The Soloist is based upon a true story, so it lacks some of the clichés that you might find in other made-up tales.

Their movie is cold, and I mean that not as a weather pun, but in the sense that it's impossible to warm up to a character who sees the awful things happening around him strictly in terms of how they affect him.

With the global economic meltdown affecting just about everybody, the film is pertinent, hugely entertaining, and, above all, timely.

13 Tzameti is certainly nightmarish, but it's the kind of nightmare that fades instead of lingering on in the memory.

Subtly gaining momentum as it dexterously glides through pages of good-time, snappy dialogue, Criminal offers no time to catch your breath, let alone enough to think through its reality-stretching story flaws and subtext-lacking motives.

Ultimately, The Jane Austen Book Club amounts to little more than a lukewarm collection of half-realized rom-com scenarios not fleshy enough to warrant their own movie.

By handing the directorial reigns to Louis Leterrier, the Parisian filmmaker responsible for the breathless "Transporter" films, Universal reveals its desire to emphasize spectacle over story.

Fighting is a fun, frank and faithful homage to simple inner-city drama.

One of those outrageous stalker thrillers in which so much trouble could have been avoided if the characters had only thought to call the police.

It might have been better to have played it straight — small instead of epic, chronological instead of deconstructed — and to give his characters some explicitness in history instead of the bedroom.

Grab some popcorn and make a pit stop, then sit back and enjoy it. You signed up for a movie about giant robots.

It really is a masterpiece--von Trier's first, as it happens.

Director Brad Anderson (Session 9) overtly cribs from everyone from Dostoevsky to Kafka.

The drama aspect is necessary to the story, but it just drags on too long.

For a while, it works, until it suddenly decides to abandon the "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see" for a ridiculous and ultimately insulting explanatory ending.

It may be a crowd-pleasing escapism, but it's that feel-good shmaltz that ultimately plays the film off-key.

Wants to be at any given moment--wrenching, thought-provoking, surprising, heartbreaking--all it ever is is tastefully lifeless. It’s been beaten into a coma by its own scruples.

Angela Bassett is great as his strict, single mother; The soundtrack is great, of course, and the ending features moving archival footage of the streets of Brooklyn after Wallace's murder.

Where Dans Paris truly pops, besides its spot-on leads or the slick curation of its fashions and locales, are in its mood-mixing musical moments.

Ma, who portrayed the stone-faced General in the Coen brothers' comedy "The Lady Killers," once again plays his role largely silent. As the despondent Ed, Ma says more with a few facial expressions & twitches than most performers could hope to with a three-page monologue.

Machete is exactly what you expect. There's ridiculously over-the-top violence, plenty of nudity, and lots of grisly humor. It's mostly enjoyable, but isn't likely to be anyone's top 5 anything.

Simply clicks on every level. From the surprising depth of the story, to the smooth and sometimes brilliant performances, to Hanson’s clear mastery of form.

Everyone involved figured that sentiment trumps sloppiness. Original Soundtrack

Gilbert films Chong as if he's a political prisoner like Nelson Mandela, when he's really just an older comic going to jail over a bad business decision.

Accomplished and well-intentioned to the extent that one wants to accentuate the positive, but the positive isn't the whole, alas; for every moment in the film that evokes classic neo-realism, there's another that's commonplace or overly sentimental.

Surprisingly clever, high-energy adventure (director Peter Berg should be proud).

I like a good flying, fire-breathing dragon as much as the next fellow. Beowulf's excesses, though, are such that the film ought to carry the subtitle …But This Is Ridiculous.

Playful, poetic, shocking, saddening, and ultimately gratifyingly and honestly big-hearted.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Home is a difficult film for its viewer, because none of the leads fall into the comfortable categories of film characters played by movie stars.

One of those novelistic independent films more concerned with atmosphere and character than the particularities of narrative, where contemplating the backstory is more satisfying than anything we see.

