They say nothing succeeds like success, which partly explains the meteoric rise of journalists like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. Their flashy but callow, mendacious mediocrity led each to a new le... 
It's some measure of writer-director Richard Curtis's sheer force of will with Love Actually that while I harbor serious doubts that it's a good movie, I feel compelled to award it a qualified recomm... 
In the hands of Will Ferrell, Elf beats a hackneyed script into submission and cajoles smiles and chuckles from obvious material. Parents can freely regard Elf as an essentially guiltless pleasure fo... 
The Matrix Reloaded--the brain-fried sequel to The Matrix--raised plenty of questions earlier this year. The purported final chapter to The Matrix trilogy--The Matrix Revolutions--answers only one of... 
In 1999's The Matrix, Laurence Fishburne's sage revolutionary Morpheus inducted Keanu Reeves's not-so-blissfully ignorant Neo into reality with this warning: "After this, there is no turning back." H... 
Were it not for Oscar-caliber talent in front of the camera, Radio would be a straight-to-PAX-TV movie. To some, perhaps that is a selling point. As an uplifting, PG-rated sports drama, Radio will al... 
When I said, "I'd watch Gene Hackman read the phone book," I didn't mean it literally, and yet, here we have Runaway Jury, an insultingly dumb "legal" thriller adapted by four screenwriters from John... 
With Veronica Guerin, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joel Schumacher efficiently embalm their titular heroic martyr. A true story told in the language and at the speed of a Hollywood thrille... 
As usual, the Coen Brothers are so damn clever. The gang's all here, from composer Carter Burwell to cinematographer Roger Deakins to fictional editor Roderick Jaynes (a pseudonym for the writer-dire... 
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Jack Black is a force of nature. The Tenacious D rocker and film-starring funnyman is a one-man band who makes his music with a bizarre patois of nicknames and eup... 
Out of Time may not be terribly ambitious, but it is...nifty. With an above-average (if highly incredible) premise and the identifiable Everyman stylings of Denzel Washington, Carl Franklin executes...
Watching Horns and Halos is to invite your lower lip to take a vacation from your upper lip. This stranger-than-fiction tale of a deeply neurotic George W. Bush biographer and the punk-rock publisher... 
"Every 23rd spring...for 23 days...it gets to eat." And every year Hollywood studios seem to devour youngsters with summer sequel jaws. 2001's Jeepers Creepers exercised a confident command of pace a... 
The poster for Los Lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) proclaims, "This film is not based on a real story. It is based on thousands." Inspired by a major layoff at the boatyards of Gijón which l... 
Jacki--the front-woman of a punk rock quartet--faces her fortieth birthday and a nagging Hobson's Choice: "bitter rock chick with a band, bitter rock chick without a band." Prey for Rock and Roll, th... 
When Hollywood flirts with bad-natured black comedy, Danny DeVito frequently takes the directorial reins. The early comedic glories of Throw Momma From the Train and the delicious The War of the Rose... 
Okay, here's The Rundown. You got your Seann William Scott, you got your Christopher Walken, and you got your the Rock. Throw in Rosario Dawson for good (ogling) measure. Baste liberally with bone-cr... 
Audrey Wells's filmic version of Frances Mayes's bestselling travelogue-memoir Under the Tuscan Sun misses the boat. Those expecting an earthy, realistic take on Mayes's self-rediscovery by way of an... 
Woody Allen's recent press has raised cause for concern among Allen conoisseurs. For years now, Allen has gear-shifted like a man trying out a new 5-speed car; frothy hit-and-miss comedies have kept... 
Like its titular homestead, Cold Creek Manor is a musty, old fixer-upper. Another thriller pitting a compromised, upper-middle-classy family against evil, low-bred trash, this rather obvious button-p... 
There's no denying that there's something quaintly appealing about Secondhand Lions, a family film that plays like a slow skim through a Boy's Life magazine. Unfortunately, writer-director Tim McCanl... 
If Matchstick Men doesn't quite reach a level of stylish substance, it at least achieves substantive style. In more cutesy directorial hands and with lesser acting talent, Matchstick Men might be eas... 
A run-of-the-mill feel-dumb comedy, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star takes a potentially funny (if dangerously played-out) premise and grinds it into Saturday Night Live-movie mulch. Early in this D... 
Jackie Chan fans (like myself) are bound to feel more of the aging action star's growing pains than usual this time around. The Medallion, a cheap-feeling, English-language hybrid of American dollars... 
What Cabin Fever lacks in discipline, it makes up for in squirmy fun. A creepy-crawly nightmare at turns laughable and genuinely disturbing, Cabin Fever might be, superficially, a bad movie, but prac... 
The love-child of M*A*S*H and Catch-22, Gregor Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers continually promises to erupt, but when it does, it does so not into full-bore satire but rather plot-satisfying theatrics. Th... 
Based on a manga by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura, The Princess Blade is one of the self-serious HK martial arts flicks (as opposed to the goofy, knowingly self-parodic ones). That would be fine, if... 
It's a measure of Kevin Costner's bizarre instincts (or perhaps his own internal range-war of art vs. commerce) that the death of a dog is given more emotional weight than the death of a man in his n... 
Uptown Girls is a daddy's-little-princess movie with two dead daddies and two psychologically damaged princesses. Nevertheless, director Boaz Yakin keeps the tone consistently zany, escorting stars B... 
It's tempting to give Passionada a pass for what it gets right, but this otherwise unassuming film--which aspires to old-fashioned Hollywood charm--has an albatross around the neck of its typically c... 
Writer-director Aleksandr Rogozhkin says of his film Cuckoo "We have not had a cinema of this kind before," which is a bit misleading and a trifle hyperbolic. Jumping off from the notion of the Tower... 
The long-awaited Freddy vs. Jason is an endlessly bizarre movie-going experience. At war with itself, this missive from the slasher-movie afterlife represents a collision of two separate and unequal... 
Camp is a bit ragged around the edges, sometimes as awkward as its emotionally needy characters, and generally scattershot and shticky. But it's just so cute. Inspired by his experiences as a camper... 
Though Robert Rodriguez wisely and admirably puts a boy and a girl front and center in his Spy Kids franchise, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams is--at heart--a boy's playground romp digitally re... 
Alan Rudolph has been celebrated--and much maligned--for his idiosyncratic style. A Robert Altman disciple, Rudolph favors a loose, improvisational approach with each actor wired for sound and a lack... 
Simon West's dispiriting Lara Croft: Tomb Raider squandered the opportunity to create a classy, new, female-headlined action franchise. Instead, it merely created a new, female-headlined action franc... 
For those who lament that Hollywood doesn't make them like they used to, Seabiscuit is just the (racing) ticket. An old-fashioned Hollywood history is a double-edged sword, of course, fudging the fac... 
In most respects, Bad Boys II improves upon its generic predecessor Bad Boys. But the casual misanthropy and aggressive "humor" cancel out the up-shifted action and newfound confidence, making Bad Bo... 
Bad Boys is an '80s buddy-cop movie dressed up in slicker, pricier '90s hyper-style. The glossy cinematic calling card for director Michael Bay and then-TV-stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Bad B...
With the recent memory of the U.S. government arguably acting against the will--or at least the judgment--of the American people, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's documentary The Weather Underground carr... 