Kenneth Turan

Has little to occupy us once its battle scenes recede. One of those goofy movies where devil-may-care Russian soldiers unwind by playing the balalaika far into the night, it takes itself far more seriously than anyone else will be able to manage.

The Paper never stops for breath long enough to be dull. But all this tumult also leads to a feeling of shellshock, of having every contrivance not nailed down thrown at the audience. Part of the problem is that many of these subplots, like Henry’s marital difficulties, are no more than Hollywood serious, dealing with adult situations in a bogus way that would be better avoided.

Despite some quite engaging sections, "Joy" is, unlike previous Russell films, dragged down more than it is inspired by its chaotic ambience, a film whose variations in tone can't be overcome.

Certainly acceptable. But no one seeing it is going to feel as spooked as executive producer Roy Lee. To make an audience feel that intensely, you need a different kind of director and a different kind of film.

The key problem is that writer-director Peter Landesman has pushed too hard to make this story fit into a dramatic mold, alternating melodrama and romance with those earnest warnings in a way that is more ungainly than effective.

Though the cast ends up looking good, the film's unwillingness or inability to have things add up hurts everyone's efforts.

It's a product of the highest quality, but at the end of the day that's what it is: a machine-made, assembly-line product whose strengths tend to feel like items checked off a master list rather than being the result of any kind of individual creative touch.

Simultaneously jokey and scary, sentimental and ruthless, tediously everyday and grotesquely out of the ordinary.

Permanent Midnight's Hollywood segments are clever and amusing, but the more Stahl's life unravels in his demeaning search for drugs, the more the film inevitably goes down along with it. Watching Stahl searching frantically for an unused vein in his neck with a baby fussing next to him (don't ask) may be unnerving, but it is far from irresistible.

A shrewd, pulpy crowd-pleaser.

The problem with Passenger 57 is that in fact the flight does not turn out to be all that interesting. Neither in the air nor in a pointless stopover on the ground does anything happen that arouses more than an entry-level of excitement. [06 Nov 1992, p.F1]

The problem is not so much that World Trade Center is an attempt to make a feel-good movie about a ghastly situation, it's that the result feels forced, manufactured and largely -- but not entirely -- unconvincing.

This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.

Even though as a whole Hello I Must Be Going lets us down in the second half, the pleasure of watching Lynskey and Abbott never diminishes.

Not content to be a mildly diverting royal bodice-ripper, it spirals out of control into the kind of overwrought dramaturgy that's out of its league.

The sophistication gap between the character Cheadle has created and the film that contains him is so great it begins to feel like you're watching two different stories that have been unaccountably spliced together.

It would be foolish to deny that Unbreakable has scenes that make you jump, but without anything resonant to apply that skill to, the film has no option except squandering its technique.

The strength of Foster’s spooky performance makes Nell more effective and worthwhile than it otherwise deserves to be. And it is just because we come to care about that unusual young woman that we wish she were in a better movie, but that was not to be.

This energetic and diverting sports soap opera throws a few head fakes in the direction of an iconoclastic examination of the dark side of professional football.

Samsara is as frustrating as it is beautiful, which is saying a lot because this is a film laced with exquisite images.

Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice.

Turns into a film that is too ostentatiously pleased with itself, so in love with its own cleverness it doesn't notice it's darn near worn you out.

The Eye of the Storm is an ambitious stab at what might be called the Great Australian Film. The results are off-and-on impressive, but the project's ambitions turn out to be greater than its ability to achieve them.

Its warped, disconnected sensibility makes for an oddly distant piece of work.

Keeps its filmmakers behind the camera and does without the personality-driven "Fahrenheit's" sarcastic sense of humor.

A sense of lethargy hangs uneasily over the lumbering new version of The Magnificent Seven. Despite its sturdy plot, seasoned director and capable cast toplined by Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke, it arrives in a comatose state, a film unlikely to arouse passions one way or another.

It's got a strong cast and an intriguing premise that has the added bonus of real-world relevance. But, good intentions and good work aside, the film flounders before it reaches its conclusion.

By having Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter play the maniacs' feisty antagonists, the filmmakers seem to believe that they've made a significant feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding. Even in an industry known for self-delusion, that is quite a feat.

It's an unhinged, off-the-wall comedy that will try anything once, an uneven film in which the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter.

The Mountain Between Us is an uneasy hybrid of a film, and its successes and disappointments show the benefits and drawbacks of hitching your film to a pair of stars.

This may sound thrilling, but it's not. Battleship plays ordinary and pedestrian because it's always been a job for hire, never anyone's passion.

Suicide Squad is a concept in search of a story worth telling. Both energized and betrayed by its “Worst.Heroes.Ever” theme and writer-director David Ayer’s trademark visceral filmmaking, it ends up in a kind of limbo, not as strong as partisans will insist or as worthless as its weakest elements would have you believe.

