Messing may simply be one of those actresses who's the right size for TV and the wrong size for the big screen.

You won't forget Nobody Knows, the quietly harrowing tale of four abandoned Japanese children.

Slater narrates as if reading a restaurant menu. Reid seems to have learned each long sentence in segments, so she wouldn't be overtaxed.

Far be it from me to spoil the secret, but I will say this: The last reel should've been sent straight to the city dump.

It's a run-of-the-mill action film that falls short of the 1976 original - and, for that matter, the 1959 western "Rio Bravo," which inspired the first film. The characters run out of energy and personality long before they run out of bullets.

Heartwarming drama.

Watching this is like sitting by a pinsetter at a bowling alley. That's too bad, because the picture had potential.

I groaned at cliches and grinned at jokes in roughly equal measure.

It's yet another warm, fuzzy, New-Age tale that cozies us into believing the grave doesn't mean oblivion.

Weitz has done one remarkable thing in "Company" that doesn't strike you until later: He's given us a functional family that overcomes difficulties with patience and effort.

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

Except for a surreal moment when Fat Albert meets the real Bill Cosby, who tells his cartoon creation he must go back into the television, nothing inventive occurs.

If you've been seduced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version of "The Phantom of the Opera," you'll fall in love with the gorgeous, splendidly cast film.

An articulate plea to Westerners not to repeat these terrible sins of omission.

Martin Scorsese understands one character better than any other American director: the man who rises in the world to wealth or prominence without attaining what he wants most. That's why Howard Hughes is an ideal subject for this director.

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.

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

Reveals the drama and degredation so powerfully that it ranks among the all-time heavyweights of sports movies.

This loose, slightly lazy sequel is both funnier than the original and more bizarre.

Wes Anderson's movies taste that way to me. They're dryly funny, well-acted, never less than quirkily entertaining. But they're never more, either.

But as cynical as I may have been going in, I came out a believer.

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.

He's (Yimou) like a painter combining bloody reds, sunshine yellows and pale blues in the harmony of a masterpiece.

This movie is an act of hubris so huge that, in Alexander's time, it would draw lightning bolts from contemptuous gods. Today it will get sniggers from stunned critics and a collective yawn from a public unlikely to share Stone's egomania.

M. Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz enliven the film as a couple across the street...These wonderful old actors briefly raise the level of the picture to the kind of warm but honest drama it ought to have been.

Heartfelt, if rather repetitive, documentary.

The film whirls by in a satisfying torrent of chases, escapes and discoveries.

Everything about the film seems to have been done on the cheap. The music sounds like it came from a high school band.

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

Johnny Depp has finally won me over to rabid support after "Neverland" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." He gives the most controlled, least mannered performance of his career, staying sweet and rueful while suggesting unseen emotional depths.

This picture has an ugly habit of humiliating Bridget, which "Diary" did not.

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.

Flaccid remake of a tough 1966 original.

Among the handsome explosions, wacky effects, slapstick comedy and zooming action sequences of The Incredibles, writer-director Brad Bird is attempting to start a revolution.

Brilliantly embodied by Jamie Foxx in this unflinching, entertaining biography.

Birth, which should never have been conceived, is obscure in every way: visually, philosophically and psychologically.

Has more psychological complexity than the average suspense drama, and the results prove more satisfying than not.

U.S. geography doesn't matter to Payne. He always charts the terrain of the human heart, and he's among the wisest of mapmakers.

The cast is drab and lifeless, the characterization non-existent, the ending simply impossible. Between our jumps of fright come lumps of time that take forever to pass.

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

The warm performances give the film momentum, but writer Audrey Wells and director Peter Chelsom (who chops dance sequences clumsily) often stumble.

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

It's a thoughtful, multi-layered film that falls a bit short of its goals on all fronts. Fans of intellectually challenging science fiction and/or Robin Williams will make up most of its market.

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.

As a vegetarian, I'm grateful that Around the Bend -- an extended commercial for KFC passing itself off as a heartwarming family drama -- is a loser.

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

One of those documentaries about a family train wreck that makes you wonder how people consented to have their tawdry laundry washed so publicly.

By riffing off two iconic American narratives of the last 35 years, "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos," it has changed the template for animation, making a timely film that still deals with timeless children's themes.

Watching I Heart Huckabees was like taking my first Manhattan cab ride with a madman behind the wheel. As the skyscrapers whizzed by, I thought, "What a view! I just wish we'd slow down, so I could take everything in."

It's obviously meant to help his presidential candidacy - why release it a month before the election, otherwise? - and for the first 7 minutes, it plays like a campaign commercial about young John's integrity, hard work and humble roots.

Has any movie this millennium had less reason to exist than First Daughter?

