Sean Means

Trots out more flag-waving wartime cliches than any movie since John Wayne's "The Alamo."

The surprising part is how, once you get over the crude humor that the teen-movie genre demands, Get Over It is a nice little movie.

It seems like nitpicking to say it, but the weakness of Jerry Maguire is that there's too much to it -- too many things happening at once for a viewer to digest. But with a charming cast like this, having too much isn't such a bad thing.

You just watch one carefully constructed but emotionally vacant image piled up on another - sometimes with regard to an overall effect, but often just for the sake of style over substance.

Disgusting and humorless mess.

A too-familiar road.

The gravity-defying harness maneuvers popularized in the U.S. with "The Matrix" -- ... look really cool, but seem out of place in a realistic gang-style action movie.

Limp direction, laughable production values, accent-heaving acting and dialogue and more lumps than three-day-old oatmeal.

A cool and rather detached movie...Heat generates lots of energy but gives off little light.

I just wanted to rail against the casual homophobia, the senseless violence and the sociopathic cruelty that Ready to Rumble treats as good clean fun.

(Thornton) proves his mettle as an actor, writer and director with this bleakly comic and surprisingly tender movie.

While The Messenger feeds our appetite for visual panache, it starves the soul.

Craven creates his savviest and most frightening movie since the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street" by spoofing the horror cliches and simultaneously reinventing them to scare you all over again.

The warm humanizing element in all the cool stuff is Crowe.

Just another lame slacker comedy.

Shining above it all, like a kewpie-doll saint, is Drew Barrymore -- whose sweet innocence and sexy romanticism have survived movies as bad as this before

Undiluted Jackie Chan, not the watered-down stuff he's been doing stateside.

Drab and depressing.

Fails as a movie, it works OK as a long-form video.

One imagines what the failed farce Drowning Mona would have been like in the hands of the Coen brothers.

Unbreakable shows Shyamalan as a rapidly maturing filmmaker, taking risks and making them pay off.

The textures are detailed, the movements are realistic and the three-dimensional feel even improves on the humor -- you may think you've seen every good "Matrix" parody, but you haven't until you see this.

Aerves up so much visual wizardry and thought-provoking ideas that even the inevitable Silver touch -- a finale with more bullets than the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" -- can't destroy the magic.

Soderbergh and [screenwriter] Frank like these sidekicks so much that they overwhelm the leads — a fairly easy task, since Lopez has all the police presence of a Revlon ad, while Clooney again tries to skate by on his good looks and smirking charm.

It's Lathan -- with her passionate performance, physical grace and drop-dead-gorgeous looks -- who makes Love and Basketball so entertaining.

Eye-popping, exhilarating and occasionally a bit stomach-churning.

An assault on brain cells.

But as objectionable as its subject matter is, the most objectionable thing is that it's not funny.