Roger Ebert

The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is, and there's good supporting work from Archer, Thora Birch as the Ryans' precocious daughter, and the irreplaceable James Fox as a British cabinet minister. But at the end, when a character is leaping into a burning speedboat in choppy seas, I wondered if this was exactly what Tom Clancy had in mind.

It would be easy to tear the plot to shreds and catch Kramer in the act of copping out. But why? On its own terms, this film is a joy to see, an evening of superb entertainment.

All great farces need a certain insane focus, an intensity that declares how important they are to themselves. This movie is too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny. And yet, when the cowboys sit around their campfire singing a sad lament and then their horses join in, you see where the movie could have gone.

The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

The reader of a pulp crime thriller might be satisfied simply with the prurient descriptions, and certainly this film visualizes those and has as its victims Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who embody paperback covers, but the dominant presence in the film is Lou Ford, and there just doesn’t seem to be anybody at home.

What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn't use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them.

As an achievement, Computer Chess is laudable. As a film, it's missable.

It is a full-bodied silent film of the sort that might have been made by the greatest directors of the 1920s, if such details as the kinky sadomasochism of this film's evil stepmother could have been slipped past the censors.

This is a brave, layered film that challenges the wisdom of victory at any price. Both of its central characters would slip easily into conventional plot formulas, but Bahrani looks deeply into their souls and finds so much more.

This film is a documentary about the young man's devilment. He seems perfectly happy — ecstatic, even — seated at a table in front of a three-sided mirror and practicing card moves over and over and over again. As a kid, he learned moves from his grandfather. He moved away from home in his early teens.

There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.

The artistry is peaceful and comforting to the eyes but not especially stirring. Given the pictorial extremes that Studio Ghibli has gone to in the past, "Up on Poppy Hill" is weak tea.

The Host is top-heavy with profound, sonorous conversations, all tending to sound like farewells. The movie is so consistently pitched at the same note, indeed, that the structure robs it of possibilities for dramatic tension.

Although Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been praised as a milestone in American literature, this film version brings into question how much of a story it really offers.

It's a portrait of a time and place, characters keeping company around a simple kitchen table, and the helplessness adolescents feel when faced with the priorities of those in power. What I'll take away from it is the knowledge that now the Fannings have given us two actresses of such potential.

Starting with Le Petit Soldat, Godard was forging his own individualistic art and becoming the most relevant director of our time.

A few great directors have the ability to draw us into their dream world, into their personalities and obsessions and fascinate us with them for a short time. This is the highest level of escapism the movies can provide for us.

Carl Franklin's film is true to the tone and spirit of the book. It is patient and in no hurry. It allows a balanced eye for the people in its hero's family who tug him one way and another.

There's an unlikelihood so large in Future Weather that it nearly derails the film. That was what I admired the most about it.

A film is a terrible thing to waste. For Roman Coppola to waste one on A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a sad sight to behold. I'll go further. For Charlie Sheen to waste a role in it is also a great pity. I stop not: For Bill Murray to occupy his time in this dreck sandwich is a calamity.

Imagine music for a sorcery-related plot and then dial it down to ominous forebodings. Without Thomas Newman's score, Side Effects would be a lesser film, even another film.

Sometimes it's all about the casting. The notice of a screening came around, I read the names Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, and it didn't matter in a way what the movie was about - although it didn't hurt that it was a crime movie.

It is a mystery, this business of life. I can't think of any under cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.

This movie will no doubt be pitched to the same audiences that loved "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." It even brings Maggie Smith along. But it lacks that film's life, intelligence and spirit. It has a good heart. I'll give it that. Maybe what it needs is more exotic marigolds.

Do we need a fourth film? Yes, I think we do. If you only see one of them, this is the one to choose, because it has the benefit of hindsight.

Here is a film about African Americans that sidesteps all the usual, hopeful cliches and comments on how one failed generation raises another.

A three-year labor of love from a mother for her daughter. It is a touching movie that, at first, might seem like a public service announcement, but eventually takes us into some touching personal struggles.

Part of the greatness of this film is that it not only avoids any simple answers, but it also takes us into the awkward contradictions and internal dishonesties that help us look at the mirror each day.

To be fair, this tawdry dose of pulp fiction ("inspired by real events") is not a complete waste of time. It offers the marginal pleasure of an all-star cast slumming their way through a thicket of routine plotting, almost laughable dialogue and the constant blaze of tommy guns.

