The material is hardly original, but the moment is affecting all the same.

It's sometimes exciting but rarely thrilling, a victory of formula over finesse.

More unfortunately still, the elements of the story fit poorly, like a Tucker decked out as a sexmobile.

A film that asks its audience to invest serious thought, and in return, bestows serious pleasure.

Go in with lowered expectations, and expect to have them dashed.

The great lesson of the film is that humor, honest feelings and genuine exuberance trump technique.

An absolutely thrilling recreation, in documentary style, of a now-legendary story.

It's a terrible life, and a terrible movie.

In the not-so-grand scheme of such things, Along Came Polly is certainly harmless, and occasionally very funny. It's just not clever enough to keep you engaged.

The energy is genuine, and the level of invention is remarkable, sustained as it is by Mr. Baseman's genially garish art, Timothy Bjoerklund's direction from a script by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner, and Nathan Lane's madly passionate performance as the canine who was famously born on the wrong end of a leash.

A singularly strange and affecting comedy.

Shows how a dedicated man ensured that great music could always be heard at its best.

A not-bad idea lurks inside this insipid story.

Something of a shambles -- a shambles about a shambles -- but bound for big success and deservedly so.

Looks splendid and commands respect, but leaves you wondering what essential something you missed. It's a worthy film at war with itself.

Lavishly produced -- overproduced, actually -- and persistently unexciting.

Clearly Mr. Altman was enthralled by the company's work process, an alchemy through which sweat and muscularity on the rehearsal-room floor become exquisite abstractions on stage. His pleasure is infectious.

A seasoned director might have known when to ask Ms. Theron to do less, or nothing at all; as things stand, she acts at every single moment. But what brave and ferocious acting she does.

The performances, under Mike Newell's direction, range from conventional (Ms. Roberts) to dreadful, and the script is as shallow as an old Cosmo cover story.

Haunting, troubling documentary.

Though the film is somber, it certainly commands one's attention, and for a while one's respect.

Very funny and surprisingly likable until it goes Hollywood.

The invisible wizard Peter Jackson makes use of every scene to show us the meaning of magnificence. Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.

Eye caviar that doesn't pretend to be much else.

Diane Keaton has the crucial role, and she makes the most of it.

The film has a surprisingly sweet spirit, and its co-stars respect the human core in their garish material; Mr. Kinnear, especially, has never been more likable.

Simultaneously beguiling and frustrating -- the product of an imagist and dramatist uncomfortably conjoined.

Too many mind and the story grows tedious or absurd. No mind and the spectacle suffices.

By turns chilling, mysterious and inspiring; sometimes it's all of those at once.

Magic suffuses this film -- performances that approach perfection, or achieve it, moments of exceptional grace as a troubled family plays out a contemporary version of a classic immigration saga, healing itself in the process.

A single seeing isn't enough to take in the eccentric marvels of The Triplets of Belleville, an animated feature by Sylvain Chomet that creates a visual language all its own.

I wanted to believe in Bad Santa. At least half of the time I did.

The only entertaining member of the cast is Terence Stamp.

Timeline has negative energy to burn. There's even less of it by the end than at the beginning.

Mr. Penn has been praised lavishly for his work in "Mystic River," in a role that was no reach for him at all, but this is one of the stand-out performances of his career, layered and exquisitely nuanced. And, remarkably, he's only one-third of a stellar ensemble.

An abomination, impure and simple.

Ms. Berry works hard in her role, generating some excitement in the course of her distress. But the story's convolutions can't cover a deficit of substance, or sense.

The film grows on you too, a later-stage version of "The Big Chill" that starts schematically and ends as a stirring celebration.

If you're able to take The Missing seriously, as I was not, you'll be impressed by its sweep and ambition. The most lasting impression it made on me was one of absurd overreaching.

Just as Aubrey's authority springs from skill and knowledge, so does the film's power. They don't make movies like this any more because few people know how to make them.

Gets to be dislikable in its glib feelgoodness. The movie's many excellent actors do too much acting with too little conviction in scenes that rush through perfunctory setups to deliver pat payoffs.

Who knew that one of Billie Holiday's most haunting songs was written in Budapest in the 1930s? I didn't until I saw Gloomy Sunday, a German film, shot in Hungary and directed by Rolf Schubel, that I enjoyed quite a lot, even though it's all over the map in more ways than one.

Smith is only a rogue computer program, but this morbidly dispiriting movie makes him sound like a prophet.

The book presented several special, perhaps even insuperable, problems for adaptation to the screen, and the movie, which was directed by Robert Benton from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, hasn't solved them.

A smart, suspenseful drama, starring Hayden Christensen, that honors its own factual roots as no movie about journalists has done since "All the President's Men."

A sudsless soap opera with human misery as a backdrop for romantic banality.

Mr. Gooding is out there in almost every scene, and the destruction of his once-promising career proceeds apace.

Calmly, almost serenely, Mr. Van Sant and his superb cinematographer, Harris Savides, reveal a vision of contemporary American youth quite unlike any other.

Downey is undone by a woefully amateurish production that, sadly and ironically, looks like a cheap TV show.

A remarkably dislikable film, long on atmosphere -- I admired Dion Beebe's brooding cinematography -- and desperately short on vitality.

This story of 12 manipulable -- or manipulative -- men and women rarely fails to hold your interest, even though much of it doesn't hold water.

Pieces of April would deserve your attention and respect even if all these colorful threads didn't come together into a luminous whole. But they do, beautifully and unaffectedly, because what's been on Mr. Hedges's mind is not just a comedy of alienation but a drama of acceptance and reconciliation.

