If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.

The message behind all of this is difficult to nail down. Mars and Venus? Adults who haven't grown up? The last fling syndrome? Doing what you want instead of doing what you must?

The work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air.

Pants and wheezes and hurls itself exhausted across the finish line after barely 65 minutes of movie, and then follows it with 15 minutes of end credits in an attempt to clock in as a feature film.

Isabelle Huppert has the best poker face since Buster Keaton. She faces the camera with detached regard, inviting us to imagine what she is thinking.

A new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood.

Swimming is above all about a young woman's face, and by casting an actress whose face projects that woman's doubts and yearnings, it succeeds. The face belongs to Lauren Ambrose.

There was a lot I liked in Cletis Tout, including the performances and the very audacity of details like the magic tricks and the carrier pigeons. But it seemed a shame that the writer and director, Chris Ver Wiel, took a perfectly sound story idea and complicated it into an exercise in style. Less is more.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke?

A step or two down from the first and second, but it has some very funny moments, and maybe that is all we hope for.

If I found it creepy beyond all reason, that is no doubt because I have been hopelessly corrupted by the decadent society I inhabit.

Of the voices, Griffith makes Margalo lovable and as sexy as a little yellow bird can be, and Lane does a virtuoso job with Snowbell, the only cat with dialogue by Damon Runyon. Fox's Stuart is stalwart and heroic--the Braveheart of mice. As for the parents, Davis and Laurie deserve some kind of award for keeping straight faces.

There is one surprise in the movie, a decision having nothing to do with the reactor, that depends entirely on the ability of the characters to act convincingly under enormous pressure; casting stars of roughly equal weight helps it to work.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

Has laughs, thrills, wit and scary monsters, and is one of those goofy movies like "Critters" that kids itself and gets away with it.

Forget the plot. The movie is really about Steve and Terri taking us on a guided tour of the crocs, snakes, deadly insects and other stars of the outback fauna. Steve's act is simplicity itself.

The parts work even if the whole leaves me uncertain. Many movies are certain about their whole, but are made of careless parts. Forced to choose, I would take the parts.

One regards Reign of Fire with awe. What a vast enterprise has been marshaled in the service of such a minute idea. Incredulity is our companion, and it is twofold: We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made.

Choice, a luxury of the Corleones, is denied to the Sullivans and Rooneys, and choice or its absence is the difference between Sophocles and Shakespeare. I prefer Shakespeare.

So enigmatic, oblique and meandering that it's like coded religious texts that requires monks to decipher.

Does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world.

Here's a case of two actors who do everything humanly possible to create characters who are sweet and believable, and are defeated by a screenplay that forces them into bizarre, implausible behavior.

It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

Has a bracing truth that's refreshing after the phoniness of female-bonding pictures like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

Not a simpleminded movie in which merely being ABLE to read lips saves the day. In this brilliant sequence, she reads his lips and that ALLOWS them to set into motion a risky chain of events based on the odds that the bad guys will respond predictably.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

The movie overcomes its lack or originality in the setup by making good use of its central idea, that a pair of sneakers could make a kid into an NBA star. This is a message a lot of kids have been waiting to hear.

A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.