For my money, what keeps it bearable is mainly the mugging of the older folks -- not just Jack Black, who steals the show in a part seemingly inspired by John Belushi, but Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, and cameos by Chevy Chase, Lily Tomlin, and Kevin Kline.

Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.

Tsai Ming-liang's most exciting and original to date.

Suspense is fairly effective until it's stretched to the point of monotony.

Doesn't add up to much more than a series of pretty pictures, and Goldsworthy's gnomic statements about the "energy" he perceives in "the plants and the land" are never fully explored.

Though passionate, doesn't pity or flatter the rank and file.

I never thought that a thoughtful director like Gillian Armstrong would get trapped in such Euro-nonsense, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

It’s a heart-tugging scenario undermined by a striking hypocrisy: obscuring a hot-button issue in casting, some actors with Down's syndrome have minor roles, while Penn plays the lead -- and chews the scenery.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

A black waitress and a white corrections officer in rural Georgia experience more misery in the first hour of this movie than some people do in a lifetime, and to its credit the drama doesn’t collapse under the weight.

There are even more characters of interest here than in "Nashville."

What's lacking here is a sustained thematic focus -- at least five people worked on the script, including Mann, which may account for the absence of a clear through line -- though the spectacle and characters keep one absorbed.

This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.

Not very believable, even in relation to its own premises, but if you were charmed by "Somewhere in Time" and/or Jack Finney's novel "Time and Again," this might charm you as well.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

Only August's assured direction and the leads' solid performances elevate this above a TV "disease of the week" movie.

Director Ron Howard's deftness in suggesting the subjective experience of Crowe's character, who's later diagnosed with schizophrenia, makes for inspirational narrative.

When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers' cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker.

Wasn't worth Allen's time and isn't worth yours.

It's full of scenic splendors with a fine sense of scale, but its narrative thrust seems relatively pro forma, and I was bored by the battle scenes.

Even though I appreciate this movie's craft, I wish I hadn't seen it. It's a heady, progressive -- or perhaps elaborately conservative? -- romance, but it's also a tale of terrible suffering.

Striking for its performances -- especially Anthony LaPaglia.

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

The acting is mainly horrendous, the English dialogue frequently awkward, but they're overcome by the beautiful colors and settings and a grim sense of the uncanny spilling over into twisted humor.

Though it isn't so much funny as clever, the parody will hopefully discourage some aspiring teen-movie makers from doing the same old thing.

It reeks of unearned profundity, but I found it entertaining.

The appearance of circus performers in any film not by Fellini usually bodes ill, and it does so here.

One of the film's most poignant moments comes when he and his father discuss his compulsive attraction to young boys.

It goes beyond sympathy and authenticity to insight as it examines the plight of a man who loves a man but feels he must love a woman.

Despite its mawkish tendencies, the film is remarkable for the naturalistic acting of its cast, particularly the simple, tenderly expressive performances of the two leads.

I was hooked from the start.

while the war-as-insanity metaphor clearly fits the cruel, heartbreaking story, its force is undercut by a succession of character types -- ambitious television journalists, outmatched UN peacekeepers, overbearing politicians.

A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.

The film raises many interesting questions about our own responses, but it may finally be too open-ended for its own good.

Weir does manage to deliver the goods.

Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.

The end justifies the means as long as everything turns out OK for the not-too-obedient American soldier and everyone else who enjoys Coca-Cola.

I couldn't always keep up with what was happening, but I was never bored, and the questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life.

Slack and saccharine more often than it's funny.

Despite the familiar story, both kids are three-dimensional characters, and first-time director Patel embraces their generational dilemmas with feeling and wit.

Better than slick, though it feels pointless -- another homage to a kind of filmmaking that's had more than its share.

A killer ending does not a movie make, and ultimately In the Bedroom may be more interesting to talk about than sit through.

Improves as it unfolds.

An entertaining and atmospheric revenge tale.

Wears its art, as well as its heart, on its sleeve -- so much so that I feel guilty for not liking it more.

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

Jamal (Martin Lawrence), starts trying to make the best of a bad situation, which becomes our job too.

As if to justify a serious discussion of this comedy before dissing it, some reviewers have pointed out that it evokes Casablanca. Maybe that's why the plot seems imposed on the characters.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.

Shiva's voice-over narration and the commentary from academics (all in English) are spiked with gender-studies jargon but illuminate the history of this peculiar underclass, over 1.3 million strong, which is beginning to gather political power.

