It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story.

It's a movie without a brain. Charlie's Angels is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie.

Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.

Effortless in the way it insinuates itself into these families, touching in the way it shows how fiercely Romeo and Knocks are, despite everything, their own little men.

The movie remains an actor's exercise--too much dialogue, too much time in the room, too much happening offstage, or in the past, or in memory, or in imagination.

Because the stories are so skillfully threaded together, the movie doesn't feel like an exercise: Each of the stories stands on its own.

The plot becomes a juggling act just when it should be a sprint. And there's another problem: Is it intended as a comedy, or not?

Brief, spare and heartbreaking.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

The movie's problem is a fundamental lack of substance.

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.

Simply amazing.

It's that ambiguity that makes the film interesting.

With a cleaner story line, the basic idea could have been free to deliver. As it is, we get a better movie than we might have, because the performances are so good.

Altman would never admit this, but I believe Dr. T, the gynecologist in his latest film, is an autobiographical character.

Desperately unfunny.

As much parable and fantasy as it is realistic.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

One of those rare movies where you leave the theater having been surprised and entertained, and then start arguing.

A touching and effective film.

The point is to show us what can be done with recycled traditional animation in the IMAX 3-D process, and the demonstration is impressive.

Only rarely is a film this observant and tender about the ups and downs of daily existence.

Oshima, directing his first film in 14 years, has found an actor with the physical attributes to play the character and seems content to leave it at that; his camera regards Sozaburo as an object of beauty but hardly seems to engage him.

Spike Lee misjudged his material and audience. He doesn't find a successful way to express his feelings, angers and satirical points.

Directed by Jay Roach, who made the "Austin Powers" movies and here shows he can dial down from farce into a comedy of (bad) manners. His movie is funnier because it never tries too hard.

Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.