Tomato |
B-52 (2001) |
"A sobering, sometimes fascinating biopic about the graceful deathmaker of the same name." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3/4 |
Baadasssss! (2004) |
"One is very glad to have Baadasssss! around, if only to remind younger moviegoers that taking chances and breaking rules can reap huge dividends." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 4/4 |
Babel (2006) |
"If Babel falls an inch or three short of greatness, it's always a great ride." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat |
Baby Boy (2001) |
"The film is emotionally overloaded with confrontations that repeat like a boxing- match replay that refuses to quit: Jody vs. Mom, Jody vs. Yvette, Jody vs. Melvin, Jody vs. the neighborhood thugs, Jody vs. Jody." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2/4 |
Baby Mama (2008) |
"What may be the first real outsourcing comedy, Baby Mama is like a pacifier: floppy, nourishment-free and may even keep your teeth from growing in straight." |
John Anderson |
Splat 2/4 |
Backyard (2003) |
"The pint-sized version of World Wrestling Entertainment on display here is sport as child pornography, one in which the participating minors and their sanctioning parents are complicit." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2/4 |
Bad Boys II (2003) |
"Somewhere deep beneath the layers of broken glass, twisted chrome, mutilated flesh and burnt gunpowder clogging Bad Boys II, there are faint signs of a cunning little crime comedy straining to breathe free." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Bad Education (2004) |
"Almodovar never stops maturing or losing his supreme mastery of the medium." |
John Anderson |
Splat 1.5/4 |
Bad News Bears (2005) |
"Bad News Bears is a monster all right, one that strikes fear in the hearts of moviegoers who prize taste and novelty." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato 3/4 |
Bad Santa (2003) |
"A foul-mouthed joy for much of the way." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Baghead (2008) |
"It's entertaining, often funny and ultimately endearing, thanks mainly to its ensemble cast." |
Rafer Guzman |
Splat 2.5/4 |
The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) |
"The Ballad of Greenwich Village is a safe movie about a renegade place." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2/4 |
The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) |
"The whole story feels like an exercise in manufactured emotion, tortured contrivance, narrative shortcutting and easy morality." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Ballets Russes (2005) |
"Seamless, effortlessly grandiose and thoroughly entertaining." |
John Anderson |
Splat .5/4 |
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002) |
"If you collected all the moments of coherent dialogue, they still wouldn't add up to the time required to boil a four- minute egg." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2/4 |
Balls of Fury (2007) |
"Christopher Walken has joined the legion of stand-up comics, student actors and bar-stool mimics trolling for laughs by doing bad Christopher Walken impressions." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 4/4 |
Balseros (2002) |
"Technically astounding, the emotional equivalent of a raft on high seas, Balseros ultimately feels perfectly true, precisely because it ended up the opposite of what it started out to be." |
John Anderson |
Splat 1/4 |
Bamako (2006) |
"Much of the nearly two-hour film consists of impassioned but lengthy speeches about interest rates, deficits, poverty and corruption. This is no way to entertain an audience, so Sissako throws in a few hastily drawn characters and a threadbare plot." |
Rafer Guzman |
Splat |
Bamboozled (2000) |
"Subtlety, thy name is not Spike Lee." |
John Anderson |
Tomato |
Band of Outsiders (1964) |
"A masterpiece of mood, nuance and emotion." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
The Band's Visit (2007) |
"Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin has made a sly and bewitching chamber comedy that underscores the decency of its characters while sidestepping the gooey, let's-join-hands imperative of its premise." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato |
Bandits (2001) |
"A screwball comedy in the best tradition, it's easily the best-written mainstream film to come out this year." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Bandslam (2009) |
"Simultaneously shiny and retro, calibrated and uncalculated, familiar and unpredictable." |
John Anderson |
Splat 2/4 |
The Banger Sisters (2002) |
"The script? Please." |
John Anderson |
Tomato |
Bangkok Dangerous (2001) |
"Entertaining, for sure. But it also impresses far more than it engages." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat 2/4 |
Bangkok Dangerous (2008) |