An unexpected kind of masterpiece by Haneke, whose films have included the enigmatic "Caché" and the earlier Golden Palm winner "The White Ribbon." We don't expect such unflinching seriousness, such profundity from Haneke.

What Tarantino has is an appreciation for gut-level exploitation film appeal, combined with an artist's desire to transform that gut element with something higher, better, more daring. His films challenge taboos in our society in the most direct possible way, and at the same time add an element of parody or satire.

Do we want to know more about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and the history and political grievances behind them? Yes, but that's not how things turned out. Sorry, but there you have it.

Here is a searing film of human tragedy.

This is a sweet, bittersweet comedy, well-executed if perhaps a little heavy on anecdotage. You know who might have made it in the old days? I kept thinking of Woody Allen. You don't know what you want. Woody knows what you want.

This isn't a serious historical film. It plays different instruments than Spielberg's "Lincoln." Murray, who has a wider range than we sometimes realize, finds the human core of this FDR and presents it tenderly.

Jessica Biel all but steals the show as Stacie.

Generation P appears to be Russian slang for Generation Perestroika and "The Pepsi Generation," which nicely reflects this film's cockamamie spirit, sort of a cross between "Mad Men" and an acid trip.

I don't believe New Jerusalem takes a position in favor of either character. It's more of an intense study of these two men and their barren work in a shabby store by the side of a highway.

The film itself deserves praise for its portraits of these two women and the different worlds they inhabit.

The case transfixed a racially polarized New York City. The teens were labeled as a "wolf pack" by the news media, led by the New York tabloids.

This is a basic story, simply and directly told by Irish writer-director Ciaran Foy. He doesn't try to explain too much, he doesn't depend on special effects and stays just this side of the unbelievable.

Fat Kid Rules the World is a movie with a title that might be misleading: It's a lot better than it sounds like it has any right to be.

What she hasn't done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel's passages, particularly from the later chapters, it's dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted. I suppose life on an isolated moor was like that at the time, but do we need this much atmosphere?

The charisma of such actors as Gandolfini, Pitt, Liotta and Jenkins depends largely on their screen presences and our memories of them in better roles.

A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.

Hitchcock tells the story not so much as the making of the film, but as the behind-the-scenes relationship of Alma and Hitch. This is a disappointment, since I imagine most movie fans will expect more info about the film's production history.

Is it real? Is this whole story real? I refuse to ask that question. Life of Pi is all real, second by second and minute by minute, and what it finally amounts to is left for every viewer to decide. I have decided it is one of the best films of the year.

There's an audience for this film. It's not me. I gather younger children will like the breakneck action, the magical ability to fly and the young hero who has tired of only being a name. Their parents and older siblings may find the 89-minute running time quite long enough.

The film is intended for family audiences. It is so gentle and whimsical that one wonders if American children, accustomed to the whiz-bang action of most animation, will accept it. Maybe there would be hope for the younger ones - but what will they make of the subtitles?

This is a sumptuous film - extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good. There are times when it is not quite clear if we are looking at characters in a story or players on a stage. Productions can sometimes upstage a story, but when the story is as considerable as Anna Karenina, that can be a miscalculation.

I suspect its audience, which takes these films very seriously indeed, will drink deeply of its blood. The sensational closing sequence cannot be accused of leaving a single loophole, not even some those we didn't know were there.

Heart-stopping in its coverage of the brave and risky attempt by a scientist named James Balog and his team of researchers on the Extreme Ice Survey, where "extreme" refers to their efforts almost more than to the ice.

Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Given the grievousness of their sins, one wonders why the church continues to shelter them. Might it not be more appropriate to excommunicate them, and refer them to the attention of the civil authorities?

We're fully aware of the plot conventions at work here, the wheels and gears churning within the machinery, but with these actors, this velocity and the oblique economy of the dialogue, we realize we don't often see it done this well. Silver Linings Playbook is so good, it could almost be a terrific old classic.

Proves to be unsatisfactory because it establishes a well-defined group of characters and shows them disrupted by the careless behavior of a tiresome young woman and two adults who allow themselves to be motivated in one way or another by her infectious libido.

Although there are some scary moments here, and a lot of gruesome ones, this isn't a horror film so much as a faux eco-documentary.

Melissa Leo plays her without inflection, giving us no instructions about what our opinion should be. It is a brave performance, an act of empathy with a sad woman.

Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It's not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless. My notion is, few will be bored.

