Its overall impact is soothing and reassuring without being overtly manipulative, propagandistic or flag-waving.

A warm exception to coming-of-age stories that accent the tacky and vulgar aspects of adolescent awakening.

Forget "Raising Helen" and "The Notebook," this is the movie summer's most touching young romance.

Doesn't completely work on its own terms, mainly because its romantic casting just doesn't spark: It doesn't make us fall in love with its lovers.

In the best tradition of Annaud's work, Two Brothers works as an engrossing outdoor adventure and quasi-documentary.

It's a much more interesting and engrossing film than its somewhat nefarious reputation may indicate -- though, granted, elements of it are very hard to take, and it finally leaves you feeling pretty down and out.

For a film that uses race, class and sexual stereotypes as the starting point, this is disappointingly skin deep.

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.

It may not be original, but it's often shamelessly funny and more clever than I expected. Not much, mind you, but enough to catch me off guard with a few surprise throws.

As well made, entertaining and seductive a showcase for Hanks as it is, the movie doesn't have a magical impact and doesn't stay with you. And while you're watching it, there's always some slight annoyance, inconsistency or motivational-lapse to slap your face in almost every scene.

Effective piece of election-year propaganda.

Hodges cuts the film like a diamond, but it's just an exercise in cut glass, an impressive surface that only looks tough.

The script keeps to the point, the performances sparkle with originality, the direction of Jean-François Pouliot mostly has the right touch and the film ultimately generates some of the distinctively eccentric appeal of a classic Ealing Studio comedy of the 1950s.

Tells a light-hearted fictional story and creates a maze of imaginative animation and special effects to illustrate how the heavier thoughts of the science apply to the everyday world.

Istanbul-born director Ferzan Ozpetek has outdone himself with this wise and ruminative mystery about memory, unfulfillment and yearning.

It's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie.

The film's creepier moments are pathetically weak, and its thematic update fails to attain the minimal credibility that even a wild farce needs to sustain itself.

This isn't a movie, it's a marketing ploy. Would you like a plush Garfield toy with that popcorn?

If you're sick of the gross-out gags and sex jokes of contemporary teen comedy, this defiant blast of idiosyncratic individuality just could be your tonic.

This free-flowing film certainly hits the high points as it flips around its talking-head celebrity sound bites at warp speed.

Though it's hardly as uplifting or inspiring, it's hard not to appreciate these driven men who know they've found their calling when they start to anagram in their dreams.

In many ways this is an extraordinary movie: there's probably never been such a portrait of a major star in the grip of old age.

Potter 3 is, in its heart of hearts, a teenage angst movie...Cuaron has done a masterful job of bringing off this shift in the Potter paradigm without disrupting any disruption in the established style of the series and without any pandering concessions to the teen-movie genre.

The live camel birth (shown in all of its excruciating beauty) is enthralling, and the cultural details, however staged, provide a vivid window into a world that is fast disappearing.

Too short to tell the whole story. It is, however, a fast-paced, highly enjoyable and provocative introduction.

Several of the special-effects sequences -- a Tokyo hailstorm, a system of tornadoes ripping through L.A. (and tearing up the Hollywood sign), a tidal wave breaking on the East Side and washing through the canyons of Manhattan -- are just dandy.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Mario Van Peebles, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father, illuminates the soul of a man driven by a belief in himself and a love for his community.