Gene Seymour

Sophisticated romantic comedy for people who think "Corky Romano" is trenchant political satire.

The hard-sell comic delivery one expects from contemporary date movies is pleasantly tempered here.

Snarkiness and sentiment are in constant battle for supremacy throughout Run, Fat Boy, Run with no chance of a comfortable draw.

Kattan and Ferrell do their best to fill out the shallow Butabis.

After a while, the only way for a reasonably intelligent person to get through The Country Bears is to ponder how a whole segment of pop-music history has been allowed to get wet, fuzzy and sticky.

Succeeds best when it intensifies its focus on the work and life of its main subject, seen in interviews, home movies and in a climactic performance with Bono and the Edge on "Tower of Song."

It's no use expecting Return to Never Land to match, much less exceed, Disney's 1953 version of "Peter Pan," which by itself isn't quite in the uppermost tier of the studio's full-length cartoons.

For all its familiar conventions and hoary improbabilities, Double Jeopardy is a relatively efficient model of its kind.

If I were 6, I could enjoy Rebound without thinking about all the better movies made from its concept.

Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.

His constant chatter may grate, but Noya does the wide-eyed wonderment thing very well.

As a full-service holiday movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause gets you into the mood to shop early and often by making the North Pole look like a shopping mall with a never-ending school pageant.

The droll cast--especially Ferrer, who's exquisite as a tough-talking dunce--deserved something more fully realized than this.

A coy, frantic attempt at screwball comedy, lightly seasoned and more than a little gummy.

As long as you keep thinking of "Babe," you can't help thinking that there's no excuse for movies like Good Boy! to merely push the usual buttons, deploy the usual poop jokes and carry out the usual sight gags.

A hostage drama, cliches intact, is what we get.

Righteous Kill's script is credited to "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz, and you wonder how the sleek, nuanced flow of that earlier movie evaded this one.

Griffiths' Pam holds your attention without any gratuitous mannerisms or broad asides. It's a sleek, rangy performance that all but redeems the hackneyed familiarity of the premise.

You'll be goaded throughout The Comebacks to think of "Bend It Like Beckham," "Remember the Titans," "Rudy," "Hoosiers," "Field of Dreams" and their ilk. What you also think about is how much this stuff worked better in "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles."

Thinking too much about the contents will ruin what little pleasure there is in the experience.

All told, this is going to make passable television. Eventually.

Edmond does, on the surface, seem very much a contemporary tale of urban terror. Yet despite the best efforts of all concerned, what seemed explosive and provocative two decades ago now comes across as schematic and artificial.

There's no real rigor or craft applied to this story -- just mood, tone, neo-gothic imagery and frantic attitude. If only Penelope knew what it truly wished to be and how to go about it. Which is probably what this overly coy fantasy's modestly appealing title character wishes as well.

From the beginning to its very end, The Benchwarmers seems to be struggling to justify its own existence.

Hostel II is far too shrewd and savagely witty to be caught engaging in higher seriousness. Roth could probably go even further with this particular franchise if he wanted to. Yet somehow, I think he's meant for grander, subtler and more intricate distractions than this.

Its dark-edged crime-caper plot is so formulaic it seems almost ritualized. Yet Ice Cube and Mike Epps enact their standard odd-couple tango with such ease and brio, you'd think they'd never seen such movies before.

There are enough grace notes and gentle surprises strewn along this well-trod path to make Just Looking just good enough to justify Alexander's career move.

What Idle Hands lacks in originality, it makes up for in energy and insolence. It takes guts for a movie to indulge as much as this one does in proto-hippie humor and you find yourself tickled, in spite of yourself, by the movie's nerve, if not its jokes.

To her credit, Jovovich carries out her action-hero duties with swagger and conviction that never get out of control. Clearly, she's expecting a franchise out of this.

While Yamamoto's bullets never miss, Kitano's attempt at tragic grandeur of "Godfather"-esque proportions misses to an almost embarrassing degree.

The movie falls short of the grandeur it's reaching for, but if you're looking for balm to soothe your frazzled nerves, you may be able to scrape some from the movie's rawer edges.

The movie is over the top and garish. Its transitions often are sloppy and crude. But it brandishes its excesses like a loud, retro suit.

The cause is just. But there's something off-kilter about the mix. Maybe it's because the animation retains its TV flatness while the story's texture is gratuitously bulked up.

Reunion is an awkward compound of paradoxical tones and ideas... But one shouldn't underestimate Perry's ability to make such contradictions work and get away with the most wretched excess.

Gallops along at a quick, easygoing clip. Grown-ups may have to scrub the sugar from their frontal lobes. But it's not about them, is it? Never was. Never will be.

Mindless escape. [12 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-4]

It's nice, once in a while, to come upon a movie that knows it's nothing special, proves it and doesn't care so long as its target audience feels good enough to have a refreshing beverage or two afterward.

Driving Lessons follows the well-worn path laid down by other, better movies while making strained, ludicrous things happen toward the end.

Whether you care if they find them (terrorists) or not may depend on how much you've been able to withstand Bad Company's sensory overload of firefights, vehicular mayhem, techno-cool swagger and enough bumptious contrivances to fill several seasons of daffy prime-time soaps.

Pettis is adorable, but she pushes the cuteness dial well past one's tolerance level. Still, if you've got small ones yourself, they'll probably enjoy the messes Joe and Peyton make together. They may also wonder why it takes so long for all the movie's messes to get cleaned up.

Documents accurately the capacity of pop culture to make mongrels of its consumers. But it doesn't quite know (or want to know) what to make of it.

The movie, with all its brashness and crassness, can still claim noble motives in encouraging insecure young people to seek the pop diva buried deep within.

The movie's clatter and whiz-bang suggests more humor than there actually is.

Manages to sustain a sweet, funny groove for, say, 65 of its 85 minutes.

There probably isn't another actress anywhere who could make that corny self-advertisement work. And there definitely isn't another actress who could make such an overbearing heroine worth watching for an hour and a half.

At times, the narrative thread slips the movie's grasp and there are flat spots in which characters just scream and thrash. Given what its ending aims for (don't ask), such interludes feel flabby and gratuitous even with Sutherland and Spacek providing gravitas to the ghoulishness.

It looks as if no one bothered to deliver more than the minimum requirement of magic or artistry.

As over-the-top as Raven-Symoné and Lawrence are, the most live-action cartoon characters in College Road Trip are the father-daughter tandem of Doug (Donny Osmond) and Wendy (Molly Ephraim), whose nitro-powered perkiness pass the point of grating and move into a perversely antic state of grace.

It's a pastiche of pulpy elements culled from all the "Dirty Harry" movies you can think of.

(Lawrence) has every right to be proud of carrying this rickety film on his stooped shoulders.

As its plot thickens, Waist Deep gets more outlandish. The whole mess empties out into an overextended car chase through Los Angeles.

The noir atmosphere doesn't quite smother the dialogue's cheesy smell.