Chris Kaltenbach

Gets credit for avoiding the easy path. Too bad the path it chooses doesn't lead us anywhere we want to be taken.

One gets the feeling Kaufman was so intent on putting fury and fanaticism on-screen, he forgot about having it serve any greater purpose. Which makes Quills the film equivalent of one of de Sade's novels: artifice, without art.

Lane gives the film her best shot; she's pretty much the only reason to see it. There's an intelligence mixed with ferocity that makes her performance compelling, far-more-so than anything else in the film.

Too much about the game and not enough about the town, the players and everything else.

The original Rocky would have found a way to ground that encounter in reality, to engender honest emotion and give audiences an Everyman hero both noble and believable. This film is too busy worshiping its hero to bother.

Doesn't match the impact of its predecessor, which both revived and reimagined the zombie-film genre.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

Let's just say this is a perfect film for penguin lovers who also are devoted members of the Green party - and leave it at that.

Unwisely bills itself as a comedy.

There's a dollop of charm and a deluge of formula in Sleepover.

Thank goodness for Davy Crockett; without him, the Alamo could have proven the blandest heroic siege in movie history.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

If only all this wonderful talent wasn't in service to a story that pushes credulity beyond the breaking point, perilously close to the realm of farce. Too many coincidences, too much convenient timing, too little honest plot development.

The movie annoyingly waits until the end to reveal the names of those experts who have been doing all the talking; it would have been nice to know these folks' qualifications first.

The sad truth is that the film squanders almost all of its inspiration in the first 20 minutes or so.

Doesn't display a single deep thought, or even a middlingly profound one.

Graeme Obree was a champion bicycler who, by all accounts, rarely took the easy way out. Too bad this movie version of his life doesn't follow suit.

Benefits from an amiable chemistry between Harrelson and Banderas, and Davidovich always makes a good tough-as-nails dame with more smarts than any man will give her credit for.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.

Has its heart in the right place, and could have been an insightful rumination on corporate shortsightedness and mid-life obsolescence. Instead, it's another one of those Hollywood films whose feel for the workingman's life seems to come exclusively from other movies.

With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

There's no character to root for in this movie, no potential triumphs or resounding failures, just the sense of people going through the motions because they can't bother to think of anything better to do. And that's not a lot to hang your moviegoing hat on.

There are moments, heaven forgive me, that left me chuckling. Not to mention eternally grateful that it's these guys doing this stuff, and not me.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

Still, it's hard not to long for the Pooh stories of old, those endearingly anarchic little tales that captured the wonder of a child's world without ever once condescending to it.

The movie finally comes to life when Liu turns up.

Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.

The result is a film that plays like a creaking melodrama, with good guys and bad guys and precious little in between.