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.