The smartest movie to come out this year, and it could hardly be better cast.

Without any believable characters or situations, Reindeer Games is about as appealing as leftover Christmas fruitcake.

Boasts several fine performances and some elegant, eerie black-and- white photography.

By far the best thing about Pitch Black is the cool-looking lighting and photography.

Inside Beautiful People, . . . there's a terrific film trying to get out.

A lame, glossy and disastrously misconceived film about three ditsy sisters dealing with the death of their horrible father.

Hits one out of the park.

An offer you shouldn't refuse: It's laugh-out-loud, side-splitting funny.

A sweet, lushly photographed but occasionally slow film.

Pays off with emotional dividends well worth the time investment.

The kind of sentimental, upbeat and inoffensive children's entertainment parents always hope their kids will like.

Uncommonly well-acted and beautifully shot on location in southern India, but it's not exactly riveting.

Makes the most of its wintry settings and never insults the audience's intelligence -- no mean feat for a family film. It's a real crowd-pleaser.

What could have been an intriguing look at a bizarre and complex woman plays like just another cog in the Annabel Chong publicity machine.

Cinematographer Darius Khonji does a superb job of conveying both the sensual beauty (there's a spectacular moonlight-on-the-water sex scene with Leo and the lovely Ledoyen), and the darkness of Richard's paradise lost.

This low-caliber Gun Shy has singularly ugly cinematography by Tom Richmond that at one point shows off Bullock's facial hair.

A talky, pretentious soap opera about Spanish intellectuals.

It's the chemistry between the Arquettes (they met on the first film and married after the second) and their rapport with Campbell that sustains Scream 3 through its overly convoluted plot.

A hapless family film that's too scary for little kids and too boring for everyone else.

Has its share of laughs.

So joyous it can actually shake viewers out of a bad mood.

The premise is so sad it's impossible to chuckle at the often heavy-handed humor.

Isn't great, but it's an enjoyable if overly discreet and romanticized look at a long-vanished show-business world.

Watchable even when what's going on makes no sense whatsoever.

Stinko movies often unwittingly critique themselves -- and the brain-dead romantic comedy Down to You (which Miramax understandably didn't screen in advance for critics) is no exception.

The latest vanity production by writer-director-star Eric Schaeffer, who still seems to think he's another Woody Allen -- despite a growing body of work that proves otherwise.

A perfectly enjoyable sci-fi thriller.

Grows on you like kudzu.

The whole movie is so ineptly written and directed that its 90 minutes seem to take twice as long.

More than lives up to its clever positioning as the first movie of the new millennium.

For all its wit and intricacy, the film is often ponderous. [31 Dec 1999, p.038]

An expertly crafted, deeply moving film.

A flawed drama offering a rare look at the Catholic Church's canonization process.

Morris' most gripping film since "The Thin Blue Line," is the year's scariest movie.

It's bone tired.

Rescues a rarely performed tragedy and makes a brilliant case that it is the Shakespeare play for our time.

An affectionate, often clever and unflaggingly funny satire.

This film of mistaken identity, murder, class envy and (bi)sexual tension doesn't live up to its own promise.

A testosterone- and cliché-fueled epic that will have some hoping for sudden death as it stumbles toward the three-hour mark.

Lacks the humor and charm that fills the book and makes it so much more than a catalog of suffering.

Less a conventional biography than a performance film - one that stuns and delights.

The year's most beautiful movie -- and surely one of the dullest.

It's an odd mixture of an unsentimental, darkly humorous take on mental illness with the usual Hollywood loony-bin cliches.

Revels in the sensual pleasure of music while capturing brilliantly the tension that grips any theater company before the curtain goes up.

The kind of unsophisticated family entertainment they supposedly don't make anymore.

The pace slackens a little after the first hour, but the photography by Remi Adefarasin and music by Magnus Fiennes keep the emotion stoked.

Such astounding computer-generated effects you'll suspend disbelief and root for the hero, a 3-inch talking mouse.

A non-starter.

The once-funny Robin Williams is still stuck in his excruciating touchy-feely mode.

