Mortensen, who reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role, starts out playing Tony like a big lug but as the road trip ensues he brings all sorts of subtle shadings to the role. He even comes to appreciate Doc’s artistry. In Tony’s eyes, he’s right up there with Liberace.

It's big, beautiful, and imposing. But there isn't much to it, and pretty pictures -- replacing ideas, not supporting them -- are its only real attraction.

The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.

The film has a creepy allure but, as movies featuring full-bore sexual gamesmanship often do, it wears thin.

Zellweger is as charming as ever, and it's good to find LaBute working with a script by writers who don't fully share his crabbed, cramped view of human nature.

She emerges as an energetic, narcissistic, and totally self-deluded woman.

Frequently funny, sometimes sad, often electrifying.

Setsuko’s pathetic attempt to claim a new life for herself is touching. The film never makes fun of her.

This comedy is as down-and-dirty as you'd expect from the Farrelly team...but more than one sequence manages to be hilarious on its own outrageously crass terms.

First-time director and co-writer George Ratliff skirts, but never quite crosses, the line into absurdity.

The evocative visual style -- is the main reason to watch this whimsical comedy-drama.

The movie doesn't have much more get-up-and-go than the characters, but solid performances and richly textured camera work keep it involving most of the way through.

The movie has no profound insights to offer, but its nimble acting and lifelike dialogue make it entertaining as well as thoughtful. Think "Stand by Me" meets "Ghost World," and you just about have it.

The movie should fascinate anyone interested in politics, publishing, and the uneasy marriage between big money and mass communication.

Although the role may not have been written with great depth, Hussain’s performance as Mirza is richly layered.

The action is swift and witty, and the 3-D effects are imaginative and not simply tacked on as with so many animated movies these days.

Although its first hour is more stunning than its second, this is a movie musical that, for a change, never degenerates into a false wholesomeness. It’s one of the rare musicals that both children and adults can enjoy, though for somewhat different reasons.

Of course, most of the people who flock to Gremlins 2 are interested in the special-effects fantasy scenes featuring the gremlins themselves, and the nastier the better. Here the filmmakers are at their most energetic and most wearisome, dishing out so many silly-gruesome variations on the crazy-creature theme that you can't help being impressed, even as you feel like ducking under your seat for a moment's relief from the relentlessness of it all.

Brilliantly filmed in his usual transfixing style, Kubrick's last movie pleads for alertness to the temptations that assail human nature from within and without.

Despite his fascinating subject and an impressive cast -- Sayles lets his story drift in too many directions, as if he'd lost his Florida road map somewhere along the way during his travels.

Riveting stuff.

For all its ambitions, though, the Coens' odyssey is a scattershot affair with too many tricks and twists for its own good.

For the literal-minded, there’s an added bonus: Johnny Cash singing Solitary Man over the opening credits.

This pitch-black comedy is less lurid than its title, but director Danny Boyle ultimately fritters away his psychologically rich story in a horror-flick finale.

Nothing more than an efficient time-killer with the added bonus of being based on a real misadventure. But, unlike its benighted cast of characters, it gets the job done without a hitch.

The movie is often as raucous and seedy as its less-attractive characters, but it gains power from inventive acting and poignant touches.

Whatever brought Greene down was far more complex than this film allows for.

An actor making his directorial debut, Parker, who plays Turner and also co-wrote the script with Jean McGianni Celestin, has taken hold of an incendiary subject and coarsened its complexities into agitprop.

Essentially three movies in one: The staged reenactment of Columbus's expedition, the filming of that staged expedition, and the contemporary local uprising. It's a lot to bite off, especially since Bollaín's budget doesn't seem to be much larger than Sebastián's.

Ms. Denis is one of contemporary film's best stylists. Friday Night is part tone poem, part love song, and all pure magic.

[The Coen Brothers] sweat and strain to deliver more of the same cinematic ingenuity, but the result seems more nervous than inspired. Relax, fellas! [13 Mar 1987]

One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.

Some of the action is as lurid as the title, but passionate performances and ingenious visuals make this the most absorbing movie by Spanish director Almodvar since his great comedy "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown."

The film, which swivels frantically between first responders, survivors, and investigators, has a percussive force, but its best scene, unbearably tense, is a quiet one, when a Chinese app designer (an excellent Jimmy O. Yang) is carjacked by the Tsarnaev brothers.

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

The film is a dual portrait in courage.

The movie is flawed by implausible psychology and moments of weak acting. But it's more than redeemed by Lee's passionate ideas about America today.

The ultimate feel-good movie about feeling bad. And within those limits, it succeeds all too well.

For all its flaws, this is as personal a movie as we've seen all year from a director in the commercial mainstream. I respect it, and I'll be thinking about it for a long time. [23 April 1981, p.19]

Look for a cameo by a movie star whose initials are J.D.

Diverting but minor.

David Mamet and jujitsu come together in Redbelt, and the result is a draw.

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

At around the halfway point the film takes an intriguing swerve, as Kyle is canonized and Lance is unexpectedly launched into celebrityhood. Flashes of deadpan outrageousness occasionally redeem the dourness.

Broadway showman Mike Todd created this extravaganza, which launched the venerable movie tradition of the celebrity cameo. The color holds up well, although the leisurely pace may be an adjustment in today's world of fast-paced editing. [14 May 2004, p.14]

Pat O'Connor directed this likable but unmemorable comedy-drama, which creates some vivid moments without quite managing to flesh out its commonplace characters.

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

Worth seeing for the expert archival selections, but a decidedly mixed bag for anyone familiar, or unfamiliar, with the times.

Lively characters, snappy dialogue, and snazzy visuals make this an uncommonly fine animation.

