Michael Sragow

The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.

Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

Strangers With Candy -- a perfect title -- is filled with straight-faced loonies. It's a nutcake you actually want to eat.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

It's about as much fun for the viewer as being dropped into a virtual-reality version of a highway-safety crash film. Hall writes and directs with the finesse of a rusty hatchet.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Gripping footage about the controversial Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, which transmits news to 40 million Arabs. But the movie offers neither lucid analyses of the channel nor probing portraits of its journalists.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.

This film's playful visual language pulls you in rather than shuts you out; it isn't difficult to decipher, and it enables Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, to navigate the story's many realms with a directness and dexterity that are refreshing.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

You may find Va Savoir pleasant to sit through, but will it stay with you the next morning? Who knows?

A smart comedy about a smart blonde -- that would be a sensation. But a dumb comedy about a smart blonde turns out to be not bad.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.