It’s a high-spirited, swashbuckling lark driven by cartoonish special effects and an ingenious double-layered nostalgia that allows it to become a virtual mixtape of ‘70s hits that predate its intended audience: “Hooked on a Feeling,” “The Piña Colada Song,” “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” etc.

This is a sweet-tempered and small movie that’s not remotely trying to be hip.

It may bore you to death or blow your mind -- and it's long and convoluted enough to do both -- but it holds nothing back.

The performances are so plainspoken and direct that they manage to push the material beyond the confines of a mere social-problem tract -- as played by the cast, these characters aren't symbols of inner-city hardship, but people.

Behind the gloss of Vogue, a revealing look at work, creativity and two strong women

Isn't profound, but it is perceptive...it's a pile of fun.

It's a sensitive, slow-moving 19th century samurai drama that will appeal to that tiny cadre of filmgoers who savor the classic Japanese films of Mizoguchi and Inagaki.

There's an unkillable something at the heart of Septien, an artistic ambition that's not calculated or cynical, that feels homegrown American but is thoroughly resistant to totalitarian spectacle and the manufactured tides of mass opinion. There's no substitute for that.

Delightful screwball comedy.

tThere's life at the center of The Duchess, in the form of Keira Knightley. She carries the weight of the movie around her effortlessly.

With Love and Death on Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski makes a very pleasing feature debut.

Offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period.

If anything, it’s overstuffed with imagination and ideas, and when it comes to Hollywood movies I very much prefer that to the default setting. See it with an open mind, and you may well be surprised.

Not a great movie, but its daring and seriousness, its refusal to take refuge in the sort of irony that diminishes whatever it touches, its willingness to risk ludicrousness, may be elements that are necessary to achieve greatness.

Something of a gigantic goof, perpetrated by Penn and Herzog -- and the goofees included much of the entertainment media, people in the film business, the Scottish authorities and (I think) even some of the film's cast.

If The Way is sometimes shaggy and inelegant, and flirts with sentimentality the whole way through, I was finally overcome by its dignity and sincerity, and by the rough, rude, gorgeous magic of its journey.

Tamahori's Die Another Day is an imperfect Bond movie. But for every patch where it's dull and lifeless or just plain stupid, there are also sections that are significantly different from anything we've seen before in a Bond movie.

The Rum Diary is enjoyable enough, after its digressive, episodic and voyeuristic fashion. But neither Depp nor Robinson seems quite aware that Thompson's story - both in terms of his brief career in Puerto Rico and in terms of his life - was at least as much a story of tragedy and self-immolation as it was of genius.

Highly entertaining, from minute to minute, and its semi-mythical portrayal of Torontonian life is entirely charming. If you can stand massive doses of cute and clever, it's a fine use for your summer-movie dollar (whether or not that dollar has a funny old lady on it).

An intriguing blend of mainstream audience-pleaser and a more subtle, even intellectual agenda.

A movie comedy that manages to be consistently funny without becoming assaultive, and that remains consistently sweet-tempered even at its most macabre, isn't so common that we can refuse this one's modest pleasures.

Has the rare distinction of being slight and tragic at the same time.

Lets you indulge your taste for soapy heartache without leaving you feeling that you have to wash the bubbles out of your mouth.

Heart of Gold is a sweet, gentle picture, if not a particularly exhilarating one.

Noé isn't a kid (he'll turn 40 this year) but he's still young as a filmmaker; he may yet learn to control his desire to sear the audience's eyes out with a red-hot poker before he's even started telling a story.

It’s clearly a directorial accomplishment to assemble this level of acting talent in one movie and come away with something so – well, “bad” is not sufficient to capture the idiot glory of this motion picture.

If the ambiguity of these stories may frustrate some viewers – we long to be clearly told which of these people are good, if any, and which bad – that is the ambiguity of the world, the ambiguity addressed by Heineman’s Michoacán friend with the bandana and the AK-47.

