Far from his best work ("Le Placard," "Le Jaguar"), but even off-form Veber has its moments of inspiration and the movie is definitely worth seeing.

It's remarkably bright, funny and sweet for a film that wades through so much sleaze, though it can't escape all of the weirdness it worms through.

But the main reason you might find the film a bad trip is that its 30-year-old Holden Caulfield-type hero is so harrowingly unsympathetic: unpleasant, unappealing, self-pitying.

Charlize Theron, playing the one woman member of the team, handily steals the movie from the guys with her no-nonsense display of verve and vulnerability.

For the most part, the film is a chaotic blur of disconnected movement that re-creates the feeling of an unforgettably bad concert experience.

Exploitive while it pretends to be empathetic.

the film is well cast and the script is mostly faithful to the novel. Visually, it's probably the most accurate evocation of Hardy's world ever put on film. [01 Nov 1996]

The funniest film you'll see this year about a political assassination.

Every frame of the way, it's eminently clear that Primer is the work of an engineer, not a film- maker.

It's a sumptuous mood piece.

It lives up to the hype. Gladiator has its creaky moments, but it delivers a particular kind of visceral historical spectacle that movie audiences haven't seen in decades.

For about an hour, the movie is essentially Budweiser ad humor writ long ("Dude!") but about halfway through -- after enough members of the "Knocked Up"/"SuperBad" dude squad have all made their requisite cameos -- the movie shows it has a little heart.

Lee's control and storytelling flair have never seemed more assured and there are moments so powerful and thrilling we feel we're in the hands of a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers.

For all the misery and emotional mess of Snow Angels, Green finds resilience and hope in the kids and even in some of the grown-ups.

A mesmerizingly suspenseful drama.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

A delectable must-see.

A funny, freaky, fiendishly good flick that might just find a following beyond the standard cadre of horror fanatics.

A perfectly titled and thoroughly engaging -- if at times gleefully violent -- black comedy.

This is a film about brave women who left home as teenagers and have been on their own ever since. Now, nearing the end of that road, they face their inevitable decline with a cheerful vivacity.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

As the voice of Bolt, John Travolta does a fine job and Disney star Miley Cyrus is fine as well, but neither one can overcome the lack of personality in their scripted characters.

It works as a fascinating and often very funny character study/satire of a famous author, though it loses interest the harder it tries to be profound and falls apart completely toward the end.

A quietly, somberly effective American indie drama.

Unfortunately, the film assumes viewers have such a vast knowledge of Fellini's life and films that it's likely to play best to graduate film students.

(Bacon's) most believable, heart-wrenching and charismatic lead performance in many years.

The sum of all this is moderately rousing and deliciously irreverent in the Moore style, but not earthshaking as journalism, and devoid of anything that the average person doesn't already know from reading the newspaper.

Makes the translation with all its wit, incisive dialogue and eccentric characters intact, and then some.

There's no question where filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter's sympathy lies, but he makes his case leisurely, without hysteria and with much playful screen time devoted to the various interviewees' pet dogs.

Although obviously a stretched and lightly drawn caricature -- the cerebral writer is obsessed with his work, has metaphorical skin problems, can't have sex without weeping, etc. -- Cotard is real. Or as real a representation of an artist as we're likely to get in this biopic age.

A witty, literate, wryly sophisticated parable of American politics: just the kind of movie that Hollywood, in its search for the global audience, supposedly doesn't make anymore.

Before the film flails, like a balloon losing air into a terrible finale, it has the audacity to lay siege to just about every xenophobic bias possible. No one -- or country -- is safe in this comedy and for that alone it's admirable.

The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what may have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery.

It's smart, instructive political cinema that tackles complex issues of the globalization with practical examples and vivid images and presents its effects in immediate human terms.

Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.

Presents itself as tragedy with the insensitive Joe as its tragic hero, but Joe's fantasies of artistic rebellion and individualism have rotted into simple, solipsistic selfishness.

It's a real pleasure to find a movie as calm, measured and dead-on in its impact as Finding Neverland.

