The film is pitch-perfect in its decor, music, clothes, cars, language and values. It takes place during those heady years between the introduction of the Pill and the specter of AIDS, when men shaped as adolescents by Playboy in the 1950s now found some of their fantasies within reach.

May be pitching itself to the wrong audience. The ads promise: "The Rhythm ... the Beat ... the Love ... and You Don't Stop!" But it's not a musical and although it's sometimes a comedy, it's observant about its people.

This is the movie to seek out.

A movie where the story, like the sub, sometimes seems to be running blind. In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat.

There is no entry portal in The Rules of Attraction, and I spent most of the movie feeling depressed by the shallow, selfish, greedy characters. I wanted to be at another party.

The movie crosses two formulas -- Fish Out of Water and Coming of Age -- fairly effectively. Because it isn't wall-to-wall action but actually bothers to develop its characters and take an interest in them, it was not at first considered commercial by its distributor, New Line, and languished on the shelf for two years.

Both hilarious and sorrowful.

Too much action brings the movie to a dead standstill. Why don't directors understand that? Why don't they know that wall-to-wall action makes a movie less interesting -- less like drama, more like a repetitive video game?

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, "Cahiers du Cinema," has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere "quality," and interprets Tavernier's work as an attack on the New Wave generation which replaced them.

The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value; is too much fable to be convincing as life.

The movie was produced by Seinfeld, and protects him. The visuals tend toward the dim, the gray and the washed-out, and you wish instead of spending a year with their store-boughts, they'd spent a month and used the leftover to hire a cinematographer.

A deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.

The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing.

The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor.

A wacky and eccentric heist comedy with many virtues, but it is also a remake of "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958), a movie much beloved by me. Some scenes are so close to the original it's kind of uncanny.

Poetic in its sadness, and Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again.

One view of what happened that day, a very effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

To my surprise, Ratner does a sure, stylish job, appreciating the droll humor of Lecter's predicament, creating a depraved new villain in the Tooth Fairy (Ralph Fiennes), and using the quiet, intense skills of Norton to create a character whose old fears feed into his new ones. There is also humor, of the uneasy he-can't-get-away-with-this variety, in the character of a nosy scandal-sheet reporter (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

To see this movie is to understand why the faces on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to the first Americans. The movie's final image is haunting.

This is a grown-up movie, in its humor and in its wisdom about life. You need to have lived a little to understand the complexities of Tobias Allcott, who is played by James Coburn with a pitch-perfect balance between sadness and sardonic wit.

The movie is silly beyond comprehension, and even if it weren't silly, it would still be beyond comprehension.

Compulsively watchable and endlessly inventive as it transforms Broomfield's limited materials into a compelling argument.

It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role (in fact, Doris Day was in this role, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies").

Not many movies know that truth. Moonlight Mile is based on it.

Fascinating to watch as a portrait of political celebrity and ego.

What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make Lawrence of Arabia, or even think that it could be made.