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.