Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.

The movie runs out of steam before its finish, but she (Kidman) doesn't.

“Train” makes its strongest impact in Blunt’s hands. Her vulnerability brings pathos to every scene she enters, making you wish the whole film could have been told through Rachel’s bleary eyes – and set in England, where she belongs. But it’s a pleasure to see her anywhere.

Monaghan gives a solid performance, and Billy Bob Thornton has sarcastically funny bits as an FBI agent.

Garner bounces around gleefully as the young spirit enveloped by this adult body. She's young enough herself to remember what it was like to be that age, and she has the vulnerability, zest and slightly over-the-top reactions of a seventh-grader.

This isn't really a narrative: It's a collection of mostly unrelated scenes, about half of which pay off.

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

Watching Arthur Christmas is like doing your holiday shopping on Dec. 23: fun and frantic, exciting and maddening.

Where Collins' book paid careful attention to detail, Ross pays far too little. Characters never become exhausted or desperate or gaunt; they don't even get chapped lips or broken nails.

Details matter here more than in most movies. The world needs to know this story, and nobody’s going to tell it again for a long while. Parker put his heart and soul into it, but sometimes the road paved with good intentions doesn’t lead to Hell: It stops at mediocrity.

The summer's most anticipated film, and it gives fans what they want - then more of what they want, and more, and more, until gluttony becomes force-feeding.

A hymn to that beautiful city, is among his least consequential efforts. It's attractive and easy to slip into, but he didn't put enough thought into the design, and it soon falls apart.

There's plenty to admire in the performances and atmosphere, but the writer-director needed someone to pull him up short.

Offers high-speed helicopter chases, fireballing explosions, deadly laser guns, futuristic technology gone amok, multiple car crashes, two Arnold Schwarzeneggers for the price of one - almost everything except a plot that makes sense.

Cook has as much depth as a coaster, so it's impossible under any circumstances to imagine Binoche falling in love with him. Her complicated, heartfelt performance is the reason to see the film: When she's around, she pierces the soothing gray nothingness with shafts of sunlight.

Wan knows how to sustain tension through terror, though he could have abbreviated the flabby middle of the movie.

The script's hokiness flattens the performances.

If inciting boredom is the worst sin a filmmaker can commit, being timid is right behind it. Whether I agree with your point of view or not, I want to hear it.

Hector Elizondo, who has appeared in all 15 of Marshall's features, turns up as a Basque rancher and adds a bit of sparkle. I just wish Marshall's good luck charm was not a 70-year-old actor but a fresh, honest screenplay.

All true, but not new -- and not especially compelling.

For all the irrelevant silliness, though, the movie never loses sight of its romantic center, and the script doesn't cop out with phony miracles or sudden changes of direction.

An unassuming, brief and cheaply entertaining boxing movie. It's long on punching and short on character, but you wouldn't go to a Hill movie to see "Raging Bull."

It's a brisk but restful breeze blowing through our heads, requiring no thought whatsoever – in fact, thoughts are an impediment to enjoying it – and touching us just a bit in unexpected ways.

This visually engaging, well-acted story held me for an hour as tightly as anything I've seen this year. But as we neared the climax, I realized only a miracle could resolve the contradictions of the tale – and we didn't get one.

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

Its familiar story has pleasing quirks.

Technically, the film can stand with most releases. The cast includes veterans Hal Linden, Paul Rodriguez and Jennifer O'Neill, all of whom do good work.

The credits say DiNorscio, who died during filming in 2004, never informed on anyone. But is that such a great thing? If you live in a sewer, is it so terrible to be a rat?

A gently pleasing if mostly undramatic picture.

It's the most claustrophobic, airless movie of the year, a menage a quatre among unstable, manipulative, needy people who prey on each other like sharks at a feeding frenzy of the emotions.

Thirty minutes into Be Kind Rewind, you may wonder what you're doing in the theater. Sixty minutes into it, if you have stayed, you will know.

