Carrie Rickey

Rian Johnson's film is a scam wrapped in a sham.

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

Peppy, painless and -- happily -- not altogether brainless.

Over-orchestrated and underdeveloped interpretation of Jeffrey Hatcher's play.

Roughly an hour in, Transformers 2 morphs from teen adventure into lumbering war movie. Bay and his screenwriters squander their human capital in order to show us scenes of 20-ton toys crushing 10-ton toys.

Salvadori's choppy film never establishes a comic rhythm.

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

A mostly charmless affair.

She may not be the most cinematic of film artists, but Heckerling will make you smile.

That a detente between the cliques is unthinkable, that they could never eat at the same table, is one of many assumptions that makes Sleepover such a downer.

Less the blistering satire it imagines itself than a blustering, bloody, blundering melodrama about bottom feeders nibbling each other.

Not a movie, it's a museum catalog of gorgeously rendered portraits and landscapes. What a crashing disappointment.

It is diverting but insubstantial.

If the filmmakers had a script half as good as their special effects, Night at the Museum would be a must-see.

What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.

Given the filmmaker's privileged perspective of hindsight, to not consider the real-world repercussions of their theater, to not connect the dots between 1968 and 2008 is a squandered opportunity.

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

The twist of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy, is that its heroes, an entry-level investment banker and a brainiac pre-med student, are not dimwits.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Tonally, the film from director Anurag Basu has more personalities than Sybil. Basu strictly observes the B-movie convention of giving the audience an embrace, explosion, or chase sequence at regular intervals. If you don't like the genre, wait three minutes.

Somebody should tell Ward that winning isn't everything. Character is. And this is what his movie lacks.

The main distinction of this particular raunchfest, about the economic opportunities available to women in the phone-sex industry, is that it does not reconcile its slim narrative conflict with a big, fat wedding.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

There is much of interest in Baumbach's pictures - the confident handling of actors, the introspection, the terra-cotta and teal-painted walls. But what do you call a comedy of manners that's not particularly funny? [19 June 1998, p.04]

Filmmaker Roger Michell doesn't so much adapt Ian McEwan's fine novel Enduring Love, a surgically precise anatomy of romance and obsession, as eviscerate it and wave its entrails before the audience.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

A movie where the action scenes feel like filler, the romantic leads have little magnetism, and, before long, its metaphysical underpinnings fall to pieces.

Despite excellent elements - great actress, taut plot, slick visuals - Flightplan is like airplane food. No matter how good the ingredients the air chef has to work with, the entree inevitably ends up tasting like a Xerox of a facsimile of a meal.

The cast is full of fresh-faced unknowns ready for their close-ups. Most likely to succeed is Kayla Jackson, an almond-eyed dreamer, as Brittany, anchor of the Ovations and of her family.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.

The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown. The two story lines are not well-integrated.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Shrek the Third isn't a movie, it's the extension of a brand.

A big fat geek kiss to the movies of Steven Spielberg and his fanboys, Paul is a mild, meandering comedy.

A creepy, oozy, dopey remake of the stylish 1998 Japanese thriller, "Ringu."

I liked this movie better when it was called "Rock'n'Roll High School" and starred the Ramones and Mary Woronov.

Short, sour and scabrous, Bosses is that paradoxical thing: a situation comedy where neither situation nor comedy is particularly effective where nonetheless Jason Bateman is sidesplitting, as is Colin Farrell in a supporting role.

Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday. Emphasizing Jesus' agony over His ecstasy, Gibson has delivered a blood-drenched epic more stunning for its brutal violence than for its depiction of the calvary.

There are sniff movies and there are snuff movies, but Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is both. It has the bouquet of balm and blood. Imagine "Fragrance of the Lambs."

At the film's inconclusive conclusion, the filmmakers strand Erica and Sean in the moral twilight.

Although Schrader is an otherwise accomplished director and screenwriter, Touch's two moods combat rather than complement each other. [14 Feb 1997, p.04]

The material is so charged that it threatens to electrocute any who would touch it. Yet from the moment that Bette Midler, as Bernice the bio-Mom, appears, she becomes the instrument of its emotional release, catharsis teetering on high heels.

