What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.

Driven is recommended only to those gentle souls who want to know what it looks like to crash into a wall at 200 mph.

As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.

The stage is set for a wonderful movie, and yet The Luzhin Defence, based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel The Defense, never courts greatness.

The dance he (Wang) ended up with is on the wrong lap.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

In The Circle, which is banned in Iran, the enforced society of women is, in effect, a community of adults treated as children.

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.

The film starts out as a freewheeling farce and turns into a pitch-black burlesque with surprising depths of feeling.

It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.

It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.

Nolan sustains an arty note of existential dread that probably will work better for noir-steeped film critics and overserious philosophy grad students than for general audiences, but he brings off a few brisk bravura moments.

It all works on the level of a sprightly sitcom: lesbianism for the Lucy-and-Ethel crowd.

John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.

There's a timelessness, an immanence to what she (Varda) shows us.

There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

On the reasonable assumption that no movie featuring an Elvis impersonator can be wholly bad, I was prepared for a high old time at 3000 Miles to Graceland, which exhibits a plenitude of Elvi. The exhibition does not last very long, however. Less than a third of the way through, the filmmakers jettison the premise and trash their own movie.

Unsatisfying at a very high level. It fritters away more than most movies ever offer up.

Leconte films in an austere yet invigorated style; the action never settles into stiff tableaux.

Practitioners of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music strut their stuff. So do the players of a style new to me but instantly beloved: I'm speaking of swamp pop.

Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.

If Rock ever comes to his senses, he can host Saturday Night Live and skewer this damp, gag-riddled civics lesson of a movie.

The audience for Hannibal is far more primed for a good time; if the film is a hit, it will be because Lecter has been cartoonized; his ghoulish panache, his double entendres about cannibalism, and his pet phrases like "goody-goody" and "okeydokey" all serve to make him a figure of fun.

In the Mood for Love has novelty value, I suppose, and plenty of pretty camera moves, but it's not really a movie you can warm to.

He (Gibson) ramrods his way through the bugged-out hysterics as if he were appearing in a movie that actually made sense. What a brave heart.

What she (Ullmann) does achieve is a couple of scenes of lacerating power.

If Penn really lets these actors sing, his watchful camera also knows how to respect their silences.

The first full-scale documentary about the history of those years, and it lays out lucidly the involvement of the Communist Party in the young men's defense and the ways in which the trials, against the backdrop of the Depression, replayed the murderous quarrels of the Civil War all over again.

The problem with all this don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it dramaturgy is that ultimately everything is sacrificed for effect. When you're dealing, as Ritchie is, with explosions of real violence and viciousness, the hyperslick technique can't accommodate the real pain that comes with the territory, or ought to. What we're left with is a cackling amorality -- not a philosophy of life, just a posture.

The Korean director im Kwon-Taek has made more than 90 films since his first in 1962, and perhaps this explains why his latest, Chunhyang, seems so effortless and masterly. Based on a highly popular eighteenth-century Korean folktale, it's a movie that, stylistically, mixes the traditional with the avant-garde; the narrative may be ritualistic, but there's a let's-try-it-on-for-size friskiness to the filmmaking.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.

Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.

Terence Davies's The House of Mirth is a rigorously elegant adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and unlike in some other Davies movies, the rigor here doesn't turn into rigor mortis.... This is dourness of a degree you won't find in Wharton, but in its own shadowed terms the film is a triumph.

At its most basic level, Cast Away is a graceful and powerfully rendered survivalist saga.... And yet there's something generic about Chuck's plight. The filmmakers don't opt for the usual happy-face Hollywood ending, but even the half-smile they provide smacks of inspirationalism.

This time around, though, the Coens' usual arch deliberateness isn't quite as deliberate, and there's an appealing shagginess to some of the episodes and performances.... This is the Coen brothers' most emotionally felt movie, and that's not meant as faint praise.

Were it not for these performances (Blanchett, Ribisi, Swank, Reeves), The Gift would be fairly negligible.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

The people who made this movie have either seen too much mayhem -- or they haven't seen any.

If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.

It's all been done before, and better.

From the look of this film, its prime appreciators will be heavy-metal futurist dweebs.

Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.

Some first-rate animation and some second-rate storytelling.

A movie that really zips along; it offers some of the same pleasures as the silent slapstick comedies, particularly the Keaton films, with their sense of how sheer velocity carries its own wit.

Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism.

In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable.

I've never seen another movie that so clearly expresses the sensual sustenance that great folk culture provides its practitioners.

