It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.

George Clooney is all by himself among living leading men in making smarm pass triumphantly for charm. But the movie lacks momentum, clarity, a decent payoff, and a location with the personality of Vegas.

This one is a mess--a misshapen, mawkish tragicomedy bordering on self-parody. Its ambitions deserve respect, though.

Closer is in the same arena as Labute, and I found it sour and airless, with the feel of a mathematical proof. The acting is superb, though, with one key exception. Jude Law.

This is the most intoxicatingly beautiful martial arts picture I've ever seen.

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great.

I like my SpongeBob a little less lumbering, a little more free-associational, without that big, heavy anchor of a story structure to weigh him down.

A stupendously moving film. Neeson nails Kinsey's rock-hard decency and fragile ego, and Linney abets him beautifully: There isn't an actress in movies right now who's more simply alive.

For all its wizardry, The Incredibles isn't among my favorite animated movies. Weirdly enough, I think of it, instead, as one of my favorite live-action superhero pictures.

Less a classical narrative than an ingenious machine for inducing terror, rage, and paralyzing unease.

This slender, increasingly monotonous stalker plot feels ludicrously overintellectualized-full of hot air.

A warm, ingratiating, and fitfully hilarious epicurean road movie with a steady ache-an ache like a red-wine hangover.

I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.

Marathon of misery.

A collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

The movie has become a kind of highway-safety film for the rock community.

The comic high point in Shaun of the Dead comes when Lucy Davis, from the great BBC sitcom "The Office," teaches the band of survivors how to lurch like zombies so that they can pass among the undead.

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

Mr. 3000 is refreshing because it ends on a slightly sour, dissonant note: Stan wins, but not in the way he imagines. It's a nice change from the sports films that end with fists pumping and crowds going nuts.

A bit of a philosophical muddle, but the climactic tennis scenes are galvanically convincing, with some long, nerve-racking volleys. And the rest of the picture works as "Notting Hill" (1999) with balls--and rackets.

Takes off into the comic stratosphere in its first sequence and then slowly sinks to Earth, made logy by its noble means and Sayles' increasing inability to shoot anything but fat clots of undramatic talk in the most boring manner imaginable.

A thriller that isn't kinky isn't much of a thriller. And Cellular has the best kinky phone gimmick since "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948).

I wonder if anything could have made this misfire work.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.

I could quibble with the conventionally romantic ending and a couple of small but not-so-cosmetic alterations, but on the whole, this is just how I'd always imagined one of my favorite comic novels should look and sound.