What first feels like thin skit material gets funnier and sweeter. Damon and Kinnear make a terrific team.

When it catches fire, this great-looking movie offers hilarious diversions.

There are pleasures to be had in the handsome, heroic The Last Samurai. But they' all on the surface.

The movie's slight, anecdotal structure is deceptive; you wouldn't guess how big an emotional wallop it packs.

A tad dark for little kids, this one-of-a-kind movie delivers 80 minutes of idiosyncratic inspiration.

Zwigoff doesn't hype up the gags, and his deliberately deadpan style gives even farfetched jokes an edge of reality.

What keeps this movie honest is the characters, each of them a mass of conflicting instincts, virtues and vices. You know Gonzalez Inarritu comes from outside Hollywood because he doesn't divide the world into heroes and villains.

Ferrell is a hoot. So is much of this witty holiday family entertainment, which, up until the end, when the “true spirit of Christmas” must be reaffirmed, happily favors slapstick over treacle.

Alternately beguiling and bloated, witty and warmed over, smart and pandering. The majority is likely to swoon; the minority will squirm their way through it.

Though they’re full of undeniably spectacular moments, great production values and unusual ambition, a simple thing has gotten lost in these sequels: they’re not much fun.

For all its shortcomings, The Human Stain is an honorable, sometimes moving attempt, better at evoking the poignancy of Silk's autumnal affair than exploring the moral ambiguities of his deception.

Writer-director Ray has a no-fuss style that is quietly, thoroughly gripping.

There’s much to argue with, but this unconventional, oddly beautiful film resonates in unexpected ways.

The film's claustrophobic, color-coordinated dourness yields little illumination, and as the surging violins accompany our heroine's un-raveling mind, the movie comes queasily close to romanticizing suicide. I knew I was supposed to feel something, but what?

Brilliant, but shallow.

A haunted thriller of disturbing power.

It's a bravura, all-stops-out, inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and the movie, kick ass.

A one-of- a-kind horror movie: hilarious, a little scary and strangely poignant. Campbell’s cranky, valiant, sad-sack King is a soulfully funny creation.

The Rock and Scott work up some nice comic chemistry, but it’s the dependably warped Walken who steals the most scenes. The frenetically edited fight sequences will satisfy the blood lust of the target audience.

Relieved of his courting duties, Allen gives his funniest performance in ages.

Scott's finesse can't entirely disguise the mechanical nature of Nicholas and Ted Griffin's script, which has one too many twists for its own good. Fun while it lasts, but it's a bit of a con job itself.

Their (Murray/Johansson) brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.

A delirious example of grrrl power, Hong Kong style.

There isn't an ounce of genuine affection on display. Fenton and Barbato already made a documentary of the same title about Alig, and their fascination with this vapid, charmless pied piper of decadence remains a mystery.

A painfully funny movie. There’s nothing in the history of movie courtship quite like the first meeting between Pekar and his future wife and fellow depressive, Joyce Brabner.

Screenwriters Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon have devised some lovely and hilarious variations on Rodgers’s irresistible premise.

After the schadenfreudian thrill of watching beautiful people humiliate themselves wears off, it has the same annihilating effect on your will to live.

It’s not half bad, with cool locations and a great stunt leap from the top of a Hong Kong high-rise.

Seabiscuit may be too airbrushed for its own good, but in the end nothing can stop this story from putting a lump in your throat.

A hilarious, rousing musical comedy set at a summer camp where NOBODY plays sports and EVERYBODY worships Stephen Sondheim.

Steven Knight’s smart, if overly plotted, script delivers social insights tautly wrapped in genre thrills.

Fortunately, whenever the movie starts to sag, Depp flies to the rescue. It’s a truly piratical performance: with his flamboyantly fluttering fingers he steals every scene in the movie.

Comes off as surprisingly unmagical, with characters you only half care about.

As adroit and charming as Witherspoon is--and she gives it her all--she cannot rise above the embarrassingly broad, witless material.

