For 8,147 reviews, this publication has graded:
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49% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
| 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: 3,632 out of 8147
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Mixed: 3,387 out of 8147
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Negative: 1,128 out of 8147
8,147
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
No-Good Men, Foolish Choices and Birth on the Floor of a Wal-Mart. -
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Reviewed by
Dave Kehr 40
The film is as synthetic as a rubber rose, but it is all but indistinguishable from the organically grown, bred-in-Britain article. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Never quite comes to dramatic or comic life. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
Obtuse, prettily decorative comedy. Characters burst gaily into song when, as often happens, they don't have anything better to do. -
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Reviewed by
Dave Kehr 40
In short, here is a VH1 "Behind the Music" special that has something a little more special behind it: music that didn't sell many records but helped change a nation. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
No question, the film's best special effect is Ms. Garner, especially when she's in costume. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
The main thing this "Assault" lacks is a point. Mr. Carpenter's film still resonates with the political paranoia and social unease of the era. Mr. Carpenter's cynical refusal to distinguish clearly between good guys and bad guys feels freshly unsettling, while Mr. Richet's "modernization" looks like something we've seen a hundred times before. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
The always charismatic Ice Cube makes Are We There Yet? watchable. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
That Mr. De Niro and especially Miss Fanning manage to register through all this murk is a testament to their talent, which however squandered does nonetheless shine. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
Isn't much when it comes to either deliberate or inadvertent humor. But it does have a few amusing moments. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
There's not much sense to the plot. But the film makers' blunderbuss approach to humor, with visual and verbal jokes coming in profusion and scattering high and low, guarantees that just about every funnybone is bound to be hit, some more than once. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Struggles from beginning to end to capture the charm and ebullience of "Four Weddings." The new movie's effort is mostly unsuccessful, but there are bright spots. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
A "slam, bam, thank you, ma'am" trifle of an entertainment. -
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Critic Score 40
Aggressive heartwarmer, which turns out to be much more of a heartburner. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Tilda Swinton is the Angel Gabriel, adding a touch of high-class celestial cross-dressing to this overblown, overlong attempt - which falls just short of success - to make a movie dumber than "Van Helsing." -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
It succeeds as a reasonably smart no-brainer. If you've ever had a yen to relive the third grade, this must be the next best thing. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
So oblivious to genre that it occupies its own special stylistic niche, if you can imagine such a thing as a romantic revenge farce. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
Directed by Dwight Little of "Free Willy 2," and written by onetime high school classmates, Wayne Beach and David Hodgin (Mr. Hodgin died in 1995), Murder at 1600 eagerly invokes other films and stock images without showing much style of its own. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Mr. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible. -
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Critic Score 40
It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in "Thoroughly Modern Millie." -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
In the end, though, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
If Dot the i, the directorial debut of Matthew Parkhill, has a crass visual flash, it fails to give its characters any credible substance. Even after it purports to eviscerate their psyches, they remain diagrammatic contrivances. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
A weird blooper reel, shown as the credits roll, records how often the actors broke into nervous laughter, and this goofy coda undermines any serious intent or honest emotion in the previous, tedious 80 minutes. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
To make a film in 2005 that asks audiences to sympathize with the plight of a band of terrorists is an intellectually audacious gesture. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Milk and Honey is the kind of nightmare-in-a-box you might expect if Neil LaBute remade Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on a shoestring. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Ms. Miller has attempted to elevate a small Oedipal story about two damaged souls into a grandiloquent epic, Shakespeare by way of Bob Dylan. She misses by a significantly wide mark, largely because she loves her monster too much and his victim too little. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
It is not saying much to point out that the sequel is better than its predecessor (directed by Abdul Malik Abbott), which was crude and amateurish in every way. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Giorgio Perlasca, who has been compared to Oskar Schindler, deserves better than this Italian television film. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
The movie never recovers from its jarring turn into a rushed, unconvincing caper movie with a blasé, Robin Hood attitude. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Broadly acted, clumsily written and directed with crude sincerity, it is a well-meaning feminist morality play unlikely to be of much interest outside the community in which it takes place. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
The offending videotape is never seen, but the entire film is built around its absence. Periodically, the film returns to a written police account of the video, which scrolls up the screen, documenting the animal's suffering blow by blow to the sound of ominous music. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Watching the rest of Damon Dash's playful movie is like entering a room where a large, too noisy party is going on and never fully adjusting to the dark or the din. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
An intermittently funny free-for-all that tries desperately to flesh out a television sketch into a feature-length movie. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
Mr. Garity's performance doesn't quite redeem this sorely lacking production. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