It’s not that Dogfight doesn’t have any story. In fact it has two, but neither one has anything like the weight of a feature, and the connection between the two is too tenuous for even a director as capable as Nancy Savoca (making her first film since the much-lauded True Love) to bridge.

Though the filmmakers may have been imagining they were re-creating the old days of MGM musicals, it's the Village People's misguided "Can't Stop the Music" that comes to mind instead.

Despite its arresting visual style, its wave after wave of creative and hypnotic images, The Pillow Book, as its name hints, slowly but inexorably leads to sleep.

Despite its high craft level and Washington's participation in it, this movie's showy violence is finally as deadening as the over-emphatic violence in these kinds of films generally is.

By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister and science-fiction fantastical, The Lovely Bones was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success. In the film version, those mismatched elements come back to haunt the story, so to speak, making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph.

An ambitious film that aims to examine the human equations behind the abductions. But for all its good intentions, it's not as subtle as it might be, and it's finally pitched too broadly to achieve the level of emotional truth it aims for.

The only thing that won't make you laugh, unless you've got a 12-year-old's sense of humor, is the film's tireless parade of gross-out gags and scatological verbal jests. Myers gets a charge out of this material--it wouldn't be here if he didn't--but so much of it is so tedious it's difficult to believe an adult actually sat down and wrote it.

It's regrettable that Woman in Gold is no more than adequate, more old-fashioned Hollywoodization than incisive modern dramatization.

Director Johanna Demetrakas has decided to simply present the man in all his demanding complexities and let him and his encounters with associates speak for themselves. Her only rubric is the one visible in her title: "Crazy Wisdom."

Began life as a comic book, and screenwriters Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, ever respectful of that lineage, have not allowed the film's dialogue or plot points to rise above their cartoonish origins.

Jupiter Ascending is best during its purely visual moments, of which there are many... All of which makes it a shame that the only sense the Wachowskis can count on is their visual one.

Still, there are some things to savor. Blanchett is an actress who's always involving, and Crowe is very much in his element as an intrepid, laconic archer who lets his arrows do the talking.

A measured, decorous, at times pat film that manages to be quietly moving because it touches on something real.

Kind of like a basketball team of all-stars -- no names, please -- that has difficulty jelling into one smooth and efficient unit.

Red can't stop itself from trying too hard to be hip. It's not that it doesn't have effective moments, it's that it doesn't have as many as it thinks it does. The film's inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it's downright irritating.

Sporadically playful, it ends up wearing as thin as any film geared to a preteen sense of humor is bound to do.

Dazzling panoramas, no matter how impressive, are no substitute for the involving story Happy Feet Two has had to do without.

Despite a high-powered cast and a zany/trendy concept, hardly anyone’s home in Housesitter. The result is much ado about too little, an occasionally amusing screwball farce made by people whose screws are barely loose at all.

This effects-loaded extravaganza has more trouble finding its dramatic bearings than the Space Family Robinson has in figuring out where the heck in the universe they are.

Last Action Hero does have occasional moments of humor, but overall it is lacking in fun or magic. [18 Jun 1993, p.1]

A peppy affair that works in fits and starts but is unable to put its successful moments together in any consistently satisfying way.

Unlike "In Bruges," the outlandish parts of Seven Psychopaths, though often bleakly entertaining in their own right, remain a collection of weird riffs that not even engaging acting by Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits can bring together.

Part outer-space romantic comedy, part science-fiction thriller, Passengers leave us feeling we’ve been taken for a ride.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.

With preposterously convoluted plot twists, not even Grant is enough to make us smile all the way through the end.

This narrowly cast documentary focuses so exclusively on a publicity tour the former president took in the closing months of 2006 that a more accurate title might be "Jimmy Carter How I Sold My Book."

Clocking in at a self-important two hours and 59 minutes, this elongated romantic fable is impossible to sustain at a running time better suited to the fall of the Roman empire.

The aesthetically misguided idea of breaking the final book into two films, commercially remunerative though it might have been, has ended up making the dragged-out proceedings feel anti-climactic and emotionally static.

If you're in the mood for seeing a Lothario humbled by true love, you're in luck. You may wish, however, that Made of Honor had given its stars something more of interest to occupy their time. And ours.

This largely Spanish-language film brings on the waterworks because its core story is undeniably affecting. The whole movie, however, would be more convincing if the elements around that vital core were more multidimensional and less contrived.

Yet, there is also little doubt that when it comes to extreme physical humor, Carrey is remarkably gifted, a throwback to the vintage antics of Jerry Lewis or even the slapstick gang of silent comedy.

Except for a memorably haunted performance by Jeremy Irons as the conflicted Humbert Humbert, what the new version lacks most of all is inspiration.

Passable, moderately diverting dramatic entertainment.

