John Anderson

Stay Alive spends a lot of time inside the video game system, and what will terrify the audience very early on is the realization that there's better acting in the video game than on the big screen.

The go-for-broke plot twists are daring, but because there's no sense of background to the characters, one gets the sense it's all being made up as Baigelman goes along.

It’s a deranged story, one that offers all kinds of opportunities for examining changes in the state of artificial insemination, medical ethics, the ways in which the human body has been opened up like an evidence locker, and the catchup that legislation has to play with technology.

Generic booze is, in its way, a shortcut, something pretending to be something else—something achieved through time, effort and expense. As such, it’s not a bad analogy for this movie.

Does for industrialists, politicians, pro-football owners and lawyers what Christopher Guest's "Best in Show' did for dog owners -- but without the skewer.

Follows a leadenly predictable path that will be more than familiar to anyone who's seen a recent sports movie, or any Sandler movie.

A sad farewell to the promising Project Greenlight concept, this Feast leaves viewers with nothing satisfying to tuck into.

An overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem’s life.

Although it comes under the increasingly crowded category of Why Did They Bother, McHale's Navy does offer an example of a movie that tries to be all things to all people. As long as they're 13 and male.

Reitman's attempt to show he can re-create the success of his biggest comedy ever. What he proves instead is that, given time and money, a comedy director can devolve into a lower life form.

The film should have been played for pure farce and is not, hence the head-scratching in which a viewer will engage before very few bodies are cold.

Ms. Brown, who first came to our attention in “Stranger Things,” and for good reason, is surrounded by a cast that may have lost a bet.

There's not enough sustained musical momentum to simulate the energy of an actual rave; the characters are likable but unremarkable.

That this is the first film for director Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony for directing the stage version, may be compounding the problem. But frankly, if someone wanted to do a parody of a gay film like this, it's hard to imagine the sloganeering being much different.

A documentary as messy as the movement it tries to portray, 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film possesses energy, passion and about a dozen documentaries inside it yearning to breathe free.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

A goofball movie, in the way "Malkovich" was, but it tries too hard.

It only serves to remind one of better movies, at a time when one needs no reminders.

What we want from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a giddy mix of gruesome horror and campy humor. What we get is less massacre than mess. [29 Aug 1997, p.F16]

There are few moments in the film—one that is wearyingly indignant and emotionally inert—that feel genuine.

Mr. Dauberman, abetted by cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”), finds ways to make the Lot both anxious and dour, though the moods don’t always match up with the wobbly storytelling, or help set it on a purposeful path.

Where the Ruby-teacher relationship falters is not the fault of the actors, but the writer. Mr. V is meant to be slightly unreasonable, a hard-liner about Ruby being both serious and on time. But the script takes the very common and dubious tack of not letting the characters simply explain their situations to each other.

Take a ridiculous premise, marry it to a situation that is bound to resolve itself in the most obvious way, and keep the whole thing rolling with juvenile gags. What do you have? Television. Or “If Lucy Fell,” whose writer-director, Eric Schaeffer, certainly knows television. Or knew it.

When the film leaves the realm of the impolite or even criminal for something far more extreme, it achieves a level of excess that makes the whole enterprise increasingly cartoonish, rather than just awful.

The only thing left unsliced is the ham in BloodRayne, yet another video game adaptation by German genre specialist Uwe Boll and a movie with more fading - or faded - talent than an Italian basketball team.

The island locale rings with reggae music regardless of its proximity to Jamaica, and any action sequence is rendered in painfully deliberate slo-mo.

Ultimately, Supercross is an example of how too much of anything will get annoying -- including VVRRRROOOOOOOMMM and flying bikes.

The issues in the film add up to a rat’s nest of athletic, economic and gender questions. But they’re given only superficial scrutiny in a production that’s essentially propaganda, powered by pumped-up music and pumped-up players.