instantwatcher.com

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

  1. Abduction 2011 "Abduction" falls in the same corner of the youth market as the "Twilight" movies. Some moments and many lines feel cribbed from that series. full review
  2. The Chaperone 2011 As funny as these guys can be when they work themselves into a purple-faced rage yelling at the TV camera, none of the current generation of wrestler-actors seem to have the charisma or comic gifts of a Hulk Hogan or Dwayne Johnson. full review
  3. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy 2011 None of the stuff supposed to give this "heart" works. full review
  4. The Hedgehog 2011 The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance "The Hedgehog." full review
  5. Hobo With a Shotgun 2011 A grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it. full review
  6. Into The Abyss 2011 Herzog has managed another strange and intriguing look at a culture and the sorts of people it creates - victims, cops and criminals. full review
  7. Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer 2011 All garish colors, small-scale sight gags and kid-friendly one-liners, it lacks the same comic spark that a recent "Wimpy Kid's" second diary also failed to deliver. full review
  8. Kevin Hart: Laugh At My Pain 2011 Like a lot of comics, Hart has taken the petty grievances and big pains of his childhood and turned them into stand-up fodder that is funny, familiar and biting. full review
  9. Like Crazy 2011 Felicity Jones will break your heart at least once in "Like Crazy." full review
  10. Machine Gun Preacher 2011 The movie has a hero it cannot make its mind up about. And that confusion muddles the movie. full review
  11. The Names of Love 2011 There's a taste of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Something Wild" "Forces of Nature" and even "Bringing Up Baby," perhaps the best of the wild child-seduces-straight arrow romances. full review
  12. Page One: Inside the New York Times 2011 A colorful "how the news is made" movie capturing some very smart, very committed reporters and editors adapting to the changing rules in our brave new online news world. full review
  13. Paranormal Activity 3 2011 "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers. full review
  14. Seven Days In Utopia 2011 Treats its subject as if it's a tap-in for par, and thus, most of the best clubs were left in the bag. full review
  15. Snow Flower And The Secret Fan 2011 "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" aims for the heartstrings and only strikes a few notes. full review
  16. Snowmen 2011 The kids are charming and the supporting cast lift this comedy from above its direct-to-video ambitions. full review
  17. There Be Dragons 2011 A muddled and unsatisfying film - "Doctor Zhivago" without the majesty, "Reds" without the passion or romance. full review
  18. Biutiful 2010 "Biutiful" has lots of characters and interwoven plot-lines, a trait it shares with earlier Inarritu films. But it's the first film he's done that feels cluttered with characters and burdened with the odd and on occasion ugly things they do. full review
  19. Bloodworth 2010 The film's payoff is clumsy and obvious. But Kristofferson, Corbin, Kilmer, Yoakam and Duff create indelible characters in just a few scenes each. full review
  20. Casino Jack 2010 [Hickenlooper] heavy-handedly tried to make sense of it all and then conjured up a movie with "a Hollywood ending." The trouble is, the Hollywood hustler Abramoff never actually provided one. full review
  21. Casino Jack And The United States Of Money 2010 full review
  22. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 2010 "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is another lovely stanza in the epic poem of humanity that Herzog has been writing for half a century. full review
  23. Centurion 2010 It's a darned entertaining outing from a director who knows action, loves narration and doesn't share Hollywood's fear of period pieces that don't involve Greek gods. full review
  24. Cold Weather 2010 "Cold Weather" settles in for a dreary haul that just makes us hope and wish something -anything - would change. full review
  25. The Company Men 2010 The Company Men will connect with anyone for whom "the new reality" of today's economy hits close to home. But anyone looking for insights deeper than the business world cliches in writer-director John Wells' film may find this a sermon easily tuned out. full review
  26. Countdown to Zero 2010 Like the ongoing threat itself, Countdown is simply numbing. full review
  27. Exit Through The Gift Shop 2010 The "Emperor's New Clothes" con job of modern art takes one right on the kisser in Exit Through the Gift Shop, a little guerrilla style filmmaking about guerrilla graffiti artists and their status as darlings of the art world. full review
  28. The Extra Man 2010 [Kline's] tour de force, a performance "of uncommon joie de vivre." full review
  29. Four Lions 2010 "Four Lions" is a very funny British send-up of the dimwitted children of parents smart enough to escape their repressive Islamic homelands. full review
  30. Freakonomics 2010 full review
  31. Howl 2010 Documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman attracted Hollywood talent, far and wide, for this film, had an epic poem and a classic culture clash as their subject and still produced a corpse from it. full review
  32. I Am Love 2010 An intimate, quiet and even slow movie, its subtle shadings veil turbulent emotions. full review
