It’s more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star’s movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a ‘Star Trek’ episode. – Elvis Mitchell
If Mr. Chan ever makes another movie like ‘The Tuxedo,’ it’s American audiences that will see him in court. With ‘Shanghai Knights,’ he has come through with one of his best. This time, it’s personable. – Elvis Mitchell
His work isn’t all glower. Even though he hasn’t smiled in a movie since the underrated ‘Proof’ in the early 1990s, Mr. Crowe is given to a hurt swallow when he’s uncomfortable and to a look of suffering in his eyes. – Elvis Mitchell
‘Ali’ is a breakthrough for its director, Michael Mann. The film, based on the life of Muhammad Ali, is Mr. Mann’s first movie with feeling; his overwhelming love of its subject will turn audiences into exuberant, thrilled fight crowds. – Elvis Mitchell
Can you sue yourself for plagiarism? If so, then ‘Old School’ has presented Ivan Reitman with a case. – Elvis Mitchell
The director Sofia Coppola’s new comic melodrama, ‘Lost in Translation,’ thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter,’ Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ and Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love.’ – Elvis Mitchell
Scene by scene, you can’t help being impressed by ‘Mean Girls;’ it’s like a group of sketches linked by a theme, with some playing much better than others. – Elvis Mitchell
You can’t ignore the Asian and Hispanic populations in L.A. We can let audiences know independent film is not just about white men. – Elvis Mitchell
One of a handful of films made in Detroit, ‘8 Mile’ doesn’t feature the Motown renaissance that Mayor Coleman A. Young dreamed of in the 1970s. Instead, it’s the beaten-down city: 8 Mile refers to the line of demarcation between Detroit and suburban, mostly white Oakland County. – Elvis Mitchell
‘Never Die Alone’ is primarily a riveting genre film that neatly exhibits the director’s growing assurance – Donald Goines would be proud. – Elvis Mitchell
Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott’s most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you’d swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot. – Elvis Mitchell
‘Pootie Tang’ may be raw and slovenly – hey, it often is raw and slovenly – but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I’m not sure what Pootie would say. – Elvis Mitchell
The story of a proud Roman soldier who is sold into slavery and must fight his way back to freedom, ‘Gladiator’ suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial. – Elvis Mitchell
Tina Fey, a performer and head writer for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ has deftly adapted Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction dissection of teenage girl societal interaction, ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.’ – Elvis Mitchell
The stoic drama ‘A Somewhat Gentle Man’ is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard’s complexion. It’s a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal. – Elvis Mitchell
‘The Third Man,’ directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made. – Elvis Mitchell
There’s a great deal of echoing going on in ‘Old School.’ Mr. Piven, who played the upstart outsider in the 1994 campus comedy ‘PCU,’ has crossed over into playing the stiff martinet. – Elvis Mitchell
Though narrative cohesion isn’t the strength of ‘Mean Girls,’ which works better from scene to scene than as a whole, the intelligence shines in its understanding of contradictions, keeping a comic distance from the emotional investment of teenagers that defined ‘Ridgemont High’ and later the adolescent angst movies of John Hughes. – Elvis Mitchell
‘Old School’ is so breezy it could be a late-night talk show, especially when Craig Kilborn, of ‘The Late Late Show,’ sidles into camera range as a particularly loathsome competitor to Mitch. – Elvis Mitchell
The title ‘Spirited Away’ could refer to what Disney has done on a corporate level to the revered Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s epic and marvelous new anime fantasy. – Elvis Mitchell
The battle scenes in ‘Gladiator’ don’t have the exultant lift of Hong Kong period-action pictures like the ‘Once Upon a Time in China’ series, where the fights have the eye-popping panache of dance sequences from a musical. – Elvis Mitchell
It’s an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new ‘Pinocchio.’ Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden. – Elvis Mitchell
One of the best things Gwyneth Paltrow has done in years was her mesmerized, good-sport cameo in a ‘Pootie’ sketch, when she was melted over him like butter on an English muffin. – Elvis Mitchell
‘Man is an endangered species,’ announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump ‘Battlefield Earth.’ And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. – Elvis Mitchell
It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but ‘Battlefield Earth’ may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century. – Elvis Mitchell
Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it’s discouraging to see ‘Windtalkers’ evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times. – Elvis Mitchell
One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts – ‘Being John Malkovich,’ ‘Human Nature,’ ‘Adaptation’ and now ‘Sunshine’ – sound like titles from REM’s ‘Reckoning.’ – Elvis Mitchell
‘8 Mile’ could do without an unnecessary class swipe. In a final throwdown, Rabbit clowns a competitor by revealing that the guy went to suburban Detroit Cranbrook, one of the finest private schools in the country. – Elvis Mitchell
Ali was the African-American who exulted in saying exactly what he was capable of, and the bouncing-boy braggadocio of hip-hop is impossible to imagine without him. So it makes sense that one of his spiritual children, the sunny-dispositioned rapper turned actor Will Smith, would play him. – Elvis Mitchell