A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

A film that can be enjoyed by all ages and that insults no one's intelligence.

What's best about this script is the premise: a lawyer who doesn't lie.

A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.

Forceful and well-acted. Fear truly lives up to its title.

Entertainment made well enough that you can overlook its absurdities.

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.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

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

It was only natural that Allen would eventually have to make a Greek drama.

[Krishnamma] gives the story a dimension of pent-up anguish and melancholy.

Douglas Carter Beane's script is so wickedly clever (the title refers to an autographed photo the drag queens carry with them), you come away from this film with the impression that you've had a much better time than you've actually had.

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

Prince-Bythewood's movie is an occasionally clunky, mostly engaging coming out party for herself.

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

From both sides of the camera, Eastwood works the crowd better than he has in years.

Delightful but not serious suspense; audience hysteria -- and flame throwers guaranteed to scare the wits out of anyone who ever had a hot foot. [17 Jun 1954, p.37]

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

First Knight has all the elements of a crowd-pleaser.

Surely there's a middle ground between a Bolshevik-style elevation of history over individual emotion and a Hollywood-style idolization of emotion over impersonal history. Surely it's possible to avoid either deifying or demonizing history, but rather to seek an understanding of it - as a force that shapes private lives even as they shape it. For all its grandeur and beauty, Dr. Zhivago denies the complexity of that exchange.

Misses some creative opportunities to really drive this story home, but it's a naturally haunting story nonetheless.

Private Parts is a sparkling, nonstop entertainment written by Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko and directed by Betty Thomas, but sometimes it gives the impression that Stern is nothing short of Nobel Peace Prize material.

The ending is a disappointment, a perfunctory upbeat gesture.

About as warm, pleasing and inviting as a film about divorce, infidelity and terminal cancer can be.

Think of this as "Die Hard" in a suit, with an election coming up.

The script, by director Richard Kwietnioski and adapted from the Gilbert Adair novel, is poignant and well constructed.

A great date movie: engaging enough to grab your attention while it's unfolding, thought-provoking enough to fuel cafe and cocktail lounge chatter long after the closing credits roll.