Face/Off wouldn't work without two great actors, and it doesn't always work with them. But their gifts justify the whole loony enterprise.

A true killing comedy would require a great deal more sophistication than first-time writer-director Peter Duncan brings to the party. He hasn't made a black comedy, really; it's more like a black spoof.

It can't compare to what might have been: a full-scale performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as an Irish raging bull--a rebel with a cause. There are still traces of greatness in what he attempts, and it's more than enough to make the movie worth a lingering look.

I wanted to be transported by this movie; I wasn't quite. But I respect it.

In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.

Inspirationalism wafts off the screen in little perfumed puffs.

The work of an obsessive who has developed a light touch--though some of his more outright themes and pronouncements can be heavy-going.

Mangold never ventures beyond the obvious. We're set up with righteous anger against the liberal establishment and then fobbed off with goombah melodramatics. The film should be called Cop Out.

In a confused world, this is a movie with answers.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.

What's weird about subUrbia is that Linklater's zoned-out technique is wedded to Bogosian's in-your-face power-rant oratory. The result is like local anesthesia--you can see the incisions, but you can't feel them.

Instead of the cat-and-mouse cogitations and psych-outs one might rightly expect from this high concept, we're fobbed off with a lot of sub-Die Hard theatrics and stinko plotting.

G.I. Jane is liberated, all right--from good acting and a good story.

In The Game, Fincher pulls back from the total gross-out but sustains a tone of aggravated anxiety. Hitchcock could have done this material and still made its perversities pleasurable.

The Lost World is a smoother, scarier ride than its predecessor, with twice as many dinosaurs twice as well designed eating twice as many people...But he's not particularly playful with his terrors here, and that's a disappointment coming from a filmmaker who can mix scares and laughs the way no one else ever has.

Some directors can profit from the strictures of a strong narrative, but, for Linklater, the conventionality of The Newton Boys works against the glide of his free-floating style.

[The movie's subject] sounds like great movie material, but the film, except in flashes, doesn't do it justice.

Cuaron is a special talent, and, as botched as Great Expectations often is, it's the kind of failure that deserves an audience--if only to experience Cuaron's way of seeing, which is at its best in the early parts of this film.

Watching this film is a little bit like getting mauled and tickled at the same time. The filmmakers have given the whole shebang a hefty levity, and that's not easy to accomplish in a full-scale disaster movie.

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive--not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives.

In U-Turn Stone is reaching for the pulp without the politics. He's trying for noir as ritual dance. But Stone is too frenzied a filmmaker to keep the dance steps simple.

Even though The Devil's Own reportedly cost close to $100 million, it comes across as a sleek, medium-grade character study occasionally punctuated by gunfire. If this is what $100 million buys these days, can $200-million movies be very far off?

Bean represents a dismal dumbing-down of a very bright creation. Is nothing sacred?

The entire film takes its cue from Cage's spritzes and jags; it's a delirious performance in a delirious landscape.

What makes the claptrap in Starship Troopers so flabbergasting is that it's monumentally scaled.

The Saint exists almost entirely as a vehicle for Kilmer's quick-change smarty-pants swagger, and it's inconceivable without him. He's great fun to watch--a squirish master thief with a wide streak of lewdness.

The entire remake has been dumb-dumbed by John Hughes, who wrote the script and produced.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.