It's a rare window on an artistic collaboration.

An awesome cinema spectacle.

However insulting the script is to the formidable talents of Clayburgh and Tambor, they turn in Shinola performances.

A romantic comedy for anyone in love with the movies, and anyone, for that matter, who's in love.

A chick movie? Well, yes, but it's a whole lot cooler than that one with the "Ya-Ya's" in the title.

This is the kind of unusual but involving picture that's ripe for a Hollywood remake - but while you're waiting for the Sandra Bullock-Ethan Hawke edition (it's a good post-movie game: coming up with your own casting ideas), Read My Lips is well worth checking out.

It's a stylish package with not much inside.

It's basketball Fantasy Camp for the cost of a movie ticket.

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

Lord knows how Holofcener got the performance she did out of Goodwin, but the child actor's Annie, rude and unmanageable, is an extraordinarily rich and complicated figure.

If your kids are old enough to safely see the movie by themselves, drop 'em off and pick 'em up after. You don't need to see this one.

Sandler nimbly steps into the role created by Cooper and makes it his nebbishy own, something that cannot be said for Ryder's attempt to rethink the Arthur part. Ryder is lovely, but perhaps too sincere an actress to play a wiseacre.

Rings true for the most part, and explores human nature - leashed and unleashed - in ways that resonate.

Taut entertainment that juggles brainy ideas about perception, predetermination and free will - and drops things in a messy third act where the vintage noir gets bathed in a bit too much Spielbergian glow.

Simple, sweet family fare, and a picture that extols the virtues of comradeship and community in a spunky, spirited fashion.

While I don't always have the stomach for Woo's viscera or the heart for his pure, angelic heroes and impure, diabolical villains, I found myself responding to the context and subtext of Windtalkers while closing my eyes through what one might call its text. It's two-thirds of a great film.

A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

Touching historical fantasy.

Damon, starring in his first full-fledged action pic, brings a determined bearing and believability to the proceedings.

Would I see it again? Not even for a Scooby snack.

Bad Company would just be another silly, intermittently funny, buddy comedy (Anthony Hopkins is Rock's training agent) were it not for a plot unlaughably close to current events.

Tunney, brimming with coltish, neurotic energy, holds the screen like a true star. She brings the role, and the movie, to life.

Less successful in exploring the long-term effects of mental breakdown than in dispensing short-term comic pick-me-ups, Ya-Ya wrings abundant laughter and tears.

This long (nearly three hours), revelatory movie is both a thrilling adventure about endurance and survival, and an elegiac examination of centuries-old tribal culture, fast-fading in the new millennium.

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

This is a smart, spirited spoof that will leave you with a smile on your face - and an appetite for some serious '70s funk to play on the eight-track in your solid gold Cadillac convertible.

A sweet but unsticky comedy from Norway that was one of the five foreign- language nominees at this year's Academy Awards.

CQ is a movie for movie-lovers, by a movie-lover: Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford and a successful commercial and video director in his own right, making a witty, whimsical feature debut.

Mostly this elegant little film is a case study in the inconsistency of thoughts and feelings. Here, moralists break commandments, intellectuals act emotionally, and cynics have moments of idealism.

At this point in her career, Lopez can clearly bend the universe -- but no amount of bending can make Enough anything more than formulaic.

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

With Insomnia, his third feature, Nolan, 32, has proven himself a precocious master of the thriller, unsettling the audience with a brief image of blood seeping through fabric.

A cartoon that's truly cinematic in scope, and a story that's compelling and heartfelt - even if the heart belongs to a big, four-legged herbivore.

Despite good taste and good will, this romp through Victorian parlors frequently falls flat on its rump.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

It is a challenging film, if not always a narratively cohesive one.

Clones makes the Frodo-speak of "Lord of the Rings" sound like Noel Coward.

This being the "ultimate" movie about "extreme" sports, there's a lot of superlative slinging in the commentary.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

Reaches breathtaking lows of incoherence, sexism, racial stereotyping, and -- did I say incoherence?

Rohmer pulls off a wonderful feat: celebrating the elegance, and artifice, of another era at the same time he brings this tale of social upheaval boldly into the present.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

It might not be good enough to make you laugh consistently, but Hollywood Ending looks good enough to eat.

