Shot in Argentina, where a prosperous middle-class economy was destroyed during 10 years of IMF policies.

Bernie Mac gives a funny and kind of touching performance as a man who attains greatness once and then has to do it again.

This is not a great movie, and you will be able to live quite happily without seeing it, but what it does, it does with a certain welcome warmth.

In its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.

Charlize Theron is one of the few actresses equal to the role, bringing to it beauty, steel-edged repose, and mystery.

The movie's strength, then, is not in its outrage, but in its cynicism and resignation.

Watching the movie is an entertaining exercise in forensic viewing, and the insidious thing is, even if it is a con, who is the conner and who is the connee?

By occupying their roles believably, by acting as we think their characters probably would, they save the movie from feeling like basic Hollywood action (even when it probably is). This is one of the year's best thrillers.

An utterly meaningless waste of time...It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.

Since you have probably not seen "Nine Queens," Criminal will be new to you, and I predict you'll like the remake about as much as I liked the original -- three stars' worth. If, however, you've seen "Nine Queens," you may agree that some journeys, however entertaining, need only be taken once.

The most outspoken and yet in some ways the calmest of the new documentaries opposing the Bush presidency.

Campbell's performance is carnal, verbally facile, physically uninhibited and charged with intelligence.

The performance by Ross invests Jessie with a kind of zealous hope that is touching: Here is a slutty loser touched by the divine, and transformed.

Diane Kruger, whose Lisa is subjected to logical whiplash by the plot, always seems to know when it is and how she should feel. Now that's acting.

The peculiar quality of Vanity Fair, which sets it aside from the Austen adaptations such as "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," is that it's not about very nice people. That makes them much more interesting.

Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside. The Brown Bunny is still not a complete success -- it is odd and off-putting when it doesn't want to be -- but as a study of loneliness and need, it evokes a tender sadness.

A visual poem of extraordinary beauty.

Competent formula entertainment, but doesn't make that leap into pure barminess that inspired "Anaconda."

There's a point at which its enigmatic flashes of incomprehensible action grow annoying, and a point at which we realize that there's no use paying close attention, because we won't be able to figure out the film's secrets until they're explained to us.

Not a documentary about anything in particular. That is its charm. It's a meandering visit by a curious man with a quiet sense of humor, who pokes here and there in his family history, and the history of tobacco.

Not one of the great dog movies, but it's a good one, abandoning wall-to-wall cuteness for a drama about a homeless puppy.

Unlike any other film I have seen about the Holocaust.

The movie has a sweetness and tenderness for these characters, poor lambs, blissfully unaware that they're about to be flattened by World War II.

The final act of the film is extraordinary. How unusual it is to see kids this age in the movies seriously debating moral rights and wrongs and considering the consequences of their actions.

The actors are better than the material.

The Leopard was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character.

Did you (Garry Marshall) deliberately assemble this movie from off-the-shelf parts or did it just happen that way? The film is like a homage to the cliches and obligatory stereotypes of its genre.

A splendid movie while its hero is preparing for his flight and actually experiencing it, but it's not nearly as interesting once he descends to earth.

This is a rare thriller that's as much character study as sound and fury.

The long closing sequence is virtuoso, redefining what went before and requiring Murphy to become a more complex character than she gave any hint of in the opening scenes.

The problem with Code 46 is that the movie, filled with ideas and imagination, is murky in its rules and intentions. I cannot say I understand the hows and whys of this future world, nor do I much care, since it's mostly a clever backdrop to a love affair that would easily teleport to many other genres.

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. Open Water had that effect on me.

Streep wisely goes for oblique humor rather than straight-ahead villainy, making the character different and yet just as loathsome.

A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment, it will send the kids tiptoeing through the multiplex to sneak into "Spider-Man 2."

A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland.

I laughed often enough during the screening of Harold & Kumar that afterward I told Dann Gire, distinguished president of the Chicago Film Critics' Assn., that I thought maybe I should rent "Dude, Where's My Car?" and check it out.

We find we cannot take anything for face value in this story, that the motives of this woman and her husband are so deeply masked that even at the end of the film we are still uncertain about exactly what to believe, and why.

This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.

It is exciting to watch this movie. It is never boring. Lee is like a juggler who starts out with balls and gradually adds baseball bats, top hats and chainsaws. It's not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one.

The kind of film I more and more find myself seeking out, a film that seems alive in the sense that it appears to have free will; if, in the middle of a revenge tragedy, it feels like adding a suite for hoes and percussion, it does.

That the director, Paul Greengrass, treats the material with gravity and uses good actors in well-written supporting roles elevates the movie above its genre, but not quite out of it.

The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie.

The director's cut adds footage that enriches and extends the material but doesn't alter its tone. It adds footnotes that count down to a deadline, but without explaining the nature of the deadline or the usefulness of the countdown.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

The plot is simple-minded and disappointing, and the chase and action scenes are pretty much routine for movies in the sci-fi CGI genre. The robots never seem to have the heft and weight of actual metallic machines, and make boring villains.

The movie has the freshness and urgency of life actually happening.