"Bangkok Dangerous pretends to have a lot on its mind. It moves slow as molasses and has the same general coloring." |
Rafer Guzman |
Tomato 3/4 |
The Bank Job (2008) |
"The Bank Job is fun to watch while both the heist and its often bloody consequences unravel in front of you." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato |
Baran (2002) |
"Majidi's poetic love story is a ravishing consciousness-raiser, if a bit draggy at times." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2.5/4 |
The Barbarian Invasions (2003) |
"The banter ... is thick enough to rake -- and often way too thick to swallow, even for those who might not mind spending a couple hours with a bunch of baby boomers wasting their time by sorting through wasted time in the past." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Barbershop (2002) |
"Amid the new populist comedies that underscore the importance of family tradition and familial community, one would be hard-pressed to find a movie with a bigger, fatter heart than Barbershop." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato 3/4 |
Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004) |
"Grooves to its own drummer, yet remains dynamically true to its roots." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2.5/4 |
Barnyard: The Original Party Animals (2006) |
"Barnyard isn't genius, but it isn't cloying either. It's aggressively entertaining and, at times, unexpectedly touching." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat 2/4 |
Bartleby (2002) |
"Uneven and half-baked." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat 2/4 |
Basic (2003) |
"Artificial, manufactured and devoid of credibility." |
Jan Stuart |
Splat 2.5/4 |
Basic Instinct 2 (2006) |
"Basic Instinct 2, for all its implausible plot devices, poverty of motivation, occasionally lethargic pace and fragrant dialogue, is a subversive piece of cinema." |
John Anderson |
Splat 2.5/4 |
Batman Begins (2005) |
"Maybe, now that this version of the franchise has drained itself of explanatory residue, the next chapter will have more bounce." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Battle for Terra (2009) |
"The script, by Evan Spiliotopoulos, borders on the heavy-handed, but director Aristomenis Tsirbas creates an intensity that may raise even grown-up neck hairs." |
Rafer Guzman |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Battle in Heaven (2006) |
"Fighting cliche, presenting the most flawed people as sympathetic and occasionally averting his camera eye as his characters neglect the saving of their own souls, Reygadas has made a movie that is itself an ethical dilemma." |
John Anderson |
Splat 2/4 |
The Battle of Shaker Heights (2003) |
"A Project Greenlight winner, which probably says mouthfuls." |
John Anderson |
Splat |
Battlefield Earth (2000) |
"The words 'so bad it's good' strain to make themselves heard through the film's coarse bluster and grimy din." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat .5/4 |
The Baxter (2005) |
"The Baxter is more than a little out of step in a summer peppered with crude or idiosyncratic wallflower romantics." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Be Cool (2005) |
"It's still jolly, goofy fun." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt (2005) |
"Brown's film evinces a tender, yet unsparing scrutiny of its subject's idiosyncrasies without getting too caught up in the romance of ruin." |
Gene Seymour |
Tomato 2.5/4 |
Be Kind Rewind (2008) |
"Even though its thin conceit strains and stumbles into being, Gondry's movie somehow ingratiates itself to the dauntless dreamer that lives within each of us." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat 2/5 |
The Beach (2000) |
"The Beach needed a director, because it's a little tough to tell what Danny Boyle was doing all those months in Thailand." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) |
"Even if it weren't a fascinating thriller in its own right, The Beat That My Heart Skipped would deserve attention for being one of the few remakes that honors its source by paring down instead of adding on." |
Gene Seymour |
Splat |
Beautiful (2000) |
"Sally Field's directing is unindictable, but the script and the acting are close to grotesque." |
John Anderson |
Tomato 3/4 |
Beautiful Boxer (2005) |
"'He fights like a man so he can become a woman,' reads the ad, but Uekrongtham's restrained film is neither as lurid nor as kitschy as the tagline portends." |
Jan Stuart |
Tomato 3.5/4 |
Beautiful City (2006) |
"Cross-pollinate an archetypal plotline with problematic romance and what you get is Beautiful City, a film in which the world is made immediate and kinetic." |
John Anderson |
Splat 2/4 |
The Beautiful Country (2005) |
"The moments of genuine feeling get wind-tossed on a sea of hard sell." |
Jan Stuart |
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