What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

Each film in Nicolas Winding Refn's mesmerizingly brutal Pusher trilogy can stand on its own, but it's fun to see all three and observe the way the bad guys in one become the sympathetic heroes (or anti-heroes) in another.

Connery and Zeta-Jones not only look great together, they work well together.

Mamet doesn't take the material as far as it can go -- we're left with a pleasing fable about the battle of the sexes and the virtues of persistence in a just cause. The neatness of it all is both appealing and appalling, and perhaps this combo is what finally hooked Mamet.

Barely rates faint praise.

Barrymore pulls off the neatest trick of the year: She makes all this pop schlock matter.

Pleasingly shaggy.

I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.

Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.

In political terms, True Crime is a far cry from "Dirty Harry" -- it actually stands up for due process of law. In Hollywood, I believe this is known as mellowing.

The emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is in the scabrous mode, and I like it better than "Trainspotting" -- it doesn't pretend its shenanigans are revolutionary.

The film is filled with actors you want to see -- just not in this thing.

Wallows in its own muck.

Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.

A noir written and directed by Paul Schrader that's so listless and numbing we need not wonder why it went directly to cable.

I'm all for films that don't flow from the usual Hollywood test tubes, but A Civil Action is basically the standard formula with a dash of downbeat.

In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.

A brilliant, disturbing, but unstable and half-crazy piece of work.

Antz, with its deadpan witticisms, its heart-stopping shifts of perspective, is completely entertaining, a kids' movie that will leave grown-ups quoting the best lines to one another.

Ronin is well-made, but it's an act of connoisseurship for people who have given up on movies as an art form.

The movie is no more than a well-produced confection designed for quick payoff in the big cities, but it's pretty consistently funny.

This is a wan, shapeless, and amazingly conventional piece of work .

Even if the film is more thoughtful than pulse-pounding, the intelligence brought to bear is appropriate for a sport that’s as much about mental toughness as it is physical skill.

I can't think of another movie that starts so brilliantly and ends so miserably as this one.

Spielberg has taken us back to basics -- back to art, back to amazement at the film medium itself.

The new version of Lolita, released at last, turns out to be a beautifully made, melancholy, and rather touching account of a doomed love affair between a full-grown man and a very young woman.

Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas work with professional skill in a ludicrous vehicle.

The general insensitivity of the atmosphere gets one down after a while. None of these people go together: Friends don't seem like friends, lovers don't seem like lovers. In brief, it's not enough just to have bad taste. You have to have talent, too.

Has an authentic rotgut flavor, but here's the question for the future: Will Gallo learn to criticize his own ideas or continue to pride himself on screwing up?

Andrew Davis, the director of "The Fugitive," one of the best thrillers of recent years, has added pace and heat and explicit sexuality to the material without whipping up phony excitement.

Dedee is a great, entertaining caricature, an updated teen version of a forties-noir seductress and murderess -- Lana Turner without corsets... Ricci possesses a devastating way with a nasty line; she could curdle mother's milk from 30 paces.

The movie is a volatile combination of ambitious mythmaking and nasty reality, and like most of Spike Lee’s work, it is also an inextricable combination of good and bad.

Two Girls and a Guy isn’t a satisfying movie, but Downey is alarmingly brilliant in it -- a man locked in torment who can’t find the way out.

If the woman’s love is obsessive and needy, the story becomes stupid and painful, and that is what happens in The Object of My Affection, the Stephen McCauley novel that has been adapted for the movies with disastrous panache by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and director Nicholas Hytner.

The movie is physically beautiful, but the ideas are kitsch -- it’s a New Age love story, the latest version of the doomed romances of 50 years ago.

Mamet has to learn to trust the camera more than he does; he has to stop trying to control everything with language; he has to let loose a little and just give in to the fluency, the ease, the free-flowing pleasure of making a movie.

This entertaining but rather peculiar movie asks extraordinary questions, and I wish it were better equipped to give the answers.

Wild Things, which was written by Stephen Peters and directed by John McNaughton, lacks fantasy and flamboyance, that it lacks, precisely, wild things, and that most of it is just flat.

An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero.

Writer-director Richard Kwietniowski has never made a feature before, but this debut effort is a triumph, a buoyant and elegant achievement -- romantic and ruminative yet always precise, a comedy of longing propelled by a strong current of satirical observation.

Stupidity is also an issue in the independent film The Real Blonde, in which everyone seems to have suffered an IQ slippage of some 40 points.

Palmetto is an unconvincing, paint-by-numbers pass at American noir by the usually ambitious German director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum).

It’s a pleasant movie -- very pleasant, in fact -- but soft as a down quilt.