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Peter Rainer, New York Magazine

1. Big Fish 2004 Overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit. full review
2. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind 2004 It's the kind of film that could mean more to people after they've left the theater and thought about it awhile. full review
3. Vanity Fair 2004 full review
4. 21 Grams 2003 full review
5. Anger Management 2003 This is the kind of coarse comedy where a fart serves as a punch line. full review
6. Bad Boys II 2003 Bad Boys II, which reunites Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as Miami narcotics agents, resembles a full-length promo for itself. full review
7. Hollywood Homicide 2003 full review
8. In the Cut 2003 full review
9. The Missing 2003 full review
10. S.W.A.T. 2003 There is something sneakily gratifying about all this. full review
11. Tears of the Sun 2003 In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it's a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis's anguished mug. full review
12. Touching the Void 2003 Most movies of this type re-create the action far from the actual scene of the crime, but Macdonald has invented a new subgenre: a docudrama in which the docu and the drama are equally authentic. full review
13. The Hours 2002 A puzzling and forbidding strangeness. full review
14. The Pianist 2002 It's Roman Polanski's strongest and most personally felt movie. full review
15. The Sum of All Fears 2002 Phil Alden Robinson, who directed from a script by Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, is an accomplished craftsman, but his movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. full review
16. The Trials of Henry Kissinger 2002 In a larger sense, this powerfully muckraking film is about the accountability of public figures and about how, in regard to international justice, there can be no exceptions. full review
17. We Were Soldiers 2002 full review
18. Windtalkers 2002 I kept wishing I was watching a documentary about the wartime Navajos and what they accomplished instead of all this specious Hollywood hoo-ha. full review
19. Black Hawk Down 2001 full review
20. Along Came a Spider 2001 Even at half speed, Freeman excels: He knows how to whip out his badge at a crime scene and make it seem as if he had been doing it his whole life. full review
21. America's Sweethearts 2001 Both harmlessly cynical and deeply fatuous. full review
22. Baran 2001 full review
23. Children Underground 2001 Almost unbearably sad. full review
24. Gosford Park 2001 full review
25. Lagaan - Once Upon a Time in India 2001 If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching Gone With the Wind without ever having seen a Hollywood movie. full review
26. Scary Movie 2 2001 Scary Movie 2 isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny. full review
27. Sexy Beast 2001 As the mobster Don Logan in Sexy Beast, Ben Kingsley is so intensely frightening that it's as if the actor were on a personal mission to deep-six Gandhi and his loincloth once and for all. full review
28. Tape 2001 The performances are amazingly charged and fluid. full review
29. Vanilla Sky 2001 full review
30. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle 2000 full review
31. Dark Days 2000 full review
32. The Gift 2000 full review
33. Hamlet 2000 By equating the garish feudalism of the play's original setting with the megalopolis of today's New York, [Almereyda is] at least on the right track. The problem is, it's just about his only track. full review
34. Meet the Parents 2000 I had a good time at Meet the Parents, even though the ratio of clinkers to yucks is disproportionately high. full review
35. Memento 2000 It's all pretty confusing, but then again, so were many of the classic film noirs. full review
36. Mission: Impossible 2 2000 Despite Cruise's attempts here to be Byronic, there's something strenuous about his soulfulness; he turns everything, even repose, into calisthenics. full review
37. Our Song 2000 full review
38. Quills 2000 full review
39. Shaft 2000 full review
40. Traffic 2000 Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a melange than it already is. full review
41. Being John Malkovich 1999 Dazzlingly singular movies aren't often this much fun. full review
42. Bringing Out the Dead 1999 Scorsese doesn't trust the power of simplicity to rock us. full review
43. For Love of the Game 1999 The film comes across like the un-Bull Durham: Every woozy cliche that Shelton and Costner refrained from has been given pride of place here. full review
44. The General's Daughter 1999 The overriding tone is soggy. About the only thing that's crisp in this movie is the way everybody salutes. full review
45. An Ideal Husband 1999 Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism. full review
46. A Midsummer Night's Dream 1999 It's captivatingly modest. full review
47. The Muse 1999 full review
48. Topsy-Turvy 1999 Though the film runs nearly three hours, it gets better as it goes along. full review
49. 8 1/2 1963 Its opening [has] perhaps the greatest dream scene of all: Marcello Mastroianni's Guido stifled in a silent traffic jam, onlookers gazing blankly at him as he rises through the sunroof of his car, high into the sky. The rest of the film isn't too shabby. full review