Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.

"Batman Begins" leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, "Speed Racer" is an excess of nothingness.

Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.

This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.

There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

It's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive.