A dual story of accidental spiritual journeys [that] illuminates storytelling's scriptural capacity to impart life lessons...a charming little film [to see] on a big screen.

While no one will walk out quoting killer punchlines, the requisite fart jokes and pop cultural references are slightly zestier than usual.

As inherently unthrilling, incoherent, and unsatisfying as scrambled porn.

Has a pleasant whiff of Capra about it, with its accessible story, good humor, and insinuating themes.

When Jeunet attempts to achieve dramatic heft, with no commensurate change in style, he falls distressingly short.

Million Dollar Baby makes the line between subtle and obvious seem finer than it is, and delivers its one-two punches Old-Hollywood-style.

DeNiro is pretty much the only reason to see Meet the Fockers...[betrays] creative exhaustion.

"Hey hey hey," Fat Albert exclaims, "How did I get this way?"

Flatly retells a high-concept Boy's Life adventure story that's hard to break, but easy to bleed of its significance.

Overnight is guiltily mesmerizing; if it's instructive at all, it's as a cautionary tale of the fatality of lost perspective.

Niels Mueller on The Assassination of Richard Nixon

[Despite] an identity crisis...a surprisingly subtle and pleasantly off-kilter comedy-drama.

Kinsey's many contradictions and awkward personality get full attention from Condon's clever treatment and Liam Neeson's best screen performance in years.

Admirably scruffy in its droll comic pursuits, but has all the storytelling aplomb of a Sunday-funnies section.

Lynn Collins on William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Career Highlights

Michael Radford on The Merchant of Venice

Instead of building on its predecessors, Blade: Trinity feels cheap, compromised, and plumb tuckered out.

Symbolic martial arts romance...sex and death offer a freedom but also a finality...colorful, sumptuous, and often gorgeous.

Alexander is unavoidably a problematic epic, but it has integrity and deserves an audience willing to engage in Stone's dialogue.

Strangers becoming lovers, lovers becoming estranged: the paradox of oh-so-modern coupling keeps the home fires burning in Patrick Marber's astringent Closer.

We Don't Live Here Anymore frames with precision emotional moments in the lives of people who build their own prisons and, over time, plot escapes.

A reminder that Spike Lee is one of our great American filmmakers, unafraid to address, directly and artfully, contemporary issues in a context of national history.

A pastiche of Chinatown and the deeply sarcastic ensemble satires of Robert Altman...Cooper's English-mangling version of George W. is a certified hoot

A missed opportunity...recommendable to audiences looking for a warm-hearted, tearjerking movie, but not terribly commendable for cineastes in search of a sophisticated film.

True to form, Almodóvar gets unimpeachable performances from his cast (particularly Bernal...) and paints his frames with gleefully lurid strokes.

A mildly abrasive satire of America's holiday lockstepping [which backpedals] desperately into toothless humanism.

The Carmen sequences, though consistent with Callas Forever's washed-out '70s look, have a beauty and immediacy which the rest of the film lacks.

The austerity of the film's latter part might seem merely maudlin had Leigh not so carefully established that life goes on in and around the film's central polemic.

Oscar winner Jim Broadbent turns up long enough to say, "I wish I was dead."

Alejandro Amenábar on The Sea Inside and Career Highlights

I have a need [to] express myself through different characters and at the same time have a chance to see the world with different points of view, may I agree or may I not agree with them. So, what's better than that?

Though many of the performers aren't, or arguably aren't, blues artists (but rather soul, R and B, or even folk artists)...a cheap seat for a fun-filled, big-ticket event.

The plotting of this otherwise workmanlike comedy-adventure is as fundamentally ridiculous as it is predictable and lacking in tension.

Alfie smacks its dog with a rolled-up newspaper and then feels guilty about it. This one has star power and nothing else, y'know what I mean?

Not the stodgy costume drama it may appear to be...To Bening's triumph, the audience can only love Julia, warts and all, by picture's end.

No one in the film comes across as a flesh-and-blood character...Birth is overdressed with nowhere to go.

Worth seeing, mostly for its colorful period design and lively musical numbers, but this version of the "official story" takes some wrong turns.

Some sort of Martian comedy hell I was doomed to misunderstand...like watching Ben Affleck burn Stanislavsky in effigy for ninety minutes.

Carruth's worthy entry in the Blair Witch Project/Pi sweepstakes is inordinately clever in making the most of modest resources.

Parker and Stone unleash the Jerry Bruckheimer id with the movie we all know Hollywood would seriously like to make...cannot be denied its humorous high points.