Lawrence Toppman

The movie fails the credibility test right here. As those of us who were social rejects in high school know, the two qualities that would defeat any prom candidate are extra weight and a blotchy complexion. Laney has porcelain skin and a sveltely curvaceous figure, so she's a candidate for prom royalty. [29 Jan 1999, p.6E]

Brosnan has toughened up emotionally for his second outing. He's been teamed with Asian action star Michelle Yeoh as Chinese agent Wai Lin, and he's been given a script that provides more fun than the lethargic "GoldenEye." [19 Dec 1997, p.11E]

This little piggy's gone to market, and he isn't coming back. Not to suggest the sequel lacks heart or an uplifting message. It has both. But they've been subsumed in slapstick clowning and the introduction of characters with no reason to exist, other than to line the shelves of toy stores. [27 Nov 1998, p.6D]

He decided early on what he wanted and pursued it straightforwardly all his life. That rarely yields riveting drama, however well-intentioned filmmakers may be.

It's got a satisfyingly brisk rhythm and two appealing performances by Brendan Gleeson and Peter MacDonald as good-natured ex-cons. But despite the brogues of their bosses, the tough-guy atmosphere is pleasantly old-hat. [10 July 1998, p.12E]

It’s just a popcorn movie – but it’s loud, smashing fun, if you accept it as a high-tech piece of silliness.

Fear not. It’s as silly as the first, a shade faster and nastier (though also sloppier) and features a new psycho more dangerous than anyone in the original.

Well, this is the best adaptation of Block – in fact, the only decent one.

Ye shall know Entourage by its acronyms: A lot of carelessly amusing R&R, copious T&A, a fair amount of BS and a consistently low-to-medium IQ.

The movie does have a heart, and Carroll plays by it. But when in doubt, he plays a safe tune we've all heard and enjoyed many a time. [22 Jan 1999, p.8E]

Gomez is a nonstarter as an actor, alternating dully between petulance and indifference. Hawke compensates with a vivid, ferocious performance that doesn’t go over the top.

Director John Lee Hancock and screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith spend about a third of the film exploring Travers’ childhood in Australia, and there the film succeeds.

The Hobbit concludes as it began: in a welter of continuous action, with characters who have become archetypes but seldom rise above that level, and with a host of ideas J.R.R. Tolkien didn't put into his short novel.

When the movie shifts gears, coming forward almost 30 years, Maurice becomes less interesting – and so does the picture.

Sometimes seeing a movie throws the source material into sharper relief.... Watching the textually faithful film adaptation by director Thomas Vinterberg and writer David Nicholls, though, the piece comes off more as a glossy, well-acted romance novel.

Much of the movie’s charm comes from seeing middle-aged women in roles that usually go to middle-aged men. (Vergara is 42; Witherspoon will be 40 next March.) Hot Pursuit isn’t funnier than most male outings in the cop-witness genre – the 1988 “Midnight Run” remains the best of those – but its casting makes it fresher than many.

Puts a fun, frothy spin on the 1960s TV show before sinking back into the mundane.

Except for the irritating Rockwell, the cast suits the characters.

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

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.

Easy to like.

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 Dirty Dozen,” one of my favorite war movies, will no doubt get a 50th-anniversary boxed set next year. Those of us who wait for it can mark time with Suicide Squad, which borrows the same concept and executes it with more lunacy and far less flair.

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

The performances do shine out through this dramatic miasma.

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

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]

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One of many small reasons to like The Recruit is that it pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut, a forgotten old lion of literature.

Many shallower movies these days seem too long, but this one is egregiously short.

I groaned at cliches and grinned at jokes in roughly equal measure.

Won't startle or surprise you but will satisfy your need to see good actors at work.

I think Garland and Boyle just want to make our flesh creep by showing someone else's flesh decaying. If that's their aim, they achieved it.

It paints its world in pastels, but the subject cries out for vivid colors.

Over the course of 108 minutes, The Royal Tenenbaums drops downward on the humor scale from hilarious to funny to quirky to pretentiously bizarre to chaotic.

Writer-director Lisa Krueger bends over backward to make everyone happy.

The strongest parts of the film aren't these money shots, but the buildup to the gunplay.

Seamless, funny and startling. Anybody who thinks Keaton always does tiny variations on the same sardonic character - making him a bit more tight-lipped, say, when donning a Batsuit - will be surprised by the variety of his skills here. [19 July 1996, p.3E]

People's eyes still look as glassy and dull as a taxidermized possum's. But if you're going to Beowulf to experience the sweeping passions that only real eyes can convey, you're missing the point.

It's grim, funny in one sequence about shapeshifters, vivid in moments of violent action, nearly devoid of plot twists and marked by long patches where Harry, Ron and Hermione camp in the woods or by the sea or near a frozen lake and ponder What It All Means.

All the actors give performances so low-key they're almost minimalist. That works, except when we're supposed to believe every woman would throw herself at the closed-off Joe.

It ends with the corniest convention of all: an absurd mano-a-mano between good and evil.

Atmospheric, well-acted, pointless story.

Goes down easily enough.

