For 4,805 reviews, this publication has graded:
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68% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.6 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,899 out of 4805
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Mixed: 1,357 out of 4805
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Negative: 549 out of 4805
4,805
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Färberböck's sensual adaptation is a matter of fact embrace of the unconventional and dangerous during a terrible time. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
At 73, Chomsky seems to understand everything about power and aggression -- except, that is, its centrality to human nature. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
With him (Schwarzenegger), we return to a franchise we never knew we missed, surprisingly grateful for the star's generosity -- and evident pleasure -- in strapping on the old sunglasses and blasting adversaries to hell. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Where ''Rushmore'' surprises and delights with its spiky depiction of sprawling American idiosyncrasy, Tadpole's more urbane, less complicated charms are specifically made in New York City. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Slums of Beverly Hills has the kind of big heart, strong voice, vivid look, and original sense of humor many young artists -- particularly young female artists -- don't find until they're riper, and some never find at all. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
Makes shameless use of tried-and-true elements -- but it's hardly the same old song. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
That his (writer-director Tom McCarthy) strange, often funny film is so well-disciplined and deadpan refreshing is an achievement. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Although it shares a bitter interest in slum desperation with last year's Brazilian-underbelly docudrama ''City of God,'' Bus 174 pulls ahead, I think, by not confusing cinematic pizzazz with the content of misery. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The discreet stink of the bourgeoisie perfumes the wonderfully mordant, dry-eyed family saga, The Flower of Evil. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The already heavy-footed clomp of Grisham's declamatory storytelling style has been given an extra-thick-soled, wing-tipped, liberal-leaning, reality-tampering kick thanks to a screenplay credited to four writers. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Like its two predecessors, Scary Movie 3 is a hit-or-miss affair, but the gags that connect really connect. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The disarming comedic tone -- silly and novel in its lack of cynicism -- is driven by the fearless, cheerful unself-consciousness of Will Ferrell, a big man last seen streaking (all too unself-consciously) through ''Old School.'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Paradoxically, a movie that loses power the more you perceive what's actually going on in it. Laid end to end, the story is, to put it mildly, overwrought, fusing several cataclysms too many. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The son is obsessive and petulant, punishing and self-pitying, and by the time he gets to a talk with his hurt old mother, we understand why. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It's no insult to Tupac to say that he was gangsta rap's greatest matinee idol, or that he lived the part only too well. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The actress (Scarlett Johansson) gives a nearly silent performance, yet the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Every moment spent in the company of Keaton... is such a joy that the whole is more delightful than the sum of the formulaic ingredients. Keaton makes Nicholson bounce the way Shirley MacLaine once did in ''Terms of Endearment.'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Just because a scenario turns dark doesn't mean that it's convincing. House of Sand and Fog is artful until it lunges for Art. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
While each Yorkshire playmate-of-the-month warmly assesses her own undewy flesh, the movie gives off a happy vibe of appreciation -- for the dignity of the real Rylstone lot, the actresses who play them so lovingly, and the simple, flower-bed borders of the story. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The key to The Company is the quiet, focused rapture of Neve Campbell, who formally trained in ballet and performed all of her on-screen dances. The tranquil delight she takes in her body becomes its own eloquent form of acting. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
This is an origami story, really, about what a construction of chance the big world is. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Smart enough to hook us with the best thing it has going: Cedric the Entertainer's gruffly uproarious and lived-in performance as Eddie. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
By not trying too hard, this remake of a dumb movie has got spring in its step. The bounce is on us. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Sweaty and claustrophobic, exciting and horrifying at the same time, it never lets us forget we're riding aboard a giant, primitive tin can, a hunk of industrial machinery that mingles the illusion of omnipotence with the reality of a floating prison cell. [Director's Cut] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
A funny and intermittently sharp German satire that musters gentle nostalgia for East German communism while mocking the not-so-distant past. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The film excels in small scenes of cannily chosen Indian everydayness. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 83
The improvisations are a mixed bag -- Reed and Fox are surprisingly hilarious, while Roseanne is a shrieking horror show -- but the air of gentle play and a wistful sense that Brooklyn is some kind of lost Eden put this one up on the more structured "Smoke." -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
As is often the case with Lee, though, the film left me wishing for even more scenes of casual intimacy, still the most powerful way to carry any message. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Anderson brings compassion to his amused sense of yuppie tragicomedy, as he does to his nuanced understanding of Boston, the setting of this appealing fairy tale. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47] -
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Critic Score 83
Becomes a too-stately courtroom drama, with the Africans in the dock, the issue of slavery on trial at didactic length, and the top-billed Morgan Freeman as an abolitionist shunted to the sidelines with too little to do. [26 Jun 1998, p. 130] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The serious struggle in this lilting doc is told with an inviting light touch and a big heart. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Velvet Goldmine is no masterpiece, but, at its best, it's a ravishing rock dream. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Director Betty Thomas demonstrates her expertise at keeping indulgence at bay in even the coarsest of comic situations. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A lot of good actors have gone to work for the Coens and ended up looking like puppets, but Hanks is too clever for that. He knows that he's playing a concoction rather than a human being. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.'' -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It took long enough, but Disney has finally come up with an animated heroine who's a good role model and a funky, arresting personality at the same time. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Wide-ranging and beautifully edited -- it's a vivid evocation of a moment when even the ugliest guitar feedback could be taken as a serious political statement. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Negotiator, once it gets going (there's a rather lengthy prosaic setup), is a satisfyingly tense and booby-trapped thriller about the meeting of two relentless minds. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Yet S21, unlike many documentaries about the Nazi era, isn't a sickening panorama of brutality. Shot on video, it's quiet and intimate. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie is sensationally exciting, but its hey-kids-let s-put-on-a-war! story line plays like Beverly Hills, 90210 recast as a military-recruitment film for the Third Reich. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The Corporation has better manners and a longer fuse than ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' But the acerbic, sardonically illuminating Canadian documentary shares with its American cousin a certain bleak leftist glee in pursuit of its cause. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The film is held together by Clive Owen, who spends most of his time on screen hidden beneath matted hair and a scruffy beard but still has more aura than any actor around. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too. -
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Critic Score 83
The biggest problem with Lone Star is that colorful Charley Wade isn't the center of the movie -- it's bland Sam Deeds. Cooper isn't a compelling enough movie star to carry us along some of the film's more languid twists and turns. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Dark, funny, paranoid, arbitrary, humming with tamped-down eroticism and in love with all things weird: That's the good news. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Palmetto has a satisfyingly deceptive plot that ultimately takes one too many turns. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
An intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A documentary that digs deep inside this most revolutionary and tortured of punk quartets, it's hard not to feel that the Ramones, who never had a hit record, were the greatest band in 50 years to be stonewalled out of success. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?'' -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Best of all, a revisit with Jedi makes a viewer appreciate spectacle, presentation, mythology -- that, and the power of a bitchin' helmet to speak volumes in a language even an alien can understand. [Special Edition] -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The title Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a brain banger. But as sci-fi nomenclature goes, it's easy to read--no twistier, certainly, than "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The daffy, innately British joke that propels the cheeky U.K. comedy hit Shaun of the Dead is that although real zombies have risen up -- slacker wankers Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his best pal and roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), are too slack, wankerish, and blitheringly British to notice. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
When they're good, the Yes Men are astonishing, anarchic sights to behold. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with restraint. But then, the true romance in Shall We Dance? is more than personal. It's the spectacle of a nation learning to dance with itself. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Kevin Kline is sweetly befuddled as a good man caught between worlds, and Sigourney Weaver, as a hard, sexy adulteress, makes her wit sting. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Shows a beguiling aptitude for self-mockery in the pursuit of polemic. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