The English cast is fun; but this is more spectacle than story, and the Steve Kloves script deserves better handling than director Chris Columbus -- plus any number of studio deliberators -- gave it.

Its poignance and urgency are undeniable.

Morrow and his collaborators so clearly believe in this project that I was carried along, often charmed and never bored.

[Farrellys'] great achievement is forcing those of us addicted to eye candy to see we have a problem.

More entertaining than "The Spanish Prisoner" -- it also turns out to be more conventional and predictable.

The fragmented compositions isolate the characters, trapping them in walled-off worlds -- which makes the brief kiss between Otomo and the grandmother all the more touching.

Instead of a credible main character this 1999 button pusher has lots of showy cinematography and generic dread.

Like several recent films, Happenstance draws on chaos theory as an inspiration, musing on the slim difference between random chance and fate and trotting out the old chestnut about the flapping of butterfly wings causing a tsunami.

An unprecedented friendship between a monster and a child leads to an amazing chase scene.

The ease with which the perky, big-eyed heroine ingeniously succeeds in improving the lot of everyone around her and the painterly manner in which reality in every inch of the frame is "improved" constitute both the "quirky" charm and the pure fishiness of the film.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

It's predictable stuff, though with a nice old-fashioned edge.

Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.

Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.

Both actors are so good that one might easily overlook the Pollyannaish subplot.

The consistency with which the plot turns on characterization instead of contrivance makes this movie better than many of its supposedly grown-up competitors.

Some of the film's situations and motivations seem convenient or underdeveloped, but Ascaride and Darroussin are riveting, and Guediguian's frankness and empathy illuminate this kaleidoscope of lonely lives.

Big, schmaltzy melodrama with mini melodramas.

Offers so much frenetic fast cutting to so little purpose that it becomes an ordeal.

Kelly is a supple and courageous storyteller, boldly free-associating as he mixes parody and satire with earnest psychodrama and coming up with plot points no one could anticipate.

The tectonic shifts in this camp-horror extravaganza are unsettling.

DuBowski focuses on religious faith as much as sexual preference, which may be the most interesting aspect of the film.

Jensen's use of the conventions of documentary making -- and his undermining of them in ways both bold and subtle -- seems too canny and consistent for the form. Yet the harder I try to decide whether this is a documentary or a parody, the more I wonder why it matters.

Chereau's film is both an observant portrait of class-bound London by a foreigner and an empathetic look at sexual passion that completely avoids cheap prurience.

This insidiously complex satire is filled with apparent digressions, and our complete identification with the man occurs so gradually that it's impossible to pinpoint just when our previous disdain becomes a position of relative comfort.

Labyrinthine yet oversimple, the story seems to hide a more provocative one. But perhaps this is the nature of the beast.

Engrossing if standard-issue prison drama.

It's a bitter story played for humor, in which a callous character is never quite allowed to see herself as such.

Exciting and innovative feature.

Unfortunately the film never establishes either a perspective of its own or a coherent geography of the city, so the politicians pontificating at ceremonies and architects commiserating at building sites become deadly dull long before the the film exhausts its 88 minutes.

Mined for comedy and milked for drama, though what results is diminished by the very framing device contrived to punch it up.

Corky never becomes sympathetic, and without this fundamental irony the movie doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Scenes of ingenious slapstick violence.

Watts and Harring even turn out to be the hottest Hollywood couple of 2001. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for. It looks great too.

A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.

The shocking, ambiguous ending might have been better served by the film's original, ambiguous title, "To My Sister."

The writers must have racked their brains for the formula: two parts other movies to one part childhood revenge fantasies

A euphemism for the right of anyone to make movies just as awful as those of big studios.

Grisman presents, with a sense of humor, the apparent contradictions of a complex personality.

It's a pleasing but shallow hodgepodge.

At some point in this endless thriller the suspense turns into an extremely unpleasant ordeal that Dahl doesn't know when to stop.

A hackneyed coming-of-age drama.

A blandly twisting plot with no meaningful revelations or substantial themes.

Romantic comedy is set mainly in NYC, where the plight of its ambivalent lovers seems particularly trivial.

Every frame is dense with life, with children and animals running in and out, yet it's not messy. Instead it's highly focused--and something of a small masterpiece.

Lacks the scariness, the mystery, and even much of the curiosity of Rivette's better work.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

This all-day sucker put me to sleep -- though it's possible I retreated out of self-defense.