  33. I Saw the Devil 2010 A thriller that makes you wish you knew how to scream "O.M.G." in Korean. full review
  34. I'm Still Here 2010 It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made. full review
  35. Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work 2010 This behind the scenes, behind the makeup, behind the plastic surgery documentary catches Rivers hard at work, ridiculously hard at work. full review
  36. The King's Speech 2010 One of the best films of 2010... full review
  37. Knucklehead 2010 Those multi-media moguls at World Wrestling Entertainment haven't quite got the hang of this "family friendly" turn they've taken with their motion picture division. full review
  38. A Little Help 2010 "A Little Help" is an odd duck of a period piece dramedy, a wonderfully detailed character-study set on Long Island a year after the 9/11 attacks. full review
  39. Monsters 2010 The immigration and drug war parable and photojournalism ethics are never front and center, but draw attention because Edwards doesn't deliver well-earned frights or even cheap jolts. It's a good-looking movie with zero sense of urgency. full review
  40. Night Catches Us 2010 full review
  41. Nowhere Boy 2010 If you've seen read or seen the Beatles history in literature or film, you'll adore Nowhere Boy for filling in more blank spaces about the early life that formed one of the seminal figures in rock history. full review
  42. Rabbit Hole 2010 The film sets us up to judge and then upends those judgments. full review
  43. Restrepo 2010 At this point in all our Middle Eastern conflicts, we need more from a documentary than just a grunts-eye-view of the frustrating nature of the war. full review
  44. Senna 2010 "Senna" makes a fascinating subject in a pretty entertaining film about a sport that isn't followed that closely by most Americans. But our very ignorance of that subject helps the film and adds to its impact. We don't know this story by heart. full review
  45. Standing Ovation 2010 It's a bubblegum mess, lacking structure, coherence,and any sense of drama. But it manages moments of daft fun, sometimes in spite of itself. full review
  46. Tiny Furniture 2010 Dunham's version of "Reality Bites," that collision between college expectations and harsh reality, runs out of gas by about the third time she confesses to her increasingly irate mom, "I'm figuring it out." full review
  47. The Whistleblower 2010 A first-rate one-woman-against-the-system drama, a film benefiting from grim recreations of an ugly reality and a stellar cast determined to expose it. full review
  48. Amreeka 2009 The immigrant experience gets a fresh, post- 9/11 Palestinian spin in Amreeka, a film that has all the familiar ingredients but is such a well-acted, winning re-combination of those that we see them with fresh eyes. full review
  49. The Boys Are Back 2009 Owen, not chasing Julia Roberts or anyone else for a change, is pleasant enough making this 100-minute argument for unconventional parenting. full review
  50. Crossing Over 2009 full review
  51. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest 2009 It's only our investment in these fascinating characters and in wholly unraveling the mystery of Lisbeth Salander's awful past that keep it compelling. full review
  52. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2009 A chilling detective tale, a horrific sexual abuse drama and an overlong, emotional, tie-up-every-loose-end melodrama that is sure to be half an hour shorter when Hollywood remakes it without Swedish dialogue and probably without the cool Swedish edge. full review
  53. Inspector Bellamy 2009 Holds enough interest to stand as reasonably representative of Chabrol's work, a dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot. full review
  54. The Limits of Control 2009 This is indulgent filmmaking at its most pretentious. full review
  55. Paper Man 2009 The manipulations characters act out with each other are realistic, even if the overlong and not-nearly-twee-enough comedy built around them isn't, making for a movie whose script may have had more merit than its execution. Or not. full review
  56. The Perfect Game 2009 The odd engaging moment is always followed by a cloying eye-roller, such as when a nearly-new ball appears on their dusty Monterey sandlot. "Father, what does it mean?" "It means God wants us to play baseball!" full review
  57. The Secret of Kells 2009 A gorgeous blend of the magical and the gloriously trippy. full review
  58. Survival of the Dead 2009 The hurtful truth is that others -- many others -- have co-opted Romero's whole living dead thing and have been doing it with more style than the Pittsburgh zombie auteur is capable of these days. full review
  59. Bottle Shock 2008 Bottle Shock is... utterly charming. full review
  60. Elegy 2008 Occasionally touching, always interesting. full review
  61. Forever Strong 2008 The whole package here is warmed-over mush from a hundred other sports movies, a tale padded out with game footage, training sequences, absurd coincidences, life lessons that teach nothing and wasted casting. full review
  62. Happy-Go-Lucky 2008 Hawkins wears her grin in almost every scene, but she gives us hints that this dizzy 30-year-old is deep, as are the disappointments that might have caused Poppy to don this mask. It's a performance of sustained, childlike wonder and adult wit. full review