Unlike the filmmaker's previous stabs at presidential biopic-ing and conspiracy theorizing - "JFK" and "Nixon" - this one doesn't have the luxury of historical perspective.

By the halfway mark, Rogen's performance, like his voice, is less cuddly than grating, and the carbonated giggle that is Elizabeth Banks grows flat. This one's for the Smith cultists.

Visually immersive but emotionally uninvolving.

George, director of "Hotel Rwanda," is better at directing actors than visual storytelling. Every time the camera tilted to suggest a character's shaken world or distorted worldview I didn't feel heartache, I felt headache.

Overstocked farce.

Despite a winning performance by Anna Faris, the cutest thing in platform shoes since Goldie Hawn, the film falls on its keister so many times that before long the perky pinkness turns bruising black-and-blue.

One reason to see Rendition is for Naor's stunning performance as the torturer who is the one character aware of the political and moral contradictions of what he's doing. Every time he was on screen, he commanded it.

While Scott's movie has a consistent aura, it lacks a consistent tone. What are we to make of the movie, gauzy as a mist-shrouded lake and brutal as "Lord of the Flies?"

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

A crude, cringe-worthy, and intermittently funny affair that triggers the gag reflex. I sincerely can't tell you whether I was choking with laughter or keeping from choking.

If it were a landscape painting, Gerry would deserve a place in the National Gallery. But as a movie...deserves its own wing in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Despite a terrific performance from Shane West, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crash, Secret is a chronology, not a biopic.

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

Overwritten, over-designed, and too clever by 200 percent, the film does offer the pleasure of actors enjoying themselves.

If the shrill Italian melodrama Remember Me, My Love were a television soap opera, it would be called The Not-So-Young and the Restless.

It's rare that a movie is so graceful and so gross.

What's on screen is a hash, though it may very well be the most comprehensive catalog of male erotic fantasies in one single film.

Not to say that it isn't fun, only to say that it is more about sensation than sense.

It's not fresh and irreverent, qualities we admire in Allen. It is recycled and irrelevant.

Watching the film is like getting hooked by a fearful angler who can't successfully reel you in.

Contrived and schematic, Peter Chelsom's film is a mechanical bird that never takes wing.

The extent to which The Princess Diaries succeeds is the result of how pretty Hathaway at first mimics, then internalizes, Andrews' essential majesty.

Edgeless as a marshmallow and twice as syrupy.

Despite Angela's skills - and Bullock's charms - director Irwin Winkler's film is so pedestrian that his movie has all the thrills of a school crossing.

Quickly devolves into a violent thriller that resolves itself in sadomasochistic romance.

By turns entertaining and excruciating.

The script, which needs not just doctoring and could benefit from a spell in the critical-care ward, is full of dress-up and put-downs, and comes alive only when Prinze or Cook are on-screen. In short, She's All That aspires to be Clueless. It succeeds in being clueless.

At its best, the movie is a catalog of doggy stunts.

An airless, bilious, endless pageant of pseudohistory.

Although it would be understatement to call their characters unsympathetic, Van Der Beek and Sossamon play their parts with such doomed passion that they have some affecting moments.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long (2 hours, 48 minutes) that into the third hour I found myself yawning, "Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum."

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

The good news is that it sees what a jihad looks like from both sides. The bad news is that it's not a very good movie, with three fine performances and two great sequences.

I watched this movie thinking that it used the idea of taking a chance on cards as a metaphor for taking a chance on love. I was dead wrong.

Legacy is a two-hour light show with a lot of flash, a little style, and not one byte of narrative originality.

A movie that provokes as many rueful sighs as it does bruising laughs.

Her (Angela Ismailos) generic questions about the politics, economics, and aesthetics of film yield predictably generic responses from her subjects.

It's a stylish package with not much inside.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

Don't blame Kline. This most thoughtful of actors is trapped behind the lectern of a film that spouts contradictory lessons it can't reconcile.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

If there's going to be a "Rush Hour 3," the filmmakers need more of the Ziyi/Sanchez women warriors to punch up the sagging cross-cultural buddy humor of the Chan-Tucker partnership.