Stephen Hunter

There may be a plot somewhere in William Goldman's script, and there might even have been a structure, but Mel Gibson, James Garner and Jodie Foster are so highly charged, as they slide through riffs that have nothing to do with anything except their own enjoyment in being invited to the party, that it's magnetic -- at least for most of the time.

The only impressive thing about it is the monotony and thoroughness with which it replicates cliches from older, better movies and hammers them into pop alloy to an up-with-me beat beat beat of its musical score.

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

While the movie is stupid, it is -- hooray, and let's put this in all the national ads! -- not appallingly stupid.

It is the perfect modern product: loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavorless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

Lung-bloatingly funny.

The Pixar people have an extreme talent for conjuring imagery that is both soaring in its majesty but also resonant -- it's a stylization but acute enough to carry emotional meaning.

The movie isn't funny in any big way so much as recognizable in its patterns of dysfunction, delusion and futility. But you believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

Seems to me, teenage suicide isn't that funny, and nothing in this movie changed my mind.

A celebration of the actor's art – but not the dramatist's.

Generally quite amusing, with a brilliant cast.

Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

You can make a good movie about a bad marriage, as countless directors, the latest being Ozon, have discovered.

Superb.

The camera, freed to glide, flows as if through the old man's memory, discovering both the glory of his life and the tragedy.

The film is one of those accursed self-styled "outrageous" comedies that play the horrific for broad laughs, with a comically inflated style of dialogue that's so hip one doubts it could have been conceived before 1997, much less 1847.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

The director, Patricia Rozema, has a rare talent: She gets third-rate performances out of first-rate performers with almost startling efficiency. All are bland, some hardly exist at all, and as performance, the whole thing seems a waste.

Though R-rated, its real target audience is under 18 -- either in years or IQ points.

Unlike so many pagan entertainments that seem to have no moral center as they blow things up, this one in fact does. It's very small, but it's there.