  63. Let the Right One In 2008 Just when you think you've seen pretty much everything that can be done with that exhausted horror genre, the vampire picture, somebody comes along with a new twist. full review
  64. Man on Wire 2008 James Marsh tells Petit's story, the most inspiring 'heist' in modern history, a Frenchman's stroll between two 110 story buildings in lower Manhattan. full review
  65. The Other Man 2008 Neeson, in particular, has to rumble through the movie behaving in a way consistent with the ending and comes off as far over the top in the process. full review
  66. Play The Game 2008 Play the Game takes an interminable hour to get going. Every scene, every line reading, plays slow. There's no snap to it. full review
  67. The Square 2008 A taut, well-executed if somewhat predictable riff on the murderous caper-that-goes-wrong theme that has anchored sexy, blood-stained crime pictures from The Postman Always Rings Twice to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. full review
  68. The Tale of Despereaux 2008 There's precious little space in Despereaux's tale for heroism (save for the third act) and humor. full review
  69. What Just Happened? 2008 Movies about Hollywood are as common as Jolie babies, and there have been broader, funnier, meaner takes on the business than this one. But this Barry Levinson version of real-life producer Art Linson's memoir is more movie-savvy than any of them. full review
  70. The Yellow Handkerchief 2008 The sleepy scenery and charming performances -- Stewart escapes her vampires and reminds everyone what the fuss used to be about -- keep The Yellow Handkerchief from blowing it. full review
  71. Broken English 2007 A likable but wan romance. full review
  72. Charlie Bartlett 2007 Imagine an R-rated Ferris Bueller with only the most annoying parts of the younger Matthew Broderick's screen persona emphasized and you'll draw a bead on Bartlett. full review
  73. Day Watch 2007 Maybe they didn't invent the vampire movie. But thanks to Night Watch and now Day Watch, the Russians certainly have the last word in it. full review
  74. Eagle vs. Shark 2007 Daft, sweet, awkward and amusingly rude. full review
  75. Encounters at the End of the World 2007 full review
  76. Freedom Writers 2007 An old-fashioned great-teacher-turns-bad-students-into-scholars story that ranks up there with Stand and Deliver. full review
  77. Hot Rod 2007 What works, wonderfully, are the falls, the punch-outs (his brawls with Stepdad are brutal throw-downs) and waiting for that next accident to happen. full review
  78. The Hunting Party 2007 The Hunting Party is a not dark enough, not comic enough dark comedy about the aftermath of the Serbo-Bosnian War. full review
  79. Lars and the Real Girl 2007 full review
  80. No End in Sight 2007 This is a movie about the very officials who boasted 'I don't do quagmires' (then-defense secretary Rumsfeld), but who hadn't actually done the planning or simple reading of other people's plans that might have avoided that very fate. full review
  81. Shooter 2007 It features a gritty, macho performance by Mark Wahlberg, stinging political commentary and more 'Here's how you do that' moments than the complete MacGuyver collection on DVD. full review
  82. The Ten 2007 Thou shalt be funny. Thou, in this case, isn't. full review
  83. You Kill Me 2007 full review
  84. Altered 2006 Too many of the arguments are whispered, too many settings are missing the horrific atmosphere the movie requires. full review
  85. Bloodrayne 2006 Who is Uwe Boll and why does he hate moviegoers so? The German hack, the one-man Blitzkrieg of Bad, is the worst filmmaker in the movies today. full review
  86. Bug 2006 full review
  87. Curious George 2006 This is an adaptation that is absolutely faithful to the child's-eye-view books, down to the name of the ship that brings George from Africa -- the H.A. Rey. full review
  88. Failure to Launch 2006 We have liftoff! And that's exactly what we want from a romantic comedy. full review
  89. Golden Door 2006 Yes, the details are spot-on and realistic in the extreme. But we've seen them before. It's the story Crialese hangs this detail on that's weak. full review
  90. An Inconvenient Truth 2006 Political will, Gore suggests, is a renewable resource. Maybe he has rediscovered his. And maybe, we figure, after we've seen it, we should discover ours. full review
  91. Jackass: Number Two 2006 The images burn into the retina like the spots you get from staring at the sun. full review
  92. Keeping Up With The Steins 2006 It's not meant to be uproarious. But even as comfort food, Steins can't keep up. full review
  93. Last Holiday 2006 This is a movie with lots of great cuisine, and precious little flava. full review
  94. Mission: Impossible III 2006 If Mission: Impossible 3 is the first pitch of the popcorn-movie season, just two words come to mind -- butter up. full review
  95. Nacho Libre 2006 Oddly reverent, faintly patronizing (they shot it in Mexico, with an exceptionally homely cast of extras), and always warm and funny. full review
  96. Severance 2006 full review
  97. Slither 2006 This writing-directing debut from the guy who concocted that rip-off known as Dawn of the Dead isn't that scary, and it isn't nearly as funny as he seems to think it is. full review
  98. United 93 2006 It is a movie that takes us where we don't want to go but need to. full review
  99. Aeon Flux 2005 It's not terrible. It's not so bad that it's fun. Aeon Flux doesn't rhyme with 'flux.' It's just watchably bad, which is no reason to watch it at all. full review
