Lawrence Toppman

What we get here is Oz the Amiable and Unthreatening.

A better-than-average thriller. That's a tribute to director Harold Becker and stars Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin, who stretch the script's one idea almost to its breaking point. [3 Apr 1998, p.8E]

Strip away [Hugo's] sociopolitical rhetoric, and you're left with a simple, heartfelt story. The film directed by Bille August and written by Rafael Yglesias does just that, rendering the plot handsomely. It's far from miserable, but it's not "Miserables," either. [01 May 1998, p.10E]

For a while, it’s fun to watch Bardem camp around in his rose-tinted glasses and stuck-my-finger-in-a-socket hairdo.

Whether you take to it will depend on whether you consider “high-octane” or “nonsense” the more important word.

The Giver has an unsavory reek of box-office calculation about it, from the overworked “teens-must-save-a-world-ruined-by-adults” plot to the casting of pop star Taylor Swift in a small and irrelevant role.

Pitt coasts through the movie in second gear. I have no idea what he's trying to accomplish with his tight-lipped, low-key performance; maybe he's angling to replace Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible IV."

I realize fantasy-based action movies aren't supposed to be as complex as William Gibson's novels. But do they have to be this simple-minded?

I can't help but feel that a funny movie was waiting to be unearthed amid all this self-congratulation and juvenile prankishness.

Watching the film is also wearying, like assembling a puzzle from a box into which a sadist continually pours new pieces. I was still processing details when the abrupt ending snatched the puzzle away.

The extraordinary canine performances in Shaggy Dog and "Eight Below" lead me to wonder whether Disney could dispense with two-legged creatures altogether, until further notice.

You can approach it as a surreal story -- you'd have to, to find value in it -- but happy chuckles are miles away from the point.

The kids provide all the vitality, but even they've been muffled by the director.

The movie hasn’t one character or sequence more memorable than the next. It’s as violent, humorless and brutally efficient as a Stalinist purge, a juggernaut of slaughter and smashing that stuns the senses and leaves nothing behind in the memory.

Aspires to rise above the conventional drugs-and-action genre and succeeds about half the time.

Del Toro gets the ghostly elements right, with red and black flesh-torn spooks wailing warnings to the receptive Edith. But he goes wildly overboard in aiming for atmosphere after the story shifts to the Sharpes’ crumbling English manor.

If serious intent led inevitably to greatness, The Good Shepherd would be a masterpiece. It turtles forward for 160 minutes with unrelenting, humorless solemnity, as if everyone involved were unaware that it has arrived three decades too late to matter.

On their accounts (Williams/Collette), The Night Listener is compelling viewing-but on their accounts only.

A picture sufficiently shallow that you'll discover everything that lies beneath it well before the end.

Audrey Wells's script and Turteltaub's presentation ring true just often enough to prevent the comedy from descending forever into Cutesy-Wutesy Hell.

Deals with emotional concerns for half an hour. Then it turns into a mindless bloodfest, where it's impossible to care which characters end on the zombie gore-gasbord.

Trying to make sense of this shaggy dog story is like climbing a mountain with glass-smooth sides and quarter-inch toeholds.

The film works best as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode.

Delivers the kind of vengeance fantasy women unhappy with their husbands may want: Vicarious satisfaction, however clumsily delivered, is better than no satisfaction at all. Just be sure to stop by the lobotomy clinic en route to the theater.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has the technical polish and competent acting of the four-film series, though less intensity. It contains no surprises and ends with an anticlimax I have heard is faithful to the book, though it doesn’t amount to much onscreen.

Damon, trapped in an inert character, shows little inner turmoil.

It's slickly executed, handsomely acted for the most part and utterly easy to forget.

Writer-director Ben Younger has sketched the foreground of this picture but never gets around to filling in the details.

The story was primitive, the characters unmemorable, the direction unsophisticated, the writing cliched, the photography and music drab, the pacing uneven, the acting varying from adroitly funny to exaggerated.

On the positive side, the four Worm Guys haven't lost their squiggly charm, and Rip Torn is always welcome as MIB mastermind Zed. On the minus side, you get two Johnny Knoxvilles, one of them a tiny head that protrudes from the big one's shoulder.

Demolition is a rarity: A film with a profound emotional truth at its heart that lies to us, scene by scene, from start to finish.

The acting is solid.

Molly Shannon's peachy-keen attitude and spunky patience win us over to the side of Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Kids might get a charge out of the mayhem. I got the vapors.

Miller gives the film's one genuine, focused, committed performance, and you can see why she might even reform a rake of Casanova's standing.

Predictable but agreeable time-waster.

