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.