Kevin Bacon is on a roll right now after several good roles, and here he channels diabolical sleaze while mugging joylessly before the telethon cameras.

After "Monster," here is another extraordinary role from an actress [Theron] who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men.

Effective without being overwhelming.

Developments unfold according to the needs of the characters. The movie is not about springing surprises on us, but about showing these people in a process of discovery. The performances are not pitched toward melodrama; the actors all find the right notes and rhythms for scenes in which life goes on and everything need not be solved in three lines of dialogue.

A movie like this, with the appearance of new characters and situations, focuses us; we watch more intently, because it is important what happens.

The movie is a great American document, but it's also entertaining. (Review of Original Release)

The other key character is McCarthy himself, and Clooney uses a masterstroke: He employs actual news footage of McCarthy, who therefore plays himself.

Like an Astaire and Rogers musical, this is a movie you don't go to for the dialogue.

Starts out with the materials of an ordinary movie and becomes a rather special one.

In D.J. Caruso's Two for the Money, you can see Al Pacino doing something he's done a lot lately: Having a terrific time being an actor.

There must be humor here somewhere.

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid. Whales inspire major novels.

Wallace and Gromit are arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation.

I am not a golf fan but found The Greatest Game Ever Played absorbing all the same, partly because of the human element, partly because Paxton and his technicians have used every trick in the book to dramatize the flight and destination of the golf balls.

Offers modest pleasures. It is not an essential film, but if you go to see it, it will not insult your intelligence, and there's genuine suspense toward the end.

Serenity is made of dubious but energetic special effects, breathless velocity, much imagination, some sly verbal wit and a little political satire.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's precise, uncanny performance as Capote doesn't imitate the author so much as channel him, as a man whose peculiarities mask great intelligence and deep wounds.

Watching MirrorMask, I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.

Avoids obvious sentiment and predictable emotion and shows this woman somehow holding it together year after year, entering goofy contests that for her family mean life and death.

Good fun, especially if you like Leone's way of savoring the last morsel of every scene. (Review of Original Release)

Three Days of Rain is only a sketch compared to the power of Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives," which continues to grow in my memory.

I despised the character of Alan James so sincerely that I had to haul back at one point to remind myself that, hey, I've met Rip Torn and he's a nice guy and he's only acting.

The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke.

Roll Bounce, a nostalgic memory of disco roller-dancing in the late 1970s, has warm starring performances from Bow Wow and Chi McBride, who are funny, lovable and sometimes touching.

A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent.

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

Polanski's film is visually exact and detailed without being too picturesque. This is not Ye Olde London, but Ye Harrowing London, teeming with life and dispute.

An extraordinary thriller... The film centers on two remarkable performances, by Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis.

Yes. The movie works, and so we accept everything.

A bleak comedy, funny in a "Catch-22" sort of way, and at the same time an angry outcry against the gun traffic.

A film that grows in reflection. The first time I saw it, I was hurtling down the tracks of a goofy ethnic comedy when suddenly we entered dark and dangerous territory. I admired the film but did not sufficiently appreciate its arc.

Not the macabre horror story the title suggests, but a sweet and visually lovely tale of love lost.

The movie contains many of the usual ingredients of teenage suburban angst tragicomedies, but writer-director Mike Mills, who began with a novel by Walter Kirn, uses actors who can riff.

The movie is sort of a sideways version of "Sideways," even down to a scene where the two men join two women for dinner. The difference is, in "Sideways" the guys desperately want to impress the women, and in The Thing About My Folks, they want to impress each other.

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

Separate Lies reminded me of Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors"... seemingly about the portioning of blame. It is actually about the burden of guilt, which some can carry so easily while for others, it is intolerable.

Nobody needed to make it, nobody needs to see it, Jackson and Levy are too successful to waste time with it. It plays less like a film than like a deal.

Sometimes you are either open to a movie, or closed. If you're convinced that An Unfinished Life is damaged goods, how can it begin its work on you?

Somehow the movie really never takes off into the riveting fascination we expect in the opening scenes. Maybe it cannot; maybe it is too faithful to the issues it raises to exploit them.

Keane is played by Damian Lewis. Here he inhabits an edge of madness that Lodge Kerrigan understands with a fierce sympathy.

Then I realized the movie's point is that someone like this nerdy Harvard boy might be transformed in a fairly short time into a bloodthirsty gang fighter. The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

Riedelsheimer, earlier made "Rivers and Tides" (2002), about another artist from Scotland, Andy Goldsworthy, whose art involves materials found in nature...Evelyn Glennie and Andy Goldsworthy have in common a profound sensitivity to their environments.

In fact the sequel is a better film than the original, as if writer-producer Luc Besson had a clearer idea of what he wanted to do (and didn't want to do).

A Sound of Thunder may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.

Underclassman doesn't even try to be good. It knows that it doesn't have to be. It stars Nick Cannon, who has a popular MTV show, and it's a combo cop movie, romance, thriller and high school comedy. That makes the TV ads a slam dunk; they'll generate a Pavlovian response in viewers conditioned to react to their sales triggers (smartass young cop, basketball, sexy babes, fast cars, mockery of adults).

Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.

A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

The problem with The Baxter is right there at the center of the movie, and maybe it is unavoidable: Showalter makes too good of a baxter. He deserves to be dumped.

