The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

A minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.

It's a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness. The plot is compromised, not resolved, by the pulling of a gun.

In all, Appaloosa is good as far as it goes--everything in it feels true--but I wish that Harris had pushed his ideas further.

Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone.

The funniest thing about The Women is that Mick Jagger is one of the producers.

The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling. It's an embarrassment.

Parts of Bangkok Dangerous, far from seeming unfamiliar or freshly stylized, offer nothing that you couldn't catch in an episode of "CSI."

Mister Foe flirts too often with the unlikely and the foolish, yet there is something to admire in the nerve of its reckless characters, so uneasy in their skins.

Menzel strings his sequences together with great affection and skill, but the movie, an absurdist picaresque, doesn't have much cumulative impact, and perhaps the hero is too much a lightweight to hold an epic together.

The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn't decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both.

One of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New Orleans.

Allen can be literal-minded about his thematic polarities, but, in this movie, he has put actors with first-class temperament on the screen, and his writing is both crisp and ambivalent: he works everything out with a stringent thoroughness that still allows room for surprise.

I can't help wishing that Chabrol would, just once, cast off his own good narrative manners--do away with the irritations of a film like A Girl Cut in Two, which is never more than semi-plausible, and arrange his passions, as the elderly Buñuel did in "That Obscure Object of Desire," into shameless, surreal anagrams of wit and lust.

The over-all effect is bizarre, daring you to be amused by something both brilliant and bristling with offense; if you sidle out at the end, feeling half guilty at what you just conspired in, then Stiller has trapped you precisely where he wants you.

The Spanish director Isabel Coixet works with candor, directness, and simplicity. She isn't afraid of lengthy scenes of the two actors just talking to each other, mixed with lavish but respectful attention to Cruz's body, especially her bare chest, which is treated as one of the wonders of all creation.

In Holdridge's movie there is as much to repel as there is to allure, and I cannot imagine leaving a screening of it in anything less than two minds.

The Dark Knight is hardly routine--it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder.

Ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.

As daft, outlandish, and speedy as it needs to be, and, for all its newfangled effects, touchingly old-fashioned in its reverence for the Jules Verne novel that inspired it.

Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It's by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer.

It’s Cluzet’s intense performance that makes this genre piece a heart-wrenching experience.

Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. WALL-E is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.

As nonsense goes, this has a certain gusto and glee, and what dismayed me was that Bekmambetov felt the need to spice it with the addition of coarsely chopped violence.

To be honest, I would be perfectly happy to walk with a zombie after ninety minutes of this; it would feel like light relief.

It's nothing we haven't seen done better before (by Paul Greengrass in the recent "Bourne Ultimatum," for instance), but it's good enough as kinetic entertainment.

An obscene, ridiculous, and occasionally very funny movie, and if it ever gets to the Middle East it will roil the falafel tables on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.

Made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show.