A big budget historical drama that carries Denmark's hopes into the Oscar season. It provides still more exposure for the rising Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, the latest male sex symbol of the art house crowd.

Skyfall triumphantly reinvents 007 in one of the best Bonds ever. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he previously played unconvincingly. I don't know what I expected in Bond No. 23, but certainly not an experience this invigorating.

Rarely has a film attended more carefully to the details of politics.

It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing.

A Late Quartet does one of the most interesting things any film can do. It shows how skilled professionals work.

Is something being hidden? No. It's more that something doesn't want to be known.

All of this grows tiresome. We're given no particular reason at the outset of The Loneliest Planet to care about these people, our interest doesn't grow along the way, the landscape grows repetitive, the director's approach is aggressively minimalist, and if you ask me, this romance was not made in heaven.

Katie Dellamaggiore's inspiring documentary covers two years in the history of the school chess team, during which one team member, Rochelle Ballantyn, approaches her dream of becoming the first female African-American grandmaster in U.S history.

More than in most animated films, the art design and color palette of Wreck-It Ralph permit unlimited sets, costumes and rules, giving the movie tireless originality and different behavior in every different cyber word.

It is nearly flawless.

You've seen houses with pumpkins in the windows and skeletons hanging from the trees, but you may never have seen such elaborate displays as the ones constructed by Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza, and Matthew and Richard Brodeur.

If we haven't caught on from earlier films that drug pushing is a thankless persuasion, maybe this is the movie that will pound in the lesson.

When the mistake is discovered, how do the families react? What disturbs them more: that their son has been raised as an enemy or that he has been raised in another religion? That's where The Other Son gets complicated.

By dropping in on this couple from time to time for the kinds of moments one of them might remember, the film is more honest than its characters.

Chasing Mavericks is made with more care and intelligence than many another film starting with its template might have been. It's better than most movies targeted at teens. And the cinematography of the big Mavericks scene by Oliver Euclid and Bill Pope is so frightening that you sort of understand why Frosty stays on the shore, watching Jay with binoculars.

It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.

Mark is played by John Hawkes, who has emerged in recent years as an actor of amazing versatility. What he does here is not only physically challenging, but requires timing and emotion to elevate the story into realms of deep feeling and, astonishingly, even comedy.

A disjointed thriller with two many characters rattling around.

Middle of Nowhere isn't a highly charged drama, as you might have gathered. Most of the action takes place within the mind of a lonely woman. That's why Corinealdi is so effective in the lead.

This is a serious movie about drinking but not a depressing one. You notice that in the way it handles Charlie (Aaron Paul), Kate's husband. He is also her drinking buddy. When two alcoholics are married, they value each other's company because they know they can expect forgiveness and understanding, while a civilian might not choose to share their typical days.

It is unabashedly sentimental and epic, and rather bold in the way it takes place during and after the Holocaust but is not defined by it.

This performance, unlike anything Paul Dano has ever done, must have required some courage. It requires an actor to cast aside all conceits of performance, presence, charisma and even timing.

In medieval times, the nobility enjoyed something called droit du seigneur, their right to deflower their serfs' virgin daughters before their marriage. These days the nobility has been replaced by billionaire bullies, who continue to screw us serfs.

One of the most involving of the many first-rate thrillers that have come recently from Scandinavia.

The film is not a compelling drama so much as a poignant observation of a sad situation.

And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes, the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't.

Now, Forager is a uncompromising film about two people who don't deserve each other - but maybe nobody deserves either one of them.

This is a delightfully goofy, self-aware movie that knows it is a movie.

Jarecki's film makes a shattering case against the War on Drugs.

Argo the real movie about the fake movie, is both spellbinding and surprisingly funny.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

At what point did I realize The Ambassador was an actual documentary, and not a fraud? Perhaps when I realized that everyone in the film was just as dishonest, venal and corrupt as they seemed - including the director.

The Well Digger's Daughter is such a success that Auteuil has already been signed to direct three more Pagnol classics, and I eagerly want to see them.

The Paperboy is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all.

When we speak of "American health care," we should in fact be calling it "American sickness care." There's more money to be made in making people sick and healing them than in keeping them well in the first place. The documentary Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare makes this argument with stunning clarity.

The cast is uniformly capable and dead serious, and if you're buying what Luc Besson is selling, he's not short-changing you.

This isn't one of Burton's best, but it has zealous energy. It might have been too macabre for kids in past, but kids these days, they've seen it all, and the charm of a boy and his dog retains its appeal.