I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

Howard might be a major actor. His DJay, though, is a major character in search of a major author.

McKellen's actions are queerly unpredictable (pun intended), but every plot other twist is portentously foreshadowed.

Given all its World War II references and parodies, the best audience for Valiant would be addled, octogenarian ex-RAF pilots in the old folks' home.

Like a lot of Gilliam's movies it's too overloaded--antic, indulgent, overdesigned--to get off the ground for more than a minute or two at a stretch.

Turns out to be semi-enjoyable, semi-tacky retelling/updating of the old Elizabeth Bathory legend.

Passable--just.

Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.

"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead.

It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust.

Full Frontal could not be more opaque. I honestly don't have a clue what it's about; it went completely over my head.

I don't know if Howard had fun directing, writing, and starring in this thing; but he had to have gotten more masochistic pleasure out of it than the audience does.

So vanilla yet so transcendentally sleazy that its target audience seems to be pubescent girls and dirty old priests.

Planet of the Apes has been designed and photographed (by Phillipe Rousselot) with real artistry, but in all the ways that matter it's hack work.

A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.

You couldn't ask for a better pair of wild eyes than Jackson's.

The strands in High Crimes don't coalesce. Those red herrings somehow take over the picture; the thing itself turns into a giant red herring.

I've shot people for less.

Less a rounded narrative than a pair of suggestive -- and unresolved -- exercises.

A movie about a man forced to stop thinking of himself as the center of the universe ends up feeling suffocatingly self-centered.

A piece of exploitive schlock.

The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag.

I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.

There isn't a mummy at the center of The Mummy, exactly, but a mutating Industrial Light and Magic Special Effect.

I'd like to recommend it, but it's too silly. On the plus side, it's ravishingly well directed by Antonia Bird.

Howard and his writers are so in love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't feature film critics discussing their movie.