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

Chases, crashes and explosions are thick on the land in the second half of this movie, but though they are expertly done, their size, frequency and increasing disconnection from what was once a coherent story leave you feeling pummeled rather than exhilarated.

Tears of Gaza is both horrifying and frustrating. This documentary's goals are noble ones, but its execution is something else again.

This is Short's picture, and though he can do no wrong in it, he is not in a position to carry the whole thing. His fans will dutifully trek to it, laughing at his skill and wondering when Hollywood will finally do him justice. It's a hell of a good question.

It is Australian Crowe, a previous non-skater, who gives the film's standout performance.

So even at 96 minutes (and padded out with pointless, uncredited cameos by Garry and Penny Marshall) “Hocus” feels thin and undernourished from an adult point of view.

For much of the film, Berg is content to act like a Michael Bay wannabe, orchestrating large action set pieces that get increasingly tiresome and WWE-like as individuals get mindlessly slammed into the dust.

If Fantastic Four is pleasantly different in its introductory segment, once those super powers kick in, the whole film goes into a more standard gear.

Ballard has infused Wind with an old-fashioned romantic sentimentality that is affecting from time to time. But this and everything else that is good about the picture fights an ultimately losing battle against an inept story that feels like it was constructed from bits and pieces of other, presumably more involving films. It's a shame that director Ballard, who has gone many years between features, has had to set out this time in such a leaky and unsound vessel.

While the new film is certainly serviceable, it's noticeably lacking in warmth and humor, and though its visual strengths are real and considerable, from a dramatic point of view it's ponderous and plodding.

A somewhat diverting but finally disappointing thriller, it is characterized by a premise even Pat Buchanan could love: If you so much as think about straying from the marital straight and narrow, all heck is sure to break loose.

There's nothing really wrong with all this in theory, but the overall doofiness of the execution is finally too much to overcome. The filmmakers come off like their protagonist, wide-eyed tourists in an exotic realm. If you've been looking for a martial arts film to take granny and the kids to, this might be the one, but a Jackie Chan-Jet Li collaboration deserves better than that.

Ricki and the Flash is a sour movie masquerading as something more cheerful. In that attempted deception the film is both helped and hindered by an indispensable performance by star Meryl Streep.

In practice this mélange of imagery is aimed more at the inside of Reggio's head than anywhere else. Unless you are able to get on his quasi-experimental wavelength, a dicey proposition at best, Visitors will miss your solar plexus entirely and instead put you right to sleep. With one exception.

The other, unintentional lesson taught here is that it's easier to make a mouse talk than to come up with something interesting for him to say.

A lovingly rendered visual treat struggles with indifferent direction and torpid plot.

A potato chip of a movie. Tasty and lightweight, it's fine for a cinematic snack, if that's what you're looking for. Making it an entire meal, however, really isn't advisable.

It's an acceptable film, but the story of family ties and forgiveness simply cannot manage the emotional connections it is desperate for.

It's well crafted by director Michael Hoffman, not painful to sit through, and even contains some 21st century plot twists -- But unless you have a predisposition toward this kind of thing, none of that is going to matter much.

Despite the linked advantages of generous helpings of the man's high octane music and a star performance by Chadwick Boseman that's little short of heroic, Get on Up is more frustrating than fulfilling, a disjointed film that suffers from having a more ambitious plan than it's got the ability to execute.

Instead of pushing for tough answers to difficult questions, this film is content to mythologize Thompson's bad-boy behavior, celebrating things like his willingness to drink a bottle of bourbon a day and go hunting with a submachine gun.

There is nothing to be embarrassed about here, neither is there much to relish, for Mary Reilly has more of the sheen of art than its essence.

It once again confuses a kind of juvenile titillation with insight and treats the ability to make audiences squirm as a pinnacle of film art.

Has trouble seeming real. Its back story, involving the sins of Detective LaMarca's own father, feels contrived and the eventual resolution is simultaneously shaky and too pat.

De Palma clearly did not want to do a conventional thriller, and so his considerable prowess in that area is only occasionally brought to bear. As a result, despite a few finely creepy moments that remind us of his talent, the shocking parts of Raising Cain feel lethargic and lacking in purpose.

This is the biggest surprise of all -- it's hard to watch Going Upriver without wondering, frankly, what became of the young John Kerry, who comes off so exceptionally well in this film.

The film's plot gets so convoluted no nongamer older than 14 will be able to follow it all.

A movie that wants to be hard-hitting and gritty but lacks the stomach for the job, it meanders through what should be a lean and focused narrative and ends up more of a letdown than anything else.

It's not that "Inferno" as it stands doesn't provide hints of better things. The plot has its share of unexpected twists, peripheral characters hold our attention, wide-screen vistas of tourist destinations Florence, Venice and Istanbul are easy to take, and stories involving the end of the world have a certain built-in interest. But as presented on screen, none of this gels as it should.

Though what he does here pretty much defines coasting, Nicholson just fooling around adds an energy to even the kind of hopelessly contrived material that lets you know that the lowest common denominator just got lower.

This is a chance to see Shakespeare with mud wrestling, something the Bard surely would have put in if only he'd thought of it himself… Though the actors have no major problems handling the language, the whole venture is listless when it should be sparkling. Shakespeare, even with mud wrestling, needn't be quite so much of a slog. [14 May 1999, Calendar, p.F-6]

Not good enough to be remembered past next week, not bad enough to get worked up about, “Point” is a factory product pure and simple, something to throw onto the screen until the next something comes along.

The longer it goes, the more frustrating it becomes, as Bar Lev declines to come down on one side or the other.

What it really is is an unapologetic cartoon, a harum-scarum endeavor that's so comically frantic it wears you out as much as it entertains.

Though Reign of Fire's concept of a humans-versus-dragons smackdown is a good one, the way it's worked out on screen is more silly than compelling.

Turns out to be a film that's interesting in spite of itself. It's less an impartial investigation than an advocacy film, having been hijacked by the members of the "inner sanctum."

The film's underlying concept is so irredeemably screwy and far-fetched that no amount of fine work can hope to make it convincing.

So unashamedly confusing, so intent on piling twist upon twist upon twist, it makes your head hurt just trying to figure out what's happened.

Not only does it feel like an exclusive party at which there is definitely no room for the uninitiated, its waves of idolization barely leave room for the band itself. Good as they are, They Might Be Giants deserve a better film.

A pleasant diversion, a lightly amusing criminal comedy with a plot so complicated even the people in it can't quite believe what's happening.

As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after.

Earnest, gee-whiz and foursquare, this simple and intentionally inoffensive sequel gets points for being easy to take and scrupulously avoiding obvious sources of irritation.

You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.

Seeing a movie that doesn’t know the meaning of shameless, that refuses to worry about plausibility, that acts as if subtlety hadn’t been invented yet, does have a very basic kind of intrinsically cinematic pull.

Even though all the supporting elements of a superior film are here, the actual plot that everything is at the service of is disappointing. The texture of reality and the sheen of fine craft disguise this for a while, but not forever.

For all its surface verisimilitude and for all its focus on a problem that couldn't be more current, this film can't manage to feel more than sporadically real.

[Barthes'] measured, distanced style brings a certain stiffness to the proceedings and makes us miss even more than usual the Emma Bovary interior monologue that makes the book so memorable.

Because the series' plot reveal turns out to be more confusing than compelling, and because turning a novel into two films invariably leads to inflated productions, only the most devoted fans of the book will pledge allegiance to what's on the screen.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.

Films can't just sound good on paper; they have to be effective on the screen, and in that form, The Statement is disappointing.

As sequels go, this one is acceptable, nothing more, nothing less.

There is a moment in The Tourist when Johnny Depp turns to Angelina Jolie and asks "Why is all this happening?" It's a question moviegoers will be asking themselves as well.

While its ambition and scope pull one way, its pinched and unconvincing sense of drama pull the other.

All these intriguing good intentions, however, have largely gone for naught because of a variety of missteps, starting with an increasing implausible plot as well as the fact that Ledger's Harry looks about as likely to pass for an Arab as the Mahdi is to pass for Queen Victoria.

If ever a film looked exactly the way you hoped and imagined it would, The Shadow is it. But if ever a film made you wince whenever its actors opened their mouths, The Shadow is that as well.

If The Core finally has to be classified as a mess, it is an enjoyable one if you're in a throwback mood. After all, a film that comes up with a rare metal called Unobtainium can't be dismissed out of hand.

Numerous good things can be said about Apocalypto, the director's foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence.

There is no shaking the feeling that Branagh and his cast are a kind of an espionage film B team, capable of mild diversion but nothing more.

This is not a chance to "experience the most timeless of stories as you've never seen it before" but just the opposite: an opportunity, for those who want it, to encounter this story exactly the way it's almost always been told.

300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.

Only a teenage boy could find this kind of stuff continually diverting, and only a teenage boy would not notice flimsy emotions and underdeveloped acting. It seems George Lucas, like Peter Pan, has never really grown up.

The body count goes up, but our interest level doesn’t rise with it.

Get Smart neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

If, as someone says in one of Brooks' trademark excellent lines, we all feel we're "one small adjustment away from making our lives work," this film is one small adjustment away as well.

Rather than a fresh breeze, it's the stale air of gilded calculation, the uncomfortable feeling that things are excessively just so, that overhangs much that is genuinely appealing about this film.

Despite being structured in an intriguing way -- bits of confusing action are shown first and explained later -- The International never finds its footing.

As (DiCaprio's) character heads for The Beach's predictable heart of darkness denouement, only die-hard fans will have the heart to tag along.

Brief enough, clocking in at 83 minutes, but its story is too predictable to make an impact even in such a short space. Unlike "Toy Story," the dialogue here, written by Todd Alcott and Chris & Paul Weitz, is pro forma all the way.

Ross' missive is earnest and well-intentioned, but it's difficult not to feel that his film both runs on too long and overreaches its dramatic resources in its attempt to deliver it.

Unfortunately for Man on the Moon, Kaufman is definitely a person more interesting to hear about than to experience, an acquired taste few will be tempted to acquire.

Though aspects of it are entertaining, the presence of all these mismatched pieces give Spider-Man 3 an ungainly, cumbersome feeling, as if its plot elements were the product of competing contractors who never saw the need to cooperate on a coherent final product.

While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement - those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced.

Drags its uninspiring action out too long for anyone's good.

Wading through blood is too much of a price to pay for Sugar Hill’s pluses, and it’s a shame the movie business has made it difficult for them to be experienced any other way.

The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.

All dressed up with no particular place to go, this 22nd Bond film tries hard but ends up an underachiever.

Overcomplicates its plot and spends a lot of time floundering around in the shallow end.

A pleasure to look at. It's filled with fine, imaginative moves and an overarching sense of visual freedom, a feeling of play that entices us into enjoyment. But, when it comes to dialogue and story, this Sinbad apparently used up all its initiative changing its hero's ethnicity to generic Greco-Roman.

Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.

Creepy and grotesque rather than terrifying. It's more distasteful than anything stronger, a sour bottle of a celebrated vintage that a gourmet like Lecter wouldn't hesitate to send back with the sommelier.

Though Vanilla Sky is smoothly and professionally done, even audiences who haven't seen the original will sense there is something off in the translation.

A middling, so-so thriller about a murder investigation on an Army base, it falls to Earth somewhere between failure and success, inconclusive to the end.

Even though this is supposed to be a kindlier Van Damme vehicle, his movies couldn't exist without his trademark ability to deliver the kind of accurate, powerful kicks any World Cup team would envy. All his soulful glances notwithstanding, Timecop still depends too much on violence to make it appealing to the uninitiated or the unwary.

A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.

Russell Crowe is invariably involving on screen, and Ridley Scott is a splendid director when the material is right. No film they collaborate on will be devoid of interest, but A Good Year almost is.

If you're in the mood for a hip-hop film with more happy faces than "The Partridge Family," Honey will divert you.

Winterbottom, who's never been a director with a gift for warmth, can't make this romance come alive. Morton and Robbins are gifted actors, but they seem straitjacketed here, and the film finds it difficult to avoid tedium as their lugubrious relationship unfolds.

A practiced piece of Hollywood hokum, way too calculated and contrived, especially for a film that nominally celebrates the chaos and creativity of the 1960s.

Though audiences will leave theaters with an increased appreciation of this pair's talents, they will also leave pondering the perennial Hollywood question: How come so little of interest could be found for performers who are capable of so much more?

Fifty Shades encourages us to buy into this credulity-straining scenario because the actors go well together (casting director Francine Maisler did the heavy lifting), Dornan's steely resolve facing off nicely against Johnson's engaging feistyness as each tries to make this cross-cultural relationship work on his or her own terms.

It shouldn't be surprising, but some of these directors are more interesting than their work. French director Breillat, never a personal favorite, is an absolutely hypnotic speaker who holds the screen the way her films rarely have.

Anyone looking for the kind of comic brio that Dustin Hoffman and company brought to "Tootsie" will not find it here. [24 Nov 1993 Pg. F1]

Unfortunately, "Blood and Honey" has script problems: Its core story is less compelling than its overall atmosphere.

Not all it might have been, an oddly old-fashioned film from a director who's usually anything but.

Because Senesh died so young, it's hard to fill out a film of nearly 90 minutes that claims her as the subject, so director Grossman has resorted to using newsreel footage as well as re-creations, which, though discreet, add nothing special to the proceedings.

What Ed Neumeier's script provides instead is a cheerfully lobotomized, always watchable experience that has the simple-mindedness of a live-action comic book, with no words spoken that wouldn't be right at home in a funny paper dialogue balloon. Not just one comic book either, but an improbable and delirious combination of "Weird Science," "Betty and Veronica" and "Sgt. Rock and His Howling Commandos."

A Walk Among the Tombstones is the creepiest film I've seen in quite some time, and that's not meant as a compliment.

If the bad guys didn't reappear with welcome regularity, "Money Never Sleeps" would be even more of a snooze than it already is.

Slick and forceful, largely unconcerned with character, eager for any opportunity to pump up the volume both literally and metaphorically, The Rock is the kind of efficient entertainment that is hard to take pleasure in.

Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.

Three Peaks is a dark little family drama, a ticking time bomb of a movie that is well made but never totally satisfies.