Director Rob Cohen shoots believable action sequences, too. Nobody jumps the gap between skyscrapers or falls 40 feet, then gets up and runs away.

With its twist, the movie leaps into a fresh realm of fantasy. But director Marc Forster and first-time screenwriter Zach Helm don't know what to do when they get there, and the film's greatest asset almost becomes its undoing.

Fairly entertaining, repetitive exhortations of a televangelist who looks like Kurt Russell playing Elvis Presley with 12 additional teeth.

The film, though seldom sleepy, is often hollow.

Last Holiday floats along on the broad shoulders of one of our most able dramatic comedians. Without her, it would sag like a punctured souffle.

I can tell you in nine words whether you'll want to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Writer-director Andrew Dominik wants to be Terrence Malick.

About halfway through Irreversible comes the longest sustained act of violence I've seen onscreen.

The result is a beautiful painting come to stately, intermittent life.

Cool. Stupid. Juiced-up. Feeble. Stripped-down. Self-indulgent. Clever. Sophomoric.

The film is always fun, but as Carroll might have observed, it’s not much of a muchness.

This is strictly a picture for the target audience, though it seems to hit that target regularly.

The characters, irritating as they can be at first, grow on you as they grow up.

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

North Country resorts to theatrics a judge would squelch after one outburst, as director Niki Caro and writer Michael Seitzman aim for a "Spartacus" feel.

I recommend it to anyone who needs proof that people past 60 have dreams, skills and/or sex lives.

Whatever he (Shyamalan) did, he shouldn't have tried to send the same lightning bolt down to Earth in the same place.

Making a film with fine performances, adept direction, first-rate photography and a doltish screenplay is like starting a rock band with no drummer. The result may yield satisfying, even memorable moments. But every time you try to build momentum, the project falls apart.

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

The part that caters to older fans is funny and satisfying, if unbelievable. The part that plays to action-movie devotees is muddled, unsatisfying and unbelievable. Luckily, the first part is about two-thirds of the movie.

Tthe kind of movie the clergy can recommend to anxious parishioners.

If you're an elementary schooler or someone who finds Gerard Butler irresistible even when fully clothed, Nim's Island may be a treat to watch. If not, it's likelier to be a chore.

He (Chomet) keeps us waiting for a narrative payoff that will equal that visual splendor, and he makes us think that many small inspired touches will add up to something memorable. But when he opens his hand at last, there's nothing in it.

[Zoe Saldana] acts with the right fire and sings beautifully and evocatively.

It’s a well-crafted, well-paced procedural drama about a monotonous psychopath.

Few modern thrillers aspire to look this striking.

Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.

The movie runs out of steam before its finish, but she (Kidman) doesn't.

“Train” makes its strongest impact in Blunt’s hands. Her vulnerability brings pathos to every scene she enters, making you wish the whole film could have been told through Rachel’s bleary eyes – and set in England, where she belongs. But it’s a pleasure to see her anywhere.

Monaghan gives a solid performance, and Billy Bob Thornton has sarcastically funny bits as an FBI agent.

Garner bounces around gleefully as the young spirit enveloped by this adult body. She's young enough herself to remember what it was like to be that age, and she has the vulnerability, zest and slightly over-the-top reactions of a seventh-grader.

This isn't really a narrative: It's a collection of mostly unrelated scenes, about half of which pay off.

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

Watching Arthur Christmas is like doing your holiday shopping on Dec. 23: fun and frantic, exciting and maddening.

Where Collins' book paid careful attention to detail, Ross pays far too little. Characters never become exhausted or desperate or gaunt; they don't even get chapped lips or broken nails.

Details matter here more than in most movies. The world needs to know this story, and nobody’s going to tell it again for a long while. Parker put his heart and soul into it, but sometimes the road paved with good intentions doesn’t lead to Hell: It stops at mediocrity.

The summer's most anticipated film, and it gives fans what they want - then more of what they want, and more, and more, until gluttony becomes force-feeding.

A hymn to that beautiful city, is among his least consequential efforts. It's attractive and easy to slip into, but he didn't put enough thought into the design, and it soon falls apart.

There's plenty to admire in the performances and atmosphere, but the writer-director needed someone to pull him up short.

Offers high-speed helicopter chases, fireballing explosions, deadly laser guns, futuristic technology gone amok, multiple car crashes, two Arnold Schwarzeneggers for the price of one - almost everything except a plot that makes sense.

Cook has as much depth as a coaster, so it's impossible under any circumstances to imagine Binoche falling in love with him. Her complicated, heartfelt performance is the reason to see the film: When she's around, she pierces the soothing gray nothingness with shafts of sunlight.

Wan knows how to sustain tension through terror, though he could have abbreviated the flabby middle of the movie.

The script's hokiness flattens the performances.

If inciting boredom is the worst sin a filmmaker can commit, being timid is right behind it. Whether I agree with your point of view or not, I want to hear it.

Hector Elizondo, who has appeared in all 15 of Marshall's features, turns up as a Basque rancher and adds a bit of sparkle. I just wish Marshall's good luck charm was not a 70-year-old actor but a fresh, honest screenplay.

All true, but not new -- and not especially compelling.

