I like Mr. Gordon-Levitt a lot as an actor, and I wish him only the best in his future work as a filmmaker. There is, however, the matter of this particular movie, an overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.

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.

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.

Morgan Spurlock has come up with a terrific idea-a movie about product placements that depends completely on product placements for its financing.

The movie, directed by Rupert Goold, is a conventional but perfectly serviceable showcase for its star, who sets the whole thing on fire every time she launches into a Garland classic in her own voice.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

This drama, directed by Pablo Trapero, is violent, and unconcerned with easy redemption. That makes it hard to watch, though fascinating for its performances, and the bottomless corruption it portrays.

Immensely winning and visually arresting adaptation of Gaiman's 1998 fantasy.

Talladega Nights may be brash, unbridled, even unhinged, but its cornpone humor is rich in parody, and its craftsmanship is superb -- smart writing, shrewd direction, precisely calibrated performances (whether the calibration calls for delicacy or broad-gauge burlesque), inventive language, inspired silliness and all-but-flawless timing.

Set ablaze by a startling performance by Laura Dern, it's a stark, often disturbing look at the ramifications of betrayal.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

Josephine Decker’s screen version of the Jandy Nelson young-adult novel, which was adapted by the author, embraces excess as an expression of the heroine’s mercurial spirit. Sometimes the results are excessively excessive, blithely blissed-out or simply clichéd. Mostly, though, they’re funny, affecting and endearing. And daring.

The laughs, the warmth, the love and the faith-based fellowship die out in the dismal final act.

The actor and his director may be addressing the oldest subject in drama. But they manage to give it a new twist nonetheless.

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

Grungily stylish and often funny, at least for a while, though all of the caveats and contradictions that apply to Tarantino films apply here: One man's--or boy's--stylization is another's profane, unrelenting and tedious brutality.

Middleton and Spinney are all about the medium’s first megawatt celebrity, who is a slippery enough subject all by himself, one treated here with affection, intelligence and an unadoring tone that’s intriguing all by itself.

A high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived.

This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

A movie you can't readily get out of your head.

They have also stripped out almost all complexity, reducing the drama to a familiar match between good and evil. You've heard all the speeches before; only the nouns have been changed. [23 Dec 1993, p.A9]

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

The buddies’ adventures are dramatized delightfully, but a case could be made for the movie’s real subject being scenery, and, particularly, water.

It's the set pieces that mark the film as something special: swirling crowds at a casino in the opening sequence, Trudy's ordeal by trailer trash, a climactic firefight that puts lightning in the shade. Very impure, and very impressive.

Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.

The film is long and sometimes harrowing, but also enthralling.

My advice to "Hobbit" fans is not only to see this one, but to see it as I did, in 3-D projected at the normal rate of 24 frames per second. The film will also be shown in what's called High Frame Rate 3-D, at 48 frames a second, but that made the last installment look more like video than a regular movie. Smaug is scary enough without a turbo boost.