What counts in a movie like this are stars so dazzling that we won't really notice or at least mind the cut-rate writing and occasionally incoherent action. Sometimes Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie succeed in their mutual role as sucker bait, sometimes they don't, which is why their new joint venture is alternately a goof and a drag. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
Mr. Rodriguez seems unsure what his film is really about, making the moral of the story -- "dream an unselfish dream" -- feel more like a vaguely judgmental homily than a satisfying conclusion. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The film's screenwriters conjured up a very clever gimmick when they decided to revamp a favorite 60's television show. Too bad they forgot that a gimmick is no substitute for a screenplay, never mind a real movie. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Short on laughs, if supremely inoffensive, this sleepy nonentity of a movie finds Mr. Lawrence in his huggable teddy bear mode. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
In the end, the film is a stale, derivative mess that borrows heavily from every zombie and alien movie worthy of imitation, to only ho-hum effect. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of "Batman Begins," Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
It would help if the movie were actually funny - or if it actually bothered to be a movie, rather than some car chases punctuated by shots of Ms. Simpson sashaying toward the camera (or more often, away from it). -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
Provides plenty of authentic dirt-flying motorcycle thrills, but the film's excruciating earnestness and clunky script frequently slow its energetic pace to a grinding halt. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Valiant is in dire need of some "Shrek"-ian sass, not to mention a drop or two of genuine emotion. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line. -
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Reviewed by
Lawrence Van Gelder 40
Mr. Morel's predilection for murky, nearly pitch-black cinematography and spare, elliptical dialogue indicates his debt to filmmakers like François Ozon and Claire Denis, but Three Dancing Slaves lacks the psychological precision of Mr. Ozon's or Ms. Denis's work. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
A somewhat faithful but not very graceful retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegant Jazz Age tragedy "The Great Gatsby." -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true. -
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Critic Score 40
With its exasperating camerawork, murky lighting - at least two scenes are near indecipherable - and interminable shots of Fannie gazing slack-jawed at the world, Piggie is a disappointing debut. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Venom certainly can't be called a good movie, but within its genre it's perfectly palatable. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
Although the film starts off somewhat amusingly, the first-time feature director Katrina Holden Bronson (who also wrote the unbalanced script) seems to have spent more energy assembling the overbearing soundtrack than expanding on her characters' fractured relationships. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Rise to Power is notable for one achievement: It makes Sean Combs (better known, at the moment, as Diddy) unconvincing as a rich man who enjoys power and luxuries. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
When not in song, the words that come out of the frustratingly undefined characters' mouths are mostly awkward and contribute to the film's overall incoherent narrative. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase. -
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Reviewed by
Anita Gates 40
Mildly scary here and there. It does not play by all the horror movie rules (e.g., the black guy always dies first). And the cast is good-looking. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Sadly, Emmanuel's Gift is a powerful story of political change almost smothered by contrivance. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Because Kids in America can't decide whether it wants to be a stock teenage comedy or something more, it ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
False and condescending films in this genre are nothing new, but Dangerous Minds steamrollers its way over some real talent. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
This glib, overheated film about vicious primates delivers little suspense, nor are there signs of the 65 cited volumes and articles that turned Mr. Crichton's book into such a learning experience. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Directed by the young actor Adam Goldberg, best known for playing the Jewish soldier who falls to a Nazi knife in "Saving Private Ryan," I Love Your Work is an attempt to say something interesting about modern celebrity. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
Part stand-up performance, part behind-the-scenes chit-chat, Michael Blieden's indulgent and often numbingly slow documentary follows four semiknown comedians. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
It's a movie best appreciated for the costumes, the sets and Ms. Theron's haughty athleticism. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
Ms. Thurman is the one bit of genuine radiance in this aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 40
Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
The mostly unprofessional cast does a lot of shouting and swearing, and Mr. Henry's face has a haunting impassivity, but the film does not offer much in the way of social insight or credible emotion. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
Hostel is motivated by an adolescent urge to shock. And while it's true that no civilized person will remain unscathed by the film's relentless bigotry - this is one of the most misogynistic films ever made - Mr. Roth's gory spectacles are too calculated to deliver the transgressive jolts they so obviously seek. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
This glib, largely uninformative and poorly organized précis of the post-World War II art scene, with its emphasis on New York in the 1960's and the curator Henry Geldzahler, succeeds neither as history nor as art history. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
A low-budget horror film with even lower ambitions, Tamara is a movie of few innovations but one genuine, if unintentional, surprise. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Mr. Levy's cold, streamlined direction gives the movie the feel of a mechanical contraption manipulated by remote control with a nervous finger on the fast-forward button. Many of the jokes barely have time to register before we're on to the next stunt. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Veering wildly between farce and suds, the movie never makes up its mind whether it's a spoof, a soap opera or a feminist pep talk. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
