question: Semi-Pro is an intermittently funny, half-hearted attempt at sports satire, and one of Will Ferrell's weaker cinematic efforts.

numbered reviews: 1. There are some ludicrous sight gags and uniquely silly, if foul-mouthed, laughs. The movie falters when it tries to be serious. Fortunately, those moments are few.
2. The humor is mostly visual while too many of the scenes that are actually written whimper out without a punch line.
3. You can't help but marvel, and laugh at, Ferrell's indefatigable enthusiasm and willingness to make a complete ass of himself.
4. If you're a Ferrell fan, this is probably the kind of movie you want to see him in.
5. [S]wing[s] with thoughtless abandon from one posture to another. Bam! Here's a vomit joke! Bam! Here's a tenderly romantic moment!
6. With all the vertical leap of a pygmy in a pick-up game, "Semi-Pro" is like a movie in the mind of a 10-year-old who's discovered profanity, pornography and a shoebox of blank Mad-Libs - funny only to the person coming up with it.
7. Will Ferrell in short shorts. Isn't that enough to inspire you to see the movie Semi-Pro?
8. This '70s-period sports comedy is only funny about half of the time and seems like an uneasy film hybrid. Half the time it's trying to be a Will Ferrell vehicle, and half the time it's trying to rip off of earlier, better movies.
9. I laughed from start to finish at its relentlessly, energetically profane absurdity and a cast crammed with funny actors in even the smallest roles.
10. Ferrell is capable of a great deal more than he's been delivering. It might surprise him to learn that white men can jump. But first they have to try.


question: Soderbergh successfully pulls off the highly ambitious Traffic, a movie with three different stories and a very large cast. The issues of ethics are gray rather than black-and-white, with no clear-cut good guys. Terrific acting all around.

numbered reviews: 1. Soderbergh goes for realism with his camera and cast -- and gets it right.
2. Traffic is movie excitement from beginning to end.
3. Traffic looks like the Oscar best-picture front-runner, and so does Soderbergh, for best director. But long after everyone has forgotten who won the statues, it will be remembered as one of film's most stylish and electrifying wake-up calls.
4. A blistering, thought-provoking modern masterpiece.
5. With Traffic, his most ambitious and complex film to date, Soderbergh again proves himself one of our most inventive filmmakers.
6. Traffic is about a war we'll never win, a war we may never admit we can't win. It has its share of blood and sweat. But after 2 1/2 smoothly flowing hours, what you remember most are the tears.
7. A huge canvas of a movie that nonetheless brings the various facets of drug trafficking -- and drug-taking -- down to human scale.
8. Walk straight and steady into Steven Soderbergh's dizzying drug drama Traffic and minutes later you'll feel as woozy as if you had fallen into one of Wonderland's smokiest sinkholes.
9. As exhaustively researched and carefully planned as it is, Traffic is also quite entertaining.
10. As gripping and entertaining as any thriller you'll encounter.


question: A creepy French psychological thriller that commands the audience's attention throughout.

numbered reviews: 1. Although its opening promises a mystery, the question at the core of 'Cache' is not who is responsible for sending the packages; instead, the film asks whether the real danger is outside the Laurents' home or inside it.
2. Un drama intimista e inquietante que esconde una reflexión perturbadora sobre un vergonzoso capítulo de la historia francesa. Brillante dirección y actores.
3. Chillingly reminds us that in life, love, family and politics, we never know the full story. And someone is always watching.
4. Haneke has made a fine study of guilt and betrayal, and tries to convey what is hidden. Perhaps what is best hidden in the film is the claim that lies are conveyed at 24 frames a second.
5. If I have to sit through French small talk in a slow-paced film for two hours, I expect a substantial payoff.
6. The most unsettling part about Michael Haneke's taut, psychological thriller Hidden, is the ever-constantly changing points of view. We are never sure through whose eyes we are watching the events.
7. It's a head-scratcher, and a particularly fine one at that.
8. However valid these themes may be, these are not issues that keep me awake at night. They do not squat on my brain like some fantasticated octopus of guilt.
9. Thrillers often betray their audiences in order to entertain them. In "Cache," it's the footage itself that betrays us.
10. Challenges the audience to get involved in the story


question: Passionate and powerfully acted, Fruitvale Station serves as a celebration of life, a condemnation of death, and a triumph for star Michael B. Jordan.

numbered reviews:
1. "An emotionally grounding character study as well as a sobering manifestation of social injustices that surround us.
2. The real power of Fruitvale Station is in reminding us all that whenever we hear about a death -- random, accidental, foreseen or otherwise -- that lost life belonged to a real person, with complications, loved ones, enemies, flaws, hopes and dreams.
3. While Jordan is responsible for making Oscar Grant come to life, Coogler deserves equal if not more praise for having so successfully created a sense of the world he lived in.
4. Well intentioned and reasonably well constructed, Fruitvale Station seems to exist for the sole purpose of making what should be an obvious point: Oscar Grant didn't deserve to die, and the officer who shot him in the back had no right to do so.
5. Powerful and disturbing.Michael B. Jordan is brilliant. It shows us we can't change the past but with movies like this perhaps we can make a better future.
6. Without ever being forced or false, and with an amazingly honest eye and ear for detail, writer-director Ryan Coogler's drama about a young man's final hours is one of the most extraordinary films you'll see this year.
7. The movie is modest in its ambition and powerful in its reverberations. It takes Oscar Grant's story and makes it universal - and transforms a sometimes awkward and obvious movie into a work of art.
8. [Ryan] Coogler isn't exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we're supposed to feel.
9. Captures the fear that seems to drive too much of race relations in this country, that blend of unease and false assumption that kills communication and leads to tragedy.
10. The fact that Ryan Coogler's film about Oscar is being released just as the nation is gripped by the Zimmerman trial makes this already stunning picture all the more pungent.