.

City Hall is more Cusack's movie than Pacino's, and he gives a more interesting performance. Cusack never reveals himself right away: With his watchful eyes and tight lips, he seems to be deciding whether he can trust the audience with his deepest thoughts. He warms up thoroughly in this Jimmy Stewart-like role, though he never gets a handle on a Louisiana accent. (Calhoun couldn't have come from Chicago, like Cusack?)[16 Feb 1996, p.1E]

It's a mass of interchangeable moving images, none much more significant than the others, linked to a plot looser than a 2-year-old's shoelaces.

The funniest, crassest, wildest, most musical, most satirical and most scatological of the Powers trilogy. And you get to watch Britney Spears' head explode. What more could you want?

Roberts, perhaps the nation's most fresh-faced actress five or six years ago, now seems to be a pair of tear ducts mounted atop a thousand-watt smile. Whether anything is going on behind that assembly remains to be seen, but there's not much proof here. [4 Aug 1995, p.1F]

If it were 10 minutes shorter, it would've been just the right length and almost wholly honest.

I don't mean to be negative, but I want Orny Adams hung naked over a pit of snapping crocodiles. That said, Comedian is a lightweight but appealing backstage film about two performers.

If you wanted this "Snicket" movie (and the presumed flood of sequels) to be faithful to the novels, you have come to the wrong franchise.

For now, the franchise has enough zip and humor to be worthwhile.

One dazzling (if overlong) bridge: technologically advanced, brilliantly designed, spectacularly executed, solid as steel in its unspectacular elements. But unlike its 1999 predecessor, this is a movie that nobody but avid video gamers and motorcyclists needs to see more than once.

In rare cases – and The Woman in Black is one of them – a story may be more atmospheric when less is left to the imagination.

Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.

There's plenty to offend Christians and non-Christians in Saved! but little to trouble either: The movie vanishes in memory like morning mist expelled by the first stiff breeze.

A clever blend of the high school comedy and the superhero genre.

It's a gentle look at people who cut themselves off from others and realize consequences too late. If Southern Baptists believed in karma, this would be their touchstone.

Someone in most Farrelly movies deserves the Good Sport Award; here it's split between Meryl Streep, who befriends Walt in a long cameo as herself, and Eva Mendes, who plays Walt's galpal in a way that mocks perceptions of her as a well-endowed ninny. Cher should get a share of this prize.