pompousass

One of the legion of Disney sports films feeds the current hunger (to put it as crudely as it merits) to kick some Arab butt. Spurred on by the blustery music of James Newton Howard, horse and rider outrun a computer-generated desert tsunami (curse of The Mummy), dodge a couple of cartoon leopards (sons of Gladiator), and tilt into a three-way photo finish after a race of three thousand miles. Fact-check, anyone?

0 _12%

Clerks II (2006) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

The official sequel can make no effort to match the scruffy integrity of its 1994 forerunner, least of all an effort to match the black-and-white photography. Not that the forerunner set any sort of mark to shoot for, but at least it accepted its limitations and worked within them. The memory of it had already been well and truly sullied, however, by repeated appearances of Jay and Silent Bob

20 _44%

Clerks (1994) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Two of them, a conscientious convenience-store one and a goof-off video-store one: best buddies, and close cousins of the populace of Slacker. Spanning one day in the lives, the micro-budgeted movie is, perhaps appropriately, scruffy in appearance (coarse-grained, high-contrast black-and-white) and scabrous in manner. Driblets and droplets of humor slip through the obstacles.

40 _71%

Boogie Nights (1997) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

A movie that needed, that cried out, to be made: a hefty slice of heretofore unsampled cultural history, carved out of the San Fernando Valley, cradle of the porn-film industry. The precise snippet of the timeline -- sufficiently lengthy to qualify as "epic," especially at a two-and-a-half-hour running time -- could hardly have been more strategically selected. A cheerful spectacle of people doing the best they can, however abysmal their level of ability.

20 _44%

What About Bob? (1991) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Murray lacks the guilelessness to pull this off (or the ability to fake it), and it doesn't help to have the script paving his way into everyone's heart but the doctor's. Dreyfuss, in his precisely calculated and calibrated way, misses no increment of impatience as the hounded Freudian.

0 _12%

King Kong (2005) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

The Kong films show a sharp decline, this one a farther step down from the last than the last was down from the first. Three hours are not automatically "better" than one and three-quarters or two and one-quarter. Even the supposed progress in special effects -- from stop-motion models to computer animation -- is largely illusory. The former falsity of stiffness and creakiness has simply been replaced by the falsity of fluidness and facileness.

60 _85%

Caché (2005) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Well-chilled French thriller comparable in degrees centigrade to Time Out, With a Friend Like Harry, Merci pour le Chocolat, Red Lights, et al. Haneke lowers the temperature a few degrees nearer the deep freeze, even, than the French ideal. He gets unostentatious fine performances from Auteuil and a thicker-in-the-middle Binoche, and it's always good to see the venerable Girardot (the mother in the country).

20 _44%

Audition (1999) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Well-made Japanese sickie doesn't tip its hand early, courting boredom. In the end, the unscrupulous shuffle of fantasy and reality is as hard to take as the gruesome scenes of torture and mayhem.

20 _44%

Congo (1995) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Old-fashioned (as old at least as Rider Haggard) African safari adventure. Linney, as a resourceful former CIA operative (diverting heat-seeking missiles with a flare gun), and Hudson, as the dandified guide, make strong impressions.

20 _44%

Galaxy Quest (1999) - Rated 27 Mar 2011

Amiable spoof of the Star Trek phenomenon (pre-reunion on the big screen), with names changed to protect the guilty. The most scrumptiously swallowable material has to do with the jostling egos of these former TV co-stars, chained to each other and to their old roles as they hobble around the convention circuit. Colantoni helps the main plot go down with his heartstring-plucking portrayal of the trusting leader of the aliens.