For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.

Together, Lopez and Caviezel make quite a pair. Sorrowful yet hip, they seem to be inventing a new mood: designer melancholia.

It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.

There's something a bit condescending about how the movie devolves into a falling-out-between-friends scenario, as if the only way our attention could be held by this subculture were if it was presented to us sentimentally.

Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

Glenconner is such a class-conscious caricature that he doesn't need the filmmakers to do him in; he does a sterling job all by himself.

It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.

Sets up a cast -- and then proceeds to knock them down like ducks in a shooting gallery.

What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.

Driven is recommended only to those gentle souls who want to know what it looks like to crash into a wall at 200 mph.

As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.

On the reasonable assumption that no movie featuring an Elvis impersonator can be wholly bad, I was prepared for a high old time at 3000 Miles to Graceland, which exhibits a plenitude of Elvi. The exhibition does not last very long, however. Less than a third of the way through, the filmmakers jettison the premise and trash their own movie.

Leconte films in an austere yet invigorated style; the action never settles into stiff tableaux.

The audience for Hannibal is far more primed for a good time; if the film is a hit, it will be because Lecter has been cartoonized; his ghoulish panache, his double entendres about cannibalism, and his pet phrases like "goody-goody" and "okeydokey" all serve to make him a figure of fun.

In the Mood for Love has novelty value, I suppose, and plenty of pretty camera moves, but it's not really a movie you can warm to.

The problem with all this don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it dramaturgy is that ultimately everything is sacrificed for effect. When you're dealing, as Ritchie is, with explosions of real violence and viciousness, the hyperslick technique can't accommodate the real pain that comes with the territory, or ought to. What we're left with is a cackling amorality -- not a philosophy of life, just a posture.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Were it not for these performances (Blanchett, Ribisi, Swank, Reeves), The Gift would be fairly negligible.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

It's all been done before, and better.

Some first-rate animation and some second-rate storytelling.

In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

Barely rates faint praise.

Ronin is well-made, but it's an act of connoisseurship for people who have given up on movies as an art form.

I can't think of another movie that starts so brilliantly and ends so miserably as this one.

Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas work with professional skill in a ludicrous vehicle.

Has an authentic rotgut flavor, but here's the question for the future: Will Gallo learn to criticize his own ideas or continue to pride himself on screwing up?

Two Girls and a Guy isn’t a satisfying movie, but Downey is alarmingly brilliant in it -- a man locked in torment who can’t find the way out.

The movie is physically beautiful, but the ideas are kitsch -- it’s a New Age love story, the latest version of the doomed romances of 50 years ago.

An off-kilter thriller with a sad-sack hero.

Palmetto is an unconvincing, paint-by-numbers pass at American noir by the usually ambitious German director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum).

Not revolutionary or even evolutionary but enormously .... methodical. Working from an Elmore Leonard novel, Tarantino has created a gangster fiction that is never larger than life and sometimes smaller.

If more can't be found in Bond than this, I wouldn't object, in principle, to that tuxedo's being hung up in the closet for good.

Despite much fervent talk of the beauty of the mountains and the closeness of God, Alive peters out. [25 Jan 1993, p.55]

It offers a Life-magazine view of the home front, with adultery added--but the adultery is so unimpassioned that it might have come from Life, too. [30 Apr 1984, p.87]

Marvelous atmosphere and individual scenes, but not quite a movie. [31 Dec 1979, p.12]

Apart from Wahl, the acting in the Wanderers is either embarrassingly flat or hysterically emotional, and the movie is an exhausting mishmash of styles. [23 July 1979, p.62]

[Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128]

While his actors carry the drama to glittering heights of intensity in outbursts of violence, explosions of temper, gushes of tears, Scorsese is unfortunately putting on a camera show of his own, the handheld pursuit of the image lending an exhausting freneticism to what is melodrama enough on its own. [27 Jan 1975, p.64]

There is a consistency of character, time and place that properly compliments the plotting and is admirable enough to almost - but not quite - make us forgive the loose ends and missing links. [29 May 1972, p.71]

As Catch-22 limps along from vignette to vignette, one sees that what it lacks is cohesion, style and essential mood. [29 June 1970, p.54]

There is all too little here to interest an adult, let alone any veteran of the nutty-girl vs. stodgy-boy chiche. [27 Oct 1969, p.68]