First-time writer-director Rodney Evans makes a ballsy leap into historical fantasia, with heartfelt fervor outrunning stray moments of artistic gawkiness. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The man has the right to retire, but what will he do with all the words in his head? -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The most spellbinding aspect of Bright Future is that the surrealism sustains its own squiddish logic, concluding with one of the most breathtaking film finales of the year. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Ong-Bak (taken from the name of the sacred statue) is delivered raw, with an on-the-fly compositional approach from director Prachya Pinkaew that includes dim lighting and jumbled editing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Notre Musique is Godard's post-9/11 statement, a meditation on how war emerges from the eternal, and hypocritical, duality of human perception -- the sense that it's always ''the other'' who dies. -
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Critic Score 83
The title refers to cheap fireworks that fizz before they flame out quietly, and that's what three Southwestern slackers do in this amiable heist movie-cum-road flick. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The denouement of the movie is as preposterously happy as a children's fairy tale. But the moral is ageless. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It says a lot for Joel Schumacher's Flawless that you can see the picture's high-concept heart a mile away and still be won over by it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The technique is impressive. But it would count for little if the human story -- of a magnetic, resourceful, and, in the way of all Rohmer heroines, articulate woman who was mistress to the Duke of Orleans -- weren't engrossing on its own dramatic terms. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Charms with its amalgam of absurdity, optimism, humor, and avuncular regard for the million small daily chores, rituals, suspicions, and courtesies of dwellers on even the sparsest spots on earth. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Allen draws a snappy, loose-limbed performance from Penn. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Lopez, for all her Latina-siren voluptuousness, has always projected a contained coolness, and this is the first movie in which it fully works for her. -
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Reviewed by
Ty Burr 83
Ang Lee's film of the Jane Austen novel slavishly follows the gospel according to Merchant Ivory, swooning over characters declaiming modestly while surrounded by topiary. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
With every detail in this clever peekaboo, the sly filmmaker dangles the possibility that fiction is fact and that Yvan and Charlotte are real -- or at least as real as the movies. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Gorgeous as the underwater life-forms are, the excitement of Aliens of the Deep comes from that most old-school, low-tech of elements: real human beings. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
It's in the brightly observed vignettes from mall-society life, captured with a low-key, on-the-run visual style, that Burman shows his best stuff and deadpan wit. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
To Winn-Dixie's great credit, both as a book and as a dandy, dignified movie, there's nothing condescendingly lesson-like in the wisdom India acquires. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
At times too movieish, yet Ashkenazi creates a memorable figure: a spy who operates - admirably - out of the most unyielding nationalist conviction, only to learn that he needs to let some of that conviction go. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The highest praise I can give to Mondovino is that it makes you want to sample every vintage it shows you. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A skillful and winning piece of honest booster portraiture. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, an ebullient sliver of a movie, follows a group of men and women in their early 20s, and for once the un-dialogue dialogue doesn't come off as an affectation. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Mysterious Skin dawdles more than it flows, but it comes alive whenever Araki, hovering between tragedy and voyeurism, reveals how sex can tear lives to pieces. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
How exceptional a film actor is Russell Crowe? So exceptional that in Cinderella Man, he makes a good boxing movie feel at times like a great, big picture. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
It's okay for a grown movie critic to admit she cried freely and with great feeling for more than half the movie, and grinned like a dork through the remainder. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
As long as it showcases the art of krump, underscoring the dancers with ominous hip-hop beats, Rize is such a vibrant eruption of motion and attitude that you can forgive the film for being disorganized and too skimpy on street-dance history. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Lila, played by Vahina Giocante, who resembles a sexed-up young Emma Thompson, is a teasing, 16-year-old blond baby doll with a gleam of perception beyond her years. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Beat That My Heart Skipped lacks the screw-loose existential vibrance of "Fingers," yet it teases out a romantic underside to the original I never quite knew was there. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Asif Kapadia's blazing feature debut, a gorgeously photographed saga with a fine sense of the way place shapes personality, has won numerous awards in the filmmaker's native Britain. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
New-era losers (the cast is a cheery scrum of relaxed kids, led by genuine whiz pitcher Sammi Kane Kraft in the role created by Tatum O'Neal) now include a rotten kid in a wheelchair. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study). -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Aristocrats has a lot of laughs, but as it giggles and blasphemes its way into areas not so far removed from the scandalous landscape of the Marquis de Sade, the movie, funny as it is, becomes exhausting and a bit depressing. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
