The bedrock of the plot is the dogged determination of the Bruce Willis character. Jack may be middle-aged, he may be tired, he may be balding, he may be a drunk, but if he's played by Bruce Willis you don't want to bet against him.

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

As for the movie, I've seen better comedy films and better concert films. It noodles around too much and gets distracted from the music. Michel Gondry, who directed, makes good fiction films but is not an instinctive documentarian and forgets that even a fly on the wall should occasionally find some peanut butter. As the record of a state of mind, however, the film is uncanny.

Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

Fantastically powerful despite its flaws. (Review of Original Release)

A film that begins in intrigue, develops in fascination and ends in a train wreck. It goes spectacularly wrong, and yet it contains such a gripping performance by Robin Wright Penn that it succeeds, in a way, despite itself.

What a simple and yet profound story this is.

Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.

The real subject of the film is Douglas Bruce sitting on two years of memories and told there is a 95 percent chance that another 30 years may return to him. A lot of people don't want to know when they're going to die. Maybe they wouldn't want to be reborn, either.

Remarkable, how in a film where we KNOW with an absolute certainty that all or most of the dogs must survive, Eight Below succeeds as an effective story. It works by focusing on the dogs.

Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

The effect of this scene is so powerful that I leaned forward like a jury member, wanting her to get away with it so I could find her innocent.

This is the kind of movie routinely dismissed as too slow and quiet by those who don't know it is more exciting to listen than to hear.

Is this movie for the whole family to attend? No, it is a movie for small children and their parents or adult guardians, who will take them because they love them very much.

The problem with "FD3" is since it is clear to everyone who must die and in what order, the drama is reduced to a formula in which ominous events accumulate while the teenagers remain oblivious.

An ingenious attempt to update an old plot with new technology, and it is made with competence, skillful acting, and the ability to make us feel cleverer about digital stuff than we really are.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

Bad movie. Ugly movie.

Something New delivers all the usual pleasures of a love story, and something more. The movie respects its subject and characters, and is more complex about race than we could possibly expect.

Everything about the film -- its casting, its filming, its release -- is daring and innovative.

It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

Will kids like the movie? I suspect they will. Kids like to see other kids learning the rules even if they don't much want to learn them themselves.

The sex in the movie is so mild that I assumed the R rating was generated primarily by the gay theme, until I learned the R is in fact because of too many f-words.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim Manderlay is fun to watch. Von Trier, who can made compulsively watchable films ("Breaking the Waves"), has found a style that will alienate most audiences. Maybe it's necessary.

Because their work is so varied, the director Winterbottom and Boyce, his frequent writer, are only now coming into focus as perhaps the most creative team in British film.

I liked the movie. I smiled a lot. It maintained its tone in the face of bountiful temptations to get easy laughs.

The movie tells us nothing we haven't heard before.

This is a loving, moving, inspiring, quirky documentary that was made while the lives it records were being lived.

Where it succeeds is as the story of a chapter in history, the story of how one coach at one school arrived at an obvious conclusion and acted on it, and helped open college sports in the South to generations of African Americans.

A movie that takes advantage of the great good nature and warmth of Queen Latifah, and uses it to transform a creaky old formula into a comedy that is just plain lovable.

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

Pretty much a mess of a movie; the acting is overwrought, the plot is too tangled to play like anything BUT a plot, and although I know you can create terrific special effects at home in the basement on your computer, the CGI work in this movie looks like it was done with a dial-up connection.

One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen's Match Point is that each and every character is rotten.

There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?

That the new Casanova lacks such wit is fatal. Heath Ledger is a good actor but Hallstrom's film is busy and unfocused, giving us the view of Casanova's ceaseless activity but not the excitement. It's a sitcom when what is wanted is comic opera.

This is not a great movie, but it's very watchable and has some good laughs. The casting of Aniston is crucial, because she's the heroine of this story, and the way it's put together there's danger of her becoming the shuttlecock. Aniston has the presence to pull it off.

Pocahontas was given the gift of sensing the whole picture, and that is what Malick founds his film on, not tawdry stories of love and adventure. He is a visionary, and this story requires one.

Brosnan redefines "hit man" in the best performance of his career, and Kinnear plays with, and against, his image as a regular kinda guy.

As a thriller, Munich is efficient, absorbing, effective. As an ethical argument, it is haunting.

A perplexing and disturbing film of great effect.

The movie surprised me. It treats its disabled characters with affection and respect, it has a plot that uses the Special Olympics instead of misusing them, and it's actually kind of sweet.

What I liked the most about the second "Dozen," was another performance, the one by Alyson Stoner as their daughter Sarah. As a girl poised on the first scary steps of adolescence, she finds the kind of vulnerability and shy hope that Reese Witherspoon projected in "The Man in the Moon."