  100. Bad News Bears 2005 It isn't funny; it isn't sweet, and it has none of the innocence of the original. full review
  101. Brick 2005 full review
  102. Brokeback Mountain 2005 Both [Gyllenhaal and Ledger] embody what that old Waylon and Willie song taught us -- 'Cowboys ain't easy to love, and they're harder to hold.' full review
  103. Broken Flowers 2005 A very gentle and wry outing for Jarmusch and his star. full review
  104. Casanova 2005 The sticky sweet stuff in the middle traps history's greatest lover and slows the whole affair to a crawl. full review
  105. Coach Carter 2005 Jackson plays the coach with wit and authority. His imposing presence ensures that he won't have to take much guff, even from the toughest punk on the team. full review
  106. Elizabethtown 2005 But as messy, unfocused and rambling as this is, fundamentally flawed as any movie about loss that doesn't let its characters or its viewers feel that loss, it's still a most-enjoyable mess to sit through, a Southern-fried Garden State. full review
  107. End of the Spear 2005 What does hold back this terrifically detailed and often-entertaining effort are the limitations of the script and uneven acting. full review
  108. Factotum 2005 This is one of the best movies of the year, and one of the two or three best performances. full review
  109. Four Brothers 2005 As long as the action snaps and the violence feels (somewhat) righteous, there'll always be a place for movies such as Four Brothers -- on rainy Saturdays, on TNT. full review
  110. Grizzly Man 2005 An alternately gripping and funny-charming nature film and psychological study. full review
  111. Jarhead 2005 Jarhead can't shoot its way out of its own cliches. full review
  112. Land of the Dead 2005 The metaphor, that a society that doesn't recognize the evil it is doing might be getting its comeuppance, would have been a cool subtext in a better movie. But this 'Dead' doesn't jolt, shock, scare or amuse. It just staggers along -- very, very slowly. full review
  113. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man 2005 It's not a deep documentary. We learn precious little about the real man underneath his sharp-dressed pose. full review
  114. Lonesome Jim 2005 Affleck plays this as a one-note turn, all dour. What a life-force like Anika would see in him is a mystery. full review
  115. The Longest Yard 2005 It's not as good as the 1974 original, or even as good as the 2001 British soccer remake of Yard, Mean Machine. But there are bright spots. full review
  116. The Lost City 2005 It's barely coherent as it is, but at 2 hours and 23 minutes, The Lost City is simply infuriating. full review
  117. My Summer of Love 2005 A perfectly diverting, perfectly forgettable summer fling. full review
  118. Neil Young: Heart of Gold 2005 This Prairie Wind concert is one long sweet twang of wistful not-quite-regret. full review
  119. Nine Lives 2005 Nine Lives is an elegant film of quick, tour-de-force acting turns, a simple actor's gesture that tells you more than four pages of dialogue, a movie that demands concentration but that rewards the viewer willing to pay attention. full review
  120. The Producers 2005 Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Gary Beach have their singing, dancing and kvetching in the Broadway smash The Producers immortalized on film. full review
  121. Sahara 2005 Let's hope today's 10-year-old boys aren't too jaded by Matrix reruns to enjoy this for the good clean fun that it is. full review
  122. Serenity 2005 It would make a cute TV show. full review
  123. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 There's a resonance to Sophie Scholl that crosses borders and approaches the timeless. full review
  124. Sweet Land 2005 Terrific acting, a perfectly captured period setting, and a simple, aching farm courtship, that's all Sweet Land is. full review
  125. This Film is Not Yet Rated 2005 ...A ringing indictment of a system that's not just broken. It's rigged and needs replacing. full review
  126. The World's Fastest Indian 2005 The World's Fastest Indian is an old-fashioned feel-good movie. full review
  127. After Innocence 2004 A compelling look at a flawed system. full review
  128. Big Fish 2004 Herniated whimsy -- straining, as labored as those poor Brits who stuff their mouths with grits and try to talk like Southerners. full review
  129. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind 2004 A happy collision of cutting-edge writer, stars up for a challenge and a director with a taste for the symbolic. full review
  130. Heroin Town 2004 full review
  131. Hotel Rwanda 2004 Move past the big picture, of race hatred, arbitrary maps and guilt over what the UN and the West can't or won't do, and find the human story within the inhumanity of war. full review
  132. Inside Deep Throat 2004 Fascinating social criticism and a witty and relevant take on American sexual history. full review
  133. Me and You and Everyone We Know 2004 Here's a perfectly twee little romance all but smothered in a blanket of indie 'edge.' full review
  134. The Passion of the Christ 2004 Bloody to the point of gruesome, moving without being inspiring. full review
  135. Vera Drake 2004 With Vera Drake, [Leigh] has made his most controversial and accessible work full review
  136. Anger Management 2003 Throw enough money at a Sandler movie and it will look like a decent film -- except when you let middling hack Peter Segal of Nutty Professor II direct.
