A harrowing look at institutional cruelty, perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and justified by a perverted hysteria about sex.

The movie is so extravagant and outrageous in its storytelling that it resists criticism: It's self-satirizing.

Tries hard to be a good film, but if it had relaxed a little, it might have been great.

Although the movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene, it has a sweetness that is impossible to discount, and it is often very funny.

Lopez and Affleck are sweet and appealing in their performances; the buzz said they didn't have chemistry, but the buzz was wrong. What they don't have is conviction.

The film is filled with spot-on performances, by Harris, Glenn, Phoenix, and by Paquin, who has grown up after her debut in "The Piano" to become one of the most gifted actresses of her generation--particularly in tricky, emotion-straddling roles like this one.

Most audiences will find it baffling and unsatisfactory. Those who are open to its flywheel peculiarities may find it bold, funny, peculiar and delightful.

It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown steadily more repetitive and dreary, "LCTR:TCOL" uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of pulp adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies.

The movie's races are thrilling because they must be thrilling; there's no way for the movie to miss on those, but writer-director Gary Ross and his cinematographer, John Schwartzman, get amazingly close to the action.

The fancy stuff and foolery impedes the story and its emotions; the underlying story was strong enough that maybe a traditional narrative would have been best, after all.

A vanity production beyond all reason. I am not sure, however, than the vanity is Dylan's. I don't have any idea what to think about him.

The strength of the thriller genre is that it provides stories with built-in energy and structure. The weakness is that thrillers often seem to follow foreseeable formulas. Frears and his writer, Steve Knight, use the power of the thriller and avoid the weaknesses in giving us, really, two movies for the price of one.

The movie is not in any sense a musical featuring this band (which, as nearly as I could tell, does not have a name). The soundtrack has a lot of music, freely selected from pop hits old and new, but the running gag is that the band never gets to play, and so we never get to hear it.

Masterful at concealing its true nature and surprising us with the turns of the story.

I watched the movie with interest, yes, but not emotional involvement, and my appreciation of Moore was based more on her essence than on her character.

The movie is so choppy in its nervous editing that a lot of the time we're simply watching senseless kinetic action.

Kurosawa was a great artist and so even his lesser work is interesting -- just as we would love to find one last lost play, however minor, by his hero Shakespeare.

9/11 was a savage and heartless crime, and after the symbolism and the history and the imagery and the analysis, that is a point that must be made.

Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.

You can laugh at lines like: "Hey, everybody, let's go inside and eat some cake"; "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"; "Man, I just can't figure women out. Sometimes they're just too smart. Sometimes they're flat out stupid. Other times they're just evil." In Wiseau's worldview, if "The Room" were a woman, she wouldn't be "evil" or "too smart." That leaves "flat-out stupid." [12 Feb 2012, p.B2]

We like these people, which is important, and we are amused by them, which is helpful, but most of all we envy them, because they negotiate their romantic perplexities with such dash and style.

Just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.

Wise and subtle in the way it presents its older man. A less interesting movie would make him lustful and self-deceiving, a man who believes his is the secret of eternal youth and virility.

There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

It's a good thing that Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp are on hand to jack up the acting department. Their characters, two world-class goofballs, keep us interested even during entirely pointless swordfights.

That it works is because of the high-energy animation, some genuinely beautiful visual concepts and a story that's a little more sensuous than we expect in animation.

After it is over, you will want to go back and think things through again, and I can help you by suggesting there is one, and only one, interpretation that resolves all of the difficulties, but if I told you, you would have to kill me.

In the real world, Elle Woods would be chewed up faster than one of little Bruiser's Milk-Bones.

Is Terminator 3 a skillful piece of work? Indeed. Will it entertain the Friday night action crowd? You bet. Does it tease and intrigue us like the earlier films did? Not really.

The film's redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.

A tough, smart, ingenious movie that leads its characters into situations where everything depends on their (and our) understanding of human nature.

Harmless, brainless, good-natured fun.