By the self-contradictory and ludicrous end, I had the mixed satisfaction of being proved right in my disappointment. (Di Pego wrote the equally silly "Instinct" and "Angel Eyes," so I can't say I was surprised.)

The result owes a little to the 1927 "Metropolis," a little to film noir, a little to early depictions of H.G. Wells' science fiction -- notably the 1936 "Things to Come" -- and a little to lovably far-fetched sci-fi serials.

A well-intentioned but overlong Czech drama that comes apart completely in the last 20 minutes?

The 23-year-old Evans has been acting just four years, and his near-anonymity makes him well-cast: He's an Everyslacker breezing through life in Santa Monica, the kind of guy who could turn into a hero under the right circumstances or remain a zero the rest of his life.

In the end, coincidence undoes Criminal.

A painfully honest film, yet it's also painfully slow, drawn-out and simplistic in too many spots.

Emotionally stultifying and brain-dead.

Nair and screenwriters Matthew Faulk, Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes have faithfully carried most of the main characters over from the novel but have changed its point of view.

Breathtaking masterpiece.

Kingsley gets the film's one big emotional scene and makes it count.

Another of Charlotte native Ross McElwee's musings about his family, history (this time the tobacco industry) and life. It may be his best.

The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.

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

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!

If you ride the paranoiac tide, letting Jonathan Demme's assured direction carry you along, the sardonic humor and anxiety-inducing message work on you.

Zach Braff, who shot the film near his hometown of South Orange, N.J., directed this drama with subtle flair and wrote a star part that perfectly fit his acting range.

I never did sort out the gangsters fighting for control of a 19th-century town, nor did I figure out exactly what happened to the main henchman. But I was rarely bored.

Trumping its predecessor with a tauter plot, a lower body count and just as many edge-of-the-seat jolts.

Pitof can be blamed for the 89-cent digitized sets, the jerky or rubbery special effects, some clunky performances and more continuity errors than I could count.

The longer film makes Donnie's intentions clearer, explains the time-travel theme better and also leaves us in no doubt as to Frank's identity.

A summer action movie that has a brain and doesn't let it atrophy? Fan me, I'm fainting!

Marston doesn't develop the characters, except for the strong-willed and quick-witted Maria.

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

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

De-Lovely gets hold of a few long-obscured facts but utterly loses the sense of life between the two world wars. I suppose that's progress, of a sort.

The ex-lovers' new conversation is stimulating and banal, selfish and broad-minded, affectionate and recriminatory, insightful and obtuse - in short, the kind of dialogue two people might have while pouring out their hearts and poring over their pasts.

Yet for all the fun the sequel provides, the series shows signs of wearing out quickly, unless characters get developed thoroughly and in unexpected ways.

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.

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.

The surprising thing about Michael Moore's polemic is not one-sidedness, which was a given: It's his failure to find devastating new weapons of mass destruction to aim at Bush's head. The smoking guns he holds up often fire blanks, and the ones that don't are mostly derringers.

The movie veers from cleverness to crass stupidity. You can never tell whether the next scene will induce loud laughter or contempt; for me, Dodgeball divided right down the middle.

Like a story-spinner from the "Tales of the Arabian Nights," Steven Spielberg begins by demanding we accept impossible things. If we do, his spell can enchant us; if not, it must vanish like colored smoke.

Represents everything that over-budgeted Hollywood can possibly get wrong in a period piece: It feels both long and slow, it's unfocused and self-contradictory, its generic characters are played too broadly, it's anachronistic..

Like so many sequels, The Chronicles of Riddick demonstrates Hollywood's law of diminishing returns: Its quality is inversely proportional to its budget.

A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

The filmmakers find "laughs" in sadistic violence.

A diverting and loosely connected series of episodes about the most bizarre screen family of 2004.

In an era when most scripts are written by committees of monkeys, hearing one man's intelligent voice is an almost forgotten pleasure.

A peaceful, unforced film, and it inspires a feeling of relief and joy that's hard to describe.

The technical side of Baadasssss! far surpasses that of "Sweetback," and re-created scenes from the 1971 film look much better in the son's hands than they did in the father's.

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.

Control Room ends by acknowledging that independence, accuracy and even truth itself may be illusory.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

It has the charm, irony and saucy wit of the original, plus two supporting characters -- a suave, egocentric feline and a cheerfully conniving fairy godmother -- who are funnier than anyone in "Shrek."

What do you get if you start with the first great narrative of Western civilization, then remove all the psychological complexity and profound characterization? Troy.

Universal Studios has unloaded its entire monster catalog in this movie, which is aimed at people with the attention span of a kindergartner. Shreds of coherence and character have been sacrificed to fangs and fisticuffs at every chance.

De Niro wears a shamefaced look most of the time, as if doubly embarrassed: He agreed to a movie he knew was worthless, yet he's too lazy or indifferent to give us his best.