What makes the movie fascinating is that it doesn't settle for a soap opera resolution to this story, with Pilar as the victim, Antonio as the villain, and evil vanquished. It digs deeper and more painfully.

There are scenes that don't even pretend to work. And others that have a sweetness and visual beauty that stops time and simply invites you to share.

The story is sometimes overwritten, often overwrought, includes an overheard conversation on the "Nancy Drew" level, and yet holds our attention and contains surprises right until the end.

During the course of Failure to Launch, characters are bitten by a chipmunk, a dolphin, a lizard and a mockingbird. I am thinking my hardest why this is considered funny, and I confess defeat.

It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony.

It says something for Robert Downey Jr. that in a movie where a man becomes a dog, Downey creates the weirdest character.

Ask the Dust requires an audience with a special love for film noir, with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer.

Not very much really happens in Duck Season, but in its rich details, it remembers how absorbing and endless every single day can seem when you're 14.

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

This is DeLillo's first produced screenplay, but he has written for the stage, and perhaps his portrait of Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), the detested critic, is drawn from life.

The bedrock of the plot is the dogged determination of the Bruce Willis character. Jack may be middle-aged, he may be tired, he may be balding, he may be a drunk, but if he's played by Bruce Willis you don't want to bet against him.

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

As for the movie, I've seen better comedy films and better concert films. It noodles around too much and gets distracted from the music. Michel Gondry, who directed, makes good fiction films but is not an instinctive documentarian and forgets that even a fly on the wall should occasionally find some peanut butter. As the record of a state of mind, however, the film is uncanny.

Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

Fantastically powerful despite its flaws. (Review of Original Release)

A film that begins in intrigue, develops in fascination and ends in a train wreck. It goes spectacularly wrong, and yet it contains such a gripping performance by Robin Wright Penn that it succeeds, in a way, despite itself.

What a simple and yet profound story this is.

Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.

The real subject of the film is Douglas Bruce sitting on two years of memories and told there is a 95 percent chance that another 30 years may return to him. A lot of people don't want to know when they're going to die. Maybe they wouldn't want to be reborn, either.

Remarkable, how in a film where we KNOW with an absolute certainty that all or most of the dogs must survive, Eight Below succeeds as an effective story. It works by focusing on the dogs.

Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

The effect of this scene is so powerful that I leaned forward like a jury member, wanting her to get away with it so I could find her innocent.

This is the kind of movie routinely dismissed as too slow and quiet by those who don't know it is more exciting to listen than to hear.

Is this movie for the whole family to attend? No, it is a movie for small children and their parents or adult guardians, who will take them because they love them very much.

The problem with "FD3" is since it is clear to everyone who must die and in what order, the drama is reduced to a formula in which ominous events accumulate while the teenagers remain oblivious.

An ingenious attempt to update an old plot with new technology, and it is made with competence, skillful acting, and the ability to make us feel cleverer about digital stuff than we really are.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.