The picture might have been a pop classic if it had stayed near the level of impudence that it reaches at its best. But about midway as Eddie has a crisis of confidence, and when Eddie locks his jaw and sets forth to become a purified man of integrity, the joy goes out of Newman's performance, which (despite the efforts of a lot of good actors) is the only life in the movie, except for a brief, startling performance by the 25-year-old black actor Forest Whitaker as a pool shark called Amos.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

Plenty of shrewd commercial calculation went into concocting the right sugar coating for this story of an 11-year-old girl's painful maturation, but chemistry seems right. Laurice Elehwany's script neatly handles a number of details but on larger matters falls into predictable patterns.

This Australia film - the pictorial re-creation of a late-Victorian novel - shows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy.

The film isn't just about the widow -- it's about family, community, America, and Christian love. But Benton's gentle, nostalgic presentation muffles this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it's an encrusted gentility.

To judge by the fashions, In Fabric is set in the nineteen-seventies. And, to judge by its visual and aural manners, it might as well have been made then, so reverent is Strickland’s thirst for the period, with its soft-core-porno tropes and its throbbing horror flicks. If anything, this antiquated air makes the film a little too arch and over-concocted for its own good.

At times, the cutting shifts from the hasty to the impatient to the borderline epileptic, and, while never doubting Scorsese’s ardor for the Stones, I got the distinct impression of a style in search of a subject.

I don't believe that anyone will have much trouble seeing what's wrong with the picture, but it's one of those bad movies that you remember with a smile a year later. [9 September 2002, p. 162]

We get one lovely, cheering sequence of a trashed room putting itself in order, like the untidy nursery in "Mary Poppins," but the rest of the magic here feels randomly grabbed at.

As a tribute to the work that journalists do, Civil War feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions.

The movie is often absorbing, and skillfully played, but, along with its snarling hero, it doesn’t have much time for ordinary folk. By the end, like Marianne, we are left gasping for air.

A competent (often overrated) thriller by John Huston about a group of crooks who plan a jewel robbery and how their characters determine the results.

The plot material isn't as strong as in the first two movies--if anything, it feels a bit desperate--but the anti-Disney joke blunderbuss remains in good working order.

Has a slapdash feeling to it.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.

Naive yet powerful.

The picture doesn't come together and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments --especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee'Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt).

The crud and petty desperation of The Cooler is enjoyable as atmosphere, and the movie is passionate. [12 January 2004, p. 86]

The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non-sad.

That the story is true (and based on an expertly written book by Jonathan Harr) doesn't make A Civil Action any more satisfying dramatically -- there's a streak of obviousness in the moral melodrama that dampens one's interest.

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

There are simply too many characters to get a handle on, and the sheer proliferation of special effects offers Singer a license so unfettered that most of the mutants act not according to their natures but purely on the ground of what, at that juncture, looks most groovy. [12 May 2003, p. 82]

The Interpreter is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness--about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls--is at once laudable and vaporous.

The boyfriend, one Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a Brit rocker and professional sex god, turns out to be the best thing in the movie.

A thin but well-shot suspense melodrama, kept from collapsing by the suggestiveness and intensity that the director, Jacques Tourneur, pours on.

Yet, for all its skill, Public Enemies is not quite a great movie. There’s something missing--a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.