Lawrence Toppman

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

Has its heart in the right place and its head shoved well down into a box of clichés.

It’s the first Pixar effort that feels less like a creative outpouring and more like an obligation met to satisfy a distribution schedule.

The movie seemed a disappointment at first, until I decided I was missing the point: It’s actually a drama about the way people treat a celebrity – with fear or reverence, as a source of income or reflected glory– and the way their own personalities change around him, while his stays the same. In that way, the film’s a small triumph.

Reflective, deliberate, building gradually to a climax that left me touched.

Proves two things irrefutably. First, Fishburne doesn't get enough work that tests his acting abilities… Second, Luke's breakout performance in "Fisher" was no fluke.

The result is two-tiered humor, broad enough to appeal to anybody but overlaid with jokes that will be funnier if you know the show.

He's (Soderbergh) among the few directors working today who makes me wonder what he'll do next - and draws me into the movie house, whatever it may be.

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?

Pearce, who's in every scene except the Sammy flashbacks, dominates the picture through his feral performance.

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

Totally underwhelming.

Like "Shattered Glass," the other picture Billy Ray directed, Breach probes a guilty mind and reveals how he baffled people. We get a Hitchcock-like pleasure from knowing the protagonist is guilty and watching other shocked characters realize his wickedness.

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.

Easy to like.

It's an uncoordinated, flailing hodgepodge of music videos, chases, crashes and moronic plot twists.

Journalists have a saying for someone who neglects or downplays the most important part of a news story: He buried the lead. That's what Paul Haggis does with "In the Valley of Elah," which submerges two important storylines beneath a pointless, unsatisfying whodunit.

The film seems like a loose and uncredited updating of "The Great Man Votes," a more serious 1939 entry.

Zach Braff, who shot the film near his hometown of South Orange, N.J., directed this drama with subtle flair and wrote a star part that perfectly fit his acting range.

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.

Director Vondie Curtis-Hall has managed to top (or should I say "bottom"?) his last theatrical release, Mariah Carey's "Glitter," with a movie that offers not one praiseworthy moment: not a scene, not a performance, not a technical achievement, not even a line of dialogue.

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

An animated film that challenges preconceptions about the genre and foregoes the usual romance/adventure structure.

Begins and ends quietly, like stirrings of thunder from a distant storm. In between comes a tragedy that rolls over us like a compact hurricane.

Parker's afraid that we'll be bored by the language alone, so he throws in absurdities.

The result is a film that has "Masterpiece Theatre" production values but not an ounce of dust upon it.

The performances do shine out through this dramatic miasma.

A spruced-up version has been re-released after 22 years, and the addition of 43 minutes means the story really has room to breathe.

For all the story's bland familiarity, it has winning moments. Allen's no actor, but he projects a likeable personality.

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.

We waited 10 years for a sequel to the movie version of "The X-Files" – and the best Chris Carter could do is The X-Files: I Want to Believe?

Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

Control Room ends by acknowledging that independence, accuracy and even truth itself may be illusory.

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.

It's among the most inventive, screwily funny and consistently surprising movies I've seen in years.

Executive Decision, a film as generic as its title, follows its 'subdue the terrorists' template by the numbers - but they're numbers that can work over and over, when handled as competently as they are here by director Stuart Baird. [15 Mar 1996, p.8E]

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

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

May wrestle with big ideas, but it does so through a succession of small emotional moments.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

If you see Hot Fuzz, you'll never again watch a Michael Bay film without howling with disrespectful laughter.

Jim Broadbent is the wild card in the cast; he screeches and growls his way through Madame Gasket's lines in the best traditions of British drag.

Bad actors, bad music and bad plot make it a hellish bummer.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

Few white directors depict racial interaction in a thoughtful, non-exploitative way, but Sayles has always been one of them.

Dragonheart is all dragon, no heart. [31 May 1996, p.3E]

It never commits the sin of sentimentalizing old age, as Hollywood usually does when it deigns to admit that people over 55 exist.

See not only the original "Detective" but the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters film "Pennies From Heaven." If you insist on giving Downey and company $8 instead, you'll be getting wooden nickels from Hell.

Amiable bundle of broad, easy laughs rather than bitingly fierce satire.

If you used this guy's umbilical cord for fishing line, you could land a world-record marlin.

