But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.

Marginally romantic and only the tiniest bit thrilling.

An art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.

You'd have thought, in his infinite wisdom, the Lord would at least send stinkers like this direct to video.

Gripping, and it's moving, but it isn't particularly subtle. There's a strong thread of tabloid drama running through its core -- but at least it's sensationalistic storytelling with a heart.

So full of winning performances and so disarmingly uncynical in its affection for its characters, it manages to leave you with a Texas-size grin on your face anyway.

There's no buildup, just emotional peak after emotional peak.

One of the most exciting Hollywood action films in years, and the best Vietnam movie since "Apocalypse Now."

An intermittently engaging thriller.

Walking out of the theater, I felt so bereft that I couldn't speak. And it doesn't hurt any less thinking about the movie now, as I write this.

Features one of the rare complex portraits of a therapist.

It doesn't take Rea long to decide that he's more interested in extending his record for Longest Acting Career Sustained on One Expression, and he's back to his baggy-eyed, hangdog look.

By no means a great movie...the movie is most liable to rekindle warm gratitude for all the pleasure he gave us.

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

A landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

It remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.

If you're dragged to the theater to be someone's not-dumb date, pack a crossword and a light pen. It'll be the only puzzle worth solving.

It's thrilling to see something this profane, mythic and, most of all, not bored with life, love and the possibilities of cinema.

A leaden exercise in what can go wrong when movies attempt to explore mysterious forces with dated special effects and easy symbolism...a soggy mess.

Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

A movie that wants to be "Speed" so badly that it runs roughshod over the essentials, including a decent script.

Far from unwatchable. It's not a good movie but at least, on its own schlocky terms, the story makes sense (which is a lot more than you can say for "The Sixth Sense").

As The Muse chugs along, it becomes more apparent how tired and pointless it is.

Enough flickers of Jay Ward's gloriously subversive sensibility to make it watchable, but it also has enough lengthy stretches of pure triteness to make it easy to skip altogether.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

An uninspired, recycled Mafia gags caper.

The penalties for drug trafficking in Thailand are very, very stiff. If there were any justice in the world, the penalties for saddling fine actors with terrible dialogue would be even stiffer.

Mechanical plot that seems dull even before it laboriously clanks and screeches into motion.

It's not a full-on go-for-broke love letter to rock 'n' roll or a broad, joyous spoof, but something stuck awkwardly in between.

It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.

Mystery Men is supposed to be an action comedy, but there isn't nearly enough of either.

A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.

Surprising as it sounds, as far as examinations of trust, loyalty and identity go, the big metal dude's story winds up far more satisfying than the plodding Kubrick opus any day of the week.

Because the movie never fully engages us, it never quite manages to allay our queasiness about watching the boy's distress.

A flinty and deeply enjoyable little comedy. There's genius in its absurdity.

You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.

So genuinely, viciously funny you can't help laughing -- even when you feel really bad about yourself for doing so.

Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.

The most inventive and genuinely frightening horror movie to appear in years.

As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.

A movie where style and craft are fatally confused with substance, and where almost no effort is made to make the characters seem like believable people.

I'd appreciate toilet humor more if it weren't so often so unimaginative.

Assayas' triumph here is in making sense of confusion and emotional drift -- bringing his characters gently forward into life, and making the film feel full and rounded while still resisting easy resolution.

An urban epic, a noisy, swirling, flawed, hilarious, witty, tender, violent, questionable train wreck.

A movie that's dazzling as you watch it and immediately unsatisfying afterward.

Beneath the veneer of fake dicks and fart jokes, it's really a righteous paean to saying whatever the hell you want.

It's a concept not without its sweet appeal -- if only it were a little wittier, I might actually be convinced.

Isn't the worst film in the world, but its vision of reality seems so stylized, so fake, that I came out of it wondering whether it has the slightest idea what it's talking about.

Potente pumps strong and true from the first frame to the last.

It all seems calculated to churn up excitement, a promise that there's lots of dazzle, glamour and intrigue to come. An Ideal Husband actually does deliver all those things, but mostly in a pleasurably understated way -- no need for the noisy signals.

It's almost as lame-brained as any Hollywood blockbuster, if prettier and more pretentious.

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.

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind.

The first half of the film leisurely examines the deterioration and possible salvation of the soul in a once-glorious, rapidly disintegrating landscape. (His Alaska is full of closed factories, wandering tourists and strip mines.) The second half, with its contrived setup and its individual journeys of self-discovery (harvesting kelp and building fires), is artificial and sadly undermines all that's gone before.