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

The Observer won't let me get stoned before a review, so I'll never know what How High would be like after a big fat blunt. Without one, it's sloppy, broadly funny in spots and chaotic.

Inside this film, a poignant and personal story is struggling to get out. But it's couched in such awkward sentiments that it can't emerge.

Leaving the book aside, how well does the picture fare? Middingly, and in fits and starts.

One Fine Day is a fluffernutter. Half of it is as down-to-earth, satisfying, even nourishing as peanut butter. The rest of it is gooey, dense and indigestible. [20 Dec 1996, p.4E]

A well-intentioned but obvious, often clumsy picture.

The last 40 minutes descend further and further into nonsense, until we're in an underground grotto where Jeremy Irons plays a furry, cannibalistic albino with psychic powers and super-strength.

Can I admit XXX is as deep as a Petri dish and as well-characterized as a telephone book but still say it was a guilty pleasure? Because I have to confess, when special agent Xander Cage tossed two detonators onto a mountainside and outran the ensuing avalanche on a snowboard, I was digging the action.

The film is a straight concert appearance: No backstage material after a brief introduction, no footage of him in any other context. He's certainly smooth, engaging and likeable onstage, but you won't learn anything about him you didn't already know.

I think the movie intends to empower all of its female characters, but it ends up chaining them to stale, timeworn ideas.

Brooks has long since mastered his whiny/neurotic persona, and Douglas does a passable version of giddy craziness. The young folks get lost in the shuffle, which leaves Suchet to steal the show with his fey, moist-eyed delivery. In this case, that's petty larceny.

There’s nothing much wrong with the film’s pacing or characterizations. We’ve just seen it all in fresher and funnier forms, from Donkey’s sassy backtalk to Puss in Boots’ eye-widening charm.

Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway exert considerable powers of hangdog charm and fierce independence, trying to give firm shape to the saggy script. But if you want to watch these two struggle through an up-and-down screen relationship, rent "Brokeback Mountain."

Randolph and Parker play fair with us, setting up a motive early and clearly. Yet whether you buy the motive or find it far-fetched, it almost immediately tells you who's responsible for the death.

De-Lovely gets hold of a few long-obscured facts but utterly loses the sense of life between the two world wars. I suppose that's progress, of a sort.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend offers us a heroine with phenomenal bone structure and a story with hardly any at all.

I can't tell you if Red Dragon is more faithful to Harris' book than "Manhunter," which I haven't seen in 16 years. I can tell you it's less artful and atmospheric, a straight-ahead thriller that never rises above superficiality.

Director Marshall Herskovitz and his cast haven't been able to achieve the outsized grandeur that could make us take the story seriously. It's not zany enough to be camp, except in one or two spots, yet it's too small to be epic. [06 Mar 1998, p.9E]

Bekmambetov introduces too many elements, losing interest in them or using them inadequately.

She's So Lovely comes from a story by John Cassavetes, who specialized in character studies of amiable lowlifes. Director Nick Cassavetes, his son, has lovingly framed a picture around John's idea, even crediting his dad (who died eight years ago) with the screenplay. But the movie remains an idea - a little idea. [29 Aug 1997, p.7E]

They've interspersed laugh-out-loud segments with dry, repetitive material.

What do you get if you start with the first great narrative of Western civilization, then remove all the psychological complexity and profound characterization? Troy.

I longed for something - anything - unexpected to occur. What I wouldn't have given for Wilson, the "Cast Away" volleyball, to float past with his bloody "face" print grinning at the pair!

The 25-year-old Lawrence is too young – Mangano was 35 when the mop took off – but compelling to watch. Yet in “Silver Linings Playbook,” Cooper, De Niro and Russell all supported her with fine work; here they lie back and make the movie a one-ring circus where she has to be acrobat, bareback rider and clown. That’s too much to ask.

The acting is adequate, though Lohan looks more like someone who has just gotten out of high school than college.

Romance has its place in movies - there's too little of it these days - but this remake of the 1954 film leaves an odd taste in the mouth. It has the trappings of a grand affair: tuxedoed men pursuing elegantly gowned women, helicopter flights to Martha's Vineyard, croissants and coffee in Paris. Yet it carries a mercenary message. In most fairy tales, riches are a reward for sacrifice or hard work; in the new "Sabrina," they're proof you have value as a human being. [15 Dec 1995, p.3E]

Everyone in the cast treads water, acting-wise -- there's nothing else to do -- except for Latifah, who brings passion to her work.

Though it begins as a praiseworthy depiction of a unique man, it turns into a formulaic disappointment long before the overly violent end... Comic-book adaptations must remain open to sequels, but this kind of coy cowardice is despicable.

