The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

Pitch-perfect -- not just the most enjoyable movie of the year but the first (after Crumb) to get the tone of a certain strain of "underground" comic right.

An appropriately generic title for a droning, high-toned little heist picture with no dash and no raison d'être.

I half-admire its exquisite balancing act, squeezing laughs out of its leading lady's wardrobe, vocabulary, gestures, and cretinously oblivious Beverly Hills sense of entitlement, while simultaneously demonstrating her brilliance, sturdy ethics, and unflappable egalitarianism.

A riot of sleazy camera moves, bad acting, and maladroit profane dialogue.

What's a shock is the crudeness with which Spielberg fills the scenario in -- how he neuters his protagonist and short-circuits the inner workings of his human characters.

Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.

Fearless as these racers are, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for a movie that plays chicken and then swerves about a mile before the collision.

She's (Jolie) the most amazing special effect in movies. The best thing in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is a bungee-jumping ballet that Lara performs late at night in her mansion, soaring high and low in Japanese silk pajamas and with her hair pulled tightly back.

The movie is riotously entertaining, and with a big heart, too.

By the third big climax the audience started to get impatient with the movie's pointless zigs and zags.

I laughed -- but mostly to keep from getting depressed about the devolution of mainstream movies.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

A perfectly decent second-banana, Rob Schneider, has been over-optimistically elevated to the top of the bunch.

The movie made me laugh a lot anyway. It has a big, inventive cast of loons and a great premise.

The filmmakers have separated themselves from all the emotions of filmmaking except anger.

I found "Pearl Harbor" annoying but not excruciating—even at three hours, it's less assaultive than either "The Mummy Returns" or "Moulin Rouge."

Ends up leaving you starved for a single moment of unhyped emotion. You can barely see the characters for Luhrmann screaming.

Some people are finding it difficult to live with the idea that Kaleil could put his employees through hell, lose $60 million of other people's money, and wind up a movie star.

The director's knee-jerk anti-capitalism often sticks in my (white, well-fed) craw.

Simply a jolly good (k)night out.

A few billion 1s and 0s in search of a movie.

The most appalling comedy of the millennium after "Joe Dirt," which is so supernaturally terrible that it levitated me out of the theater after 40 minutes.

Quite likable -- even sometimes, with the squeezable Zellweger its principal object, lovable.

Even if you find the satire in Josie and the Pussycats self-serving, you might still love the movie, buy the soundtrack, and surrender to the hype. That's what happened to me.

This is an extraordinary -- and unfathomable -- piece of whitewashing: a true snow job.

I fear that the cozy domestic ending will leave audiences disappointed, convinced that they've seen something smaller and less momentous than they have.

The most enthralling movie of the year.

Con-artist caper comedies are almost always piffle, but there's a fierce, cruel competition at the heart of Heartbreakers that gives it some bite.

I must admit that I find those motifs -- and the Farrellys' universe in general -- more sweet than offensive, and I liked Say It Isn't So just so. So there.

He (Annaud) doesn't have a clue how to dramatize the romance. Fiennes, whose eyes are extremely close together, stares with a mixture of rage and longing at Weisz, whose eyes are extremely far apart, and the film turns into "The Dating Game" designed by Picasso.

It's scary to have to puzzle out a plot line scene by scene -- scary and exhilarating, at least for an hour.

Smoothly narrated and is packed with some wonderful quirks. Nonetheless, it could have taken more to heart the lovely paradox it reserves for Jessica: that we most become ourselves in our capacity to surprise ourselves.

It all adds up to one of the most brazen pieces of blame-shifting in exploitation-picture history.

You couldn't ask for a better pair of wild eyes than Jackson's.

It's only fitting that we emerge from Series 7 feeling both entertained and implicated.

A passably diverting entry in the Tarantino genre of splatter and yuks and soulfully bumbling hit men.

Rock (is) arguably the best comedian in America, as well as a curiously important cultural figure. It does not, however, make him an actor. In fact, it makes him something like the opposite of an actor. He does not produce lifelike gestures and emotions.

He's (Reeves) not as good as he was playing a menacing Georgia wife-beater in The Gift, but he's an awfully convincing jerk.

"The Silence of the Lambs," was morbid but also a rich and satisfying serial-killer thriller—a cunning weave of the fairy tale, the forensic, and the fetishistic. Hannibal, on the other hand, is simply a fat slab of sadism.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

Faithless is almost entirely insight-free. Bergman gives no indication that he understands the link between his alter ego's "retroactive jealousy" and compulsive womanizing.

The preview—if that's truly what it is—has a beginning, a middle, and an end; a host of good lines; and so many goofy surprises that it's hard to believe that there's anything more to see in the picture itself. I mean … they wouldn't show you the entire movie in the coming attraction, would they?

