Caine makes Hampton's too-literary narration work by playing it as an inner dialogue: It's the best performance of narration I've ever heard. It makes you want to hear Caine read the whole book--or read anything.

I can't think of a movie this long that has left me so starved for a movie.

There are a lot of stale -- and nefarious -- clichés in 8 Mile, but most of the time they're overwhelmed by the pulsing, grinding, hopped-up camerawork and the soulful star turn of Eminem.

I wish it were as much fun as its prospectus. The truth is that The Truth About Charlie gets increasingly tiresome.

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you.

Pure misery.

The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.

Schrader is like a reformed addict who isn't even honest enough to show what once gave him pleasure. He's the most dangerous kind of crusader. In Auto Focus, he makes you hate sex and movies equally.

Something appalling about the way he turns to the camera with a look of sorrow: Michael Moore as a suffering Christ. It's an insult to his own movie, which at its considerable best transcends his thuggish personality.

I found it exquisite. In part I responded out of sheer amazement: I've never seen anything like the sequences in which Sandler, in his boxy, sea-blue suit, charges around his warehouse to the rhythm of Brion's harsh drums.

It more or less works.

I'm at a loss to account for how OFF this film is -- how a movie can seem so conscientiously earnest yet so creepily exploitive. It's like a Christmas stocking over a crematory.

A too-pat but very funny comedy.

Most love stories are bland and generalized. This one takes you deep inside the dance.

A halfway-smart thriller.

Igby Goes Down got a reaction from me: I think it's the movie of the year. I squirmed, I laughed a lot.

That City by the Sea isn't laughed off the screen is testament to Caton-Jones' attention to actors and to some tightly written scenes.

The premise cries out for take-no-prisoners, Terry-Southern-style sick humor; it gets instead a lot of clunky, self-congratulatory in-jokes, and Pacino is left to ham in a vacuum.

The film is visually worked out to within an inch of its life, but after 15 minutes you can see where it's going, and along the way there are no surprises.

That's what these sequences feel like -- a sensual uproar. They almost make this small, unresolved little movie feel mythic.

A wee, breezy thing with painterly cinematography (by Jean Yves Escoffier) and with actors who are mostly fun to watch. It sails by in 103 minutes and the clunky stuff isn't painful, which makes a change from LaBute's usual grueling studies in human callousness and depravity.

The German reserve and Italian extroversion are in just the right balance. The movie exists on a tantalizing border -- and I don't mean Switzerland.

What's left is a wan and impersonal whodunnit -- a movie that never gets into your blood.

The movie gets funnier and less obvious as it goes along, and Zooey Deschanel is a hoot as a disdainfully bored co-worker who ritually insults the zombie chain-store shoppers -- but what is The Good Girl saying, exactly?

Full Frontal could not be more opaque. I honestly don't have a clue what it's about; it went completely over my head.

As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

A breezy hoot, and it's gorgeous to look at.

Mike Myers is like a rich 12-year-old who rents out F.A.O. Schwartz, upends every toy in under two hours, and brings in strippers. He can get away with this privileged romp because he grooves on what he does in a way that none of his contemporaries -- can comprehend.