The movie doesn't shed much light on their famously contentious marriage. Instead, it spreads gloom all around.

Glorifies its subject without quite knowing what to make of her. There's no question, though, about Ms. Blanchett in the title role. When she's on screen, the Fourth Estate flourishes.

None of this would work, of course, without stylish performances in the leads and Mr. Clooney and Ms. Zeta-Jones do themselves and their dubious characters proud.

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill inflicts intolerable cruelty on its characters, and on its audience -- though I'd like to believe that there is no mainstream audience for what has already been described, quite correctly, as the most violent movie ever released by an American studio.

Dopamine could do with a bit more of whatever hormone governs pacing, but Mr. Decena is a director with a future. He knows how to connect with his actors.

If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.

Mr. Franklin has always been easy with quicksilver moods -- and Mr. Washington is terrifically appealing as a fool for love who loses his cool as he learns about fear.

This joyous farce is a big, big deal, and Jack Black is nothing less than majestic as a scruffy, irreverent rocker passing himself off as a pedagogue in a private school.

A droll and affecting debut feature by Tom McCarthy.

There's no doubt, though, that The Rundown will be a crowd-pleaser, despite a forgettable title and lots of roughness around the production's edges. It's a comedy-adventure with a frivolous soul.

Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.

A visionary film with dramatic myopia.

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

A gothic thriller called Cold Creek Manor extrudes an 80-minute idea -- I may be overgenerous here -- into 118 minutes that feel like an eternity.

To enjoy what's enjoyable in The Fighting Temptations, you've got to take in the music and shut out the words -- not the lyrics of the wonderful songs, but the dialogue stuffed into actors' mouths.

Mr. McCanlies's style lurches between the lyrical, the fantastical (flashbacks to the uncles' youth) and the clumsily antic, and Mr. Osment's performance is woefully stiff and inexpressive.

It is, simply and stirringly, a kind of beau ideal of education, a vision of how the process can work at its best.

Cleverly conceived, skillfully made and performed with unflagging verve, it's a change of pace (slower) and scale (smaller) for Mr. Scott, the director of such pounding epics as "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down." Yet this intimate, intricate con about a couple of petty con men selling water filtration systems is also remote and forgettable in the end, a lapidary icicle.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

Squanders endless opportunities for sharp satire, keeping to a steady course of tame, toothless comedy, and wrapping things up with the kind of vapid ending "The Brady Bunch" would be proud to call its own.

The distance between tawdry and tedious can be amazingly short. It is traveled with Concorde speed in the arch Party Monster.

Goes down fighting, but it goes down just the same.

As the hilariously foul-mouthed, sweet-souled Dr. S, he (Wayans) slaps Marci X to life every time he's on screen.

Mr. Chan proves yet again that he has the virtuosic grace -- and goofiness -- of any of the great clowns of the silent era, and a complete refusal to abide by the laws of gravity. Do let us be clear, however, that the movie's plot, minus a few roundhouse kicks, is straight out of the Scooby-Doo playbook.

Moronic. idiotic. Insulting. Pathetic. But enough with the sweet talk.

Walks a fine line between bold indie film, with the attendant in-your-face roughness, and sodden Lifetime Original Movie.

By the climax, the adult has finally become a responsible though still charming citizen; the child has become age appropriate and, yes, even cuter. Tsunami swell of music. Roll the credits. Minus the charm, that pretty much sums up Uptown Girls.

Pirandello didn't have a patch on its complexities. Here's a popular entertainment with an eclectic soundtrack raising penetrating questions of identity in astonishing sequences that interweave live action with comic-book art.

A fine, heartfelt film, sometimes harrowing in its violence but blessedly free of pretension or bombast, even though it aspires to -- and achieves -- the stature of a classic Western.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

See The Magdalene Sisters for its own sake; the performances alone are inspirational. But see it too as an example of how powerful a feature film still can be in the hands of an impassioned filmmaker.

The good news about Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies and Gentlemen -- there's no bad news -- is that the man who made the sublimely superficial "A Man and a Woman" almost four decades ago has grown in wisdom and artistry, but hasn't lost his love of glossy surfaces.

This portrait of a failing marriage is one of the summer's great discoveries, and a marvel of mercurial intimacy.

A gross-out saga that sentient adults should avoid like the plague.

The worst movie -- all right, the worst allegedly major movie -- of our admittedly young century. More stupefying follies may come, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.

A surprise and a not-so-guilty pleasure.

For all its pictorial splendor and carefully calculated drama, this film misses greatness by a country mile.

The film's examination of confused sexuality, psychic scars and unsupportive parents never moves a step beyond cliche.

The thriller aspect of this work, happily, doesn't overshadow its real beauty -- its stark portrayal of the nightmare despair of aliens, hunted, on edge, prepared to risk all for a new start.

What MTV's "The Real World" would be like if its characters admitted they were simply aspiring actors. Garage Days is more clever, more compelling and genuine.

Like our two loose cannons with badges, the movie misses its target at least as often as it hits it.

The movie is, at times, funny enough to make you cry, and, when it's not, it moves nicely as a parody.

Succeeds the same way the original comic books did: by making the conflicts and dilemmas basic enough for a five-year-old, while giving the heroes and villains glamorous outfits and layers of complexity, to thicken the broth.

The effect is a haunting vision of neediness, age and rejection.

Without Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush, who play two rival pirate captains, "Pirates" might have gone straight to video. The two are a pleasure to watch, rescuing an otherwise forgettable film.