It's trash, all right, but perfectly skewed trash -- a comedy that knows just how smart to be about just how dumb it is. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
A good measure of the movie's white-knuckle fun comes from Craven's old-hand familiarity with the way thrillers tick. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The interviews Bitton conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie draws us into complicity with someone who may be on the verge of insanity, but only because he's living with the unbearable. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
For one of those obstreperously original books that are themselves impossible to translate, Everything Is Illuminated is impressively well lit. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Bow Wow plays the skate-dance hero in a way that's never too cool to hide what an avid achiever the kid is, and he and his buddies converse in a fiendishly alert middle-class trash talk that keeps Roll Bounce jumping. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Yet precisely because this is by Roman Polanski, it's irresistible to read his sorrowful and seemingly classical take, from a filmmaker known as much for the schisms in his personal history as for the lurches in his work, as something much more personal and poignant. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Director Ira Sachs moves to the rhythms of his native Memphis, teasing emotional resonance out of geography. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Good Night, and Good Luck has a small-scale time-capsule fascination, yet its hermeticism is really a form of moral caution -- a way of keeping the issues neat, the liberal idealism untainted. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A mood of lush romantic decadence -- sleaze made enigmatic -- hovers over Where the Truth Lies, which has a score that works so hard to evoke "Vertigo" that it may leave you dizzy. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Kirkman is shrewd enough to coax a wistful performance out of pretty boy Kip Pardue. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The unusual intimacy and authenticity can't be faked: The cast is peppered with nonprofessionals, most notably Michal Bat Sheva Rand. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The true pleasures of Bound lie in the Wachowskis' inventive updated take on film noir traditions, sensuously realized by cinematographer Bill Pope ("Clueless"). -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
By the time Worf (Michael Dorn), knocking off a slimy attacker, growls a Schwarzeneggerish ''Assimilate this!'' we've already done so, with pleasure. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The archival footage is so breathtaking, the reminiscences so piquant, that even a stranger to dance can't help but be swept up by this peek into such exquisite, now vanished glamour. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too. -
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Critic Score 83
Mangold, who also wrote the script, has made a modern-day "Marty", a kitchen-sink drama that doesn't condescend to its characters. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Jarhead isn't overtly political, yet by evoking the almost surreal futility of men whose lust for victory through action is dashed, at every turn, by the tactics, terrain, and morality of the war they're in, it sets up a powerfully resonant echo of the one we're in today. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Has too many contrivances, but as an act of sinister staging, it proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A big, juicy, enjoyable wide-canvas biography with a handful of indelible moments. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Argues on behalf of the Darwinian theory that all of life imitates high school...But the argument is only halfhearted. Just Friends is much more interested in - and hilarious about - the small nostalgias of suburbia. -
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Critic Score 83
First Descent is not as eloquent, and thus not as electrifying, as Stacy Peralta's "Dogtown and Z-Boys" or "Riding Giants," the two jock docs it's clearly modeled after. No matter: Visually, MD Films offers up a sugar rush. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed). -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this oasis of romance amid the turmoil of Shanghai represents the way that Merchant and Ivory, for 40 years, saw themselves: as a sanctuary of calming, life-size taste in a movie culture grown coarse. It was often far from perfect, but I'll miss that sanctuary. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
He rarely allowed himself to be interviewed, but Henri Cartier-Bresson, here nearing 100, comes off as a marvelous, spritely, and companionable figure. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
James Westby's loving and self-aware homage to mouth-breathing boys who worship Wong Kar-Wai and can't talk to girls is the opposite of Tarantino-esque: It's Westby-ish, interspersing settings of biting social oafishness with spasms of film knowledge. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Young, wizened yet valiant, his voice still braying at the moon, delivers these songs of aging and loss as if caught in a beautiful dream of what lies waiting for him on the other side. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There's something invigorating about this unpretentious dog tale. And if a penguin drops by to promote his own movie product, well, there's room on the frozen continent for all. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
A helluva lot happens in 16 Blocks - an outrageous amount, really, along with a coda that deposits the audience squarely at a movieland finale. Who knew that looking both ways before crossing is where the real action is? -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A fascinating glimpse at the perils of ''exporting'' democracy. -
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Critic Score 83