With a little more subtlety - and a lot less predictability - the movie might have played more like a thoughtful drama and less like an outrageous exercise in wish fulfillment. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel. -
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Critic Score 40
The star of Stay Alive is a cutting-edge video game, but the film still has hackneyed horror at its heart. And worse, it's not even the stylishly, wittily executed hackneyed horror of the "Scream" movies. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Despite a gloriously baroque performance from Mr. Wahlberg - attempting moves certified only for Antonio Banderas - Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School remains irredeemably soggy. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
As the downward spiral continues, "drugs are evil" is pounded into our heads again and again until numbness sets in; in this case, even a touch of subtlety would have sent a more powerful and lasting message. -
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Critic Score 40
Two groups of people should probably not see 95 Miles to Go. Unfortunately, they're the two groups that were probably envisioned as the film's core constituencies: stand-up comics and Ray Romano fans. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama. -
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Critic Score 40
It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
The movie bubbles with incest, adultery, religion and homosexuality -- steamy themes that incite the cast to fits of enthusiastic overemoting. -
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Critic Score 40
Insufferable characters make for an insufferable play or movie. The Sisters, a grueling family feud conceived by Richard Alfieri, proves the point. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Yet another movie dedicated to privileged self-involvement; just once, it would be nice to observe the early-adulthood traumas of, say, some plumbers or pipe fitters. Surely they have friends, too. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
A convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
An American Haunting purports to be based on a documented event, although most of its inspiration has been drawn from the empty well of "The Exorcist" and its progeny. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
As the clichés mount, Danny Cannon directs as if he's the one on trial, teasing tension out of every pass and dribble. Most irritating of all is his determination to paint British soccer as a gentleman's game, a notion United's real fans would no doubt treat with the scorn it deserves. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 40
The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
As much fun as that is for the choir being preached to, it would have been even more persuasive with a little less hammering and a little more historical perspective. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
For all its manifest corniness, this is an achingly sincere and supremely unembarrassed effort to transform an audience for the good. Its heart is very much in the right place - a place that movies all but ignore - but its mind is a mush. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
The director, Eric Werthman, a practicing psychotherapist, presents Peter and Suzanne's dilemma like a case study from his own files rather than a real, flesh-and-blood-and-handcuffs relationship. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Despite his access to both No Wave luminaries and atmospherically battered footage of various bands wreaking havoc at various venues, Mr. Crary never figures out what story he wants to tell. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
A limp attempt to wed a romantic comedy to a buddy comedy, largely because the filmmakers see women as visitors from another planet, which is more or less what they now are in Hollywood. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
A demented jag of blasphemy, multicultural weirdness, splatter-movie tropes and inchoate meat metaphors, Mad Cowgirl is an underground movie with little sense of grounding; the point is an aggressive pointlessness. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The director, Ryuhei Kitamura, whose earlier films include the cult film "Versus," brings nothing new to the samurai-swordsman game other than some styling shorts for the whelps and a miniskirt for Azumi. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
A stagy, only mildly compelling prison drama that ends up feeling like purgatory to all involved. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
To call Hamilton minimalist filmmaking is an understatement. Without plot or incident, and with only the flimsiest of characterizations, the movie operates primarily on the level of suggestion and insinuation. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
A polemic masquerading as a movie, Poster Boy unspools like a humorless lecture on right-wing homophobia. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Ms. Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Mr. Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The joint doesn't jump in the musical Idlewild; it just twitches and stumbles. As much a missed opportunity as a terrible tease. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
A maudlin melodrama about prostitutes in Madrid, Princesas is not, alas, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, but a dilution of his manner by the writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Although the early scenes hold out some promise...the movie quickly runs out of ideas. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
Mr. De Palma can be a director of dazzling creative lunacy, but there's little craziness in this restrained, awkward film. With the diverting exception of Hilary Swank, who plays a slinky degenerate named Madeleine Linscott, the leads are disastrous. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Employee of the Month is more tired than a Wal-Mart greeter at the end of a Saturday shift. One can only hope its halfhearted suggestion that winning isn't everything is some comfort if the movie's grosses are as disappointing as its jokes. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
Purely for curiosity’s sake this unusual, intermittently hypnotic quasi monster flick is worth checking out, at least until the initial "what is this?" effect wears off and it becomes as tiresome as listening to someone relate long-winded tales about nightmares or drug-induced exploits. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 40
Co-starring as Rome, the ringleader with "intimacy issues," Robert Patrick appears to be enjoying himself. That makes one of us. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Cess Silvera, the film's writer and director, doesn't find any of the humanity or inner demons that would allow the characters to rise above B-movie exploitation. -
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Reviewed by
Laura Kern 40
After a whole lot of buildup, and a real letdown of a payoff, the only enigma left is why we should care. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