At its screeching, wall-breaking best, “T3” achieves heavy-metal slapstick.

This is one of the silliest movies ever made--and lots of instantly forgettable fun.

Where so many comic-book movies feel as disposable as Kleenex, the passionate, uncynical Hulk stamps itself into your memory. Lee’s movies are built to last.

Inside this numbingly formulaic action comedy there's a small, quirky movie not screaming hard enough to get out--the kind of movie that director and co-writer Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham,” “Tin Cup”) could have had some real fun with.

Despite an overwrought finale, this stylish horror film is genuinely creepy. See it before the inevitable Hollywood remake.

While Whale Rider is a doozy of a female-empowerment fantasy, it’s mercifully free of any feminist smugness.

It’s like a nightmare that follows you around in daylight: you can’t quite decode it, you can’t shake it, you can’t stop turning it over and over in your mind. This is one queasily powerful movie.

A cliffhanger with no real ending. When the lights come up, think of it as the start of a six-month intermission. For better and worse, Reloaded leaves you hungry for more.

Unless you’re 15 at heart, you may need anger management yourself after sitting through this aggressively crass comedy, which alternates between mean-spirited slapstick and arbitrary uplift.

A schizoid action flick bogs down in lofty intentions.

This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.

Irreversible takes an adolescent pride in its own ugliness. “I Stand Alone" told me something about the world; this one tells me more than I want to know about the calculating mind of its maker.

The best movie of the last 20 years about young people in love is 1989’s.

Torn between moody grandiosity and cartoonish mayhem, Daredevil tries to have it both ways, and succeeds at neither.

An excruciatingly entertaining portrait of the filmmaking process that no Hollywood studio would ever allow to be shown. But Gilliam, bless his impish, obsessive heart, is anything but a Hollywood type.

Exuberantly theatrical yet every inch a movie, and some numbers ("The Cell Block Tango") are so entertaining you might want to applaud.

This powerful, precision-made movie offers hope as well -- an act of kindness from a German officer that saves the pianist’s life, the music that sustains his soul.

Never less than engaging; all that’s missing is a proper crescendo. The picture moves along briskly, even at two and a half hours, but it seems to be running on cruise control.

Gangs is a dream project Scorsese has wanted to make for 30 years. You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.

The superbly acted Spider is muted in comparison: it’s a quiet nightmare, painted in hospital greens and rust browns.

What's remarkable is how immediately, after a full year, The Two Towers seizes your attention, and how urgently it holds you through three seamless, action-packed hours.

This powerfully contained, painfully funny performance has to rank with the greatest work Nicholson's ever done -- This road movie gives you emotional whiplash, and you’ll be glad you went along for the ride.

An inspired flight of fancy, an oddly poignant examination of the creative process, a rumination on adaptation (orchids to their environment, books to the screen and misfits like Charlie to life) and, in its ultimate irony, a story in which our hero learns a life-altering lesson.

Noyce uses his Hollywood craft to unfold this primal, powerful story, he has an epic feel for the harshly beautiful Australian landscape and he gets wonderfully natural performances from the three girls. His bold, lyrical images stay in your head, like an unaccountably beautiful nightmare.

Flat, distressingly witless -- To put it bluntly -- the thrill is gone. Nobody did it better. But that was then.

Far from being a period piece, this love story/murder mystery/political thriller couldn’t seem more timely.

Before it degenerates into Indiana Potter and the Chamber of Doom, the movie holds promise -- it hints at why the Harry Potter movies aren’t half as wonderful as they ought to be, why they feel created from the outside in. Magic isn’t made by committee.

What blasts off the screen like a heat wave, burning in the heart, is the sheer toe-tapping, booty-shaking joy of making music.

It’s too early to place Eminem alongside those Hollywood giants (Jimmy Cagney/John Garfield), but the promise is there. He understands the power of being still in front of a camera. Compact, volatile and burningly intense, he’s got charisma to spare.

Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.

It’s a movie for movie lovers -- playful, hip and light as a feather.

