It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience.

Plays like it was directed as a do-it-yourself project, following instructions that omitted a few steps, and yet the movie has an undeniable charm.

Burnt Offerings is a mystery, all right. What's mysterious is that the filmmakers were able to sell such a weary collection of ancient cliches for cold hard cash.

War movies used to have dash and color and a certain corny sentimentality; Midway hardly even makes us care.

Even with the uniformly good performances — and the standout work from Ms. Green — 300: Rise of an Empire is foremost a triumph of production design, costumes, brilliantly choreographed battle sequences and stunning CGI.

The idea of the president's daughter being held captive isn't blindingly original (it's an alarmingly dangerous occupation), but placing the story on a space station is a masterstroke, since we're about filled up to here with prison movies set on Earth.

This material is intriguing enough that I wish there had been more of it. Comedy consists of the application of logic to the absurd, and there are many more opportunities here than the screenplay takes advantage of.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

An occasionally entertaining, often incomprehensible and ultimately quite average 1980s-homage mismatched buddy action picture.

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

As a family movie, Operation Dumbo Drop is sort of entertaining. As history, it's shameless.

A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.

It’s shiny trash that begins with promise but quickly gets tripped up by its own screenplay and grows increasingly ludicrous and melodramatic, to the point where I was barely able to suppress a chuckle at some of the final scenes.

This is the second movie Judd and Freeman have made together (after "Kiss the Girls" in 1997). They're both good at projecting a kind of Southern intelligence that knows its way around the frailties of human nature.

Paltrow is truly touching. And Black, in his first big-time starring role, struts through with the blissful confidence of a man who knows he was born for stardom.

The very soul of sophomorism. It is callow, gauche, obvious and awkward, and designed to appeal to those with similar qualities.

This kind of film requires us to be very forgiving, and if we are, it promises to entertain. Angels & Demons succeeds.

At one time or another, Casino Royale undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

Fortress doesn't dig enough beneath its own surface, or create the tension it should. But its originality and taut muscularity make up for those limitations, and a winning supporting cast makes up for the granite-headed Lambert (already lined up for a sequel), who is only marginally less robotic than anything he's fighting. Locklin is bright and appealing. And "Re-Animator" star Jeffrey Combs keeps the party hopping as an explosives expert in the nerdy Bud Cort/wasted hippie mold. "This is highly sensitive," he says, examining a potent device. "We are talking TNT on PMS!" [6 Sept 1993, p.21]

The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it's a fair example of what it is.

It tries to be the best bad movie that it can be.

In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.

The result is a well-acted, competently made, utterly tedious bore of a film lacking in creative spark, unwilling to take chances and determined to grind Tolkien through the muck and the blood of war and death at the expense of providing much insight into his creative process.

Aric Avelino shows an almost tender restraint in his story-telling, not pounding us with a message but simply looking steadily at how guns have made these lives difficult.

This is a small film and knows exactly how to be a small film. Like many New Yorker short stories, its purpose is to strike a particular note and allow it to reverberate.

Hoffman has countless characters inside of him, and this is one of his nicest.

Admission has some sublime moments, most of them involving Fey and Rudd dancing around their inevitable romance. The problem is in the foundation.

But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.