Perhaps the director should make only silent movies. Scenes where characters communicate via eyes and body language usually work here, even if we don't know exactly what's going on.

It's a pleasant but insubstantial excuse for a film.

What makes Blade 2 marginally better than "Blade," especially if you thought the first was a hollow spectacle? It has a plot.

The picture feels like an entertaining short story, competently executed at undue length, and that's its origin.

Inside Moonlight Mile, an honest and heartbreakingly true movie is struggling to get out.

While the 29 pages of his (Van Allsburg's) mini-classic would have made a superb half-hour TV special, Zemeckis and writer William Broyles Jr. have created a steroidal monster with a heart about one size too small.

Vardalos is of Greek ancestry, which makes stereotyping permissible: She can tease Greeks, just as Italians can safely mock Italians or Jews can poke fun at Jews. But isn't it demeaning to reduce your heritage to clich?s?

While it doesn’t recapture the black magic of the original, it delivers the requisite terror in the last half-hour after a slow and ambiguous start.

Starts as sweetly impossible and ends as impossibly sweet.

A sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy movie.

It's cheerful nonsense from blithe beginning to obvious end.

Performances keep the film afloat and focused whenever it threatens to drift. Deschanel, Harris and Warner are ideally cast. You might not think Ferrell would be, but he gives a different performance than I've seen from him.

Bits of welcome weirdness creep in, mainly through the too-brief character of Ghantt’s intense fiancée (Kate McKinnon). But Hess has little time for wit.

Crowe likes to work with large ensembles...But he doesn't know when we've had enough, however interesting they all may be; he's like a guy who decorates a Christmas tree with so many ornaments that you can't see the foliage.

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

Production values are acceptable in the Klasky Csupo vein. If you know that company, you're prepared for animation that isn't conventionally attractive: flat backgrounds, characters with big heads, pushed-in faces and beanpole limbs.

Performances are simple and complementary, and Hidalgo's potential death scene sustains suspense as much as is equinely possible.

It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.

It's no surprise, and it's trite, but sometimes fun -- and not magic -- is more than enough.

Far too clever for its own good.

The film has a huge heart, and it's in the right place.

When Rock of Ages remembers it's supposed to be a cartoon, it's a noisy, sweaty, giddy ball of fun. When it suddenly develops a conscience or tries to process a thought deeper than "I love rock 'n' roll," it trips over its own feet.

The pleasure comes from watching the clever rodents do their stuff. Computerized images have been kept to a minimum, and real animals provide most of the film's atmosphere.

Writer-director Theodore Witcher fills his debut with jazz-cool atmosphere. He's got a fresh-faced but mature cast: Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington. But once he's staked out the territory, he falls back into the most conventional kind of storytelling. [14 Mar 1997, p.4E]

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

It's watchable, due to the rotoscoping technique...It's also as lightweight as the smoke rings blown by one of many perverse, dull characters.

What seemed laugh-out-loud fresh in its unpredictable rudeness (at least intermittently) is now chuckle-to-yourself funny with about the same regularity.

Good idea for a movie about rebellious Asian Americans doesn't fully pan out.

The casting is weaker this time. Watching Peck crumble under fear and doubt was like seeing a skyscraper implode; Schreiber's more of a whipped puppy for most of the film.

Starts as a tart little lemon drop of a movie and ends up as a bitter pill. I'm glad to have seen it, for I appreciated Campbell Scott's dominant performance and Jesse Eisenberg's breakthrough. But I hope writer-director Dylan Kidd mixes less acid into the next drink he pours.

Chaotic, sometimes funny.

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

Movies about artists play fast and loose with truth, but this is a hoot.

Will dazzle you while establishing the world in which it takes place. After that, you may wonder whether Guillermo del Toro got amnesia halfway through.

Whatever you think of Melinda and Melinda, you have to admire Woody Allen for this: After years of criticism that he didn't use people of color in films, he's written two interracial romances.