Tells a pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

Williams handles the main line of the story, the war between Ted and Marion, clearly and strongly; you may not always hurt the one you love, but you certainly know how to.

Most of the time, though, Anchorman works, and a lot of the time it's very funny.

A lame and labored comedy.

Doesn't require you to know anything about the band Metallica or heavy metal music, but it supplies a lot of information about various kinds of monsters.

Riding Giants is about altogether another reality. The overarching fact about these surfers is the degree of their obsession.

Not a bad movie, although it could have been better. It isn't flat-out silly like "Troy," its actors look at home as their characters, and director Antoine Fuqua curtails the use of computer effects in the battle scenes, which involve mostly real people.

A musical and a biography, and brings to both of those genres a worldly sophistication that is rare in the movies.

The film has the materials for a lifetime project; like the "7-Up" series, this is a conversation that could be returned to every 10 years or so, as Celine and Jesse grow older.

The Clearing doesn't feel bound by the usual formulas of crime movies. What eventually happens will emerge from the personalities of the characters, not from the requirements of Hollywood endings.

Working within the limitations of the star rating system, I give four stars to the subjects of this movie, and two stars to the way they have been boiled down into cute pictures and sound bites.

It's a real movie, full-blooded and smart, with qualities even for those who have no idea who Stan Lee is. It's a superhero movie for people who don't go to superhero movies, and for those who do, it's the one they've been yearning for.

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

The result is a reassuring fairy tale that will fascinate children and has moments of natural beauty for their parents, but makes the tigers approximately as realistic as the animals in "The Lion King."

Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.

A compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader.

In a miraculous gift to the audience, 20th Century-Fox does <I>not</I> reveal all of the best gags in its trailer.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

Mike Hodges' gritty new film noir I'll Sleep When I'm Dead begins in enigma and snakes its way into stark clarity.

Not a conventional documentary about quantum physics. It's more like a collision in the editing room between talking heads, an impenetrable human parable and a hallucinogenic animated cartoon.

None of this amounts to anything more than goofy fun, but that's what the ads promise, and the movie delivers.

Chronicles doesn't pause for much character development, and is in such a hurry that even the fight scenes are abbreviated chop-chop sessions.

The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.

The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen.

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.

Compellingly watchable.

Brave, heartless, and exceedingly strange, a quasi-documentary in which the actor Maximilian Schell mercilessly violates the privacy of his older sister, Maria.

Is Prisoner of Azkaban as good as the first two films? Not quite. It doesn't have that sense of joyously leaping through a clockwork plot, and it needs to explain more than it should. But the world of Harry Potter remains delightful, amusing and sophisticated.

A joyous movie.

An impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome.

A sober, even low-key documentary about how the American death penalty system is broken and probably can&#146;t be fixed.

Yes, the movie is profoundly silly. What surprised me is that it's also very scary. The special effects are on such an awesome scale that the movie works despite its cornball plotting.

What's fascinating is the way Mario, working from his father's autobiography and his own memories, has somehow used his first-hand experience without being cornered by it.

How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much.

The Mother peers so fearlessly into the dark needs of human nature that you almost wish it would look away. It's very disturbing.

An important film as well as an entertaining one.

From beginning to end, we've been there, seen that.

The Five Obstructions clearly calls for a sequel, in which Leth would require von Trier to remake "Dogville," despite Obstructions 6 through 10.

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

The film's buried message is that there is a reservoir of admiration and affection for America, at least among the educated classes in the Arab world, and they do not equate the current administration with America.

The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman's longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist.

The performances are strong, although undermined a little by Anselmo's peculiar style of dialogue, which sometimes sounds more like experimental poetry or song lyrics than like speech.

Bright, lively and entertaining, but it's no "Shrek." Maybe it's too much to expect lightning to strike twice.

Not a comic masterpiece, but it's entertaining and efficient, and provides a showcase for its stars. It's on the level of a good sitcom.

The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies.

In a prison filled with vivid, Dickensian characters, several stand out. There is, for example, the unlikely couple of Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro), tall and muscular, and No Way (Gero Camilo), a stunted little man. They are the great loves of each other's lives.

Sometimes movies tire us by trying too relentlessly to pound us with their brilliance and energy. Here is a movie pitched at about the energy level of a coffee break. That the people are oddly assorted and sometimes very strange is not so very unusual, considering some of the conversations you overhear in Starbucks.

The movie is not a great dramatic statement, but you know that from the modesty of the title. It is about movement in emotional waters that had long been still. Taylor makes it work because she quietly suggests that when Evie's life has stalled, something drastic was needed to shock her back into action, and the carving worked as well as anything.

Begins and ends with facts of war, but it is really a film about the nature of male and female, about middle-class values and those who cannot afford them, about how helpless we can be when the net of society is broken.

The most valuable task of the film is to re-create the historic legal struggles that led to Brown, and to remember heroes who have been almost forgotten by history.

The film is warm and intriguing, and he (Valentin) is the engine that pulls us through it. We care about what happens to him; high praise.