A documentary about a town of 33,000 so consumed by football it makes South Bend and Green Bay look distracted.

If you want to see a great movie about a couple of kids endangered by a sinister guardian, rent "Night of the Hunter." Watching The Glass House has all the elements for a better film, but doesn't trust the audience to keep up with them.

It drifts above the surface of its natural subjects, content to be a genre picture. We're always aware of the formula--and in a picture based on real life, we shouldn't be.

The movie does have charm and moments of humor, but what it doesn't have is romance.

I cannot in strict accuracy recommend this film. It's such a jumble of action and motivation, ill-defined characters and action howlers.

The film's title is appropriate. A desperate Catholicism flavors the doomed city.

That the movie is fun is undeniable. That it is bad is inarguable.

By the end of the film I conceded, yes, there are good performances and the period is well captured, but the movie didn't convince me of the feel and the flavor of its experiences.

The ending is a cheap shot. An inconclusive ending would have been better, and perhaps more honest. The movie and the ending have so little in common that it's as if the last scene is spliced in from a different film.

A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.

In this movie the war is not quite over. For those who survived it, maybe it will never be.

The movie is cast so well that the actors bring life to their predictable destinies, and Elizondo casts a kind of magical warm spell over them all.

It may be that Together only wants to remember a time. That it does with gentle, observant humor. If it has a message, it is that ideas imposed on human nature may be able to shape lives for a while, but in the long run, we drift back toward more conventional choices.

A brawny space opera, transplanting the conventions of Western, cop and martial arts films to the Red Planet.

Essentially silliness crossed with science fiction. The actors make it fun to watch.

Whether you will like Jay and Silent Bob depends on who you are. Most movies are made for everybody. Kevin Smith's movies are either made specifically for you, or specifically not made for you.

Never quite lifts off. The elements are here, but not the magic.

Here is the most passionate and tender love story in many years, so touching because it is not about a story, not about stars, not about a plot, not about sex, not about nudity, but about LOVE itself.

In this film there is a scene where something is said in English pronounced with one accent, and a character asks, ''What did he say?'' and he is told -- in English pronounced with another accent.

For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead.

I laughed at American Pie 2, yes, but this is either going to be the last "Pie" movie or they're going to have to get a new angle.

Likely to entertain kids, who seem to like jokes about anatomical plumbing. For adults, there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the whole movie, which is just plain clever.

Nastassja Kinski, in one of her most affecting performances, does much to convey the turmoil going in her soul.

In drawing out his effects, Amenabar is a little too confident that style can substitute for substance. As our suspense was supposed to be building, our impatience was outstripping it.

It's intense and involving, and it doesn't let us go.

The movie itself isn't as interesting as the conversations you can have about it. It duplicates Thomas' miserable world so well we want to escape it as urgently as Thomas does.

The movie is not intended to be subtle. It is sweaty, candle-lit melodrama, joyously trashy, and its photography wallows in sumptuous decadence.

Movies like this are not for everyone, but arrive like private messages for their own particular audiences.

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

A march through the swamp of recycled ugly duckling stories, with occasional pauses in the marsh of sitcom cliches and the bog of Idiot Plots.

More than ever it is clear that Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is one of the great films of all time. It shames modern Hollywood's timidity. To watch it is to feel yourself lifted up to the heights where the cinema can take you, but so rarely does.

Burton's made a film that's respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that's not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.

It may be that a relationship like the one here between Rosalba and Fernando is impossible in real life. All the more reason for this movie.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

I want to escape, Oh, Muddah Faddah -- Life's too short for cinematic torture.

Amusing enough to watch and passes the time, but it's the kind of movie you're content to wait for on your friendly indie cable channel.

A typical Kitano film in many ways, but not one of his best ones. Too many of the killing scenes have a casual, perfunctory tone.

America's Sweethearts recycles "Singin' in the Rain" but lacks the sassy genius of that 1952 musical, which is still the best comedy ever made about Hollywood.

There's some kind of pulse of sincerity beating below the glittering surface, and it may come from Mitchell's own life story.

I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor.

Not as awe-inspiring as the first film or as elaborate as the second, but in its own B-movie way, it's a nice little thrill machine.

Not a great movie, but as a classic heist movie, it's solid professionalism.

A peculiarly entertaining comedy, revisits the rapport that Favreau and Vaughn had in "Swingers" (1996), and rotates it into a deadpan crime comedy.

