One of the strongest arguments yet for making sequels illegal.

The brute force of Terminator 3 is relieved, I'm happy to say, by Claire Danes's winning performance as John Connor's reluctant accomplice (whom the production notes describe, not inaccurately, as an "unsuspecting veterinarian"); by many of the special effects, which don't seem obsolete at all, and, yes, by the sinister trix of the Terminatrix.

Rarely has so scary a thriller been so well made, and never has digital video -- by the English cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle -- been put to grittier use.

It's a movie devoted to showing it, shaking it and selling it with huge zest and self-delight, a movie that raises MTV-style dada to the status of superheated mama, even though, toward the end, it wears awfully thin rather than svelte.

How could a movie with such likable actors be so deeply dislikable?

The movie's real locus of anger must have been the director, Ang Lee, once he realized what an epic clod his computer wizards had wrought.

Like many dreams that enliven filmmakers' nights, this one derives from other, better films, though it does have a few clever twists.

Combines silly stuff about life in Los Angeles with buoyant energy, a couple of chases worthy of the Keystone Kops and quick-witted actors playing droll characters with obvious affection.

The perverse fascination of Jet Lag is watching two superb actors struggle with material that doesn't suit them.

None of it is enough, though, to save this glum drama from its schematic self.

Much of the action is interesting, and surprisingly well grounded in science...Yet the script works few variations on its basic idea until the climax, which is crazily out of scale -- the urban-traffic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust.

Certainly trashy, but, stripped of Mr. Diesel's services and directed by John Singleton, it's a no-go Yugo in muscle-car sheet metal.

Seduces us with its leisurely pace and felicitous details into believing that something miraculous is afoot in a mundane rural community.

In the entertainment culture that surrounds us, words like "harrowing," "anguishing," "unfathomable" or "horrifying" don't sell movie tickets. Capturing the Friedmans is all of these things and more.

Pays off in surprising ways, when love of music, and fame, plays second fiddle to love of family.

The best car commercial ever, an absolute triumph of product placement, and great fun as a movie in the bargain.

An undersea treasure all the same, and a prodigy of visual energy.

All that's missing is wit and humanity.

As long as this deity remains childish, materialistic and narcissistic, Jim's in his heaven and all's right with the world. It's when the story reaches for maturity, spirituality and altruism that the divine spark of comedy sputters and nearly goes out.

The explosively combative young hero, Liam (a brilliant performance by Martin Compston), has only the illusion of a fighting chance. Yet Sweet Sixteen is powerful because of the searing honesty with which it strips Liam of his illusions.

Blissfully funny, terrifically intelligent and tender when you least expect it to be.

In this second installment of the trilogy, lithe bodies endowed with superior brains do all sorts of spectacular things, but the movie has the dead soul of a video game.

His (Eddie Murphy's) performance in Daddy Day Care isn't bad. He's restrained, and even tender in some of the scenes he plays with the kids. But restraint is the last thing we want from a comic of his caliber. It's no fun at all.

Jeff Cronenweth did the lovely cinematography. It's the only element that improves on the original material.

Goes from good to great in 90 minutes, and then it's over, except that it's really not, because this small masterwork grows even deeper and more affecting as it takes up permanent residence in your memory.

Ambitious and uneven.

All the same, X2 and recent action adventures like it constitute a mutation in their own right: fast-paced, slow-witted movies in which the impact is the message; impersonal movies that deny any need for characterization; disjointed movies that make no apologies -- and pay no penalties -- for making no sense. Their special gift is giving little and getting a lot.

For the most part, though, Ms. Moncrieff has given us a portrait of a young woman with a luminous soul.

More to the point of this marvelous film, who knew there were kids as heroic, in their various ways, as these valiant super-spellers?

Didn't see through it, though I had a rough sense of what was coming, and didn't have all that much fun. I did enjoy the movie's cheerful preoccupation with style.

Every scene in this oppressive film has a theme or didactic purpose, but little life.

Not a pretty sight, any of it.

Entertaining when it's really lurid, and Gerard Depardieu is something to behold as the proprietor of a broken-down hotel. He's a spectacular ruin in his own right.

This flamboyantly operatic anti-war film takes getting used to, though it leaves you with memorable images of madness, both poetic and military.

One would have to be totally tone-deaf not to notice that the director, Andrew Davis, has inflicted a broad cartoon style on adult performers who are distinctly uncomfortable with it.

A magnificent documentary that flies us along with migratory birds on their intercontinental travels, it's the polar opposite -- North Pole, South Pole and all latitudes in between -- of modern feature films that rely on special effects.

I laughed myself silly through most of A Mighty Wind, and was pleasantly surprised when it took a turn toward genuine feeling near the end.

It's slapdash, crudely crafted and resolutely adolescent. And occasionally, though only occasionally, very funny.

Breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school.

If only there'd been a chance to contemplate the legend in blessed silence.

For all its seriousness, though, Levity struck me as pretentious and intractably lifeless.

Young audiences may welcome this movie, but girls, and boys, should want more.

Provides a reminder of the power of unadorned drama and language -- whole torrents of eloquent words -- in the service of a nifty idea.

Of the original and the remake, only one film feels authentic, and it's not The Good Thief.

Built from an alloy of absurdium and stupidium, with the latter, heavier element dominating the mix.

I loved this movie, and I wish it could be seen by all those kids who turn out every weekend for shoddy studio comedies that show them who they'd like to be. Raising Victor Vargas shows young lovers as they are.

An odd little thriller that celebrates, in order of importance, Mr. Duvall, tango and his real-life significant other, Luciana Pedraza, who makes her attractive debut as a screen actress and, yes, tango dancer.

