Washington's stoic persona here conceals a volcanic rage, and the cast of pros--including Giancarlo Giannini, Mickey Rourke and Rachel Ticotin--support him with relish.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

None of it is very convincing, thanks to Tuggle's shaky storytelling: on the one hand, he sets up his plot twists with such elephantine emphasis that the payoffs are invariably anticlimactic; on the other, he relies constantly and shamelessly on the most outre coincidence. Still, the action scenes do have a certain punch and vigor, and there are a few fresh, offbeat views of the City of Angels. Part of the point of the project seems to be to prove that Hall can “act” (as if his comic roles were something else), and he does move honorably if not remarkably through a mumbling Method performance.

Matt Dillon almost runs away with the movie as a preening, conniving NASCAR champ who may be dumber than a box of rocks but realizes there's something up with the VW.

The feminist veneer is the most deeply disturbing part of this callow thriller, whose fetishizing of a dead woman's body (and a live woman's sexual behavior) is far more questionable than anything even "The Silence of the Lambs" has been accused of.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

The surprise ending is neatly done, but the characters are so thin that waiting around for it is no fun whatsoever.

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

The problem is that only a fan would be inclined to tolerate this dunderheaded mystery.

Rides high on its old-fashioned sentiments and the precocious charms of its teenage star, who can be both obnoxious and endearing.

It's a letdown from the man who brought us "Men in Black" and "Addams Family Values."

Though its ending feels protracted--especially the climactic chase--it kept me reasonably distracted.

This special-effects animal-action comedy is for heavily identified pet owners.

This silly, contrived video--plays like a student work.

Thoughtful and complex.

Not so much a sequel to "The Fugitive" as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interesting.

Any movie that name-checks Ford Maddox Ford's novel "The Good Soldier" is OK by me, and clearly writer-director Julio DePietro has made a careful study of Ford's crafty, illusory narrative.

Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.

There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.

Directing real-life street kids, Tan abruptly shifts focus from one character to another, as if mimicking their impatience and short attention span, and like Godard he playfully subverts his own material by having actors address the camera directly, spouting cultural and political asides.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the riots, but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down--much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner "Crash."

This is sentimental but dramatically solid, its placid themes fortified by De Niro.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

In the manner of a southern gothic, they never fail to fascinate.

Unfortunately the story lurches like the characters' beat-up T-bird...and the film's rebellious attitude wears thin long before its sentimental denouement.

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

This parallel-reality shtick would be OK if the gun violence weren't so awful--but staging a murder again and again for the sake of some undergraduate head game is no more defensible than using it to pump up an action flick.