Charles Taylor

Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.

Everything the first "Mummy" was fun for not being. It's loud and chaotic, jammed with effects that don't wow us precisely because they are trying so hard to wow us.

It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.

If Bond long ago became part of your fantasy life or your pop iconography, then the anticipation of a good Bond movie would probably survive even if The World Is Not Enough were worse than it is.

Even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal.

Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.

Kate Hudson gives the best performance in the movie, though she seems always on the verge of being funnier and dirtier than she's allowed to be. Elsewhere the cast is accumulated for their cachet more than for any role they're given to play. Some of the casting makes no sense.

The most surprising thing about the movie is the clumsiness of Harold Ramis' direction. Ramis has never equaled the work he did on "Groundhog Day."

Conspiracy Theory doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy, a political thriller, a romance or a satire.

It doesn't take Rea long to decide that he's more interested in extending his record for Longest Acting Career Sustained on One Expression, and he's back to his baggy-eyed, hangdog look.

The movie is efficient but scores zero in suspense, wit or class.

It's in no way a stupid movie. The trouble is that there's only so much emotional energy you can expend on these assholes before you start wondering why you're paying attention to them at all.

Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.

There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.

Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.

Barbershop 2 is like going out for a bad meal with a group of people you love being with. You're happy to be in their company; you just wish you didn't leave feeling hungry.

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something. That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches.

The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.

Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.

Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.

Jackie Chan is thoroughly wasted in a bad suit and a witless comedy.

A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.

The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.

If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.

Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.