Chris Kaltenbach

Gracie is painfully earnest, which might be OK were it not also painfully trite, painfully cliched and painfully formulaic.

Latifah's performance and the film's gentle heart should prove enough to win over even the most churlish.

Entertaining, thrilling and honestly sentimental, it's an equal-opportunity crowd-pleaser.

Cinema has once again proven its ability to incorporate every other mass-media art form. Director Zack Snyder and his computer wizards have made the best example yet of the movie-as-comic-book.

Nacho Libre enhances Hess' reputation as a gifted filmmaker and suggests there's more to Black than manic dementia. Both director and actor, however, need to find projects better-suited to their respective (and often impressive) talents.

Just don't think about what's going on, and you should be OK.

Delivers deliciously low blows at corporate America, office politics and the lengths people will go to avoid work.

A film that really has no idea what it wants to be, so it tries a little of everything, and does nothing very well.

Neither Grimm comes across as especially interesting to watch, and neither does anything in the movie offer much to get excited about.

Disney is creatively bankrupt and bereft of ingenuity -- especially in its live-action films. [25 Dec 1998, p.8F]

See it to be reminded (if you need further reminding) of this actress' remarkable range. Otherwise, take a pass.

Refreshingly, the movie never wavers in the importance it places on friendship over just about anything else.

The final resolution is silly by just about any standard. A little grounding in reality and a larger effort to avoid the trite could have made Everyone's Hero fun and inspirational for everybody, not just the very young.

The one thing most sorely missing is movie magic.

Until the last 15 minutes, What Lies Beneath is a well-paced maze that earns every gasp from its audience.

Johnny English never builds any momentum, and Atkinson simply isn't a good enough actor to mine continued laughs from repetitive material.

Darren Aronofsky labors awfully hard to get across a pretty simple message in The Fountain. But his efforts are so ethereal and extreme, it's almost impossible to turn away.

It's deliciously warped, deceptively smart and undeniably funny. Isn't that enough?

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

A slice-of-life where being gay is a fact of daily existence, not an excuse for existential dilemmas or grand tragedies.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best Star Trek movies are the even-numbered ones. Nemesis may keep that streak alive, but barely.

As a narrative, it has serious problems -- holes so gaping that they're all but unavoidable.

It's plenty thrilling, and it appeals to the flag-waving patriot in all of us.

A great cast can't quite pull City by the Sea out of the drink.

Too bad director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs didn't look more closely at their source material, a 2001 German film called Mostly Martha. That film used the same basic premise but injected real conflict into the mix, in ways sexual, culinary, even ethnic. That film tried to do something, even while it was entertaining us.

Blethyn's performance belongs in another movie, not this bipolar comedy-drama.

As each male-female relationship works itself out in ways either contrived or predictable, here's betting you wind up more disappointed than enlightened.

It's obvious and stereotypical. It's leaden and unconvincing. It's not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is.