So this is the greatest Shyamalan movie ever made by someone else, or maybe it’s Christopher Nolan’s best impression of what a Shyamalan movie ought to be like. No doubt that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I don’t entirely mean it that way.

Nearly as enjoyable as the original. Its not-so-secret weapon is the poised, calm performance of Yen, who somehow manages to play Ip as both character and archetype.

Something of an odd bird, a cross between a documentary, an art film and a personal reflection on aging.

Fast-moving and bloody, enjoyable even within its unapologetically generic limits. But McAvoy is its real secret weapon: With his X-ray blue eyes and lips that look bitten with anxiety, he has the miraculous ability to fool us into thinking there's really something at stake here.

Destroyer may position itself as a kind of redemption tale, but Kusama’s film is decidedly not feel-good. The music by Theodore Shapiro is deliberately set to jangle one’s nerves — it is definitely trying too hard — but like most of the film’s elements, it is just effective enough to create an impression.

A haunting and terrifying film. It's also a film of wonderful spaces and silences.

This is a performance of great subtlety, not a caustic caricature: Rat (Cusack) still believes in something, probably still in some Platonic ideal of poetic possibility.

Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives "OSS 117" its edge.

Often hilarious, although I found it so amped-up and overly broad that I was exhausted before the movie was over.

So beautiful to look at that it practically feels like a drug.

When Pirates of the Caribbean is good, it's certainly something to behold.

In essence, the movie is an ungainly but irresistible romantic-triangle comedy built around Rudd, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, with Nicholson rambling around its periphery like a demonic bear, part comic relief and part distraction.

A sweet little picture with a sense of humor as well as a mission. If money can't buy you love, at least it can buy you 90 minutes of warmth.

Weighed down with self-important messages, but it's also splashily opulent.

An engaging, well-made docu that admirably captures the singular importance of its subject.

While it would be accurate to call the film a comedy, the Duplasses are trying to wrestle something closer to Chekhov than to farce out of the lives of these semi-likable, highly recognizable people.

I'd put To's Exiled -- into the category of Hong Kong movies that even people who think they don't care about Hong Kong movies should see.

There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life -- it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago -- and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

Avenue Montaigne, is a delicious French pastry, tart and sweet, steeped in Parisian glamour.

Pretty good summer flick!

Deschanel is great, with her feral eyes and Joey Ramone shag haircut, and Ferrell is fantastic. This one's worth the effort to find.

It's by no means the greatest Altman, and not even a great Altman. And yet, even though it was written and conceived by Garrison Keillor -- as a fanciful fiction that draws on elements of his popular radio show -- it is somehow pure Altman.

This is a small film, but it moved me and made me angry. Both reactions, in this context, are worthwhile.

Given the choice between a movie that's better structured and only half as funny, I'd take The Spy Who Shagged Me (or its predecessor, for that matter) any day.

A deviously engineered parasite that'll crawl under your skin and live in your nervous system for a while if you give it half a chance.

Another way of reading a movie like this is that it channels our ancient hatred of nature while recognizing that it’s essentially nostalgic, and that the occasional hungry ursine cannot compete with the animal we really have reason to fear.

People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.

Total Recall is a doggone good time, with a bunch of nifty technical and visual flourishes, competently managed plot twists and elegant, Wachowski-esque action choreography that eventually becomes deadening because there's just too much of it and it's dialed up too high.

This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.

An essentially sweet-natured picture that doesn't go as far as it could.

Thrumming with anguish and erotic vitality, Eden paints a heartbreaking portrait of a newly affluent country (freed from dour priests, whiskey-soaked revolutionaries and shawl-clad women) afflicted with emotional growing pains.

I hate to criticize anybody for artistic ambition, but the problem with Babel isn't that it's a bad movie. It's a good movie, or, more accurately, it's several pieces of good movie, chopped up in service of a pretentious, portentous and slightly silly artistic vision.

CBGB has more of the original prankish punk spirit than it even recognizes.