For whatever reason, Michael Collins is a troublesome movie, a film about a religious war in which religion is almost entirely absent; a flick that gives us our kicks with thrillingly shot terroristic violence while paying lip service to pious antiviolence sentiments. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
This moving film explores the trauma of a Holocaust survivor with rare complexity. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm. -
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Critic Score 83
Surprisingly, given Lee's penchant for experimentation, there's nothing remotely innovative about this sober, often intensely moving exploration of a community's lingering grief and outrage -- just the usual talking heads, stock footage, montages of stills, and such. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Ice Age: The Meltdown blithely looks on the bright side of life, amassing a screen full of vultures to sing and dance ''Food Glorious Food'' and daring us not to get happy. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
There are times (and plenty of them) when Slither slops over from smart, affectionate homage into unmodulated frat goofiness as Gunn cannibalizes so many horror plots with such high spirits. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A fascinating and lovingly crafted musical documentary that nevertheless misunderstands its own subject. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Hard Candy is extreme - a battle of the sexes that glides from tricky to angry to shockingly ugly. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie, in a sense, is just like Bettie's photos: all glorious surface. The Notorious Bettie Page captures, with seductive finesse, how Bettie Page happened, yet what it leaves us with is the tantalizing enigma of a girl who couldn't truly be ''bad'' because she made sex divinely delicious. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Ineffably Australian and intriguingly (rather than annoyingly) artsy, Look Both Ways introduces a handful of people gobsmacked by life-changing crises, all of them trying to make sense of responsibility, mortality, and connection. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
Blessed with excellent turns by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, this feel-gooder revels in its hip-to-be-square hyperliteracy, and neatly exceeds its own PSA-ness, practically amounting to a black, preteen "Good Will Hunting." -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A gratifyingly clever, booby-trapped thriller that has enough fun and imagination and dash to more than justify its existence. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
It's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The visual and verbal jokes are as bouncy and multilevel (hip height for adults, knee-slap-size for kids) as we have come, no doubt selfishly, to expect from DreamWorks. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Gehry sketches and free-associates about how he's not nearly the menschy aw-shucks pussycat from Canada he appears to be but rather a wily, complicated L.A. lion. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The movie, which has the slightly glum perversity of early Chabrol, is a dream of betrayal, with the squirmiest attack-of-nature tableau since Willard. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
What sustains the film is the performers' belief in their shaggy-dog selves, which is more than just talent - it's faith. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
A breakneck inner-city odyssey of jump-cut shaky-cam suspense. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
The film is a furious full-court press, its subjects aflame with the kind of passion only youth can furnish. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
I'm not generally a big fan of tribute concerts, but this is a glorious exception. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Greggory anchors Gabrielle in manly bewilderment and rage, while Huppert claws the title character's way to self-awareness. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Good times and bum times, they've seen it all and they're still here. Lucky us. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The result is an unabashedly home-cooked homage to New York eccentricity. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The Illusionist looks rigorously styled and measured, and every one of Norton's postures feels chosen. Yet the interesting actor has chosen so thoughtfully that we're riveted. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
Beerfest panders shamelessly to the 15-year-old in this 30-year-old... without assuming he is a 15-year-old. It's R-rated puerility for actual immature grown-ups. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
Wahlberg, with shaggy hair and a pumped bod he wears more convincingly than any actor, plays Vince as a guy who truly doesn't expect to win. That makes his rib-bruising triumph all the more believable and touching. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable. -
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Reviewed by
Owen Gleiberman 83
If this is the sound of a new generation, then it may be the first generation cautious enough to embrace friendship as mightier than love. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
Ken Takakura, a great rain-creased oak of an actor, delivers a quietly massive performance. -
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Critic Score 83
Even when he looks like a complete dolt, Sutherland still comes off sympathetically, as a cool guy. -
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Reviewed by
Scott Brown 83
As a documentary, Jesus Camp could lose its haunted-house score and contrapuntal Air America refrains and still deliver its message: that, here and elsewhere, fundamentalism is no longer content with a separate peace. It wants the meat. -
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Reviewed by
Lisa Schwarzbaum 83
Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell. -
