This one is dully conventional even by family-uplift standards. The details are sweated, all right: It's a triumph of perspiration over inspiration.

Sometimes you forget how great an actor is, then he or she is reborn in an Altman movie.

Yet another remake no one needs is The Omen.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

See The War Tapes. Maybe this picture can be worth a thousand lives.

It's a fast and enjoyable B-movie, though, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine brings some good stormy drama to the proceedings.

It's not a particularly complex (or pleasant) film, but along the way you get a glimpse of the kinds of neighborhoods that give birth to anti-Western fanatics.

One of the most realistic documentaries I've ever seen--and, dry as it is, one of the most devastating in its implications.

Stagedoor features unremarkable rehearsal footage (exhibitionists make poor subjects for vérité documentaries) and thoughtful but unsurprising interviews with camp counselors and parents.

If there's anything to be learned from this dud, it's that when you decide to adapt an explosive property like The Da Vinci Code, playing it safe isn't safe: Either swallow hard and make the damnable thing or give it to someone with more guts and/or less to lose. Here is a saga that bombards the very foundations of Western religion. But onscreen, there seems to be absolutely nothing at stake.

Has William Hurt ever been this perfectly cast? He uses his groggy self-importance to make the pastor the victim of evil and the very fount of it.

The movie is, in all senses, a big downer.

In the world of bloated movie-star vehicles, it's not unusual to see an ego trip of these dimensions. What’s rare is when one hits its marks so smoothly.

Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.

The best thing about Down in the Valley is that you hope it's not going where you have an inkling it's going. The purity of Norton's madness is a wonder.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.

This Romanian movie defies categorization--it's halfway between a black comedy and a Fred Wiseman documentary. And it haunts you like the ghost of any dead person you've ever ignored.

To keep his satirist’s street cred, Weitz chases the sentimentality with sour slaps at the audience. But for all its supposed outrageousness, American Dreamz has a soft center.

Little turns out well in Rebecca Dreyfus's Stolen, a haunting and expansive documentary.

Its tone is semi-parodic, with lurid black-and-white cinematography and brassy, tongue-in-cheek music. But Harron stops well short of camp.

Even when it spreads itself too thin, Look Both Ways enlarges your perception of the here-and-now--and what movies can do to transcend it.

The pretzeled syntax is fun for a while. But as the holes are filled in, the film stands revealed as just another vacuous revenge picture. It shrinks your perception of what movies can do.

Friends With Money doesn't quite snap into focus. It just floats along-an agreeable comedy of manners with actors you like to hang out with.

James Toback seems oddly nice in Nicholas Jarecki's delicious cult-of-personality documentary The Outsider.

Stupefyingly lackluster.

Writer-director Rian Johnson gives the usual teen angst an entertaining kick. But the joke wears off, and what's left is as convoluted and monotonous as any conventional hard-boiled mystery.

Surprisingly diverting as a case study: not only of a talented misfit sublimating like mad to keep his loneliness from consuming him but also of a fringe artistic community (which includes the makers of this film) that rallies to give him the reinforcement he craves.

I found myself savoring a thriller (as well as a Spike Lee “joint”) that wasn't, for a change, in my face.

The Dardennes' most accessible film. Their handheld camera catches tiny flickers of emotion that few filmmakers come near; you feel as if you're watching the movements of a soul.

It's the perfect moment for the ridiculous but riotously enjoyable revolutionary comic-book thriller V for Vendetta-which will doubtless outrage conservatives and unnerve fuddy-duddys but liberate the rest of us with its magisterial irresponsibility.

Something is missing, though. The themes are all there, but the movie doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier and rev you up.

The fullness of Duck Season is in direct proportion to its smallness; its modesty makes it bloom.

A happier surprise is the smart work of director Richard Donner: 16 Blocks is all jumble and jangle--crowds, snarled traffic, and discordant car horns. The scariest moments have no music.

It's hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton's knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis--the context is so morally topsy-turvy.

Given that this retrograde memory loss has cleansed Doug Bruce's perceptions and made him an altogether more open and emotional person, Unknown White Male suggests that amnesia could be the ultimate chicken soup for the soul.

Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.

The ending is a huge letdown, doing little besides setting the stage for the sequel… But for a good hour and change, the film is a big toy box that teases you out of the Gloom.

Powerfully rendered in every respect - and another testament to how bad the Nazis are for drama.

The director, Richard Loncraine, doesn't generate much tension in Firewall's first half...The standard-issue climax is pretty exciting, though.

Steve Martin can be a delightfully spasmodic clown, but his Clouseau makes no sense.

Demme is in such perfect sync with Young's music that even the painted prairie backdrop (and the painted farmhouse interior screen, complete with hearth, that slides in front of it) only makes you roll your eyes in retrospect.

Worth seeing, even if you're as ambivalent about it as I am. Its strength is in the way the drama creeps up on you.

No matter where he (Von Trier) begins, his dramatic compass drifts toward the same pole: the sexual humiliation of his heroine (How could Daddy let you do this, Bryce?). But it's hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.

The actors are in a nice place--poking fun at themselves without spilling into travesty. Fogged by self-absorption, Coogan makes you like him most when he's most dislikable; he has a fool's vulnerability.