Although the science fiction element had the potential to drag the story down, it's kept to a minimum and left somewhat buried in techno jargon.

Cocaine Cowboys might work better as a miniseries for television; as it is, the two-hour running time is fatiguing and some of the later material gets lost in the onslaught.

We Own the Night can't sustain itself; as the stakes of the story get higher, Gray paints it in broader and broader strokes until there's almost nothing you can believe in it anymore.

The sweet, furry animals are witty and often funny, and while the physical comedy is simple, the main characters ultimately aren't.

A sweet, sunny, cinematic song of praise to simple '70s pleasures, Roll Bounce isn't any kind of life-changing picture, but it's breezy, good-hearted fun.

An amply entertaining tale of survival terror, fully realizing the epicness of Romero's vision by infecting every wide-angled overhead shot with as many computer-generated cadavers as possible, and bridging tense moments with a laugh-aloud, plucky wit.

Perhaps with an open and willing mind, you'll also see the vast difference between this wily consciousness experiment and, say, Rob Zombie's new box of schlocks.

The crazy fantasy world of this saga is plenty compelling and quirky.

Strikes me as more of a thesis piece than anything LaBute has put his name to thus far. Its characters don't seem to be people as much as they are stand-ins for ideas.

In this vibrant character study, newcomer Lázaro Ramos plays Francisco with an almost animal intensity.

The sequel to 2003's unexpected and rousing hit offers a lot of the same elements that made the original so enjoyable, but the humor doesn't have the same freshness.

If you subtracted from the story and style components recycled from landmark sci-fi films of Hollywood past, you’d be left with Will Smith wisecracking over a box of unformatted floppies. I, Unimpressed.

The pretentious title might be trying to make a statement about the new, fast-moving economy. It's also a weak reference to the first Wall Street. But mainly, no, it's just pretentious.

The music is catchy. The actors are likeable. It's all pleasant enough to watch but ultimately it's about as substantial as a pop song. Though it's unlikely to stay with you quite so long.

It's capable and strong direction that hold the audience through the final match, but in the end, it's Paul Bettany's world, and the rest of us are just happy to visit for an hour and a half.

As the phrase turns, it's better when things come off WITHOUT a hitch.

It's equal parts shivery and silly -- eyeball popping in slo-mo!

Overall, a modest but lovely achievement for Anderson, Moore, and Harrelson, and a family entertainment in the best senses of the words.

This one aims for bleak and hits it.

Comic-book enthusiasts can breathe a sigh of relief: Brett Ratner hasn't completely ruined the X-Men series a.k.a. "The Franchise that Bryan Singer Built."

That Jarhead is an impressive technical achievement is a given, but ultimately this picture is the last thing any war movie should be: innocuous.

Winslet deserves an Oscar for her amazing performance.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

The perfect antidote to the post-holiday blues. It's exciting, well-acted, touching, and genuine.

This is one movie that's guaranteed to linger in your mind after you leave the theater, whether you want it to or not.

Quantum, thanks to a deft blend of exotic escapism and bare-bones modernism, is more than strong enough to be judged on its own. In fact, it's the perfect Bond film.

Why is this movie so watchable? Four simple reasons. It's truly funny. It's truly scary. It's truly gruesome. And Samuel L. Jackson is the cool head who prevails (“You stick with me, you live”).

The film is ultimately so repetitive, un-enlightening and lacking in substance, even Drew Carey seems bored by the end when he asks, "When are you guys going to make the 'c*nt' documentary?"

Big Fish really is a big delight.

The sheer absurdity of the presented relationship is redeemed by a sort of surprise ending, but by the time it arrives, you wish it had come sooner, as the pain of viewing has already been interminably long.

Fun, fun, fun. [July/Aug 2003, p.26]

Farrell and Hayek are two beautiful people with absolutely no chemistry. Even when they're lying in bed together, they're so far apart that they might as well be in different movies.