Plays largely like a performer's showpiece, with all the showboating and not so surprising character twists that entails, but Stettner comes out the other end with a pleasantly modest and satisfying revelation.

The colorful cultural history lesson in an idiosyncratic key is entertaining and informative, if a little indulgent in its adoration of Roth and his counter-car culture.

A true gem: perhaps the most thoroughly charming, and completely satisfying, independent film I've seen in the past two or three years.

Works best when it devotes itself to the small group of main characters featured on the show.

It's a gorgeously atmospheric, perfectly cast, beautifully crafted oater of the old school, made with heaps of integrity, no gimmicks and few concessions to the box office. Its only real flaw is that it strains a bit too hard to be a "classic" western.

The dark, rotting interiors and sunless winter skies create a festering atmosphere of unexpiated guilt as Kremer ponders the question of how a decent man is to navigate the rivers of hell.

An enigmatic but gorgeous film.

One of the American cinema's rare excursions into pure autobiography: the movie is Montiel's own coming-of-age story, with little or nothing disguised as fiction.

While most movies would sink under the weight of such eccentricity, pretentiousness and earnestness, Garden State is so full of wit and the genuine heart of characters that you can't help but care about what happens to them.

Most political films involving children are vicious or sentimental. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, set in 1970 when Brazil was under the military dictatorship of General Emilio Medici, is neither.

It's the warmest, most generous portrait of American hospitality you've seen from a European movie in some time.

It's pretty weird stuff, and filmmakers Keith Fulton and Luis Pepe embrace it with a layer of cinematic gauze that builds a pounding energy to this hypnotic twisting of rock legend.

Although set in England with a predominantly British cast, Death at a Funeral is no stiff-upper-lipped comedy, but a lean, mean, and often crude, farce.

The bad news is that Ferrell's modestly likable performance is the ONLY good thing about this misguided comedy that's so tiresomely written, badly acted by a stellar cast and ploddingly directed (by art-house whiz Marc Forster) that it just never quite gets off the ground.

Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson -- may have delivered their parts just a wee too convincingly. Their squabbling is so pitch perfect that most adult viewers likely will want to reach through the screen and start crackin' some heads.

The story is slim but the script is snappy and the film moves with a fluid rhythm that charges up to a rollercoaster pace.

Oddly fresh and naively chipper.

Even though he's strikingly played by Rockwell, Barris comes off as such a distasteful character and the silliness is so unrelenting that the movie wears you out. Long before it's over, you feel yourself reaching for that gong clapper.

Love. Lust. Recrimination. Jealousy. Resolution. This British female friendship melodrama has them all.

Director Fred Schepisi has done an admirable job of making all the characters and their various interests clear, and he gets a fine, deglamorized and convincing performance from Pfeiffer as Connery's love interest. [22 Dec 1990]

Philip Messina's claustrophobic sets and Cliff Martinez's elegantly creepy score add to the film's distinction and work off Clooney's performance and Soderbergh's staging to create an hypnotic spell and suggest a cosmos full of spiritual possibility.

The movie whips itself into being a surprisingly effective love story. [16 Aug 1991]

It assaults us with violence, brutality, sexual confusion and anarchy and has enough bruising, punishing humor to keep us laughing with relief.

A suspenseful, fascinating movie that milks the premise for all it's worth.

It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions. Green has an ego and a gift for stealing the spotlight with a wink and a grin. Yet his respect for the kids is genuine.

From the first voyeuristic peek into the ruthless world to the haunting, accusatory, unforgettable final image, it's a brilliant, stunning piece of work, perhaps not Assayas' best, but certainly his most fearless and impassioned.

Another worthy performance comes from Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.

MTV offers an airbrushed portrait that does nothing but perpetuate the myth of an "angelic" hoodlum.

The lack of stellar performances gradually becomes a virtue of the movie as we forget we're watching actors in roles, and Stone builds a documentarylike veracity that gives the saga of the trapped cops and their loved ones a riveting immediacy.