Brooks is looking for comedy in all the wrong places. He's no longer his own White Whale. He's something slower, in a shell--his own turtle.

I found The Promise pretty hard to resist. A heady blend of swordplay, somersaults, fairy-tale romance, and computer-generated whoosh.

A pitch-perfect farce for the post-Enron era.

The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story.

A film that transcends its obvious timeliness to say some elemental things about personal loyalty and institutional betrayal.

There are too many musical performances in this movie, even for a country fan such as myself, to keep the city slickers engaged. This bespeaks great faith in the charisma of the stars, who merit it. They also, however, deserved a better script.

If only Knightley had a co-star equal to her here: The 1995 edition of Colin Firth, come to think of it, would have been perfect.

As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances.

The terseness of a thriller, the clarity of a documentary, and a mixture of high drama and low humor.

Danes gives a marvelously quiet, poignant performance.

The time shifts are awkward, and Egoyan displays little of the deftness of characterization he evinced in such movies as "Exotica" (1994) and "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997); the result is a cold scold of a movie.

Clooney may be a specialist in embattled camaraderie--he helped revive "Ocean's Eleven," after all--but as in that caper remake, there's no depth to these characterizations, and Downey and Clarkson are squandered in a goes-nowhere subplot about their secret marriage.

When superb craftsmanship, discipline, and risk-taking (toning down Diaz and MacLaine; treating Collette as a desirous leading lady) are applied to accessible, even frivolous material, the results can be deeply pleasurable. In Her Shoes isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s the best Saturday-night movie millions of people are going to go to.

A pungent delight.

A sci-fi saga that manages to be at once stirring and screwball, gut-busting and gut-wrenching, and more fun than you had at any bigger-budget movie this past summer.

Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.

I'd like to hear from some women about the sole scene I didn't buy--Bello getting angry, then super-turned-on when she learns about her calm Tom's tough-guy origins--but otherwise, A History of Violence is a remarkably convincing examination of heroism, hero worship, and the seductive allure of villainy.

One of the wonderful things about Thumbsucker is that, unlike so many movies in which a character changes in order to propel the plot forward, this one stops to follow up on the consequences of those changes.

Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances.

Murray's performance is at once enormously generous and fiercely, concisely witty.

Gloriously filthy, ramshackle, endearing documentary.

It turns out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is half goofy-great, and half just a goof.

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny--another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.

Kidman is stuck in this pomo movie about the making of a TV-show remake. It’s "Being John Malkovich for Morons."

Stunning, explosively moving.

Begins, at two-hours-plus, is a nonstarter.

A cool summer thriller whose laughs don't slow down the suspense.

In the best moments of Howl's Moving Castle and in his extraordinary body of work, Miyazaki teaches his viewers more valuable lessons.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis, who's done a lot of briskly unsentimental TV work with young people--"Malcolm in the Middle," most notably--knows how to avoid mawk, keeps the squawk to a minimum, and gets wonderful performances out of at least two of the sisterhood, "Gilmore Girls'" Alexis Bledel as the modest Lena, and America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as the stubborn Carmen.

Lucas is a brilliant technician but a poor philosopher, and his lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires. (You don’t make anything this big, for this long, without aiming for the planet Masterpiece.)

It's a film you won't stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up.

Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.

The most blessedly traditional sort of documentary. It follows the twisty, complicated rise and fall of Enron in steady, chronological order, from the mid-eighties to the present.

Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.

Half-amazing, half-ridiculous, thoroughly exhilarating.

The visually stunning Sin City has grit to spare and a thrilling undercurrent of morality.

When are we going to get a generation of actors who will finally decline to succumb to The Woody Mystique, and refuse to accept a proffered role without first deciding whether the entire damn project is worthwhile?

A hapless comedy that already seems about ten years out of date, Be Cool is a curious failure.

Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.

Reeves has confidently entered his self-parodic period. You’ll enjoy his wry post-Matrix murmurs and squinty stares.

Delightful, insightful documentary.

An expertly woven narrative, as nail-bitingly effective as any good Hollywood thriller.

It's simply an astringent action flick that uses the wounded sensitivity of Ethan Hawke and Fishburne's witty hauteur to give the shoot-'em-up scenes some juice.

Jackson's wonderfully nuanced, witty performance, and a few unexpected plot turns, give Coach Carter a subtext that helps complicate such knee-jerk oversimplifications, redeeming the role with energetic humor and a loose-limbed grace.

John Travolta finds no artistic breathing-room in A Love Song for Bobby Long.

Penn is mostly in "I Am Sam mode" here, doing a lot of shoe-gazing and mumbly-talk, but not without adding an edge of bitter intelligence to his character; he's just too good an actor to merely repeat himself, even when the material encourages him to.

The result is an admirably bumpy ride of a biopic, a rare one that leaves you feeling not safe but bracingly unsettled.

Operates as stealth art: stately, moving, beautifully acted, and urgently subversive to our own status quo.

So fizzy it nearly fizzles out.

Closer is marred by some drippy music courtesy of Damien Rice and a small-surprise ending that feels like gimmicky irony. But the film's core idea is compelling.

When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.

As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie.

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

It's a new Neeson as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, all spiky-haired and harried, and he's enormously appealing in the role.