question: Gracie can be rousing and touching in spots, but is ultimately undone by its predictable story arc and a lack of nuance.

numbered reviews: 1. In real life, Elizabeth Shue was quite the activist, the first person in her New Jersey community to break the gender barrier in soccer: this is her charming(fictionalized)story.
2. Why is Gracie as processed as an after-school special? You miss the knockabout edge of Bend It Like Beckham -- though the ending, in its Pavlovian sports-flick way, pumps you up.
3. It's not without well-observed moments, and in the title role, Carly Schroeder makes an agreeably flawed and feisty rooting interest.
4. Gracie strives to be G.I. Jane in shin guards, but it ends up as She's the Man without the comedy.
5. How often do you see a film that's not only interested in girls' lives but equally honest about their tribulations and their potential?
6. Not a terrible movie...but it's awfully familiar--so much so that it probably should have been called Trudy.
7. Gracie's only achievement is technical, yet it has nothing to do with creative merit: Prints for the film, Davis Guggenheim's first feature-length fiction, will be carbon neutral.
8. An unbelievable mix of sports movie clichés and girl-power attitude
9. Firing on all formulaic cylinders, Gracie is heavy with tidy meaning and mealy morality.
10. For anyone who's ever had an adolescent girl in the house, Gracie will be both eerily familiar and a bit scary.


question: Be Cool is tepid, square, and lukewarm; as a parody of the music business, it has two left feet.

numbered reviews: 1. Ultra-smooth ex-gangster Chili Palmer returns to the screen after a decade's absence and the audience gets whacked...an unmitigated disaster.
2. The kind of sequel that gives sequels a bad name - a bland, lifeless, uninspired cash-in with an assembly-line script and a sleepwalking star.
3. They'll look look longingly at the screen, silently willing the movie to Be cool! Be funny! At least be somewhat interesting! And the hopes will go unfulfilled.
4. Irony? If you say so.
5. has been manufactured to the hilt to appeal to all demographics yet entertains none
6. Painful to sit through. Except for Travolta & Thurman's dance, this is awful. Product placement everywhere and only Aerosmith's Joe Perry & The Rock keep their dignity.
7. The laughs come often and the massive cast has brought its best.
8. doesn't capture much of what's really cool in Elmore Leonard's novel, but there's no denying that "Be Cool" provides some very funny, very entertaining moments.
9. A lazy, rhythmless, and redundant piece of moviemaking.
10. It should be a rule of filmmaking that when the plot fizzles out, the film should end


question: This brooding, measured look at adultery is ultimately emotionally riveting, thanks to its script and performances.

numbered reviews: 1. Rarely has a supreme artist's twilight been so richly illuminating.
2. Enthrallingly original work of highly personal fiction.
3. Faithless is Bergman at his most familiar.
4. At once harsh and beautiful, lucid and dense, delicate and overwhelming.
5. If Ullmann has unquestionably appropriated from her years with Bergman (and Josephson) a magnificent empathy with her players, she is also rewardingly attentive to visual detail.
6. Endre is superb in the role Ullmann would have played 20 years ago.
7. Bergman has reached for a woman's insight his whole career. Ullmann completes this for him.
8. That it is thought provoking is no question; that it offers few epiphanies, likewise without debate.
9. A probing look at love, marriage, fidelity, rivalry, and other deep-rooted emotional issues.
10. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that my response to these events was a thundering 'duh.'


question: The symbolism in this cinematic metaphor on conflicts in the Middle East becomes so overbearing that it's hard to care about the characters or their plight.

numbered reviews:
1. A rambling road movie with noble intentions and an excess of speechifying.
2. The elder actresses simmer as they warily interact, but the dialogue is more schematic than dramatic...
3. The milieu he chooses -- essentially one long, queerly prosaic car ride to nowhere -- robs the film of much of its dramatic force.
4. Portman and the audience are stranded in the middle, on the outside looking in, with nothing to do and patience increasingly wearing thin.
5. There's an art to ambiguity -- there really is... Left to their own devices, viewers will fill in the blanks, but when the movie starts filling them in itself, you have to wonder about the mismatch.
6. While Portman does outshine everyone and everything on screen and though she certainly gets credit for making the résumé sacrifice in the spirit of embracing her heritage, Free Zone does nothing for her in return
7. Without much effort you can imagine the corkboard littered with index cards mapping out the political clashes this cast is asked to act out in their robotic interactions.
8. Much of it is labored and overemphatic.
9. An exceptional new film.
10. A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.