In his genre pastiche The Good German, Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
What saves Breaking and Entering from foundering altogether in earnest self-regard is Mr. Minghella's evident affection for London, a city of inexhaustible architectural and human variety. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
If some of the characters won't be returning for the sequel, no matter. In all likelihood, neither will the audience. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
Snow Blind calls itself a documentary, but it's really all about selling the product of snowboarding; it never stops feeling like the in-house channel on a ski-lodge television. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
The screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, tosses out a few chewy bits of B-movie wit, most of them supplied by Mr. Jones, who expresses the ambivalence of an African-American visiting the motherland through a series of bitter jokes. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Mr. Travolta or Mr. Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Ms. Tomei. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, Michael O. Sajbel’s Ultimate Gift”is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
But the film, written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano and directed by Richard Benjamin in a style cute enough to peel paint off the walls, can't do much to generate romantic sparks between its two young leads. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down. -
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Critic Score 40
The movie's strongest element is the chemistry between the reflective Mr. Kearse and Mr. Scott (who really has Down syndrome). Improving on its obvious antecedent in "Dominick and Eugene," their relationship feels real, not like a movie contrivance. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way. -
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Critic Score 40
The film is brazenly indebted to old cowboys-and-Indians movies and to James Cameron’s "Aliens." Gleefully sensationalistic and paced like an adults-only shoot-'em-up video game, it's ultimately less interested in subversion and subtext than in making viewers squirm, shriek and throw up into their popcorn bags. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
The turtles themselves may look prettier, but are no smarter; torn irreparably from their countercultural roots, our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Set in North Florida and based on a book by Harry Crews, The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Self-consciously edgy and romantically limp. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
An ill-advised sequel to "Are We There Yet?" and a feeble fable of better parenting through home improvement. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market. -
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Critic Score 40
This film is about surfaces, for young men with testosterone to burn, and the racing passages snap. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!" -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
White Nights is only tolerable when Mr. Baryshnikov is on screen, especially when he is dancing alone or with Mr. Hines, with whom he does a couple of ballet-tap numbers that are of an order of excellence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
French Kiss may have a more putatively foolproof formula, but everyone here has done vastly more interesting work. Too much gets lost in translation. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
With a score by Giorgio Moroder, and with ingenious costumes that are utterly au courant, Flashdance contains such dynamic dance scenes that it's a pity there's a story here to bog them down. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State." -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
This latest recycling of foreign-grown frights shows less interest in horror than in healing. -
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 40
A romantic subplot is formulaic, and, most disappointing, the break-dance sequences don't sizzle, though the film's director, Harvey Glazer, is known for his music videos. Keep an eye out, however, for some nutty cameos. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Mr. Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat. -
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Critic Score 40
Fortunately, there is Molly Shannon as the money manager's disgruntled wife, giving a selfless, robust performance. Bracingly astringent in an unlikable role, she almost turns a potential liability into the film's salvation. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 40
A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
Unfortunately, in keeping its inflammatory subject matter at arm’s length, Provoked does exactly the same to its audience. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 40
A Michael Keaton outing is always cause for celebration, no matter how ramshackle the vehicle ("First Daughter," anyone?) or paper-thin the role. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur. -
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Critic Score 40
It is made by a Morrison groupie for other groupies, a film that leaves the rest of us locked outside wondering what the fuss is about. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a "Saw"-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 40
As it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula -- a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case -- and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 40
Kalifornia, which was written by Tim Metcalfe, lets its stars overact to the rafters as it vacillates between wild pretentiousness and occasional high style. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 40
It is funny, unpretentious and fast-paced. It has a kind of comicbook appreciation for direct action and no time whatsoever for mysticism or for scenery for its own sake, though most of it was shot in Morocco and is fun to look at. -
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Critic Score 40
Cashback suggests a “Malcolm in the Middle” episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The hero’s pained, hilarious childhood flashbacks deserve a much better movie. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 40
The movie itself is a shell. The characters, especially the unstable Hadley, barely exist. And even by the loose standards of film noir, the mechanics of the murder plot, and the story’s jolts and twists toward its abrupt surprise ending, are unconvincing. -
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Critic Score 40
Part domestic drama, part thriller, the microbudget shot-on-video feature Laura Smiles is so ambitious that its ultimate failure is more depressing than anything in its dark script. -
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Critic Score 40
How many helicopters, armored vehicles and burglars suspended from ceilings can you take? Cash, for all its flash, leaves you hungry. But not for more. -
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