The wigs, hats and gowns look realistic, gorgeous and utterly right. In a vapid confection like Stage Beauty, perhaps that's what really counts.

The real joke is that the picture's most conventional elements, the superbly acted entanglement between the complicated Orlean and the boastful but unexpectedly thoughtful Laroche, would have made a compelling movie all by themselves -- if written by someone other than Charlie Kaufman.

Writer Lou Holtz Jr. and director Ben Stiller (who has a funny cameo as an accused killer) needed to make the film scarier, turning Cable Guy into a veritable demon. Instead, they vacillate between comedy and attempted thrills like a TV set with a broken vertical hold. [14 June 1996, p.1E]

On a simplistic level, the movie works as a revenge fantasy...Yet anybody who thought about the movie for two minutes would have to conclude it couldn't happen.

Tries with intermittent success to juggle two stories.

If you're indifferent to silly revisions of history and bad acting, you may enjoy The Other Boleyn Girl. I'm not, and I didn't.

The two stars of Nacho Libre, Jack Black and Jack Black's hair, take different paths.

Even if they're on the side of the angels, 106 minutes is a long time to keep this sermon going.

Scorsese in his prime might've made better use of this hamming, but this picture feels like an exercise by a Scorsese clone who has tackled the master's themes - without his energy and economy of style.

While Shyamalan competently scares us from time to time and makes us laugh uncomfortably at the odd actions – aren’t we snickering at mental illness? – he has nowhere interesting to take this simple tale.

Whether or not you think Starsky & Hutch is funny -- and I did, though intermittently and in spasms -- you have to admire it for being the first openly gay cop-buddy comedy from a big studio.

A movie's in trouble when neither the hero nor the villain has charisma, and Clu is a dull dog.

Nick Schenk's well-intentioned script employs the creaky old Hollywood device of reversing everything set up in its first half.

The cast is drab and lifeless, the characterization non-existent, the ending simply impossible. Between our jumps of fright come lumps of time that take forever to pass.

I can say only three good things about his latest martial arts picture, the incoherent The Curse of the Golden Flower: 1) Gong Li deserves better roles, 2) The costumes are astonishingly beautiful, and 3) Ummm...wow, how about those costumes!

The film, which covers Graham's life roughly from the ages of 16 to 30, presents us with characters so uncomplicated they belong in a pop-up book.

Elementary school-age boys may well be delighted, but it offers not a scintilla of stimulation for anyone else.

Critics starved for thoughtful movies will often mistake the will for the deed. A serious film about an important subject seems like an important film, even if the effort falls far short of the target. So it is with We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Whenever the tires stop screeching and the fenders slamming, the story lands in a brutal pile-up of cliches.

The best work comes from Timothy Dalton as the grizzled, Scots-accented head of the Pinkertons.

I heard a moviegoer calls this drama "a feel-good `American Beauty,'" which is like saying "a hot bowl of gazpacho" -- the point has completely been missed.

I'll sum up my reaction in a word: Yawn.

Wrestles with big questions, gets the upper hand during the first hour, then loses its grip. By the end, it's flat on its back on the mat.

Sandler, whose mop of curls makes him look like a 40-ish Bob Dylan, acts up a satisfying storm. Cheadle remains an appealing island of calm; other cast members deliver the little that's asked of them.

Cholodenko doesn't put much activity into her languid movies. Watching them is like sagging back on the couch at a party that has run past 2 a.m., knowing we can leave -- surely nothing exciting is yet to happen? -- but basking lazily in the pleasant atmosphere of half-intoxicated flirtations.

Could there really have been a black evangelical church in rural Georgia where half the congregation consisted of whites who stomped, flung their hands in the air and rocked along with their brethren of color 15 years after forced integration? Just asking.

Eastwood has two knacks as a director/producer: He casts smaller roles well, as he did here, and he can establish an atmospheric mood, often an ominous one. But he hasn't much visual style -- for an action star.

A roller-coaster ride that goes on far too long, ends with a colossal crash, then follows that wreck with a lecture explaining the physics of the machinery. My head was spinning for multiple reasons, none of them pleasing.

"Velocity" told multiple stories, each lasting half an hour, but "Ballad" wears out one tale before its end.

Once The Quest begins, the movie collapses. The ending turns coincidental, preachy and stupid.

The plot of "Nights" will occupy only 10 or 12 brain cells.

The characters are so conventional that the movie has nowhere interesting to go, even when a corpse complicates affairs.

Darabont and Sloane stumble consistently and fall into the abyss.