Connie Ogle

It's possible to achieve hilarity and pathos, but it's not easy, and Litvak isn't quite skilled enough to make the sex jokes rest easily beside the final grandiose and pat confessions. As a result, When Do We Eat? merely whets your appetite for a fresh take on family matters.

The few jokes it does land can't make this more than a look-what's-on-late-night-cable event.

Unlike Uncle Nino's garden, the film never blooms into anything special.

It's pretty much a waste of everyone's time, especially yours.

Amusing at times but never more than a modest diversion, lacking the cleverness and imagination required to turn it into more than a one-joke movie.

There are not enough thrilling musical interludes, and few come close to capturing the sly joy in Porter's music.

Overall, the film's sheer mediocrity prevents Thurman from flying to its rescue.

It's unimaginative, crude and so derivative it hurts.

In the wake of TV's powerhouse "The Shield," Dark Blue comes off as something of a retread, with little of "The Shield's" electric fury, edgy camera work or deft characterizations.

Flamboyantly over-the-top, visually kinetic.

The film, bound to bore the socks off impatient viewers, mistakes reserve for depth and ends up hamstringing its talented cast into playing characters you never care about all that much.

Shakespeare's rich language does not fit soundly inside every mouth.

The movie does miraculously end up making good use of a couple of running jokes, and the cast soldiers on, though the laughs are meager. But mostly, Girl Most Likely is a case of good actors in serious need of worthwhile material.

Watching A Late Quartet feels more like sitting through a Classical Music 101 lecture than entertainment.

If you can get past the ludicrous fantasy — well, wait, that’s the problem. You can’t get past the ludicrous fantasy.

The sins of the inspirational Saint Ralph are venial, but they undeniably prevent the small Canadian film from stretching beyond the boundaries of an After School Special.

The cast is impressive, and the story even soapier than "The Tudors," if you like that sort of thing.

Despite all the flying bullets, which are admittedly entertaining at times, Shoot 'Em Up doesn't offer enough bang for your bucks.

Nobel Son is not good. Nor is it bad. It exists, instead, somewhere in the middle ground of interesting enough to hold one's attention without actually providing any fresh, sensible or nonderivative developments.

The only positive thing about the aimless film The Yellow Handkerchief is the idea that William Hurt may be ready for his Jeff Bridges moment.

Chéri never fulfills its emotional promise.

An uninspired, sporadically funny adaptation that falls short of the book's winsome, frisky chaos.

For most U.S. audiences, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, is going to feel more like a history lesson than a movie.

Rapidly devolves into a pedestrian thriller in which almost nobody behaves in a recognizably human way.

One of the problems with Rampart is that we've seen guys like Dave in movies and on TV for years now. The bad cop psyche has been delved into pretty deeply on all fronts, most notably in FX's brilliant series "The Shield."

The Age of Adaline is a modern romantic fairy tale set in San Francisco, marred by bad narration and an unnecessary desire to overexplain random magic.

Little happens that you don't see coming, down to which cast members will get picked off and in what order. It's a dumb action movie in a summer full of dumb movies, and yet it's always entertaining. And you won't really miss Arnold at all.

Features one of the more pointless cameos ever when Tom Waits shows up abruptly in the desert to spout mystical nonsense about Domino trading her life for somebody else's. The scene has absolutely no place in this jarring, violent movie; Waits is just another of Scott's distractions.