Cohen and his gang are smart enough to know when to quit. Like a loud but amusing guest at a dinner party, Borat collects his coat and goes home just as his hosts are starting to fidget.

Bogdanovich adds touches to appeal to serious film fans.

Will Ferrell strides through Elf like a crazily cheerful wind-up toy: arms swinging, legs stiff, mouth fixed in an impossibly happy grin, eyes wide with wonder. He's the Christmas gift nobody thought to ask for but everybody will want to play with.

This loose, slightly lazy sequel is both funnier than the original and more bizarre.

Nobody smells of sagebrush, campfire coffee, tobacco (smoked or chewed) and saddle soap like Duvall.

Bardem delivers the kind of performance the director might have given himself: subdued, thoughtful, wry, sometimes a bit too detached.

The final drum-off (c'mon, you knew it would come down to that) resembles a combination of music, gymnastics and martial arts, and I don't think I've seen a more pulse-pounding scene this year.

To my detached eye, this slender biography suggests that Curtis went from a faintly interested glam-rock wannabe of 16 to a mildly talented performer to a quietly glum fellow of 23 whose frustrations drove him to suicide.

One of those rare action comedies that actually delivers action and comedy.

The main message of this drama is driven home with emotional hammer blows.

The film whirls by in a satisfying torrent of chases, escapes and discoveries.

Feuerzeig leaves a lot of territory unexplored. Why did people overlook his suffering and bizarre behavior for so long? Were they cold-hearted profiteers, onlookers enjoying a freak show or honestly ignorant of his troubles? Are there links between Johnston's creativity and madness?

On the most basic level, Cars is an old-fashioned fable about an egotistical, talented loner who learns humility and redeems himself by helping unfortunates.

If you want my rock-solid statement on whether The Fountain is a masterpiece or a muddle, check with me in 2026.

After an hour, The Pianist stops being the Holocaust movie and becomes a Holocaust movie.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

It warms the heart in the hands of such sensitive storytellers.

It's fascinating to watch others sweat, suffer and triumph in the documentary Dust to Glory, which chronicles the longest nonstop, point-to-point race on our planet.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

How bad, really, could it be? I couldn't have guessed.

He presides over the picture with such assurance that even longtime Denzel-watchers gape.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

If it were 10 minutes shorter, it would've been just the right length and almost wholly honest.

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.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.

It makes "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "12:08 East of Bucharest," the last glum Romanian movies about life under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, seem merry.

MacDowell gives an uneven performance, as she often does, but Strathairn is ideally cast as the conflicted husband.

Blethyn glides through the proceedings elegantly, a comic swan among ducks.

Allen, rejuvenated by foreign settings, makes us appreciate posh parts of England as he always did Manhattan. (Credit cinematographer Remi Adefarasin for showing us how seductive upper-crust London can be.)

Shows the fate of Sicilians who moved to the Italian industrial city of Turin 40-plus years ago, and it suggests that the experience of relocation is universal.

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

Stallone doesn't pander to audiences with unearned sentiment. He believes in his story, in the inspirational element that has sent thousands of folks running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art over 30 years.

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

A director needs to know how to pace the tale, where to place the camera, how to draw out a shy actor or get out of the way of a strong one. Those skills are rarer than you'd think. Sarah Polley, who never wrote or directed a feature film before Away From Her, has them all.

Souza and Shelton throw in all kinds of ridiculous devices they learned in second-year screenwriting class.

OK, so no plot, really.

Bolt has the magical quality of great animation, the ability to touch us without the hint of preachiness or manipulation.

Brilliantly embodied by Jamie Foxx in this unflinching, entertaining biography.

An experience as tender and troubling as any you're likely to get - or not likely, if this subject puts you off.

It pays homage to the genre's most glorious days.

When we're outside Frank's body, Osmosis Jones drags. When we're inside him, it zooms.

You can also see Sylvia without realizing she could be witty and bemused, qualities apparent in her posthumously published novel, "The Bell Jar." This book, which spoke to sensitive girls of the 1960s like few others, is mentioned once in passing in the film. We never see her writing it or learn what it means to her.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

I never did sort out the gangsters fighting for control of a 19th-century town, nor did I figure out exactly what happened to the main henchman. But I was rarely bored.

Bride has atmosphere and charm, but the exotic flavors have often been toned down to avoid complaints.