Miramax's over-the-top import Shaolin Soccer gleefully runs on the mock import of applying a fifteen-century old martial art to soccer. With the bold comic style of a lunatic cartoon, writer-director... 
If you watch the latest version of Walking Tall--and I recommend that you don't--just keep telling yourself, "It's 'inspired by a true story.'" Thusly, you can convert the Rock's latest vehicle from... 
Home on the Range carries the dubious distinction of signalling the death knell of 2D animation (for now, at least). The last primarily hand-drawn feature produced by Walt Disney feature animation, H... 
This appropriately dour, stolid biopic of Irish-Australian folk anti-hero Edward "Ned" Kelly supplants the ridiculed Mick Jagger version--also titled Ned Kelly--by adapting Robert Drewe's historical... 
Though I'm a bit loathe to admit it, I grew up as a fan of Scooby Doo, so I warily carried my misguided affection for the titular mutt, the colorful Mystery Machine van, the haunted houses, and the c... 
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is, like the first film, not to my taste, but it does represent a hair's breadth of improvement and kiddies will giggle, so do as you will. The sequel reunites the Sc... 
Employing mesmerizing understatement, director Jafar Panahi spins Crimson Gold from a yarn scripted by Abbas Kiarostami. The film details the absurdity of the class gap in modern Tehran ("...a city o... 
Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl is only half as adorable as it is bad. Beladen with pop rock designed to goose emotions and blandly predictable in the extreme, this View Askew Film doesn't live up to Smith... 
Why don't we take off alone,
Take a trip far, far away,
We'll be together on our own again,
Like we used to in the early days...
It's like we both are falling in love again,
It'll be just like s... 
Taking Lives plays one of the more interesting gambits in recent cinematic history: by being willfully stupid and obvious for most of its running time, this serial-killer thriller lulls the audience... 
Across the cineplex from David Mamet's better mousetrap Spartan (admittedly built from old parts), writer-director David Koepp has the ignominious chore of reassembling Stephen King's dusty old contr... 
The classic TV spy series Get Smart replaced logic with comic absurdity. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London has no virtues to fill its yawning gaps of logic. Though the movie stars Frankie Muniz... 
I can't exactly recommend Starsky & Hutch, a big-screen remake of the '70s TV-cop show, but I can't claim not to have laughed from time to time, either. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson bring their we... 
Writer-director Siddiq Barmak's Osama--the first all-Afghan film to emerge since the fall of the Taliban--paints a visually striking and decidedly haunting mural of the Taliban's reign of terror. As... 
Critics hate little more than when bad movies happen to good people. But unless the moguls at Paramount Pictures had incriminating photos of Philip Kaufman--director of The Right Stuff and The Unbear... 
If you want a good chuckle, sneak into a theatre showing the new Dirty Dancing movie in time to catch the opening credit. After a teaser which establishes (through dingbatted narration) the middle-cl... 
In Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, a bit of background propaganda proclaims, "PEOPLE ARE AT THE CENTER OF SOCIALIST SOCIETY," and indeed this farce driven by historic global change makes more tha... 
Right from its animated title sequence, Eurotrip announces itself as a party movie chock full of sex, booze, and rock and roll. It's R-rated, but sure to be the latest coolest movie amongst the high... 
If you're ready for Meg Ryan to wrap a gum-cracking accent around lines like "That was off the hook!" and "He's the bomb!" strap in for Against the Ropes, a modern melodrama audacious enough to claim... 
Despite the presence of Oscar-winning actors Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden, TV funnyman Ray Romano, and an ensemble of well-liked former stars of stage and (mostly small) screen, Welcome to Moos... 
I'll admit it up front: 50 First Dates, like all Adam Sandler movies, is essentially critic-proof. What can I say? Sandler fans will love this carefully constructed Sander-formula flick (including a... 
When Louis Kahn died of a heart attack, alone and unrecognized, in a men's room of a New York railway station, he left a concrete legacy of brick and stone and an ephemeral one, shrouded in mystery.... 
Silly adults—heists are for kids! 20th Century Fox's Catch That Kid takes 2002's well-regarded Danish family film Klatretøsen and turns it into Hollywood mulch. Movies like Catch That Ki... 
With Barbershop 2: Back in Business, executive producer and star Ice Cube isn't particularly interested in reinventing the wheel. The sequel to the 2002 hit brings back Sean Patrick Thomas, Eve, Troy... 
Twenty-four years ago, well-known American sportscaster Al Michaels uttered a line for the sports history books: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" This instantly quotable exhortation had its genesis... 
This god-awful comedy rips off the classic Tootsie up and down, Southern accent and all, in a particularly egregious and shameless manner. It's enough to make Kevin Pollak scream, "Somebody kill me!"... 
You got served (yoo got sûrvd) Slang.1. You have been presented with a defeat at the hands of others. 2. You have been made to watch a bad, feature-length music video.In olden days (the 1980s), brea... 
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is sweet and cute and amusing, as well as derivative, unexceptional, and highly unlikely. Let's give it a draw and call it a mostly unoffensive diversion about the etern... 
In his greatly promising debut feature The Station Agent, writer-director Thomas McCarthy tells a simple story with a rare gentleness which most audiences will find surprisingly life-like. McCarthy l... 
Norman Jewison's The Statement, adapted by Ronald Harwood from the
Brian Moore novel, unfolds a taut opening sequence, then slowly slackens
into a repetitive torpor. Early buzz pegged The Statement... 
Along Came Polly is a typical modern comedy of catastrophe, seasoned with scatological humor (the BBC's The Office has recently reminded us that poo is not the height of embarrassment, but the movies... 
Watching Monster brought to mind John Cleese's lament in 1985's Clockwise: "It's not the despair...I can stand the despair. It's the hope." In telling the story of recently executed killer Aileen Wuo... 
By framing his latest film with black-and-white Warner Brothers logos, Clint Eastwood correctly implies that Mystic River is a classical film noir. Like Dennis Lehane's exceptional novel, Eastwood's... 
Aki Kaurismäki's much-awarded The Man Without a Past (2002 Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes) will certainly be too drily quirky for some tastes, but it is a comedy for grown-ups, and for that w... 
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World--based on the 20-novel naval adventure series by Patrick O'Brian--plays to director Peter Weir's strengths. The man who made Gallipoli and The Mosquito... 
Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters is a scathing indictment of the sins of the Sisters of Magdalene Order, and by extension, all unholy acts ever committed in the name of religion. In one of the fi...
Peter Jackson opens The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with the regarding of a worm. Pulling back and racking focus, Jackson reveals a hook. With the final part of a what amounts to a singl... 
Barking up the right tree, our favorite hangdog is back. The one-of-a-kind Bill Murray, the charm-oozing, heavy-lidded king of bemused deadpan, seems only to improve with age. Under the preternatural... 
I don't know what I wanted from a movie called The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise. Maybe I just wanted it not to exist. But it does. It exists and exists and exists. Director Edward Zwick has made... 
By all rights, Jim Sheridan's In America--the fictionalized version of Sheridan's own immigration with his family in the 1980s--should be branded with a scarlet "S" for sappy, but somehow the man get... 