Fitfully haunting and impressive: a little less loitery and opaque and it might have been a classic.

Libel on one of the true visionaries of American business in the 20th century, a man unfairly demonized for doing what others strove to do but doing it faster and better.

Gives off the same vapor of impending tragedy—of a fate neither just nor unjust but ineffably, wrenchingly right.

There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.

You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.

I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.

Hanks and Zemeckis (and writer William Broyles Jr.) are so intent on making an epic of the spirit that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the comic, narcissistic side of their desert island fantasy. And so on simple, human terms, the picture gets all gummed up.

The picture has some fun slapstick set pieces and an inventively manic turn by Gibson.

I don't know what Pollock is supposed to be about, but as it stands—by default—it's the most blood-freezing Jewish-mother nightmare ever filmed. Pollock would give Woody Allen the willies.

The movie is barely sufferable.

Crowe gets to use his real Aussie voice, which works better with that poker face, and his underplaying at times has a psychotic intensity. But Ryan looks dopey when she's supposed to be stressed-out.

My first viewing left me dazzled but slightly confused; a second deeply impressed; a third rhapsodic. I wish I hadn't needed to rediagram it in my head to turn it into the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

What the film does have is coruscating anger, impish wit, and a breathtaking style.

Profoundly unnecessary -- cluttered, padded even at 90 minutes, indifferently narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and consistently misdirected by Ron Howard.

A fun ride. It's loud and obvious, but it's also the first high-tech, sci-fi thriller to think through some of the implications of cloning and capitalism.

The best American movie of the year. Has a subtext so powerful that it reaches out and pulls you under. Even when the surface is tranquil, you know in your guts what's at stake.

Dull-witted.

The movie is one dead, overcomposed scene after another.

A charming, hyper-energetic, and wittily self-aware action comedy about gorgeous girls.

Lordy, what a stinker.

Most haunting of all is Caan, who has never given a performance this layered.

Had enough grit to scratch its way through my cynical defenses, at least until its grotesque ending. But that capper isn't an aberration -- it's the logical extension of the movie's grandiose ambitions.

A giddy ballet in which the women whirl around a still, clueless man.

There's too much miserable reality and not a lot of transcendent dance, and the director, Stephen Daldry, doesn't cover the action from enough angles.

Has a nonsensical twist ending that almost wrecks it, but until then it has enough fast, hyperliterate venality to make it great fun.

Beat by beat, scene by scene, gorgeous...at times emotionally devastating.

One of the least entertaining satires ever made.

Has a soft windup, but along the way are some of the best-constructed slapstick sequences since "There's Something About Mary."

Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.

Belongs to that most promiscuous of genres -- the go-for-it sports melodrama -- but transcends it and then some.

Best in Show has an uproarious wild card in Fred Willard, who plays a hack commentator convinced that he's the most amusing fellow on television

At times the movie's crudeness has an eerie beauty, but the musical fantasies are a bewildering hash, and the protracted climax on death row is nearly unendurable.

Crowe's world is an open ecosystem --transcendentally open. This movie is his boombox held aloft.

A feminist sitcom tricked up with garish violence and garrulous hit men.

More entertaining than it needs to be.

Succeeds in dramatizing the resentment and guilt on all sides without just adding to the noise.

I also thrilled to identify with a male lead (Jon Favreau) who's as brilliant and crazy and self-absorbed as Woody Allen or Albert Brooks but whose self-absorption doesn't shape and color everything else in the movie.

Bizarrely depressing.

Serves up some of the most gruesomely misogynistic imagery in years, then ends with a bid for understanding. Are its makers so deluded that they think they're making the world a more compassionate place?

It's fun to see.

Went down like a slice of warm pecan pie topped with two scoops of Ben and Jerry's Bovinity Divinity.

I've shot people for less.

It proves that male action stars can triumph not only over space but, more important, over time.

Turns into a moronic, psycho-on-the-loose picture pretty quickly.

Gorgeously silly.

A hilarious, poignant, lovingly ironic celebration of (Tammy Faye Bakker's) rise and fall and her refusal to be broken.

There's a great, Hitchcockian suspense sequence in a bathtub.

It's a rich, impressive comic-book fantasy -- easily the summer's best "blockbuster."

Might be the most perversely agreeable stalker picture ever made.

This is an amazing movie.

So sniggeringly one-sided that the picture has no tension.

It's like a memorial service with killer special effects.

It's depressing that this first movie in years to dramatize the American Revolution has so little to do with the politics of secession and so much to do with pop-culture themes of vigilantism.

Not enough happens in it. And yet everything happens in it.

A disgusting piece of work; I still can't believe how much I loved it.