Emma writes everything down and then offers helpful suggestions, although she fails to supply the most useful observation of all, which would be to observe that the entire novel is complete crap.

Ang Lee has boldly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn't be caught dead at a comic book movie.

This movie could obviously go on fooling us forever, but we are good sports only up to a point, and then our attention drifts. Shame, since there's so much good stuff in it, like how effortlessly Rachel Griffiths keeps two tough guys completely at her mercy.

The film is bold and passionate, but not subtle, and that is its downfall.

My own feeling is that the film is one more assault on the notion that young American audiences might be expected to enjoy films with at least some subtlety and depth and pacing and occasional quietness. The filmmakers apparently believe their audience suffers from ADD, and so they supply breakneck action and screaming sound volumes at all times.

One of the pleasures of Hollywood Homicide is that it's more interested in its two goofy cops than in the murder plot; their dialogue redeems otherwise standard scenes.

Like "The Godfather," it shows him (Makovski) as a crook with certain standards, surrounded by rats with none.

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

Manito sees an everyday tragedy with sadness and tenderness, and doesn't force it into the shape of a plot.

Jet Lag is sort of a grown-up version of "Before Sunrise"...The difference between the two films is sort of depressing.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

This is the kind of movie you happen across on TV, and linger to watch out of curiosity, but its inspired moments serve only to point out how routine, and occasionally how slow and wordy, the rest of it is.

A video game crossed with a buddy movie, a bad cop-good cop movie, a Miami druglord movie, a chase movie and a comedy. It doesn't have a brain in its head, but it's made with skill and style and, boy, is it fast and furious.

The genius of the movie is the way is sidesteps all of the obvious cliches of the underlying story and makes itself fresh, observant, tough and genuinely moving.

Whether the protest movement hastened the end of the Vietnam War is hard to say, but it is likely that Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election was influenced by the climate it helped to create.

By the end of Capturing the Friedmans, we have more information, from both inside and outside the family, than we dreamed would be possible. We have many people telling us exactly what happened. And we have no idea of the truth. None.

A movie with the nerve to end with melodramatic sentiment--and get away with it, because it means it. Expect lots of damp eyes in the audience.

This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

This time the dad is the hero of the story, although in most animation it is almost always the mother.

Seems conventional in its ideas about where it can go and what it can accomplish. You don't get the idea anyone laughed out loud while writing the screenplay. It lacks a strange light in its eyes. It is too easily satisfied.

Aniston, as a sweet kindergarten teacher and fiancee, shows again (after "The Good Girl") that she really will have a movie career.

A cheerful, life-affirming film, strong in its energy, about vivid characters. It uses mental illness as an entertainment, not a disease.

Slight and sometimes wearisome.

Too cluttered and busy, but as a glimpse into the affluent culture of a country with economic extremes, it's intriguing. Occasionally it's funny and moving, too.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.

The movie's performances have a simplicity and accuracy that is always convincing. Compston, who plays Liam, is a local 17-year-old discovered in auditions at his school. He has never acted before, but is effortlessly natural.

They talk warmly and with enthusiasm about certain titles, but I have the eerie feeling that they must be at a movie whether they enjoy it or not.

The movie is as light and frothy as a French comedy, which is what it is, a reminder that Cedric Klapisch also directed "When the Cat's Away" (1996).

It is an immensely skillful sci-fi adventure, combining the usual elements: heroes and villains, special effects and stunts, chases and explosions, romance and oratory.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

Aggressively simple-minded, it's fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.

LaBute has that rarest of attributes, a distinctive voice. You know one of his scenes at once. His dialogue is the dialogue overheard in trendy mid-scale restaurants, with the words peeled back to suggest the venom beneath.

No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.

Leconte brings his film to transcendent closure without relying on stale plot devices or the clanking of the plot. He resorts to a kind of poetry. After the film is over, you want to sigh with joy, that in this rude world such civilization is still possible.