As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.

Dry, wry, difficult-to-capture comedy.

Rubberneck immediately put me in mind of the classic slow burn of vintage thrillers like Fritz Lang’s “M” and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” although Karpovsky and co-writer Garth Donovan have cited all kinds of other things, from “Michael Clayton” to “Caché” to “Fatal Attraction.”

At its best the film is blissfully, anarchically funny, and director Steve Pink keeps the pace crackling.

Not among the most memorable works in this genre, but its deliberate lack of artifice and its stitched-together quality possess an undeniable power.

There are times when even a director's worst impulses aren't enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.

A deeply and disappointingly conventional picture masquerading as a free-spirited one.

Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.

A genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb.

Surrogates stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.

Pedestrian but appealing.

Hanna is almost a terrific movie, or a partly terrific one, but all its giddy, improvised wonder resolves into nothing more than a ruthless, symmetrical story about a murderous monster.

If you love actors, it's the sort of thing you might be tempted to see a second time, even after you've found out whodunit, just to examine more carefully the way the performers -- particularly the mesmerizing Cate Blanchett -- weave shining silken threads around what's essentially a pretty uninvolving narrative.

If a film can be both lush and cold, both erotic and cautious, that film is Lady Chatterley. It's a picture to honor and appreciate, not necessarily to love.

By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O.

It will change your understanding of the Vietnam era, even if you were alive then.

Part of what makes "ackass Number Two so frighteningly watchable -- even against your better judgment -- is the way the guys delight in one another's bumps, bangs and bruisings: First, they feel one another's pain; then they laugh like hell.

If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.

This is no art film, but Edel and Eichinger supply an action-packed, reasonably coherent account of youthful rock 'n' roll idealism run amok, and how it produced the craziest phenomenon of the crazy European far left.

It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.

Shifting his focus away from white kids seems to have done Clark good, because Wassup Rockers is the least sensationalistic, and hence the least moralistic, of his films. It's an enjoyable if haphazard picaresque.

It's amazingly beautiful and it tests your patience; both things are par for the course with Reygadas, After that, you've either surrendered to his idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, or you're out of there.

Secret Agent is the weirdest movie Hitchcock made: a First World War espionage thriller that lurches between suave levity and sobriety.

I kind of enjoyed Rise of the Planet of the Apes despite its evident silliness and the fact that nobody's likely to remember it three weeks from now.

With the genial pairing of Jennifer Aniston as a rich guy’s trophy wife and John Hawkes as a low-rent criminal at the center of a colorful cast and a pitch-perfect rendering of caste-divided Detroit, Life of Crime is a bittersweet end-of-summer surprise.

Pretty damned irresistible. What begins as a winning workout in a highly familiar genre -- the white-ethnic, big-city family comedy -- gradually gains both screwball momentum and emotional power, and delivers an unexpected punch by the time it reaches its climactic pileup of characters and revelations.

Despite his reliance on visual cliché, Trajkov mines a rich vein of morbid Slavic comedy, and his young characters have an appetite for adventure that's thoroughly unfake.

Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.

An entertaining botch of a movie.

Mirkin hits just the right note between naughty and raunchy.

I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling. I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all.

May not be entirely original or entirely successful, but it's definitely fun to watch.

Dramatic, massive in scale, at times very moving. And yet, somehow, it comes up short in terms of essential poetry.

As sad stories go, this is a happy one.

When We Were Kings, which was put together by Taylor Hackford and Leon Gast, is a patchy movie that fails to rise to the grace and articulation of its main attraction. But it has Ali, and when he's on-screen, that's enough.

Even if you think you know where Lucky You is headed, there's something pleasurable about watching it unfold, maybe chiefly because Hanson isn't trying too hard.

Even though there were moments in The Magic Flute when I wondered if Branagh hadn't truly gone off his rocker, I found its audacity exhilarating. [11 Sep 2006]

Terrifically acted, reassuringly formulaic, and moderately amusing.