Ultimately a primer. Without actually putting it in direct terms, it proposes a revolutionary solution, not just in Argentina but everywhere that the corporate culture has failed its workers and their communities.

The kind of movie you're glad somebody had the guts to make, but you don't really want to endure.

There is a heart-warming familiarity to much of its 2 1/2-hour tale, but the surprises around its edges gives Zelary a refreshing perspective.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in Son of Rambow, a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will's private world), is its very conceit.

A smart, savvy and satisfying Hollywood comedy.

A delight, a vigorous, vibrant romantic comedy that mines emotional desperation and frustration for all its comic potential, but never at the expense of its temperamental heroine.

In a summer of comic book super-operas dense with psychological torment and sprawling well over two hours, the unpretentious efficiency of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is refreshing.

Never quite builds the compulsive emotional power it needs to be an unforgettable personal drama.

Don't expect scary from this trilogy of short horror films from a trio of Asia's most interesting directors, which are not so much extreme as twisted.

Its script is sharp, its dialogue is acerbic, its stars could hardly be better and, in its more sparkling moments, it exudes some of the flavor and charm of the later Hepburn-Tracy comedies.

The film's take on media and personal responsibility recalls Brian De Palma's faux Iraq documentary, "Redacted," here dropped into a homefront turned guerrilla war zone.

White Hunter, Black Heart may not be a spectacular success, but it contains Clint Eastwood's best work as an actor and director in years, and is worth seeing. [21 Sep 1990]

For such a harrowing portrait, Mandoki remains oddly distant but for a few scenes. He makes his points boldly when he should be making his points sting.

Develops its own unique charm.

Wholesome, warm and energetic -- if predictable.

The film is so explicit (endless swinging parties and porno scenes, more bouncing breasts than a Russ Meyer movie) that it finally becomes the thing it fears.

The film uses '70s rock songs especially well to establish mood and act as the bridge between sequences. Director Zanuck's use of actors is also hard to fault. She gets strong, no-nonsense supporting performances from Gregg Allman, Sam Elliott and Max Perlich; and Jason Patric and the always-reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh could not be more believable as the tragic, doomed, criminally naive lovers. [10 Jan 1992]

What makes this film truly chilling is the fact first-time feature filmmaker Scott Elliott and his writers somehow make every step of this descent harrowingly believable.

The sentiment smacks of "Titanic" for teens, but that doesn't make it any less valid, or the quietly told coda any less lovely.

It's part Jules Verne arms-race nightmare, part James Bond gadget war and part boy's own adventure.

As well-acted and well-directed as many of the individual scenes are, the movie itself is a mess. Lumet, who made the mistake of writing the script himself, apparently couldn't leave out anything that was in the book. It's a confusing jumble of characters and themes, with off-screen actions that crowd and diminish the movie's impact. [27 Apr 1990]

Ultimately, the movie is about finding contentment during tough times.

Crash can't rise from the ashes of its pessimism.

White Palace doesn't entirely work on this level (and is certainly no "Graduate"), but it carries a fascinating subtext. It dramatizes rejection of '80s values by a member of the '90s generation. Like several movies already released this year, it is a hopeful statement that the new decade will be - if not a return to the '60s - at least a clean break with the recent, shallow past. [19 Oct 1990]

The Pangs are at their best playing in the style sandbox, creating shivery imagery and eerie moods while exploring nothing deeper than irony and unease, as their climax so effectively demonstrates.

Terrifically fun entertainment; wonderfully shot and acted, instilled with spirit and life and able to woo us with its exhuberant freshness.

So Close is the film "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" dreams of being: sleek, silly, completely ridiculous and irresistible.

If you can forgive some woeful casting and a plot that is as creakingly thin as an old staircase, you can enjoy director Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

This is standard fare on the subject of father and son relations.

An absorbing but somber drama.

While their stories are well worth telling, first-time director Ruskin fails to shape his material into the dynamic film it might have been.

Ponderously plotted, poorly cast, visually undistinguished and devoid of any real verve or charm.