Drew me in from the opening shots. Byler reveals his characters in a way that intrigues and even fascinates us, and he never reduces the situation to simple melodrama, which would release the tension. This is like a psychological thriller, in which the climax has to do with feelings, not actions.

Elegantly, even languorously, photographed by Jose Luis Alcaine, who doesn't punch into things but regards them, so that we are invited to think about them. That doesn't mean the movie is slow; it moves with a compelling intensity toward its conclusion.

There have been many good movies about gambling, but never one that so single-mindedly shows the gambler at his task.

Perhaps in the next generation a mutant will appear named Scribbler, who can write a better screenplay for them.

Hilary Duff is beautiful and skilled, and I hope she finds something worthwhile to do with her talent before she truly does become the next Britney Spears and has to start worrying about the next Hilary Duff.

The ending of the film is as calculated and cruel as a verbal assault by a Neil LaBute character.

As we watch them drilling with flashcards and worksheets, we hope they will win, but we're not sure what good it will do them.

A rarity, a movie that seems to be on autopilot for the first two acts and then reveals that it was not, with a third act that causes us to rethink everything that has gone before. Ingenious, how simple and yet how devious the solution is.

It fails to make us care, even a little, about the characters and what happens to them. There is nothing at stake.

The movie is simply not clear about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. It is heavy on episode and light on insight, and although it takes courage to bring up touchy topics it would have taken more to treat them frankly.

The movie is finally just a little too ungainly, too jumbled at the end, for me to recommend, but it has heart, and I feel a lot of affection for it.

If the movie is not original, at least it's a showcase for the actors and writers. It does not speak as well, alas, for director Jordan Melamed and his cinematographer, Nick Hay.

Between the Caan and Dillon characters there are atmosphere, desperation and romance, and, at the end, something approaching true pathos.

The masterstroke is the use of Bryan Adams, who seems like a joke when he first appears (the movie knows this), but is used by Konchalovsky in such a way that eventually be becomes the embodiment of the ability to imagine and dream--an ability, the movie implies, that's the only thing keeping these crazy people sane.

Flashes of inspiration illuminate stretches of routine sitcom material; it's the kind of movie where the audience laughs loudly and then falls silent for the next five minutes.

The movie, written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, has the directness and clarity of a documentary, but allows itself touches of tenderness and grief.

A movie so strange that it escapes entirely from the family genre and moves into fantasy. Like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," it has fearsome depths and secrets.

Jacques Perrin's Oscar-nominated Winged Migration does for birds what the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos" did for insects: It looks at them intimately, very close up, in shots that seem impossible to explain.

The fight scenes in Bulletproof Monk are not as inventive as some I've seen (although the opening fight on a rope bridge is so well done that it raises expectations it cannot fulfill).

As light as a feather, as fresh as spring, and as lubricious as a centerfold... There is something extroverted and refreshing in the way these women enjoy their beauty and their sexiness.

The edge is missing from Guest's usual style. Maybe it's because his targets are, after all, so harmless.

The concept is inspired. The execution is lame. Anger Management, a film that might have been one of Adam Sandler's best, becomes one of Jack Nicholson's worst.

Ruffalo plays the character with that elusive charm he also revealed in "You Can Count on Me."

Not just a thriller, not just a social commentary, not just a comedy or a romance, but all of those in a clearly seen, brilliantly made film.

If Cameron wants to be a pioneer instead of a retro hobbyist, he should obviously use Maxivision 48, which provides a picture of such startling clarity that it appears to be 3-D in the sense that the screen seems to open a transparent window on reality. Ghosts of the Abyss would have been incomparably more powerful in the process.

Griffin is quick, smart and funny.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

At the end of The Man Without a Past, I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I'd seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.

The movie is clearly intended for girls between the ages of 9 and 15, and for the more civilized of their brothers, and isn't of much use to anyone else.

The movie is essentially a morality play, and it's not a surprise to learn that Larry Cohen, the writer, came up with the idea 20 years ago--when there were still phone booths and morality plays.