The Farrellys have set themselves the awesome task of arguing passionately for the non-importance of appearance while at the same time making relentless sport of it. The happy news is that they pull it off: In Shallow Hal, they've contrived a deeply humanist gross-out comedy.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

Doesn’t have the warmth of the Toy Story pictures, but it still boasts a very entertaining slapstick-farce structure and some neat hairy, oozy, tendrilly creatures.

No wonder Hawke was so hot to pass the script onto Linklater. He's superb, by the way.

The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.

Much of K-Pax consists of Spacey grinning like Stevie Wonder behind sunglasses, -- taking dippy steps, and bobbing his head as if attached to an invisible Walkman.

Intimacy doesn’t answer the question, which makes it all the more tantalizing: This is an emotional puzzle movie.

A melodrama in which the clichés prove more lethal than the bullets.

There's no dramatic trajectory here at all.

One of the most inspired cases of the medium embodying the message ever captured on celluloid.

A movie about a man forced to stop thinking of himself as the center of the universe ends up feeling suffocatingly self-centered.

Levinson must think he's on safe ground morally by keeping Bandits bloodless, as if the absence of carnage somehow makes kidnapping and armed robbery wholesome.

A rollicking, comic-book Robin Hood plot and more furiously entertaining fight scenes than the ones in Ang Lee's solemn martial-arts art movie.

Mulholland Drive isn't a "puzzle" like "Memento," in which the pieces (sort of) fit together. There are some pieces here that will never fit -- except maybe in Lynch's unconscious. And yet -- and yet -- this distinctly Hollywood nightmare makes a deeper kind of sense.

It's a measure of Brooks' stature that he survives the self-sabotage and comes through with his most engaging performance in years.

If nothing else, Training Day is a gorgeous pedestal for Denzel Washington.

This is lovely, momentous piffle.

The movie has an intriguing wild card in Bess Armstrong as an ex-prostitute turned Zen masseuse. I'm not sure if she's meant to be brilliantly evolved or an idiot -- or if the actress is really good or really, really terrible. But her chemistry with Forster is terrific.

The movie is a big, noisy mess, with a howler at its center: Overrouged psychiatrist Michael Douglas.

A marvelously nasty revenge comedy.

Toward the end of Hardball, the story takes a jolting turn from heartwarming to tear-jerking that people might find cruelly manipulative. Perhaps under normal circumstances, I would too. But these are not normal circumstances, and instead of put off, I was completely undone.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

A scruffy delight, a movie with the happiest sort of family values.

Most of all, I enjoyed the picture's subtext, which is that Smith has become so sensitized to Internet abuse -- that the cathartic climax consists of tracking down bellicose posters (all of whom turn out to be adolescent dweebs) and pummeling the crap out of them.

It's evidently important to Allen to work, work, work, but he's starting to make his movies by rote instead of passion. Could he handle -- psychologically -- a year or two off? Could he afford -- creatively -- to keep grinding them out?

Probably the most horrifying stuff I've seen all week.

The final illuminations (people have demons, a mind is a terrible thing to lose) are a poor return on nearly two hours of ear-buckling, eye-stabbing incoherence.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.