Allison Benedikt

Parker is pretty much a disaster here, shrill and phony and, worst of all, spineless. She reminded me of Tea Leoni in "Spanglish," her performance working against the movie, serving only as a cumbersome, opaque obstacle.

This is the kind of movie that nice people call ambitious. Let's just leave it at that.

Cherot shot G on a tight schedule, but instead of this age-old indie predicament generating a certain scrappy passion, the film just looks cheap.

Challenging to follow, at best.

It's a familiar dance, but something only July could invent, a vignette much like her characters: beautiful, flawed, organic--fine alone but better with the others.

Phony, disingenuous family entertainment, suffocated by its green bean casserole approach to Middle America, spineless cardboard characters and paper-thin plot "twists."

Gere and Binoche are both terribly miscast--one far too charismatic, the other far too dowdy, which is something for Juliette Binoche. And the spelling bees? Dull. Dreary.

Inner dialogue is a hard sell on screen.

A huge waste of talent (Witherspoon's) and time (ours), a supernatural romantic comedy that is neither romantic, comedic, super or natural.

It's formulaic and frequently over the top, 30 minutes too long and altogether too slow, but oh when those gorgeous, graceful pups tilt their heads just so … love.

A compelling piece of press criticism as it probes the media as terror's conduit of choice, spreading message and validating violence in the 1970s and today.

Even with a new leading man and a more family-friendly rating, some things never change: The Mask still stars Industrial Light & Magic.

Sam Dunn's unabashed wet kiss to his favorite genre of music, heavy metal, a.k.a. devil's music.

Mostly it's an incredible tale of ritual and perseverance.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Running Scared could become a cult classic.

As visually stunning as it is, "DR9" is also more than two hours and contains, at best, 10 lines of dialogue, an ear-piercing Bjork score and no discernible plot.

I won't pretend there aren't moments of sweetness here--there are, aplenty. But the promise of true emotion goes bust with bad acting, cheap writing and false sentiment.

McAvoy does his best with this subpar, heart-tugging material. At times his mix of easy charm and inner demon pulls Rory out from under the tired script, but those pesky dramatic forces keep pushing him back in for every predictable plot development.

Mark my words: Mindhunters will do for psycho-thrillers what "Showgirls" did for stripper movies.

In the end, Protocols of Zion is all context--a bit here about Father Coughlin, a minute there about the Holocaust, a stint with "The Passion" and a brief shot of Levin watching the beheading of Daniel Pearl--no soul.

An exhausting, predictable, even maddening moviegoing experience.

If this all sounds very heavy, well, it is, but it's also very, very funny. Cronenberg may want to say something important about violence, but he's also head over heels for it, ending each gunfight and neck-breaking with a close-up on the victim, blood either pooling behind his head or brains spilling from his face. Big laughs.

But, as with any other Merchant Ivory film, this one provides pleasures beyond the ordinary. [07 Apr 1995]

Maybe if Mindel had focused more on his characters, less on the silly "noir" trickery, his film would do Garity justice. As it is, go find better work, kid.

Grace and Quaid imbue what could have been caricatures--with heart, intelligence and great comic timing.

Could have been a funny movie. There are a few truths about food-service that McKittrick gets right but doesn't fully exploit.

A mostly bland, sporadically crude, by-the-numbers romantic comedy about two gay men in love.

Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.