I must confess that I was outsmarted by the ending, but by that time my brain had been bludgeoned into a state just north of stupor.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

All the same, it's a feat to find the lowest common denominator at 40,000 feet; View From the Top would be perfect as the first in-flight offering of the new Hooters airline.

This horror-free horror flick sent me wandering through my own memory warehouse, where, at every turn, I bumped into images from similar -- and mostly superior -- entertainments.

This comedy is harmless, too, when measured against the vast array of harms that the world has to offer. It's also stupid, strident, witless, pitifully inept and bad for what ails you.

Everything that was modest, soundly grounded and therefore horrifying about the 1971 rodentarama that starred Bruce Davison is now insistent, Grand-Guignol-intense and therefore shrug-offable when it isn't downright awful.

Aspiring to pure action -- several very long passages are wordless -- the movie ends up teetering on the brink of self-parody.

It's going to be a hit with libidinous boys, and their parents could do worse (see first review) than to watch the lavish, James Bondish gadgetry and cheerful anarchy of an action-adventure that's been made with all the finesse it needs, though not a jot more.

I'm still smiling as I recall Jess, the soccer star-to-be, standing behind her straitlaced mother in the kitchen and casually bouncing a head of lettuce on her knee.

Relevance can't rescue this would-be epic from the swamps of inertia, absurdity and sentimentality.

Everywhere in Nowhere in Africa, skill and art translate into vivid life.

A romantic comedy of grace notes and mini-epiphanies -- mini, that is, except for Ms. McDormand's Jane, who is memorable to the max.

If you go to see this sloppy sitcom, in which Mr. Martin plays a divorced, repressed lawyer named Peter Sanderson, do expect to be surprised, seduced and entertained by Queen Latifah.

To get to the beginning, one must first get through the end, which is almost literally unendurable.

Straightforward in form but surprisingly intricate.

Through it all, though, Kurt Russell gives Dark Blue a bleak integrity -- funny word, given the circumstances -- that almost serves as its redemption.

Unlike "Dead Man Walking" and many honorable dramas before it, "David Gale" has nothing coherent to say about capital punishment, or anything else. It's a dead film lurching.

Magnificent.

Like his (David Gordon Green's) debut feature of three years ago, the exquisite "George Washington," this new one has my heart, and I think it will have yours.

It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities.

A machine for killing time, and it does so fairly painlessly.

The movie isn't all bad, and it's sure to succeed with its target audience.

A film that tries constantly to amuse, but succeeds only fitfully.

Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about a movie that never got made, is more involving -- and heartbreaking -- than many movies that do get made.

Al Pacino is his own venue as yet another flamboyant, self-ironic, self-dramatizing, self-parodying, self-selfing quasi-Mephistopheles. His performance isn't very good, but it's big.

Designed as a disposable commodity, it's a film I'd dispose of with no further ado, except for what it says about minimum standards in a certain tacky niche of the movie business, as well as for what it suggests, in its lunkheaded way, about the perils that marriage may pose.

Has many more downs than ups, but this ragged action comedy, with Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn as mismatched buddies, rings some outrageously funny changes on a deadly serious genre of amateur video that began with Rodney King.

Even in the month of January, traditionally a time for movie lovers to expect the worst, this cheapo feature, directed by Shawn Levy, takes the stale cake for witlessness.

The finished film afflicted my own mind with an unwilling suspension of belief. I couldn't connect with it on any level, despite Sam Rockwell's terrific performance as an emotional desperado who wants only to be loved.

Everyone's work is heartfelt, heaven knows, but the script, by Mr. Hoffman's brother, Gordy Hoffman, gives the movie's star little but lugubriousness to play...eventually the whole thing seems to be running on fumes.

By the end, though, the production is engulfed by barely controlled frenzy -- all decor and no air, music as lo-cal ear candy, scenes as merchandise to be sold, people as two-dimensional props.

Astonishing visually and problematic dramatically.

The links and resonances remain largely abstract -- to understand them isn't necessarily to be moved by them -- while the individual dramas of those three lives are often stirring, and the three starring performances are unforgettable.

Finally seems like a bit of a con in its own right, but a marvelously smooth one.

(Morton's) character here is emotionally mute -- though Morvern speaks, she can't or won't reveal what's in her heart -- and her performance is brilliant from start to finish.

Manages to make its live actors sound -- and even sometimes look -- computer generated. This wan, sluggish comedy wouldn't pass muster as a premium-cable original, but here it is on the big screen.

Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.

The most elegantly crafted and confidently directed of all his (Cronenberg's) films, it's a calm, chilling portrait of a blighted soul and, just as calmly but quite stunningly, an evocation of the thought processes behind the blight.

Affecting but formulaic.

Edward Norton makes an art of self-containment. No contemporary actor gives less away to more effect, and he's at his closely held best in 25th Hour, a drama of redemption, directed by Spike Lee, that seldom rises to the level of his performance.

Casts a spell and then some -- a ringing testament to the power of motion pictures.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

A surprising, entirely beguiling little film.

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

Mr. Crystal underplays his role wisely and well, while Mr. De Niro parodies -- maybe the better word is pillages -- himself and his career with scary gusto.

Adaptation, like "Being John Malkovich" before it, is far from a well-made film, even on its own flaky terms. But it's a brave, sometimes brilliant one, with a phantasmagoric ending, full of love and hope, that defeats prose description. Never was an adaptation more original.

By turns intriguing, boring, frustrating, amazing and stirring, this is a tour de force that, necessarily, lacks dramatic force, but one that creates a dream state of seemingly limitless dimensions.

A movie of minimalist moments (Molly's tiniest gestures speak volumes) and lovely, almost holy tableaux.

An appallingly tedious Hanukkah comedy that must have bubbled up from the Porta Potti of his subconscious.

Unexpectedly thoughtful, as well as touching.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.