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Your assessment of this movie depends completely on what you are looking for. If you come to this film without any knowledge of who and what and why, it will be disappointing. But if you approach the film not as a movie in the regular sense but as an historical document of a moment in time, then it becomes an entirely different experience. In this sense it helps to understand what is being documented and who these people are. Some working knowledge of the late 70s NYC downtown scene, the Mudd Club, T.V. Party, the lower east side art boom, the post-punk music world, etc. gives you a much greater sense of appreciation. Understood historically and not just as another film, whether the movie works as a traditional film, whether the plot is interesting or the characters well developed (a tricky proposition seeing that the original dialogue was lost and had to be re-dubbed) doesn't matter. What you are seeing is the last truly avant garde art and music scene in the US before AIDS, money, MTV and the rest destroyed it. And it focuses on someone right at the center of the storm, Basquiat before his rise to international fame. (Another commentator questioned Basquiat's cultural credibility, but I'm not sure what culture he is talking about). Beyond that the musical performances are exceptional and rare and are worth the price of admission by themselves. This is a portrait of something lost and timeless. It is a fascinating historical document and should be appreciated as such.

Too many movie critics are wanna-be pundits. They seem bored with their profession and spend a disproportionate amount of time with their reviews trying to make political or cultural observations or in a vain search for novelty that can alleviate their own lack of enthusiasm. The point is that critics are supposed to review a film with some sense of what it is trying to be. Night at the Museum was intended to be a fun, family-oriented movie. That it wasn't Citizen Kane or the Seventh Seal, that critics were too self-important to enjoy such a movie, etc., should not have been the point. Rather the point should have been if we, the unwashed movie-going audience, would like the film. Having seen it on cable this week I actually enjoyed it a lot. As the film made 250 million dollars domestically despite lukewarm reviews, it seems a lot of other people liked it too. Critics exist supposedly as a service to the audience. It would therefore be nice if critics kept an audience's expectations and desires in mind when writing their reviews.

I caught this one on television and I liked it quite a bit. Is it a great film? No. But it was a good film and was solidly entertaining. There is a distinction I make between a good television movie and a good theater movie. A good television movie is not a movie with substandard production values; the production values for this film are actually quite good. Instead it is a film that for whatever reason just seems more satisfying on TV at home than after all the hassle of going to a theater, paying 20 bucks, being generally irritated, etc. It does nothing groundbreaking. All it does is entertain. The film has Vikings, swords, battles, barbarian hordes-all the ingredients of a healthy, long-running, well deserved cable television life, the type of film that plays on television twenty years after its release.