Recycles the 1977 comedy right down to repeating the same mistakes.

Fiennes and Richardson make this film work with the quiet strangeness of their performances; if they insist on their eccentricities, it's because they've paid them off and own them outright.

Silly at times, leaning toward the screwball tradition of everyone racing around the house at the same time in a panic fueled by serial misunderstandings. There is also a thoughtful side.

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

It was fun, it was funny, it was alive.

A magnificent entertainment. It is like the flowering of all the possibilities in the original classic film.

I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here.

Brokeback Mountain has been described as "a gay cowboy movie," which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal.

Mrs. Henderson Presents is not great cinema, and neither was the Windmill great theater, but they both put on a good show.

This is a film situated precisely on the dividing line between traditional family entertainment and the newer action-oriented family films. It is charming and scary in about equal measure, and confident for the first two acts that it can be wonderful without having to hammer us into enjoying it, or else. Then it starts hammering.

The Weavers of 2003 did not sing as well as they did in 1982, or 1952, but if anything they had more heart, because more memories.

This is one of Anthony Hopkins' most endearing, least showy performances.

What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.

Boring, repetitive and maddening about a subject you'd think would be fairly interesting: snowboarding down a mountain.

Not a great film, but you know what? It achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it isn't boring, and it kept me intrigued and involved. As an actor, Eric Gores creates an engaging and convincing character that I liked and cared about -- and believed.

Here is a movie that makes you want to do something. Cry, or write a check, or howl with rage.

The movie is a delight, in ways both expected and rare.

I liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die. I liked it for Charlie's (Cusack) essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas.

There is not a spark of chemistry between Chris and Jamie, although the plot clearly requires them to fall in love. There is so much chemistry involved with the Anna Faris character, however, that she can set off multiple chain reactions with herself, if you see what I mean.

On film, Rent is the sound of one hand clapping.

There's not a moment in this story arc that is not predictable.

Feels uncomfortably stage-managed, and raises fundamental questions that it simply ignores.

Depp accepts the character and all of its baggage, and works without a net.

An endlessly fascinating movie.

The film is more violent, less cute than the others, but the action is not the mindless destruction of a video game; it has purpose, shape and style.

What adds boundless energy to Walk the Line is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

A crisp, smart, cynical film about dishonor among thieves.

The movie is like a Dickens novel in which the hero moves through the underskirts of society, encountering one colorful character after another.

I was fascinated by the face of Emmanuelle Devos, and her face is specifically why I recommend the movie.

Movies like The Syrian Bride are not overtly political, but nibble around the edges, engaging our tendency to take a big political position and then undermine it with humanitarian exceptions.

Derailed has a great setup, a good middle passage and some convincing performances. Then it runs off the tracks.

It works gloriously as space opera.

The movie is well cast from top to bottom; like many British films, it benefits from the genius of its supporting players.

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

A good movie, fearless and true, observant and merciless. Naomi Watts was brave to make it and gifted to make it so well.

A movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing and the lack of a parent or adult guardian.

When politics do not create walls (as apartheid did), most people are primarily interested in their families, their romances, and their jobs. They hope to improve all three. The movie is about their hope.

A wise and touching film with a lot of love in it. I may have given the wrong impression: It's not entirely about drinking, it's just entirely about a drinker.

A film with a rich and convincing texture, a drama with power and anger.

The movie did make me smile. It didn't make me laugh, and it didn't involve my emotions, or the higher regions of my intellect, for that matter. It's a perfectly acceptable feature cartoon for kids up to a certain age, but it doesn't have the universal appeal of some of the best recent animation.

It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.

A sweet and touching film, worth a visit.

It leads to one of those endings where you sit there wishing they'd tried a little harder to think up something better.

There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.

The Legend of Zorro commits a lot of movie sins, but one is mortal: It turns the magnificent Elena into a nag.

There are some one-liners that zing not only with humor but truth. On the whole I was satisfied.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

Intended as a thriller of sorts, although Antonioni is, as always, too deeply involved in the angst of his characters to bother much with the story. (Review of Original Release)

What all three of these stories share is the quality found in Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King: An attention to horror as it emerges from everyday life as transformed by fear, fantasy and depravity.

Watching Doom is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.

A well-made use of familiar materials.

A tender and perceptive film.

The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang contains a lot of comedy and invention, but doesn't much benefit from its clever style. The characters and plot are so promising that maybe Black should have backed off and told the story deadpan, instead of mugging so shamelessly for laughs.

Once in a blue moon a movie escapes the shackles of its genre and does what it really wants to do. Kids in America is a movie like that. It breaks out of Hollywood jail.