Auteuil does an excellent job. He's like Marcello Mastroianni, whose naturalness also deluded people into thinking for a while that he wasn't a versatile actor.

I realize fantasy-based action movies aren't supposed to be as complex as William Gibson's novels. But do they have to be this simple-minded?

About 45 minutes into Swordfish, the picture degenerates permanently from drivel to sleaze (only a short drop).

Director Ivan Reitman used to know how to tell a silly story, back around the time of "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters."

A frantic, heartless hodgepodge of pieces from James Bond movies, Indiana Jones adventures, "Star Wars" and half a dozen legends.

The filmmakers would have been better advised to stick with the Zeroes and spend less time making up heroes.

Hints heavily at its One Big Secret from the get-go, then waits for you to figure it out miles ahead of the not-too-bright characters.

It's possible to groan, chuckle, wince and be moist-eyed, sometimes in a span of seven or eight minutes.

The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.

The coolest film in town offers industrial espionage, power struggles, thwarted romance, betrayal and suspense - and best of all, it's true.

Forget the bug-eating, cow-spearing and one-upsmanship of TV's "Survivor." The real results of isolation and deprivation unfold in The King is Alive: madness, suicide and murder.

This might all have been silly fun -- as it was in the 1999 version -- except for the carelessness of the whole picture.

Goodman exudes doltish kindness, Dillon a hapless gentleness, Reiser a vulgar buoyancy. Douglas turns in the best performance.

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.

Whenever the tires stop screeching and the fenders slamming, the story lands in a brutal pile-up of cliches.

95 breezy minutes that typify cotton-candy filmmaking.

A Kafkaesque series of interwoven stories that depict the hopeless lives half the populace there (Iran) must lead.

Spade, who almost invariably plays smug or smarmy characters, proves he really can act.

The whole thing's as phony as a funeral oration from a pastor who never knew the deceased.

The acting is solid.

It's blah. Worse than blah, actually, because it's so stupid.

This isn't a cheerful movie. But director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga tell these stories with authority and verve, making 2½ hours zip by.

The film's full of in-jokes, from the Spanish-language billboards to the name of Banderas' character.

Someone Like You is from Hollywood's bottomless box of cliches.

If you're going to serve up a half-baked idea, you might as well have Sigourney Weaver do the cooking.

Pearce, who's in every scene except the Sammy flashbacks, dominates the picture through his feral performance.

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

It's the poster child for bad taste, not to mention bad construction.