Challenges us to reconcile its snapshots of earnest entrepreneurs, colleagues, and fans with its long takes of her disillusionment.

Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.

What's most conspicuously missing is the kind of background information needed to assess many of Eichmann's statements.

The slick satire cleverly equates materialism, narcissism, misogyny, and classism with homicide, but you may laugh so loud at the protagonist that you won't be able to hear yourself laughing with him.

Shows her transition to sobriety as many ensemble stories do--mainly through the development of other characters, the quirkier the better.

This caper movie starts off as enjoyable guff before turning strictly formulaic and winding up as unenjoyable guff.

Far less insulting to Pakistanis or Mancunians than it is to its audience.

Stodgy storytelling and a hyperbolic score reduce their experiences to melodrama.

Pretty familiar stuff, but the performances--by Adrien Brody, Elise Neal, Simon Baker-Denny, and Lauryn Hill--are relatively fresh and sincere.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

The ingenious if erratic slickness is disorienting and makes the movie more like drama than journalism.

The period ambience (call it funk) is irresistible, but the main points of interest here are sociological rather than musical.

A movie to savor.

Friedkin does a superb job of serving up the well-appointed script by James Webb and Stephen Gaghan.

There's little rapport between Duchovny and Driver after their initial meeting. More exciting and suspenseful is the relationship between Driver's confidant (Hunt) and her husband (James Belushi), who can't seem to get all their kids to go to sleep at the same time.

This gross-out action comedy gets good mileage from its high-energy music and World Championship Wrestling characters, and leads David Arquette and Scott Caan are expertly pathetic.

Easy to take but ultimately rather aimless.

An extravagant mess.

The labored storytelling in this movie about displaced ambition diminishes the impact of the powerful performances.

A pleasure.

Initially tolerable but increasingly stupid thriller.

Masterpiece.

The humor about male neurosis doesn't try to remind you of Woody Allen at every turn.

Neither the love nor the loss in this tear-jerking romance contains much drama.

Its virtues are still genuine and durable enough to resist the blandishments of hype.

Reputed to be sentimental crowd pleaser, for better and for worse.

It's scary and hilarious, with a magical, nonrealist tone, and it emphasizes physical comedy as much as disturbing, beautifully integrated metaphors.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

Disingenuously naive romantic comedy.

I can't yet decide whether the film works or not, but it certainly held me for its full two hours.

The hinted romance, featuring Aaliyah, makes for some decent drama and some fine comedy.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

All the macho men who let down their guard for Blaustein can be proud of the loving deconstruction of violence-as-entertainment that resulted.

Disturbing--if less sophisticated than the best SF (science fiction)-horror TV.

An extraordinarily subtle, witty, and nuanced work.

There are a few pretty good design effects en route, but not enough to compensate for all the embarrassments.

So visually striking, so compulsively watchable as storytelling, and so personal even in its enigmas that I found it much more pleasurable than any of the Hollywood genre films I've seen lately.

Foreigners who argue that Americans are Neanderthal savages can point to this movie as persuasive evidence.

The buildup to social criticism in what at first appears to be pointless and partly misogynist exploitation is subtly impressive.

It's beautifully cast and filmed (cinematography by the matchless Robby Muller) and often quite moving, despite the fact that most of the characters are never developed much beyond mythic or parodic prototypes.

I didn't laugh once.

The whole thing becomes a very rickety and contrived tearjerker.

For every jab at hypocrisy in law enforcement or in the media's crime coverage...there's a scene's worth of uninflected scatology or misogyny.

The ideological reasons for the heroine's project aren't divulged, so I guess we're supposed to be fascinated simply by the fanaticism of her will, doubts and all. I wasn't.

An open-mindedness in the plotting of this romantic comedy set on Ireland's Donegal coast adds a couple of mild surprises to the story.

The characters--their motives at once obvious and obscure--are almost painfully fascinating.

Cliched narrative, which isn't funny as often as seems intended.

The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars.

I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers' cynicism and the characters' gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath.

Arch yet earnest.

Stylishly realized, but its striking cinematography, nontraditional editing, and consistently reflexive use of genre conceits add up as methodically as a math problem.

Dizdar inventively examines bigotry, combining daring humor and hyperbole, dark realism and shining idealism.

Not particularly sensitive or funny comedy-drama.

Kempner's lighthearted yet not apolitical collage conveys how Greenberg's success as an athlete in the 30s and 40s contradicted an ethnic stereotype.

Bruce Willis's marvelous performance as a contract killer only makes everything else about this comedy seem more pathetic.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

Fast-paced editing doesn't compensate for unconvincing dialogue.

Somewhat depressive anecdote drawn out to feature length.

Doesn't quite support the weight of its allegory.

This grasping comedy targets kids of all ages but will please no one as it exploits exhausted ideas about adolescence.

Vacuous filmmaking of a very familiar kind.

A narrative that tries to juggle thriller elements, tons of pop culture imagery, and way too much philosophical baggage.

Slower, more earnest, and not as gory.

A series of stunts with bears and lots of stage fighting involving characters who are unambiguously good or evil.

Laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless.

Norbu tries too hard to please and charm, but his film at least carries the advantages of unactorly faces and a premise based on actual events that dramatizes the issue of religious vocation in a secular world.

The incredible adventures pile up unrelentingly, with no inflection, no downtime, and each new space is a set decorator's hallucination, as brightly colored as a candy store on acid.

A major washout.

One very sick and messed-up movie.

Prinze and Stiles regularly talk to the camera, but that doesn't make their characters self-aware.

This mildly moody SF thriller belabors standard dramatic conceits involving jealousy and sexual betrayal.

Hokey.

Nothing miraculous, but it's time pretty well spent.

The rest of these animated sequences...depend on gimmickry, cuteness, or facile ideology, and don't come close to demonstrating the complex relationship between sound and image found in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

A dense and subtle masterpiece.

The narrative--a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in perspective that's part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part character study, part exposé--never makes it seem that history is being oversimplified.

This spiritual thriller is too wooden to be taken as seriously as was clearly intended.

Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.

Even when his work is at its most contrived, which it certainly is here, writer-director Ron Shelton is the best purveyor of jock humor around.

Even the most shocking elements of the story are made bland by childish overkill.

Overall it's what it aspires to be--a pleasant time-waster.

This adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel is commercial to the core.

By the time the manic camera slows down to reveal the back stories of the characters, everyone's motives are either moot or redundant.

If misery were inherently interesting, this adaptation starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as a couple plagued by alcoholism and child mortality might be too.

Though it suggests intriguing ideas about the nature of performance, humor, ambition, and the consumption of spectacle, the movie only superficially explores them.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

A musical number or two might have balanced the overdetermined politics and spectacle in this version.

Few things are more enthralling than unrequited love, as demonstrated by this drama.

Boring, irksome family movie.

An extravagant waste of resources.

The childish humor and sensationalistic effects undercut the movie's philosophical agenda.

This is a powerful story and a splendid spectacle.

A quantum leap in ambition from "Hard Eight" and "Boogie Nights" and is, to my mind, much more interesting.

The ultimately uncomplicated view of sexual and emotional violence in a family is only tragic, not insightful.

Impeccably crafted and utterly impersonal, Lasse Hallstrom's adaptation of John Irving's novel has many of the qualities Oscar is known to appreciate.

There's something stirring and gutsy about this evocation of collective ferment -- not to mention timely, in the wake of the Seattle uprising against the World Trade Organization.

Much of the three-hour movie takes place in the prison, but the resonant characterization, expansive plotting, and judicious use of exterior locations and flashbacks remove any sense of claustrophobia or sluggishness.