Why does this chronicle of a passionate life refuse to catch fire? For all of Taymor’s flashy embellishments -- surreal dream sequences, constructivist collages come to life -- it trudges through the Kahlo chronology with the dutiful step of a conventional Hollywood biopic.

This visually stunning movie serves up generous dollops of designer creepiness.

It’s not a particularly sexy movie. What’s shocking to Schrader is not Crane’s promiscuity, but his obtuseness. It’s the story of the unbearable lightness of Bob.

It stinks. The movie is so inert -- and Madonna’s performance so starkly amateurish -- that it’s impossible to take it seriously as an allegory about class and gender.

Punch-Drunk Love is one dark, strange-tasting sorbet, its sweetness shot through with startling, unexpected flavors. It’s a romantic comedy on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Brings history to life with an uncanny sense of realism.

Red Dragon is certainly an improvement on “Hannibal.” It has something the Ridley Scott movie didn’t -- a good story -- and it will no doubt keep the franchise rolling in dough.

Manages to be simultaneously subversive and sweet.

Neil LaBute’s Possession is bad, but not spectacularly bad, which is disappointing.

One of the things that makes Signs such a refreshing summer movie is that it goes against almost all the grains of contemporary Hollywood razzle-dazzle filmmaking -- as did “The Sixth Sense.”

Self-conscious to the point of suffocation.

There are just enough fresh, funny gags and witty throwaways to keep the 88-minute MIB2 percolating -- it fulfills its end of the bargain: a good time will be had by almost all.

Ferociously intense, furiously kinetic, it’s expressionist film noir science fiction that, like all good sci-fi, peers into the future to shed light on the present.

It’s as formulaic as "The Sum of All Fears," but it feels fresher, hipper, less inflated.

Poor Affleck. He doesn’t just have to singlehandedly save the world from nuclear destruction, he has to erase our memories of Ford and Baldwin. That’s a tall order for any actor, and Affleck, an expert at playing cocky, callow yuppies, just doesn’t have the heft.

Hilarious, affectionate spoof.

It might, however, have been a greater film if its villain were as compelling as its flawed hero. Williams is effectively creepy, but next to Pacino’s rich, multileveled portrait he seems one-note, and one we’ve seen before.

For all its retro design, Spirit actually represents a delicate marriage of the hand and the computer.

This may be a less than ideal “Earnest,” but it still has delights, not least of all Anna Massey’s Miss Prism, Cecily’s dotty tutor, and Tom Wilkinson’s Dr. Chasuble, her clergyman admirer.

Movie purists will tell you that a heavy reliance on voice-over is a sin (“show, don’t tell”), but when the words are this funny, to hell with purity.

A decidedly mixed bag.

Unfaithful shows what a powerful, sexy, smart filmmaker Lyne can be. It’s a shame he substitutes the mechanics of suspense for the real suspense of what goes on between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.

You know a romantic comedy is in trouble when you root for the hero not to get the girl.

Director Sam Raimi, working from David Koepp's screenplay, wisely anchors his big action-adventure flick on Maguire's modest but beguiling persona.

Kaufman's new script isn't as inspired as "Malkovich." It's a precious little concoction -- the B-plus work of a madcap genius.

Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are asked to humiliate themselves many times over in The Sweetest Thing, and they do it with such game good spirits that they ought to get the actor’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.

It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.

The eroticism in Cuaron's road movie (which broke all box-office records in Mexico) is the real deal: tactile, sexy, psychologically charged.

A clever, pleasingly sentimental tale of prehistoric times.

A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.

Nair’s stereotype-shattering movie -- like the polymorphous culture it illuminates -- borrows from Bollywood, Hollywood and cinema verite, and comes up with something exuberantly its own.

Gets too earnest for its own good. But Billy Ray and Terry George’s screenplay, taken from a John Katzenbach novel, is expertly plotted.

There’s not a whisper of melodrama or sentimentality in the way Moretti tells his tale, guiding us through the stages of grief with calm, devastating lucidity.