It's got one of the best kisses in movie history: Spidey, hanging upside down, delivers an open-mouth smooch to Mary Jane, a lip-lock for the ages.

Rain is a quiet, disquieting triumph.

Rarely has sex on screen been so aggressively anti-erotic.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

Exhilarating, breathless, must-see chronicle of the skateboarder revolution and evolution.

A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.

Best of all, though, is Northam, whose sable hair and polished poise put one in mind of the young Cary Grant. In this no-sweat performance, he's an actor who conveys how restorative it is to think.

Too freewheeling for its own good, like a Robert Altman ensemble piece without a gravitational core. But Hawke's actors are a talented troupe, and even when things get self-indulgent and fuzzy-headed (and boy, do they!), interesting stuff is going on.

When Bullock is on screen, Murder by Numbers is as far away as a sleepwalker's gaze. But when Schroeder focuses on the teenagers, the film is wide awake, eye-to-eye with adolescent angst and anomie.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

Iridescent as each of the actors is, the result is like a handful of beads without the connecting string.

Director Jean-Pierre Denis doesn't explore psychological motives, which are, finally, unknowable. What he accomplishes in his chilling, unnerving film is a double portrait of two young women whose lives were as claustrophic, suffocating and chilly as the attics to which they were inevitably consigned.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

Seething, searing tragedy of unmannerliness.

Blood-curdling stuff.

The film is better on mood than on message, sharply etching the professional desperation behind the forced gaiety.

The ads for The Sweetest Thing promise that if you loved "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," then you can't miss this latest Cameron Diaz vehicle. Well, miss it.

It is inspirational in characterizing how people from such diverse cultures share the same human and spiritual needs.

Comes across as gratifying, not grating: the same way the familiarity of a well-crafted whodunit is part of the book's pleasures.

The folks at Disney's Touchstone Pictures would have been wiser, however, just to have forgotten all about this hyperactive farce.

The picture uses humor and a heartfelt conviction to tell a story about discovering your destination in life.

The result is a movie that is both laugh-out-loud funny and cringe-worthily silent.

Despite some jaunty performances and its pretty Cotswolds locale, the film, in the end, is hardly a pleasure at all.

It's hard not to get caught up in this improbable but true follow-your-dream tale.

This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.

A squirmingly strange and brutal study of sexual power, masochism and mother-daughter madness.

Williams, going full throttle as the desperate deposed kiddie icon Rainbow Ralph, is, well, simply exhausting.

Works the basics with style and intelligence.

It's a wise and endearing little film.

Stunning, beautifully observed character study.

Simple, poignant and leavened with humor, it's a film that affirms the nourishing aspects of love and companionship.

That rare thing, a Hollywood teen flick transfigured into something like pubescent scripture: In the beginning, there was lust; in the end, there is knowledge.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful.

Diverting, if undistinguished.

It isn't a good movie, but it is diverting, a showcase for Anouk Aimee, Greta Scacchi and Ron Silver, and a peephole on behind-the-scenes moves.

The film, in its early going, also has a nice light humor about it, and an engaging, albeit tragic, love story.

Ice Cube possesses real screen presence, and it's a shame to see him squander his talents here. He and Epps made me laugh in "Next Friday." They made me squirm here.

One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit.

The film's intimations of bisexual romance have a certain innate drama that no amount of bad acting or cornball rugby matches can completely erase.

It's rare that a movie is so graceful and so gross.

Even when his technique is amateurish, Jones' belief in the material is refreshing. Pollak's gentle humor is well balanced by the blunt wit of Bonnie Hunt as the O'Malley matriarch.

Too long (and it sure ain't taut), but it brims with passion.

A likably energetic star vehicle for English sports god Vinnie Jones.

At its best, Queen is campy fun like the Vincent Price horror classics of the '60s. At its worst, it implodes in a series of very bad special effects.

A feast for the eyes and ears as its story is a banquet for the heart.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.

This is a star vehicle that stalls.

Filled with wildly inventive sound, as records are cut up and recombined on the spot.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

This is an A-list cast toiling on a C-list screenplay.

A thriller fusing the primal elements of "Bambi" with those of "The Blair Witch Project."

The best that can be said about Collateral Damage is that it offers a fleeting fantasy of American invincibility at a time when we desperately crave the reality. It functions as a movie narcotic.

Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.