This is not your average family cartoon. Shrek is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, Startup.com is definitive.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

Will this movie change anything, or this review make you want to see it? No, probably not. But when you come in tomorrow morning, someone will have emptied your wastebasket.

It doesn't make the slightest effort to cater to conventional appetites. But the more you appreciate what they're trying to do, the more you like it.

It's a reminder of the days before films got so cynical and unrelentingly violent. A Knight's Tale is whimsical, silly and romantic.

Performance is a bizarre, disconnected attempt to link the inhabitants of two kinds of London underworlds: pop stars and gangsters. It isn’t altogether successful, largely because it tries too hard and doesn’t pace itself to let its effects sink in.

Essentially a hyperactive showcase for Tsui Hark's ability to pile one unbelievably complex action sequence on top of another.

A movie of introspection and defiance.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

One Night at McCool's does not quite work, but it has a lot of fun being a near-miss.

I admired this movie. It kept me at arm's length, but that is where I am supposed to be; the characters are after all at arm's length from each other, and the tragedy of the story is implied but never spoken aloud.

The movie is so filled with action that dramatic conflict would be more than we could handle, so all of the characters are nice.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

It may not be brilliant, but who would you rather your kids took as a role model: Crocodile Dundee, David Spade or Tom Green?

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.

This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

Mantegna gives us just enough detail, enough exterior shots, so that we feel we're on a ship. All the rest is conversation and idleness. The lake boat is a lot like life.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

The Circle is all the more depressing when we consider that Iran is relatively liberal compared to, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Joe Dirt is so obviously a construction that it is impossible to find anything human about him; he is a concept, not a person.

Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they're as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough.

It might work on video for viewers who glance up at the screen from time to time. The more attention you pay to it, the less it's there.

Eric Bana's performance suggests he will soon be leaving the comedy clubs of Australia and turning up as a Bond villain or a madman in a special-effects picture. He has a quality no acting school can teach and few actors can match: You cannot look away from him.

Take away the drugs, and this is the story of a boring life in wholesale.