A featherweight comedy balanced between silliness and charm.

Larry Clark's Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing.

The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

I like the movie on a simple physical level. There is no deeper meaning and no higher skill involved; just professional action, well-staged and filmed with a certain stylistic elegance.

Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.

This is a movie for those who sometimes, in the stillness of the sleepless night, are so filled with hope and longing that they feel like -- well, like uttering wild goat cries to the moon. You know who you are.

The plot unfolds with the gradual richness of something by Eric Rohmer, who has the whole canvas in view from the beginning but uncovers it a square inch at a time. By the end of Jump Tomorrow I was awfully fond of the picture.

One of the movie's most enjoyable in-jokes is the way some of the animals actually look a little like the humans doing their voices.

A breathtaking exercise in the macabre, a gruesome thriller with quirky cops and a killer of Lecterian complexity, and even when the movie is perfect nonsense, it's so voluptuous that you're grateful to be watching it anyway.

Passes the time pleasantly and has a few good laughs.

Not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen?

Tougher, less sentimental mirror version of "Save the Last Dance."

Audacious, technically masterful, challenging, sometimes moving, ceaselessly watchable. What holds it back from greatness is a failure to really engage the ideas that it introduces.

Although the narration is addressed to his wife, we learn little about her, his family or his personal life; he is used primarily as a guide through the milestones of the Congo's brief two-month experiment with democracy.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

What's special about the film is at a deeper level, down where (Tykwer) engages with the souls of his characters.

Not a great movie, but it delivers what it promises to deliver, and knows that a chase scene is supposed to be about something more than special effects.

Cute, crude and good-hearted movie.

If you're curious about why the demonstrators are so angry, this is why they're so angry.

Perhaps too laden with messages for its own good, but it has many moments of musical beauty, and it's interesting to watch Janet McTeer.

So monumentally silly, yet so wondrous to look at, that only a churl could find fault.

These are hard men. They could have the "Sopranos" for dinner, throw up and have them again.

It's skillfully mounted and fitfully intriguing, but weaves such a tangled web that at the end I defy anyone in the audience to explain the exact loyalties and motives of the leading characters.

It's not good, but it's nowhere near as bad as most recent comedies; it has real laughs, but it misses real opportunities.

What makes The Anniversary Party intriguing is how close it cuts to the bone of reality--how we're teased to draw parallels between some of the characters and the actors who play them.

Rousing in an old pulp science fiction sort of way, but the climactic scene transcends the rest, and stands by itself as one of the great animated action sequences.

The movie has three tones: overwrought, boring, laughable.

Too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars' acting styles.

It alternates between graphic, explicit sex scenes and murder scenes of brutal cruelty. You recoil from what's on the screen.

Until the plot becomes intolerably cornball, there's charm in the story.

A film of unusual visual beauty and enormous intrinsic interest.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

This is an amazingly ambitious movie, not so much because of the time and space it covers (a lot), but because Potter trusts us to follow her heroine through one damn thing after another.

Has the courage to work without a net, aware that when you're a teenager, your life is not a story so much as a million possible stories.

There's nothing wrong with Fast Food Fast Women that a casting director and a rewrite couldn't have fixed.

A surprisingly effective film.

This is not your average family cartoon. Shrek is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

Will this movie change anything, or this review make you want to see it? No, probably not. But when you come in tomorrow morning, someone will have emptied your wastebasket.

It doesn't make the slightest effort to cater to conventional appetites. But the more you appreciate what they're trying to do, the more you like it.

It's a reminder of the days before films got so cynical and unrelentingly violent. A Knight's Tale is whimsical, silly and romantic.

Performance is a bizarre, disconnected attempt to link the inhabitants of two kinds of London underworlds: pop stars and gangsters. It isn’t altogether successful, largely because it tries too hard and doesn’t pace itself to let its effects sink in.

Essentially a hyperactive showcase for Tsui Hark's ability to pile one unbelievably complex action sequence on top of another.

A movie of introspection and defiance.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

One Night at McCool's does not quite work, but it has a lot of fun being a near-miss.

I admired this movie. It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.

The movie is so filled with action that dramatic conflict would be more than we could handle, so all of the characters are nice.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

It may not be brilliant, but who would you rather your kids took as a role model: Crocodile Dundee, David Spade or Tom Green?

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.