There's camp, and there's just plain lousy writing.

Musical...handsome...poignantly nostalgic...The Lost City is a lot of things, but what it's not is incisive.

Obvious...All [but soccer fanatics] can pass on Goal! The Dream Begins and make plans now to avoid its two upcoming sequels.

On more than one occasion...a girl scrapes her fingernails across a wood floor as an invisible poltergeist attacks her. The wood floor may not be a chalkboard, but it's close enough.

Why does the new Lindsay Lohan picture have such a poo fixation?....Could it be that director Donald Petrie is Freudian slipping on his s**tty material?

Zwigoff too often picks up his putty knife when he should be running with scissors...doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts, but some of the parts are pretty amusing all the same.

Jimmy Buffet may be known for his Hawaiian shirts, but there's something undeniably plaid about Hoot.

A thrill ride, and a gripping one: plausibility-straining, predictable at times, but pulse-pounding all the same.

Detailed and graced with irreverent humor and fine performances, Mehta's film deals powerful blows to economic injustice and misogyny.

Dramatically jerry-rigged in every possible way.

Too lazy to perfect its own routine...[but] a surprisingly appealing vacation, from sense to sensibility.

Color me surprised when Barry Sonnenfeld's family comedy turned out to be a palatable picture that doesn't rob Robin Williams of his dignity as a comic actor.

A unique film about a unique event...but what will we think of United 93 in five years or, for that matter, fifty?

The actors play it with poker-faces, but the further we go into the noir territory of hard-boiled, fast-paced dialogue and dames wrapped in crimson and black, the more ticklish Brick gets.

Not everything works in this semi-audacious challenge to the American Dream, but Weitz consistently and amusingly hits the broad side of the barn.

Strictly boilerplate...fail[s] to pursue any interesting avenues, using the cardboard characters as mere shooting-range targets.

The appeal of Schultz's pop philosophy hasn't faded in forty years: this kind of sincerity can't be faked.

I just don't see much entertainment value--or, certainly, a shelf life--in a contrived string of mildly amusing parodies of bad movies. Here today, yawn tomorrow.

Rigged for your pleasure...everything is played up for schmaltz value or dopey laughs.

Skews just enough toward Death and the Maiden and away from Saw III.

Since Lu depicts the punishing, unforgiving determination on both sides of the conflict, the film is not entirely pitiless for the pathetic criminal class.

Offers nothing in the way of balancing the protest viewpoint...[but] still usefully revisits--during our current unpopular war--the internal conflict of America during the Vietnam War.

More clever than insightful, [but] Harron makes the most of that humorously earnest style ripped from the pin-up pages.

Gives the characters relatable failings and the story some ironic bite...[but] lacks the depth of empathy Holofcener showed in Lovely and Amazing.

The dance remains the same...Take the Lead has exactly two things going for it (each worth one star): the always entertaining Antonio Banderas and a lot of ballroom dancing.

It's heartening to be able to report that ATL is as much like Diner as it is like Boys in the Hood....Robinson may overdose on style, but he also respects the homegrown origins of this ATLanta-bred tale.

The seams show...a somewhat grudging social obligation for audiences over the age of ten to tow their younger charges.

The collaborationist anti-hero finds Malle instantly broaching a cultural taboo, compounded when the traitorous young man forces himself into a sexual relationship with a not-entirely unyielding girl named France.

In all their messiness, here are love, sex, society, and family, met with cleansing laughter.

As Parker and Stone see it, you can't laugh without first dropping your jaw.

The sympathy toward the obvious evil of a contract killer never flies...Still, the clever central gimmick and a streak of sly humor lift [the] film, just barely, a cut above.

Thorough skewerings of celebrity foibles and fearless campaigns on taboo subjects.

Gets by because it knows it's dorky. It's happily dorky. It's proudly dorky.

A scathing satire....If there's a lesson, it's that spinning your fellow Americans is the real national pastime--the greater problem is when you spin yourself.

Just because American films frequently exploit repressed memories as a plot device in nasty genre pictures doesn't make the genteel Don't Tell a sophisticated or particularly insightful film.

A divided domestic electorate will take [it] either as a kick-***, future-punk primal scream of political frustration or as an irresponsible, literally and figuratively incendiary attack on our...approval-deficient leaders.

The most fun I've had at the movies this year.

The real blood war is between this movie and the slightly better Aeon Flux, which Wimmer plagiarizes as freely as Equilibrium plagiarized Fahrenheit 451 and The Matrix.

Its own bird...gets dryly funnier and more emotionally rich as it goes along, making it a fine way to while away an afternoon.

Wait for iiittt...yes, there's Allen lifting his leg to pee. I checked my watch when the sound of Baja Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out?" surrounded me: fifty minutes in.

As skillfully made and genuinely horrific as it is a pointless rehash....there's more than a whiff of smug cynicism in the dry air of this conflicted satire.

Despite its flaws, this story of love and self-discovery is still more smart, stylish, and sexy than the usual fare.

Paula's practiced fraud sounds criminal at worst and grounds for civil suits at best, but to Hollywood, it's a romantic comedy....downright repellent.

Carion old-fashions the true story of the 1914 Christmas truce into sentimental melodrama....it's easy to imagine the story being told more effectively with less labor.

Rothemund's film, like last year's Downfall, benefits from its scrupulous treatment of history and generally restrained performances.

The grabber premise of trying to evade a cordon of enemies to transport a man just 16 blocks runs low on ingenuity at the halfway point, bogging down in a too-familiar hostage standoff.

A character plans out a 42-hour-and-11 minute journey accompanied by a 16-CD soundtrack....Elizabethtown feels every bit as long and music-saturated...