Columbia Pictures' Batman is just about as good as the next serial, which spells plenty of two-fisted fun.

Painfully predictable romanticized crap, but dealing as it does with mortal tragedy—death, brain-death, and loss—it's also unscrupulous and exploitative.

Something that's increasingly rare: a stringently subtextual drama....when they finally arrive, the epiphanies are small ones.

Defiantly slow-paced, Schultze gets the blues embraces a neglected subject: the wanderlust of the retiree.

Though rudimentary by ordinary film standards...diverting entertainment for innocent youngsters.

A veil of censorship frustrates Milani, but also inspires her to clever means of skull-penetrating overstatement and subliminal understatement.

Can be voyeuristically interesting...[but] James fails to justify this for-hire, backfired vanity project in an age glutted with reality TV.

Provides a useful contrast to good dramas....Redford and Freeman should have invested their chops elsewhere.

If the memory of the film flits away soon after viewing, the comic beats are amusing.

Soft in the middle, and none of Cho's stories here take on an epic scope....[Yet] the comedienne remains endearingly naughty.

Transporter 2 has the narrative skills and libido of a newly pubescent boy.

Sing, muse! Sing of a century-hence future when we shall all/Drive impractically bulky cars and pay through the teeth/To hunt dinosaurs on a TimeSafari to the past!

Iglesia's comic cautionary tale observes the monsters created by "every man for himself" attitudes.

As Hollywood actioners go these days, this one's quite tolerable in its guilty-pleasure way. Feel free to saddle up.

A terrible script, pedestrian direction, and acting that's mediocre at best signify that Eternal...[is] ready-made, moderately sexy fodder for late-night Skin-emax.

Nothing is less shocking than a movie that's constantly trying to shock....more bite than bark, but it's all dog.

Humanizes the conflict of peace versus the arguable necessity of violence.

Inspiration is inherent in Brown's story, but Sheridan, co-screenwriter Shane Connaughton, and Lewis refuse to sanctify him.

Though Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio...tells stories of a Roman Catholic saint, it should not be branded merely as a religious film.

Wes Craven banishes the memory of Cursed to bring us a lean thriller that's just right for armrest-gripping.

Valiant is sadly boring, and while its rote mechanics may function nominally on children, it's going to be a long 76 minutes for the adults.

Dude, I am bummed.

Kim Ki-duk's happily unhinged drama comfortably occupies the middle ground between his baroque thriller The Isle and his meditative Spring, Summer....

May I humbly suggest you go to a concert or have sex instead? Heck, do both.

We're spared the sounds [of Treadwell's death], but haunted by our own mental image, one more example of the individual's capacity to create his own reality.

Call Four Brothers a guilty pleasure....Singleton may go for easy laughs, but he gets them; the gut-level jolts may be ridiculous, but he delivers them (with style).

Bottom line: with Murray on fire and enough clever dialogue to rival its predecessor, Ghostbusters II is good enough to put post-milennial comedy to shame.

Has little more ambition than to make Murray the funny valentine of one of Jarmusch's mood pieces....indeed, some of the best moments are wordless.

The balancing act of character contradictions ultimately becomes more about itself than true human behavior.

Glazed-over looks, naked flesh, inane philosophizing, and sand dunes announce that we're in Antonioni-land, circa Zabriskie Point.

Passing eccentricities of character, but serious trouble staging honest and coherent emotional scenes....a surplus of preciousness and a deficit of truth-ringing reality.

Weerasethakul's confident composition of sight and sound induces a trance-like state with an elegant suggestion: that all-consuming love is for old souls.

Dissatisfying to an adult audience accustomed to more sophisticated parody....will resonate with young viewers on their way to high school.

Lucas insists, "I just don't think war should become some kind of video game." Too late.

Cutesy stuff, breezily amusing but...a basically weightless and disposable date movie.

Partly an internalized memory play and partly a strident drama in the vein of Strindberg or Ibsen, Ingmar Bergman's latest swan song to cinema bears the mark of a master.

A sincere effort to sound an echo into Kurt Cobain's cave....Van Sant turns photographic art into screen poetry.

Telegraphs its unsatisfying payoff for miles, has no fun getting there, but at least boasts a running time of 73 minutes, padded by a hilariously slow credit crawl.

Weaves the politics of borders into the comedy of human frailty...seasoned with the everyday absurdities of artificial social boundaries.

Seen with forgiving eyes, Wedding Crashers is trashy, raunchy fun.

Secrets and lies laid bare by a strong cast make Roos' happy endings cathartic and reassuring.

The medium is also the message: the film itself has mana, offering "a gateway into a whole realm of knowledge," material and spiritual.

So much...is bungled with inept storytelling and watered-down dialogue, and Story is so powerless to right the course, that Fantastic Four winds up more dopey than fun.

A story that hasn't gone out of style....Perhaps Berri spoke for himself through the old man's self-summation: 'I don't have a church bell for a heart, but I respect life.'

Undead is sort of imaginative and considerably scattershot....succeeded only in making me groggy.

Never less than intriguing, and often adrenalized....[depicts] men who live harder than most "able-bodied" individuals.

Though Dark Water doesn't run deep....Salles keeps his head above [it]...with superior acting, mise en scene, story, script, and photography.

Has all the mechanized ingenuity of one of those dazzling Tripods, but the bigger they are....it's the gutless ending that renders War of the Worlds most insulting.

A wasted opportunity to tell in filmic terms two important histories: the crimes of apartheid and the love with which they were answered.