The best and worst of old school -- retro but stale. Frankenheimer, along with Ben Affleck, donates what cool there is.

Broadway-sized performances.

The sudden cranking of the volume that makes us jump, even if we're just watching a cow chew on its cud.

Too screwy to be really funny.

Offers insights from a host of former players.

It's not easy to wrench belly laughs out of contract killing, but Nine Yards does just that.

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

Generates very little heat.

Sad but still bouncy.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

When Annabel Chong sits in front of Gough Lewis' camera and complains about her need to have one of those normal everyday lives, you want to tell her that having intercourse on camera with more than 200 men is probably not the way to get to normal.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

Second-banana material.

The single worst movie David Lynch never made.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

The punch line isn't that funny.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

A wicked, light-headed first half dissolves into a bloody, head-bashing second half . The previews make it seem like a comedy. It isn't.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

An exceptionally funny science-fiction comedy.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

The author calls the movie "perfect" - reassurance that the director hasn't tried to pull any fast ones.

A fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

In Winona Ryder's case, Girl Interrupted is a showcase in which her brittle, angry portrait shows she has graduated from ingenue to actress.

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

Entertaining but predictable, and too long.

Hot-blooded.

An enervated adaptation of E.B. White's Stuart Little escapades.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

It's a more intelligent and dimensional epic than, say, "Anna and the King." Emperor is worth every single penny.

Spellbinding.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

A fun movie, with moments guaranteed to bring you close to tears. But, like most of Robbins' work, it's a cartoon, an emotional cartoon.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

If you buy the gross, it's surprisingly funny .

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

What's on the screen may not be a letter-perfect Mansfield Park, but something true to its spirit.

The only film sequels in history that just keep getting better.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

The success of Felicia's Journey lies in the work of the steady and here understated Hoskins, who gives one of his best performances, and young Cassidy, who displays a weary maturity even through her deer-in-the-headlights character.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.

By casting model-turned-actress (and his now-estranged wife) Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, Besson gives us an over-amped spectacle with an annoying, sometimes ridiculous cipher at its heart.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Painfully unfunny.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.

A meticulously assembled dramatization of a grossly controversial moment in TV history.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

What could have been an insightful, irresistible movie is instead a simple, self-contained fable, pleasing to look at but meaningless

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

If your name's on the marquee, chances are your agent's already dead.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Overlong, naggingly pretentious, more absurd than absurdist and a cruel, cruel bore.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.

There's enough sexual manic depression to justify house calls from Dr. Laura.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

Like a guy who finally gets what he wants, you just want to go home once it's over.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

Not as predictable as the rest of its ilk.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

The story of a trainer and three of his boxers trying to break away from the confines of a gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each story is strong, gripping in its own way. But you've heard them all before.

Often grating in its presentation.

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.