As a movie, it's a mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

A marginally above average crime caper with one big plot twist that's pretty tough to believe but mildly interesting to consider.

I can't explain the film's main problem without giving plot points away; suffice to say that, after decades of watching Earth, Klaatu's team of observers has missed a crucial event you and I witness every day. I can tell you about the secondary problem, though: too much money.

It's watchable from start to finish, despite lapses in common sense, and it boasts a terrific cast of over-40 actors.

If you like films short, sweet and soothing, this may be exactly your "Dish."

Handsome and competently acted and prettily shot and all the other things critics say when what they really want to scream is "Aaaaaaaargh! No more Jane Austen adaptations, ESPECIALLY not Pride and Prejudice.

Nicholson operates in full-bore demonic mode in Anger Management, eclipsing gentle star Adam Sandler and satisfying everybody who's been waiting for Hollywood's Wild Man to cut loose once more.

Like all his movies except "Badlands," a taut 1973 debut, "Tree" looks gorgeous, has philosophic ambitions, meanders wherever Malick's imagination takes him and stays dramatically inert.

I do wonder why a gay director's best-known movies about straight guys, Talk to Her and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!," suggest that satisfying relationships with women are most easily achieved if they're 1) unconscious or 2) in bondage.

Most of the actors keep an icicle-stiff upper lip except for Winslet, who darts around like a finch with a beak full of sunflower seeds, and Burrows, who exudes a musk of refined sexiness.

Green knows how to convey a mood visually and develop tension with his camera. He just doesn't give people enough interesting things to say or know when to shut them up.

Jon Favreau, J.K. Simmons, Thomas Lennon and half a dozen other capable comedians drift in and out. Yet the movie seems long even at 105 minutes.

Everyone's entitled to a slump, and this is only the first blah film in five for Guest.

95 breezy minutes that typify cotton-candy filmmaking.

We get pleasure watching two sets of likeable, convincing actors move toward their foreordained futures. The film's affecting ending proves familiarity needn't breed contempt, after all.

If only Hollywood studios weren't so addicted to happy, oversimplified endings, the film might leave us shaken instead of slightly stirred.

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

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

Who else in Hollywood would've met a non-actor with spina bifida (Rene Kirby), created a role for him, then shot him dancing and skiing on his hands to show how easily he fit into society?

The real stars are the orchestrators and musicians who swaddled Spacey in a gorgeous blanket of sound.

Fanboys won't mind the absence of depth or emotion; they may even welcome it for making the film more representative of its comic-book origins. The rest of us, however, cannot rejoice at the overspending and overkill likely to come in Hellboy III.

Steven Zaillian never seems completely at home with these characters, not because he's white but because he's a cerebral screenwriter frustrated with a story that gives him little that's meaningful to say. Like Washington and Crowe, he's a chef functioning here as a short-order cook: The meal's perfectly edible but falls short of delicious.

I didn't believe most of what I saw until the last 20 minutes, and whaddaya know? This thriller finally cast the spell it had been trying to achieve and lifted itself above the pack of late-summer, clean-out-the-studio-attic releases.

The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.

The loosely autobiographical 8 Mile, an uneven but watchable drama about life in Detroit's slums, begins the shrewd transformation of vitriolic rapper Eminem into a mainstream figure.

Entertaining and preposterous in nearly equal amounts.

What keeps this from cloying? Universally good performances, led by Banderas' blazing intensity.

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

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.

So I was curious to see why we needed a two-hour documentary about the three-hit wonder who cast away his career halfway through life and coasted on celebrity status for 30 years. After seeing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, I'm still not convinced we do.

The only thing they don't take time for is characterization, which the story badly needs.

It requires an almost childlike faith to get into the spirit of Stroke of Genius, an old-fashioned willingness to believe that the world was once this way - and might, somehow, become this way again.