Desson Thomson

After a promising beginning and an amusing middle, the movie gets stuck in limbo.

Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains about 50 minutes of extra footage, is Coppola's final artistic assault. This is the one where he honors his vision -- or clears his name, whichever way you look at it. Does he do it? Perhaps the first thing to get out of your mind when watching this "Apocalypse," or the 1979 version, is worrying about whether the film's a success or failure. It's both. The more you see of "Apocalypse," the more obvious its triumphs and mistakes.

Let's accentuate the positive: Saving Silverman really stinks. No, really. It's bad. Awful.

Robocop is one weird and entertaining hybrid of camp and sci-fi shoot-'em-up.

An intriguing idea for about two seconds.

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

It's definitely NOT a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain. (Nor, as its title oddly suggests, is it about the demise of writer-director Van Sant.) It's a tone poem, an elliptical, fictionalized meditation about the ill-fated rock 'n' roll superstar.

Dull, plodding comedy.

A delirious mixture of spectacular gun battles, furious explosions and breathtaking stunt work, it's also one of the strangest stories to ever get the green light at a Hollywood studio. You have to take your hat off to Paramount Studios for allowing such inspired weirdness to see the light of day.

What starts out as a moody arthouse flick rapidly becomes an uneven B-movie yukfest (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), with low-budget concessions to the Hollywood cop-versus-killer industry.

Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.

Insufferably cloying experience.

The lighthearted buoyancy comes through. Silver takes her time, just as surely as slowly, searching for nuance between the hackneyed lines of Jewish Moms, Barrow Boys, Famous Authors and English Lit Groupies. Everyone at least has flickering moments of originality.

Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.

If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third American Pie installment, you'll have a good time.

The movie doesn’t hit one out of the park, the way Get Shorty (another Leonard adaptation) did. But it racks up points with stolen bases and singles.

An engaging battle between terrific acting and a flawed script.

Allen, who's a natural charmer, seems to be at half-strength here.

The wacky incongruity works when debuting director Mamet has tongue in cheek. But all too often he's rechewing film noir, Hitchcock twists and MacGuffins, as well as the Freudian mumbo-jumbo already masticated tasteless by so many cine-kids.

Thanks to Caine's subtly nuanced performance, there's a deeper dimension to everything. He's snappily ironic at times, sometimes amazingly delicate, always engaging.