It's just a spectacularly lazy movie that's content to trod the same well-worn ground as its predecessors.

Soderberg provides a cornucopia of fizzy, post–New Wave imagery, fitting for a picture that’s pretty much all about surfaces.

While basketball fans might have trouble recognizing the sport as it's played here, the games certainly aren't dull. Unfortunately, most of the off-court sequences are.

I have misgivings about Schreiber's use of the well-worn "I'll make you empathize with these Others, but first let's have laughs at their expense" approach, but eventually I was won over by his humane, moving road trip.

A slick, bloody, fast-paced, and ultimately enjoyable B-movie.

Best appreciated as a rather amusing farce called The John Malkovich Show, the movie's every scene is anchored, then stolen, by the commanding thespian's Alan act.

One casting wild card is the country singer Tim McGraw, and he's very solid in the role of Katie's horse-rancher dad, the kind of guy whose hard-headedness can't mask the size of his heart.

Scott doesn't bring much to the table as an action director, and his keen storytelling abilities go invisible here.

To call Towelhead exploitative is to miss the point. What made Towelhead the novel so extraordinary was the honesty in Jasira's adolescent narrative voice, the genuine way she misguidedly, but honestly, conflates the sexual attention she receives with the parental affection she really needs. With the film, Ball, though he drops the book's first person narration, is faithful to that voice.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

Nearly perfect in its own cotton-candy way.

Even if its premise weren't so achingly familiar, the film's bland humor and oddly conservative depiction of its central character, a flamboyant drag queen named Lola, would still make it seem like a museum piece.

Dennis Quaid is mostly lost at sea as Lawrence Wetherhold, the Carnegie Mellon lit professor; he apparently saw fit to tinker with his performance as filming went along, greeting us in some scenes as a noticeably swishy highbrow, while at other moments he's channeling the smiling, drunken menace of Nicholson's Jack Torrance.

Ledger turns in another stellar performance and Cornish is heartbreakingly good also in this well-crafted film. But once that first plunger is pushed, the surprises are few.

The interpersonal dynamics haven't been scripted out very thoughtfully, so as the final 20 minutes wind down, it becomes increasingly tough for Penn and his talented cast to mine humor from a story that mandates they actually play elimination rounds of poker.

One of the pleasures of the film is that the themes don't hit you over the head.

It's a brisk and lively getaway with genuine personality.

Touching.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

At the screening I attended, someone walked in wearing a shirt that read "I HEART BONGS," so that gives you a pretty good idea of the target audience. Maybe this time they will rouse themselves from the couch and make it possible for us to follow Harold and Kumar through more adventures.

Like the original, Iron Man 2 is a good time from start to finish.

This is one unmarked van you just might want to take a ride with.

A wildly creative amusement, thanks mostly to Campbell, whose weathered yet still-taking-care-of-business Elvis is alone worth the price of admission.

A sports flick that’s a worthy addition to the genre.

Under the clichéd spell of rock-and-roll promiscuity and pills popped, Seigner shows astonishing range as the detached superstar who still fixates on her ex-boyfriend and has mood swings like a manic-depressive on fast-forward.

Green, the first feature Coupland's written, doesn't really make any innovations to the Almost 30-Underachievers genre, but it's an endearing, solidly-crafted example.

Hey, remember “fun”? If you’re sick of the apocalypse and tortured anti-heroes, then you need to see Sherlock Holmes. It’s a blast from start to finish.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

A tart, funny, moderately over-the-top hijinks-and-snafus yarn.

Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

Duff is a charming heroine who carries the movie cheerfully, if not gracefully--the pratfalls come early and often.

All this stuff is enacted by a better-than-reliable cast (Griffin Dunne, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Roger Rees, and more), so Game 6 is never a bore. But it's not much more besides never a bore.

One-dimensional fluff piece.

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

Shame is a welcome reminder that sex is sometimes too ridiculous to take so seriously.