It will not appeal to the impatient, but those who like long books and movies will admire the way it accumulates power and depth. It is about youthful idealism, headstrong love and fierce ambition, and is pessimistic about all of them.

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.

It's the kind of movie you can't quite recommend because it is all windup and not much of a pitch, yet you can't bring yourself to dislike it.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

Crush is an Aga romance crossed with modern retro-feminist soft porn, in which liberated women discuss lust as if it were a topic and not a fact.

Comforting, even soothing, to those who like the old songs best. It may confuse those who, because they like the characters, think it is good. It is not good. It is skillful.

No Such Thing is inexplicable, shapeless, dull. It doesn't even rise to entertaining badness.

I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.

There is an old saying: Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. The Piano Teacher has a more ominous lesson: Be especially careful with someone who has asked for you.

To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.

The movie has been produced by Nickelodeon, and will no doubt satisfy its intended audience enormously. It does not cross over into the post-Nickelodeon universe.

The movie resembles a chess game; the board and all of the pieces are in full view, both sides know the rules, and the winner will simply be the better strategist.

You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.

One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the title. Pause by the poster on the way into the theater. That will be your high point.

The movie is "Dawn of the Dead" crossed with "John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars," with zombies not as ghoulish as the first and trains not as big as the second. The movie does however have Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez.

One of those movies where "after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again." Yes, but it redefines "nothing."

The movie's funny in the opening scenes and then forgets why it came to play.

The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help.

A pleasure to look at and scarcely less fun as a story. I came to scoff and stayed to smile.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. We Were Soldiers doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.

My problem with Borstal Boy isn't so much with the facts as with the tone.

Hartnett shows here a breezy command of his charming, likable character. It is a reminder of his talent and versatility.

A delightful surprise because despite all the backstage drama, this is a movie that tells stories that work -- is charming, is moving, is funny and looks professional.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.

Guy Ritchie, who started out as such an innovator in "Lock, Stock, etc.," seems to have headed directly for reliable generic conventions as a producer. But they are reliable, and have become conventions for a reason: They work. Mean Machine is what it is, and very nicely, too.

It is happy to be goofy.

Maryam is more timely now than ever.