True Blood is delightfully, deliriously sick and "wrong," but it's also a medium for Ball's patented brand of social satire.

A hall of fame guy's movie...[with] a macho '90s ensemble eclipsed only by Glengarry Glen Ross...the monologues—oh, the monologues!

A heavy-handed potboiler, but as it raises the temperature, it does give cause to consider the line—so easily crossed—between social function and disasterous personal undoing.

The bones of the story are comfortingly familiar, the action is rollicking, and the metaphorical moustache-twirling of Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham is priceless.

Widely regarded as a modern populist classic, the film is both a fabulist fable and a celebratory baseball movie that acknowledges scandal within the sport but also the game's transcendent ability to rise above attempts to damage its integrity.

Lee is a bona fide cinematic genius, and his lively and inventive take on tired material proves that thriller corn needn't be mindless in its machinations.

It's nice to see the two together, practicing their easy screen rapport—and no doubt more so given Farley's untimely passing—but Black Sheep is still a clunker.

Ham-handed...makes Afterschool Specials look like Ibsen.

A diverting but typically silly Roger Moore entry in the Bond canon.

[A] pleasing throwback to 1970s war-intrigue pictures.

Writer-director Ross's true-believer American salesmanship—inspired by Frank Capra and honed in Dave and Pleasantville--suits this story of American entrepreneurship, optimism, and resilience.

In Cuarón's highly-skilled hands, Children of Men continuously threatens to develop into something more fascinating than it is.

[The] writers...pay lip service to the dark side of 'yes,' but don’t do enough to explore what could have made the film more than a bouncy entertainment

It's like the Whack-a-Mole of everything reasonable people hate about so-called 'chick flicks.'

Cinderella Man may not be subtle, but it's reminiscent of the well-crafted popular entertainments of Hollywood's Golden Age, blarney and all.

Entertaining and provocative...a satisfying intellectual bout.

Problematic but ultimately irresistible adaptation of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's hit Broadway musical.

Pollack excels by establishing an interesting situation, sustaining it, and—in keeping with the paranoid-thriller genre—resolving it on a pleasingly ambiguous note.

Wayne's World 2 revels in silliness even more than the first movie, but it turns out that's a good thing as compensation for the otherwise repetitive feel.

With Myers feeling his oats as a comedy star, Wayne's World turned out to be an irresistibly silly (and masterfully marketed) option for audiences.

A meat-and-potatoes '80s movie, that maybe doesn't 'taste great,' but at least is 'less filling.'

A bizarrely appealing movie, Tango & Cash is the essence of camp: it's bad and knows it's bad, so therefore, it's...good?

Gauche, garish, and gross, a prime example of the coarsening of our culture and of the art of comedy in film. It's also pretty darn funny.

A Bug's Life [is] sure to endure as a superb children's entertainment.

Schwarzenegger's Brewer remarks, 'If I don't do it, it seems no one else will,' but that's a lousy excuse for...a multi-million dollar mistake like this one.

The tone set by director Frank Coraci tends to the cartoonishly broad while making jokes at the expense of grotesques.

If didactic and overwrought at times, it's also powerful and persuasive.

The technically proficient The Sky Crawlers is nice to look at and listen to...but by relying on zombified blank-slate characters, Oshii makes a point at the expense of engagement, much less entertainment.

The screws tighten to an almost unbearable tension by season's end, when Dexter must answer the threats posed by Lundy, Doakes, and Lila without hurting anyone he loves—and preferably without losing his life or liberty.

Playful but inconsequential...the interpretation of Dick's intriguing concept is a street which mostly just dead-ends into noisy silliness.

One of Hollywood's all-time most appealing magic realist fantasies.

Strands good actors in mushy, movie-of-the-week material.

With fine acting all around, and Fincher's typically meticulous filmmaking engagingly, if coldly, transportive above and beyond Roth's mediocre script, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button bears examining.

They say that still waters run deep. Suffice it to say that the waters of Without a Paddle are raging...a soggy embarrassment for all involved.

Sometimes all we really want from a movie is to spend some time with beloved actors.

The archetypal haunted house story might be more effective as a campfire story which takes ten minutes to tell...as a 90-minute movie, it's a crushing bore.

A full-fledged mutant jamboree, but one that blunts thematic and character development in favor of narrative expediency.

A next generation Eddie Haskell, Ferris Bueller redefined "cool" misbehavior for Generation X....Hughes has a knack for memorable set pieces.

Unlike the rest of the Class of '09 thus far, The Uninvited marches to an off-beat, and thank goodness for small favors.

Runs hot and cold, but mostly satisfies with its "upgraded" science-fiction razzle-dazzle.

The Last Kiss isn't afraid of exploding romantic conventions--um, at least not at first.

Retrograde, sexist, and gleefully sadistic... pitiable and fearful in the language we go to the movies to learn. The old cop line 'There's nothing to see here' hardly applies.

Like Heathers with the edges filed down a bit...the kind of smooth, clever (and rare) entertainment that critics and audiences can all enjoy, guilt-free.

Arctic Tale isn't a documentary. They say it right there in the title, see? It's a tale.

Like his characters, Oshima is determined to explore and transgress sexual boundaries, if they even exist, by posing a challenge to conventional morality.

More of a mess than the pleasant surprise one might have hoped.

Even dog skeptics might be surprised how deftly Marley & Me adapts newspaper columnist John Grogan's book...into the equivalent of a kid's movie for adults.

Darren Aronofsky’s character study...[has in Mickey Rourke] an actor unusually in sync with a role, indeed what seems to be the role of his career.

A classic suspense film...also the screen equivalent of a classic existentialist drama...The chemical reaction Clouzot gets from these genres is pure dynamite.

Primo kids' stuff, but under-satisfying for adults.