  137. Bad Boys II 2003 Bad Boys II just goes on and on, with more dazzling camera work, more 'funny' murders and executions by the bad guys and the good guys and judiciously used profanity and the occasional 'N' word for comic effect.
  138. CSA: Confederate States of America 2003 A sometimes incisive, sometimes amateurish look at race in America, the things we do and tolerate as a nation that are really no different from an America ruled by unrepentant slave-holders. full review
  139. Gigli 2003 It's a catastrophic miscalculation of tone, a comatose comedy about mental illness, contract killers and corpse desecration.
  140. Hollywood Homicide 2003 Shelton is too smart an observer to totally miss the mark. But after a career of cooking up yummy, tart dessert delights, he has wheeled himself down the junk-food aisle. Let's hope he's doing it just this once.
  141. In the Cut 2003 A puzzling affair of murky motivations and leaps of logic that no amount of Meg Ryan skin and no number of faked orgasms can hide. full review
  142. The Machinist 2003 [Bale's] is a great performance, full of commitment and sacrifice, and The Machinist is one of the year's best films. full review
  143. The Missing 2003 The Missing is often entertaining. But plainly something more was aimed for, and incredibly simple, basic missteps keep the film from reaching the next level. full review
  144. Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 A winking exercise in actors acting cool and the amoral joys of trigger- happiness.
  145. Primer 2003 It takes a lot for a movie to surprise today's jaded, seen-it, bought-the- PlayStation-version sci-fi fan. Primer can. Let it. full review
  146. S.W.A.T. 2003 A worn-out yawner of a cop thriller where even the cliches seem to realize how dated they are.
  147. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 2002 [A] charmer. full review
  148. Bloody Sunday 2002 It's not just one of the best but also one of the most important films of the year.
  149. Bowling for Columbine 2002 A worthy successor to Roger & Me.
  150. Equilibrium 2002 Silly stuff, all mixed up together like a term paper from a kid who can't quite distinguish one sci-fi work from another.
  151. The Hebrew Hammer 2002 Profane, shockingly un-PC and often laugh-out-loud hilarious, this is the sort of parody that the folks who made the Airplane and Naked Gun movies used to make -- funny. full review
  152. Lost in La Mancha 2002 Wondrous document of a film gone wrong and an artist who inspires fans, cast and crew, even as he terrifies financiers, insurers and anyone more firmly footed in filmmaking reality.
  153. Nicholas Nickleby 2002 McGrath has rendered the weighty, moving and engrossing Dickens tale into a near sitcom.
  154. The Pianist 2002 Brody is a sublimely haunting presence at the heart of The Pianist.
  155. Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams 2002 Though it's competently made, Spy Kids 2 is a classic example of the too hasty sequel, a movie with few ideas and no heart.
  156. Windtalkers 2002 [Woo] doesn't reinvent the war film with Windtalkers. But he does capitalize on the post-Private Ryan trend toward showing combat at its most brutal and personal.
  157. The Animal 2001 Flat-footed and half-hearted.
  158. Session 9 2001 A great setting in search of a decent horror film to fill it.
  159. Tomcats 2001 This is the first movie of this genre that I can recall that actually hates women.
  160. Vanilla Sky 2001 Stands as a genuine existential idyll, a movie that muses rather than demanding, 'Solve me.'
  161. The Tigger Movie 2000 Even though the animation is still sharp, the writing is flat.
  162. Big Night 1996 full review
  163. The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993 A work of grand visual wit, clever songs, funny gags and genuine pathos, it is perhaps the greatest stop-motion animated film ever, a painstaking style of model animation that computers have all but completely done away with. full review
  164. True Grit 1969 full review