Though it wasn't planned this way, it's an amusing exercise to view A Man Apart as an allegory for the war in Iraq.

Blessed with considerable virtues, including a clever concept, crackling filmmaking and a charismatic star, it ultimately squanders all of them, undone by an unfortunate lack of subtlety and restraint.

Has a good deal of the appeal, and the drawbacks, of a high school play. It can be pokey and overly earnest and its dramatics are not always polished, but, on the other hand, would you want them to be?

Dante's Peak is customary for the genre, with convincing special effects sharing screen time with standard-issue characters and situations.

So it is a surprise to say that the biggest mystery this legal thriller presents is how a film based on a novel by John Grisham, starring the bankable duo of [Julia Roberts Darby Shaw] and [Denzel Washington Gray Grantham] and written and directed by veteran Alan J. Pakula can end up more of a fizzle than an explosion. [17 Dec 1993 Pg. F1]

A blithe and unapologetic fairy tale about affairs of the heart, it's a spun-sugar confection that's so light and airy it threatens to simply float away.

Nominally a satiric comedy, the film is only sporadically effective, running out of energy before it reaches the end.

Defiance has some genuine strengths but also some weaker elements, and these opposing traits battle it out kind of the way the contentious Bielskis fought not only the Germans but each other.

This third installment of the popular series about fast cars and the posturing boys who love them is best viewed as an energetic cartoon, an unintentionally amusing, head-shaking guilty pleasure that will divert those not in the mood for anything more profound than gleaming metal and preening women.

As enervating as it is long -- and at 2 hours and 47 minutes it is quite long -- this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasy short story is a baffling project, an endurance test of a movie that feels like it was made on a dare.

This intriguing hybrid is dramatically involving only when the shooting - with real bullets, naturally - gets underway.

A series of miscalculations caused this project to lose its way, until what we're left with is a film that should involve us more than it does.

Wants to be an honest look at the problems that can beset a modern marriage, and be funny at the same time, but it doesn't have the skills or the temperament to pull all that off.

LaGravenese... has understood that the worst of Bridges is not in its dialogue but in the silent musings that occupy its characters' minds. By keeping those thoughts unspoken, by allowing the camera to show instead of having words tell, much has been accomplished.

The virtues of The Aeronauts are real but they are almost exclusively visual. Despite the hard work of acclaimed actors in what sounds on paper like a strong story, the drama presented is determinedly earth-bound.

This film turns out to revolve around a whole series of whopper coincidences, even one of which would be difficult to swallow. Not even a film this accomplished can work up enough suspension of disbelief to enable audiences to ingest them all, and just making the attempt is painful. [05 Nov 1993, p.F1]

For though it is a reasonable facsimile of a successful thriller, this film (named after a barrier that protects computers from hackers) never manages to be more than mildly effective.

City Hall is inside information in search of a movie, a forced marriage between the trappings of reality and the fantasy of a jerry-built plot. Reasonably intelligent, neither offensive nor enticing, it passes its time on the screen without providing compelling reasons for audiences to either go or stay. [16 Feb 1996, p.F1]

The characters in this somber film have the glum look of individuals delivering a Very Important Message to the world. And though this film in fact does have something crucial to convey, this is not the way to go about it.

Though Pitt is as attractive as ever, "Seven Years" offers other things to look at and in fact functions better as a travelogue than as a drama.

This film has much more to do with what goes on inside director Tim Burton's head than with any TV show, no matter how beloved. In fact, Dark Shadows is as good an example as any of what might be called the Way of Tim, a style of making films that, like the drinking of blood, is very much an acquired taste and, unless you're a vampire, not worth the effort.

If we'd never seen another film on the horrors of apartheid, all this might have been more impressive, but we have and it isn't.

Squanders an appealing performance from Costner.

As advertised, A Knight's Tale does try to rock you. The problem is, it doesn't rock you nearly enough.

Has to fight to hold our attention and it doesn't always succeed.

With two of the world's biggest stars in tow, the creators of The Devil's Own can be forgiven for figuring that nothing else really mattered. If you've got Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, do you really need a coherent script? Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the answer is yes.

While it's difficult to dislike what this film tries to do, the way it does it is more problematic.

A performer of formidable self-absorption, Johnston has inspired a film with the same trait, and the results are about what you might expect.

Guilty of squandering resources. Amusing as it goes about setting up its premise, in Witherspoon, the gifted veteran of "Election" and "Pleasantville," it has an actress willing to throw herself completely into the part to excellent effect.

In effect, aspects of Gibson's creative makeup -- his career-long interest in martyrdom and the yearning for dramatic conflict that make him an excellent actor, coupled with his belief in the Gospels' literal truth -- have sideswiped this film. What is left is a film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

Only partially convincing.

Regarding Henry is a breath of stale air, an unconvincing rehabilitation of 1960s values for a 1990s audience that is bound and determined to take the easy way out whenever possible. Which is really too bad, because there are signs along the way that this could have been a less manipulative, more genuine exploration of what really matters in life instead of the slick Hollywood shuffle it turned out to be.

Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.

A concept, no matter how promising, is not a movie, and this picture has the bad luck to illustrate the difference.

Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind.

If they had to make things up, couldn't they have made up something smarter?

Fluffy and mild to the point of somnolence, it can't even get the full benefit of its strongest asset, Glenn Close's performance as the grasping virago Cruella DeVil.

Even by sequel standards, a minimal amount of creativity has gone into Sister Act 2, and not even the talents of its cast, including several likable young people, can compensate for this thrown-together feeling.

Kevin Costner very definitely isn't Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and his noticeable awkwardness in that rebel's role underlines the problems this muddled, fitfully effective version of a most durable English legend has in deciding which face it wants to present to the world at large. While the makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves may have set out to bury the poor old duffer of Sherwood Forest in a welter of trendy banter, they have ended up burying themselves as well.

Despite the story's melodramatic contrivances the creation of characters we actually care about is beyond this film's capabilities.

Promising as it seems in theory, everything in this new version, like Lena Lamont's image in "Singin' In the Rain," falls apart as soon as the talking starts.

A sour romantic comedy, only sporadically amusing.

Demolition is a well-meaning misfire, terribly earnest but unconvincing for all of that.

Revenge may be sweet, but this is one "Monte Cristo" that leaves a sour taste.

A disappointment. A good-faith attempt has been made to duplicate the original elements, but the mix is wrong, bearings have been lost, the balance is off. It was attitude that made "Men in Black" special, a particular kind of cool insouciance that has proved as impossible to duplicate as it was irresistible to experience.

Outside of a hyper-energetic, irresistibly evil portrayal by Tim Roth as General Thade, the baddest ape in town, the sad truth about Planet of the Apes is that, disappointingly, it's just not very much fun to watch.

Unfortunately, attempts to be original are not enough, they have to succeed, and this film's solutions tend to present themselves as alternately gimmicky and banal.

The forced hybrid of a preposterous potboiler plot with genuine questions of medical ethics, Extreme Measures is weakened, not strengthened, by its strange bedfellows shenanigans. And the fact that director Michael Apted is able to put considerable realism and skill into his filmmaking merely emphasizes how out to lunch this picture’s story is.

Beowulf appears so cartoony, in fact, that the academy just put it on the short list of films to be considered for the Oscar in feature animation.

Its successful moments (and they are only moments) remind us that this is a squandered opportunity.

When a set of pre-shooting guidelines a director came up with for his actors turns out to be cleverer, better written and of considerable more interest than the finished film, that's a bad sign. A very bad sign.

Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.

Becomes unfocused as it stumbles over all the points it wants to make.

Its twisty film noir world of down-on-their-luck men and unfathomable women is vintage B-picture material, but, in the grand B tradition, the games it plays are more ambitious than successful.

Money Monster is all over the map, mixing earnest contemporary relevance, black comedy, bogus emotion and tragedy with its nominal thriller plot, all to frankly bewildering effect.

Eraser does have a few big-ticket stunts that hold the attention, but director Charles Russell, fresh from "The Mask," isn't able to infuse them with the intensity and believability that James Cameron brought to comparable sequences in "True Lies."

Expendables 3 is a kind of ho-hum experience, wherein a lot of bullets are expended and a lot of structures exploded to minimal dramatic effect.

The Crossing Guard, Penn's second film behind the camera, is a troubling, troublesome movie whose makeshift structure cannot contain the powerful flood of passions that he and his cast have poured into it.

LaBute can't avoid a fatal mistake in the modern era: He's changed the male academic from a lower-class Brit to an American, a choice that upsets the novel's exquisite balance and shreds the fabric of the film, corrupting all of LaBute's good work and robbing it of the impact it would otherwise have.

It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.

Despite its pro-forma nature, the setup for Siberia — a lone hero in over his head in an unfamiliar world — actually starts out well but refuses to play out in satisfying ways.

The script is muddled and unsatisfying, as ponderous on its feet as its protagonists are in their heavy diving suits.

Too slight to be taken seriously and too off-putting (especially when the phone callers get hostile and the work demeaning) to be funny, Girl 6 feels like the first draft of a potentially interesting project. It just hasn't been made good on here.

So over-plotted that it's borderline incomprehensible.

"You've got a sense of humor, I like that," Lester Long proclaims at one point. Well, we all like that, but would it be asking too much to have a little coherence to go along with it?

Downhill is a misfire, unable to show either of its stars to their best advantage. Neither the actors nor the film can decide how to balance humor with drama and that is the heart of the problem.

But the magic has deserted him with She's the One, which turns out to be one of those remixes that creates nostalgia for the original.

Director Michael Bay's filmmaking style is so frantic and frenetic that it's often impossible to figure out exactly what is happening.

Sometimes glossy, sometimes hard-edged, the film alternates between glitz and unpleasantness and ends as a kind of glum soap opera, too glam to be bleak and too bleak to be so glam.

Like many other overprepared athletes, the players in Body of Evidence left their best game in the locker room. [15 Jan 1993, p.F1]

As written by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, The Legend of Tarzan alternates between a brazenly contemporary sensibility and quietly time-honored events. Unfortunately, almost all of the former are awkward while the latter still ring true.

As well done as much of Selma is, it periodically falls from grace with moments that are either emotionally flat or excessively agitprop in nature. Consistently the most ineffective scenes are those that involve powerful but obstructionist white people, especially the unhelpful trio of Johnson, Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker). The deftness with acting and character that can be this film’s strength simply deserts it here.

Harlin's skill compensates for a lot of narrative preposterousness, even it is overmatched this time around.

Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that.

A decorative Italian soap opera with an asterisk for earnest aspirations. Its beautiful people say painful things to each other in gorgeous clothes, and though the film expects us to take their problems seriously, it's awfully hard to do so.

It is deeply unpleasant to see women abducted, tortured and eviscerated by a methodical and meticulous butcher.

The result is exposition overkill and a dragged-out finale that turns what should have been a Tear Duct Special into a deflating experience, making what worked in the book unacceptable on the screen.

Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.

After keeping its balance over much treacherous terrain, greedily overreaches and stumbles badly at the close.

The film's political philosophy, as much as it has one, is of the "a plague on both your houses" variety, painting the rebels and the CIA as equally fixated on killing innocent civilians for their own nefarious ideological ends. We've seen it all before, and we'll likely see it all again.

From its standard-issue action to its halfhearted dialogue and acting, that's one situation even two Schwarzeneggers aren't enough to solve.

There's no doubt Sandler is talented, but if he persists in believing that, like Elvis, his presence alone covers a multitude of omissions and inconsistencies, he will squander his gift and make a series of forgettable films in the process.

But whenever a film has hysteria as its subject, as this one does, the danger exists that it will become hysterical itself, and “The Crucible,” all its promise notwithstanding, falls into that trap with a demoralizing thud. Rife with screaming fits and wild-eyed rantings, this film is too frantic to be involving, too much an outpost of bedlam to be believable.

Though amusing from moment to moment, is erratic, unfocused and uncertain where it's going.

Not as much fun as it should be. Few of its numerous actors make a lasting impression and Burton's heart and soul is not in the humor but (remember the "Batman Returns" backlash) in deadpan postmodern horrors, of which this film has a few.

A technical amazement that points computer-generated animation toward the brightest of futures, it's also cartoonish in the worst way, the prisoner of pedestrian plot points and childish, too-cute dialogue.

Even by the non-Olympian standards of the disaster genre, San Andreas is chock-full of cliché characters, staggering coincidences and wild improbabilities.

The only thing that keeps Knight of Cups from terminal artistic overreach as it follows Rick around town is the knockout cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who does superb work showing us contemporary Los Angeles in a most magical way.

Unconvincing and annoying, a miscalculation on numerous fronts, it is finally sugary enough to make the sentimental Priscilla play like a model of icy restraint.

Like Malkovich's out of control Russian accent, Rounders ends up reaching a place too hard to understand and even harder to believe in.

It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience.

The melodrama of the Maugham original is too simplistic to involve, and the places the film's plot goes are so obvious that even the presence of quality actors can't create sufficient interest.

If The Mexican proves anything, it's that eccentric features need a particularly delicate touch to be successful. With a film like this, how close you come doesn't matter: Off by a little is as debilitating as off by a lot.

Trapped in a no man's land between seriousness and pulp trash, it plays like a combination of "Death Wish" and "The Hours." If that sounds like an awkward fit, it is.

Something we want to like more than we can. It's a mild family film with an excellent cast that never develops traction.

Well-meaning and convinced it has something of value to say, its "Reach Out and Touch Someone" sensibility ensures that all its satisfactions will prove hollow, and so they do.

Amiable and upbeat though it is, the documentary Hollywood to Dollywood lacks a compelling reason to see it. Unless you are a Dolly Parton zealot, which its two protagonists definitely are.

Transformers' multiple earthling story lines are tedious and oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen.

To say that Oscar, Sylvester Stallone’s latest attempt to become king of comedy, is funnier than might be expected (which it is) is really not saying that much.

Awkwardly balanced between comedy and significance, with plotting that gets increasingly schematic and unconvincing, My Old Lady is bound and determined to get more serious than it is capable of sustaining.

An unfortunate melding of style and subject matter, too intent on turning the Little Tramp into an icon to be regarded with stately awe to do justice to the disturbing energy of his life.