Can't hold a candle to Robert Altman's 1992 comedy "The Player." Both films present themselves as knowing views of the movie business, but Mr. Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, really knew.

Joyless and largely witless sci-fi fantasy.

While the movie is dreadfully clumsy or sentimental around the edges, there's no denying the strength of Mr. Gibson's performance or the power of the savage combat, a 90-minute sequence that's even more graphic than the horrific firefight in Somalia in "Black Hawk Down."

It's very funny, terrifically lively and, considering how awful it might have been, surprisingly tender in its portrait of a young guy who learns sensitivity the hard way.

Against heavy odds, Mean Machine adds darker flavors to the plot without curdling it. Beneath the comic craziness is real craziness, and desperation. These goal-kicking, bone-crunching cons are both actors in and prisoners of their own horror show.

After missing the film on the small screen the first time around, I recently watched it on video, and can only conclude that my screen wasn't small enough.

Knows that it's junk and tries feebly to rejoice in its junkiness.

Nair's movie, far from being paste, is a string of small, exquisite gems.

Costner has never been further from the lively, engaging actor he can be, or at least once was.

If glum were good and bleak were best, Hart's War would be a standout.

Every so often a movie transcends stupidity and soars into the empyrean of true idiocy. John Q. is such a movie.

Five months after Sept. 11, the movie inevitably echoes those events, but in a loud and extremely cheesy way.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

At many points along the way I wanted to wash my hands of Scotland, PA., but then this sly, silly comedy got me smiling again.

I've been a Vanessa Redgrave fan for such a long time that I would have been happy to watch her beautifully weathered face without much happening around her.

There's nothing wrong with beguiling star turns, but I wish this one had been surrounded by more of a movie. Birthday Girl is a harmless trifle that makes 93 minutes go by as if they were hardly more than an hour and a half.

A provocative but eventually dislikable two-part film that dares us to dislike it.

I found this film deeply affecting as well. It has a gravity that's independent of technique, and an engaging spirit that's enhanced by flashes of comedy.

James Caviezel makes us care more about that innocent romantic, Edmond Dantes, than we may care to care about the rest of the picture, which entertains in fits and starts, with startling ruptures in tone.

Movies like this have been around forever too. They're a normal condition of winter's doldrums, which, in the fullness of time, will pass.

Snow Dogs isn't subtle, to say the least, but it's a serviceable city-slicker-in-the-frozen-sticks comedy for kids and undemanding adults.

This is a woman's work in the best sense -- empathetic, inferentially erotic and delicately intuitive, as well as fiercely intelligent.

It's a movie at war with itself. The first half, more or less, is witty about California culture, or the lack of it, in a "Clueless" kind of way, which is a very good way.

If only Brotherhood of the Wolf had the wit and grace to match its exceptional physical beauty.

Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

Halle Berry is something else as Leticia Musgrove, the widow of an inmate who's just been executed by Hank and his crew, and that something else is commandingly passionate.

A wickedly astute and beautiful comedy of manners-cum-murder mystery, it's too dense, and occasionally confusing, to grasp fully the first time around. How lucky, then, that it's also too much fun to see just once.

Ali nails its subject's anger and courage, but not his lilt; his swaggering boasts but not his sly self-irony; his power but not his grace; and his inner turmoil but not the outward joyousness that has made us come to love him.