What Mark does, better perhaps than either he or his father realizes, is to capture some aspects of a lifelong rivalry that involves love but not much contentment.

House of Wax is not a good movie but it is an efficient one, and will deliver most of what anyone attending House of Wax could reasonably expect, assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much.

Better than "Gladiator" -- deeper, more thoughtful, more about human motivation and less about action.

Jiminy Glick needs definition if he's to work as a character. We have to sense a consistent comic personality, and we don't; Short changes gears and redefines the character whenever he needs a laugh.

At once the most harrowing and, strangely, the most touching film I have seen about child abuse.

The central performance in Brothers is by Connie Nielsen, who is strong, deep and true.

Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.

The movie was more of a revue than a narrative, more about moments than an organizing purpose, and cute to the point that I yearned for some corrosive wit from its second cousin, the Monty Python universe.

Theater of the absurd, masquerading as an action thriller.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

What I admire most about the film is the way it enters the terms of this world -- of international politics, security procedures, shifting motives -- and observes the details of all-night stakeouts, shop talk, and interlocking motives and strategies.

To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.

This is not a political documentary. It is a crime story. No matter what your politics, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will make you mad.

Obviously made with all of the best will in the world, its heart in the right place, this is a sluggish and dutiful film that plays more like a eulogy than an adventure.

What is it about Indiana that inspires movies about small-town dreamers who come from behind to win?

House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep, it privately thinks it is superior.

The downward arc of the first two acts of the movie is made harrowing and yet perversely amusing by the performance of Paul Kaye.

If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own.

I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level.

The movie has been directed by the Farrelly brothers...Here, they're sensitive and warm-hearted, never push too hard, empathize with the characters, allow Lindsey and Ben to become people we care about.

This is the kind of movie where you laugh occasionally and have a silly grin most of the rest of the time.

Variable ratings: The Hand (4 stars), Equilibrium (3 stars), The Dangerous Thread of Things (1 star).

The movie is not plot-driven, for which we must be thankful, because to force their feelings into a plot would be a form of cruelty. The whole point is that these lives have no plot.

There's nothing much wrong with the film; my complaint is that there's nothing much right about it.

This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids.

The race is more like a private poker game held upstairs in somebody's suite during the World Series of Poker.

Antal's visuals create a haunted house where the lights are off in most of the rooms and there may, indeed, be a monster in the closet.

The thing about a movie like this is, the characters may be French, but they're more like people I know than they could ever be in the Hollywood remake.