One of the most violent films this year, it's no more so than many of the Asian kung fu flicks it pays homage to. Don't be surprised if it slaughters its action-film competition in this overcrowded movie season.

Directed and cowritten by a veteran of Denmark's no-frills "Dogma 95" movement, this is a quiet, no-frills drama with simple human values at its core.

The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.

It's not a deep-thinking film, and I wish it probed more thoroughly into the feminist issues it raises, instead of finessing them in a goopy finale. But much of it is first-class summertime fare, generating plenty of humor while examining a slice of Americ ana that's as revealing as it is entertaining.

Put Roeg's powerful cinematic style on the cultural map.

Dan Klores's astonishing film is about a subject so bizarre it could only work as a documentary – as a drama, it would be dismissed as being too far-fetched.

For me, there is too much rue that goes unacknowledged by the filmmakers. When great musicians must adulterate their art in order to find an audience, I see no pressing reason to cheer.

McAvoy succeeds in making the boy's mania for trivia endearing rather than annoying. As his (delayed) love interest, Rebecca Hall, playing a campus radical and the first Jewish person he has ever encountered, is stunning.

Clint Eastwood transcends the story's cliches with a classically restrained yet steadily imaginative filmmaking style.

Plays like a warmed-over "Last Tango in Paris," with more explicit sex but a lower level of originality and acting skill.

This situation hardly provides a clever or original metaphor for the failures of communication that perennially plague the human race, but the drama's heart is in the right place.

A refreshingly novel ride.

While the story is sentimental, heartfelt acting makes its impact less manipulative.

Its amiable acting and feisty visual humor make it a must for fans of Japanese film.

Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.

I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.

One aspect of this story that could have been more deeply underscored: The steroid use that ultimately banned so many Russian Olympians was not just about winning. It was about winning under threat of disgrace or death.

Harrelson does his considerable best to redeem the hackneyed role of the dreamboat do-gooder. No matter how conventional his roles may be, he always gives them a feral quality, an eccentricity, that lifts them out of the ordinary.

Schoenaerts has the gift of being able to make inarticulateness expressive. Perhaps this is why, in moments, he seems to recall Brando and Dean.

A semi-improvised, microbudget marvel with a range of feeling that shames most big-budget star-driven movies.

Ross manages to keep the pacing remarkably swift, given that the games themselves don't start until halfway through the 144-minute running time.

Berri lets the story develop in a leisurely and organic way, capping it with a last scene that's subtle and satisfying. Jean-Pierre Bacri is just right as the man and Emilie Dequenne is perfect as the maid.

The results are unsparingly perverse and oddly spellbinding.

While it's not a great movie, it's a revealing study of how long it often takes for businesspeople to realize they're being freaked out, not flattered.

Michael Douglas and Annette Bening head the well-chosen cast, but what gives the movie substance is its willingness to take real stands on real political issues.

This love letter to Valentino from director Matt Tyrnauer seems intended for the already smitten.

At worst is inoffensive. But that's the point. When you're making a movie about people whose lives are torn up in this way, inoffensiveness is, well, offensive.

Ultimately, the blight is so overwhelming that the film collapses from corruption overload.

The Bhutto family is often referred to as the "Pakistani Kennedys." After seeing this film, that designation doesn't sound so glib anymore.

Nick Nolte gives a superb performance and Julie Christie is positively incandescent.

August Evening is rambling, diffuse, and at times so "sensitive" it makes your teeth hurt. And yet it's also intermittently quite affecting.

Shoot the Moon doesn't reach the eccentric emotional heights of John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, perhaps the best family drama ever made. But flaws and all, it towers over most of the kiddie movies that have dominated the cinema scene for too long. It will be taken very seriously for a very long time. [28 Jan 1982, p.18]

Their chief adversary is the greedy, heedless BP executive played by John Malkovich in his finest slinky-slimy mode. At its best, the movie is like “The Towering Inferno” but without all the sudsy subplots that doused that film’s fires.

Sayles takes great storytelling risks to explore this theme; his unusual approach will please some viewers and irritate others. [04 Jun 1999, p.14]

I wish that the Mexican drug cartel subplot was not so overwrought and Oliver Stone-ish, and the decision to shoot much of the film "Cops"-style is also problematic. But the film puts you right inside an everyday inferno and, to its credit, doesn't turn down the heat.

It's difficult to imagine the target audience for this film. Gangbangers, perhaps?

For its first two-thirds, Potiche is a frothy delight.

This drama is richly photographed and enhanced by Binoche's steadily appealing performance.

If, like me, you find the movie technique known as motion capture creepy, you might be put off going to see Steven Spielberg's 3-D The Adventures of Tintin.

Burton is extraordinary in one of his rare good movie roles and O'Toole is regally madcap and larger than life. No doubt his Oscar-nominated appearance in "Venus" has prompted this rerelease of Becket. They make a fascinating then-and-now combination.

This film would be better if it wasn't so slick. Still, parts of it are enjoyably shaggy, and Hopkins is very endearing.

One thing is clear from A Place at the Table: You cannot answer the question “Why are people hungry?,” without also asking “Why are people poor?”

Ingeniously crafted with flashes of intelligence, if not very memorable.

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

Henry Fool finds Hartley assimilating Godard's ideas with far more assurance than in previous pictures like "Amateur" and "Flirt."

Used Cars is full of used characters, used ideas, and used jokes, many of which are in astonishingly bad taste.

It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

As an evening of family entertainment, Something Wicked is probably far too exotic for its own good. As an excursion into the domain of dreams, it's often a fascinating voyage.

I find it the most adventurous and imaginative American film I've seen this year - and also the weirdest.