It's an English movie doing its best to masquerade as the shallowest kind of Hollywood romantic comedy, as if somewhere along the way someone had made a calculated supposition that would be the only kind of comedy American audiences would buy.

Between the 12th floor and the 14th floor, boredom awaits!

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

The 76-year-old Zeffirelli will make many more movies, but Tea With Mussolini has the unmistakable feeling of a personal testament. Its sunny disposition and modest wit are well-suited to the genial temper of this born entertainer.

What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics.

Pusher begins as a fairly standard ’90s crime saga, almost an open imitation of Quentin Tarantino... But something happens on the way to the film’s haunting and ambiguous conclusion.

As stupefyng as Idle Hands is while the title appendage is still attached to Anton, it goes into a whole other realm of godawfulness when the demon digits take off on their own.

It's too bad that the glamour wears off about halfway through Entrapment, when it stops being a movie about art heists and starts being one about stealing (ho-hum) money.

Cronenberg, who both wrote and directed, is out to fool you -- to give you just enough information to let you figure out what's going on, and then bluff you out of using it. The movie, in other words, is a game itself.

Wickedly funny, an ode to youthful overachievers that's as blackhearted as "Rushmore" was gently sentimental.

Almost always a pleasure to watch. Pushing Tin is, essentially, a western -- Cusack really is the fastest gun in the West.

The movie starts out as a sweet piece of hardcore pie, full of energy and "Repo Man"-esque satire, but ultimately deteriorates into a Percodan-flavored "Afterschool Special."

Liman's buoyant direction is almost enough to make one forgive the film its heavily appropriated plot (including its groaner of a punchline).

There are some indignities that Drew Barrymore should never be made to suffer.

A dismally unfunny comedy, but that's not what's depressing about it. Worse by far is the palpable desperation in Goldie Hawn's performance.

Southern Gothic lite -- with a bite.

What really elevates it, though, is the film's sharp wit and tender heart, both of which are conveyed beautifully by the fresh-faced cast.

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.

Bleach out the colors, backdate the wardrobes, insert Gary Cooper and Rosalind Russell and you've got one of Frank Capra's lesser films.

One of the most mindless, shamelessly lazy films.

Though it definitely requires a strong stomach, Ravenous may be the best cannibal tragicomedy ever made.

The fault isn't all in the chemistry, or lack thereof. The more pressing conundrum of "Forces" is that writer Marc Lawrence paints his lead character into a morally ambiguous corner.

An electrically paced and brilliantly acted death-row thriller.

So finely crafted, so alive with wonderful acting and an extraordinary commitment to realism that most audiences will be happy to surrender themselves to its improbable ride.

Pretty much everything in this high-space war yarn has been swiped from other, better movies.

The surprise of the movie is that it actually does have a talented director and star. It doesn't begin to make up for the low quality of the story or the numerous other unfortunate elements, but it does suggest little flashes of something that, with more thought, might actually have been somewhat interesting.

Ramis has made a fleet, unself-conscious, eminently enjoyable picture, where one-liners carom merrily like stray bullets, and where there's casual ease, like the drape of a sharpster's trousers, in the rapport between its two stars.

The dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory -- and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at.

It's supposed to be visually exciting, but the result is more like a corpse-strewn Gap khakis ad than a triumph of technique. At least, based on the film's grainy texture and amber lighting, it's nice to know that the guy who shot every porn movie released in the '70s appears to be working again.

The plots vary widely in their watchability -- from mildly amusing to stupefyingly godawful.

Almost as degrading as any unmarked video you can buy in the back alleys of Manila, and, in its pseudo-significance and arty pretension, it's a lot less honest. I'm heartily sorry I had to poison an entire evening with it.

Its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized... It's not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart.

Despite all their seamed stockings and Wonder Bras, the Reagan High girls are as far removed from their sexuality as Jawbreaker is from comedy.

When the enchanted crab is the most appealing character in a movie, you know you're in some serious metaphoric hot water.

What really saves She’s All That from being just another why-good-heavens-you’re-beautiful piece of piffle, however, is the way its lesser elements sparkle. The romantic comedy may be predictable, but director Iscove’s over-the-top parody of faux celebrity — by way of Lillard’s gleefully preening, partying, getting-sensitive-for-the-camera ex-Real Worlder — is a hoot.

The most dispiriting thing about Gloria is that it's further evidence that filmmakers just don't know what to do with Sharon Stone.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.

Affliction is a harsh experience, but the harshness isn't a matter of punishing the audience or of the director, Schrader, showing off his toughness: That unvarnished harshness is the very essence of the material.

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

Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it.

It's as if the whole movie's on Prozac, only in this case the antidepressants are cuteness and romance.