Meanders along in a confused, confusing way for what feels like hours.

Hands-down the best movie of the year.

A relentlessly grim, rather heavy-handed drama of family dysfunction.

A major disappointment, The Cider House Rules pales by comparison with the gutsier, more full-bodied adaptation of Irving's "The World According to Garp."

There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented.

Thanks to (Douglas), Diamonds is quite affecting -- even if it's not a particularly good movie.

A reminder of just how good Hollywood storytelling can be.

It's not to say that the adolescent humor isn't funny; some of it is hilarious. It's just that this movie lacks the overarching comic sensibility that made "Mary" and even Adam Sandler comedies like "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy" so satisfying.

This intense psycho-sexual drama doesn't easily lend itself to the camera.

Studded with potent fright scenes and built on a rock-solid performance by the ever-dependable Kevin Bacon.

A satisfying Irish stew made from very familiar ingredients.

It's hard to feel anything but disappointment and boredom by the time the picture grinds to a mystical ending.

All of the characters in this story of love, guilt and redemption feel like real people, facing real dilemmas, and you truly care about what happens to them

It lurches ineptly from lame comedy to hokey melodrama.

Isn't Allen's finest work by a long shot, but an undeniable part of its fascination is trying to figure out what -- if anything, even unconsciously -- he's trying to say about how he treated Farrow.

Worth seeing for McTeer's touching, funny and richly detailed performance, which should put her on the map in Hollywood.

A hokey, overblown and deeply unsatisfying movie.

Toy Story had a simpler, stronger story and the advantage of being the first of its kind. But it's quickly apparent that TS2 represents a major step forward in computer-animation artistry.

De Niro gives a technically brilliant performance as Walt, struggling with a body that will no longer obey him.

Comes closer to what a Bond movie should be and once was.

As a horror movie, even one inspired by the kitschy Hammer horror films of the 1950s, it's disappointing.

The year's best foreign-language movie an absolute must-see.

Easily one of the year's best movies.

The latest episode of this ongoing masterpiece of reality TV -- which every seven years revisits a group of English people first interviewed as 7-year-olds in 1964 -- is every bit as enthralling as the earlier ones.

Kevin Smith's attempt to combine sketchy low comedy with long-winded theological speculation results in a mostly unfunny and occasionally tedious mess.

But given the potentially gripping subject matter, the film is fatally underedited: Every scene feels too long.

Well worth seeing for the incandescent Portman.

Besson is unable to weave the comic scenes together with the serious gory ones, so both seem increasingly jarring and unbelievable.

Light It Up would be a strong candidate for the year's most irresponsible movie - if it were remotely believable.

Some wonderful films have come out of Iran in the past few years, but A Moment of Innocence, by highly regarded director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is too smug and too self-indulgent to count as one of them.

Strictly a kids' movie, but parents may be relieved to sit back and enjoy the fact that for two full hours, they won't have to hear the kids asking them to buy any more Pokemon trading cards.

So unremittingly vulgar and inept it makes "The Best Man" and "Runaway Bride" look like masterpieces by comparison.

Isn't particularly funny, romantic or well-acted. It drags on endlessly.

Something most have gotten lost in the translation.

Bleak, demanding stuff, and its hand-held documentary-style photography is harder on the stomach than "The Blair Witch Project."

Entertaining but terminally dopey.

A misguided exercise - a crude merger of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Schindler's List" that somehow reminds you of "Hogan's Heroes."

A rare and welcome reminder of how original, provocative and moving a low-budget independent film can be.

A beautifully shot, well-acted movie that manages to make a complicated, real-life story without much drama feel like a thriller.

German director Werner Herzog's fascinating, fond and often bitchy documentary recalling the late star of his most celebrated movies.

Frequently hilarious, if overlong.

Grows tiresome rather quickly.

This one is often more interesting than involving.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

Beautifully shot and often moving.

A campy docu-drama about the secretly gay world of 1950's muscle magazines.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

Watching Meryl Streep act can be an exhausting experience - and never more so than during Music of the Heart.

The movie isn't bad, only scattered and incomplete.