Watch Jan Decleir's performance. He never goes for the easy effect, never pushes too hard, is a rock-solid occupant of his character.

Surprisingly insightful, as buddy comedies go, and it has a good heart and a lovable hero.

Helped enormously by Rachel McAdams, whose performance is convincing because she keeps it at ground level; thrillers are invitations to overact, but she remains plausible even when the action ratchets up around her.

El Crimen Perfecto has energy, color, spirit and lively performances, but what it does not have are very many laughs.

The Piersons went, they showed movies, they returned. Taveuni is more or less the same. But by living and coping together for a year, the family is probably stronger and richer.

Beauchamp's film has an earnest solemnity that is appropriate to the material. He has a lot of old black and white TV and newsreel footage, including shots of the accused men before, during and after their trial.

One of those movies that explains too much while it is explaining too little, and leaves us with a surprise at the end that makes more sense the less we think about it. But the movie's mastery of technique makes up for a lot.

Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.

It's an overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

The documentary is an uncommon meeting between Treadwell's loony idealism, and Herzog's bleak worldview.

So the movie is daring, and well-acted. Yet it isn't very satisfying, because the serious content keeps breaking through the soggy plot intended to contain it.

Emily is played by Maggie Cheung with such intense desperation that she won the best actress award at Cannes 2004.

Chaos is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel -- a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it.

A lame-brained, outdated wheeze about a couple of good ol' boys who roar around the back roads of the South in the General Lee, their beloved 1969 Dodge Charger.

No actor is better than Bill Murray at doing nothing at all, and being fascinating while not doing it. Buster Keaton had the same gift for contemplating astonishing developments with absolute calm. Buster surrounded himself with slapstick, and in Broken Flowers Jim Jarmusch surrounds Murray with a parade of formidable women.

Since it is by Wong Kar Wai, 2046 is visually stunning. He uses three cinematographers but one style, that tries to evoke mood more than meaning. The movie as a whole, unfortunately, never seems sure of itself. It's like a sketchbook. These are images, tones, dialogue and characters that Wong is sure of, and he practices them, but he does not seem very sure why he is making the movie, or where it should end.

An astonishing film.

Junebug is a great film because it is a true film. It humbles other films that claim to be about family secrets and eccentricities. It understands that families are complicated and their problems are not solved during a short visit, just in time for the film to end. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.

The movie is pleasant, sedate, subdued and sweet, but there is not a moment of suspense in it.

Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."

The Aristocrats might have made a nice short subject. At 87 minutes, it's like the boozy salesman who corners you with the Pinocchio torture.

Artfully designed to appeal to lovers of romance and books, but by the end of the film I was not convinced it knew much about either.

Every good actor has a season when he comes into his own, and this is Terrence Howard's time.

The Island runs 136 minutes, but that's not long for a double feature. The first half of Michael Bay's new film is a spare, creepy science fiction parable, and then it shifts into a high-tech action picture. Both halves work.

The movie is like a merger of his ugly drunk in "Bad Santa" and his football coach in "Friday Night Lights," yet Thornton doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself.

Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre. If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, The Devil's Rejects may exercise a certain strange charm.

As an idea, the film is fascinating, but as an experience it grows tedious; the concerts lack closeups, the sex lacks context, and Antarctica could use a few penguins.

Last Days is a definitive record of death by gradual drug exhaustion. After the chills and thrills of "Sid & Nancy" and "The Doors," here is a movie that sees how addicts usually die, not with a bang but a whimper. If the dead had it to do again, they might wish that, this time, they'd at least been conscious enough to realize what was happening.

Courteney Cox, well known from TV, rarely gets an opportunity to revise her famous image, but here she is serious, inward, coiled. She carries the film; the other characters circulate through her consciousness as possibilities and hypotheses.

Now this is strange. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which should have been the high point of the movie.

You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.

Maintains a certain level of intrigue, and occasionally bursts into life.

What is best in the film is its depiction of the warrior's epic journey, photographed with breathtaking beauty and simplicity by Roman Osin.

Most important, I cared about the Jennifer Connelly character; she is not a horror heroine, but an actress playing a mother faced with horror. There is a difference, and because of that difference, Dark Water works.

The really good superhero movies, like "Superman," "SpiderMan 2" and "Batman Begins," leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters.

This is one of those rare docs, like "Hoop Dreams," where life provides a better ending than the filmmakers could have hoped for. Also like "Hoop Dreams," it's not really a sports film; it's a film that uses sport as a way to see into lives, hopes and fears.

Powerfully, painfully honest.

The kind of movie that grabs you while you're watching, even if later you wish it had grabbed a little harder.

I can't recommend the movie, except to younger viewers, but I don't dislike it. It's "Coach Carter" Lite, and it does what it does.

Doesn't replace "Fingers," but joins it as the portrait of a man reaching out desperately toward his dying ideals.

The kind of movie that would be so bad it's good, except it's not bad enough to be good enough.

The movie is long and slow. Either you will fall into its rhythm, or you will grow restless.

A big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.

It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.

Romero finds still new and entertaining ways for unspeakably disgusting things to happen to the zombies and their victims.

The most remarkable thing about Rize is that it is real.

Alive and daring.