Ken Tucker

This is Chinatown for chowderheads.

Given a wealth of acting talent and the freedom to improvise its way past the cliches that hobble so many films by and about women, Chantilly Lace ends up a cliche anyway: a manipulative tearjerker.

John Travolta finds no artistic breathing-room in A Love Song for Bobby Long.

Clooney may be a specialist in embattled camaraderie--he helped revive "Ocean's Eleven," after all--but as in that caper remake, there's no depth to these characterizations, and Downey and Clarkson are squandered in a goes-nowhere subplot about their secret marriage.

There are too many musical performances in this movie, even for a country fan such as myself, to keep the city slickers engaged. This bespeaks great faith in the charisma of the stars, who merit it. They also, however, deserved a better script.

Penn is mostly in "I Am Sam mode" here, doing a lot of shoe-gazing and mumbly-talk, but not without adding an edge of bitter intelligence to his character; he's just too good an actor to merely repeat himself, even when the material encourages him to.

When are we going to get a generation of actors who will finally decline to succumb to The Woody Mystique, and refuse to accept a proffered role without first deciding whether the entire damn project is worthwhile?

Begins, at two-hours-plus, is a nonstarter.

The time shifts are awkward, and Egoyan displays little of the deftness of characterization he evinced in such movies as "Exotica" (1994) and "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997); the result is a cold scold of a movie.

As a result, Jarhead is utterly predictable (boys endure tough training; boys encounter another culture and are baffled), studded with first-rate performances.

One reason the Flipper flick is worse than the TV show: Bland, mannered Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan plays Sandy’s uncle, Porter Ricks, instead of television’s wonderfully grumpy Brian Keith.

Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.

A hapless comedy that already seems about ten years out of date, Be Cool is a curious failure.

Lucas is a brilliant technician but a poor philosopher, and his lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires. (You don’t make anything this big, for this long, without aiming for the planet Masterpiece.)