For all the irrelevant silliness, though, the movie never loses sight of its romantic center, and the script doesn't cop out with phony miracles or sudden changes of direction.

An unassuming, brief and cheaply entertaining boxing movie. It's long on punching and short on character, but you wouldn't go to a Hill movie to see "Raging Bull."

It's a brisk but restful breeze blowing through our heads, requiring no thought whatsoever – in fact, thoughts are an impediment to enjoying it – and touching us just a bit in unexpected ways.

This visually engaging, well-acted story held me for an hour as tightly as anything I've seen this year. But as we neared the climax, I realized only a miracle could resolve the contradictions of the tale – and we didn't get one.

Lane, perhaps the most underrated actress of those deemed employable in their 40s, wonderfully embodies the mogul's wife.

Its familiar story has pleasing quirks.

Technically, the film can stand with most releases. The cast includes veterans Hal Linden, Paul Rodriguez and Jennifer O'Neill, all of whom do good work.

The credits say DiNorscio, who died during filming in 2004, never informed on anyone. But is that such a great thing? If you live in a sewer, is it so terrible to be a rat?

A gently pleasing if mostly undramatic picture.

It's the most claustrophobic, airless movie of the year, a menage a quatre among unstable, manipulative, needy people who prey on each other like sharks at a feeding frenzy of the emotions.

Thirty minutes into Be Kind Rewind, you may wonder what you're doing in the theater. Sixty minutes into it, if you have stayed, you will know.

Perhaps the director should make only silent movies. Scenes where characters communicate via eyes and body language usually work here, even if we don't know exactly what's going on.

It's a pleasant but insubstantial excuse for a film.

What makes Blade 2 marginally better than "Blade," especially if you thought the first was a hollow spectacle? It has a plot.

The picture feels like an entertaining short story, competently executed at undue length, and that's its origin.

Inside Moonlight Mile, an honest and heartbreakingly true movie is struggling to get out.

While the 29 pages of his (Van Allsburg's) mini-classic would have made a superb half-hour TV special, Zemeckis and writer William Broyles Jr. have created a steroidal monster with a heart about one size too small.

Vardalos is of Greek ancestry, which makes stereotyping permissible: She can tease Greeks, just as Italians can safely mock Italians or Jews can poke fun at Jews. But isn't it demeaning to reduce your heritage to clich?s?

While it doesn’t recapture the black magic of the original, it delivers the requisite terror in the last half-hour after a slow and ambiguous start.

Starts as sweetly impossible and ends as impossibly sweet.

A sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy movie.

It's cheerful nonsense from blithe beginning to obvious end.

Performances keep the film afloat and focused whenever it threatens to drift. Deschanel, Harris and Warner are ideally cast. You might not think Ferrell would be, but he gives a different performance than I've seen from him.

Bits of welcome weirdness creep in, mainly through the too-brief character of Ghantt’s intense fiancée (Kate McKinnon). But Hess has little time for wit.

Crowe likes to work with large ensembles...But he doesn't know when we've had enough, however interesting they all may be; he's like a guy who decorates a Christmas tree with so many ornaments that you can't see the foliage.

It delivers cop-genre thrills at the pace required and reminds us Omar Epps is a star in the making.

Production values are acceptable in the Klasky Csupo vein. If you know that company, you're prepared for animation that isn't conventionally attractive: flat backgrounds, characters with big heads, pushed-in faces and beanpole limbs.

Performances are simple and complementary, and Hidalgo's potential death scene sustains suspense as much as is equinely possible.

It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.

Far too clever for its own good.

The film has a huge heart, and it's in the right place.

When Rock of Ages remembers it's supposed to be a cartoon, it's a noisy, sweaty, giddy ball of fun. When it suddenly develops a conscience or tries to process a thought deeper than "I love rock 'n' roll," it trips over its own feet.

The pleasure comes from watching the clever rodents do their stuff. Computerized images have been kept to a minimum, and real animals provide most of the film's atmosphere.

Writer-director Theodore Witcher fills his debut with jazz-cool atmosphere. He's got a fresh-faced but mature cast: Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington. But once he's staked out the territory, he falls back into the most conventional kind of storytelling. [14 Mar 1997, p.4E]

A conventionally violent, do-or-die ending on such an unconventional movie.

It's watchable, due to the rotoscoping technique...It's also as lightweight as the smoke rings blown by one of many perverse, dull characters.

What seemed laugh-out-loud fresh in its unpredictable rudeness (at least intermittently) is now chuckle-to-yourself funny with about the same regularity.

Good idea for a movie about rebellious Asian Americans doesn't fully pan out.

The casting is weaker this time. Watching Peck crumble under fear and doubt was like seeing a skyscraper implode; Schreiber's more of a whipped puppy for most of the film.

Starts as a tart little lemon drop of a movie and ends up as a bitter pill. I'm glad to have seen it, for I appreciated Campbell Scott's dominant performance and Jesse Eisenberg's breakthrough. But I hope writer-director Dylan Kidd mixes less acid into the next drink he pours.

Chaotic, sometimes funny.

It flies apart when it clumsily introduces humor at a funeral or an application for death benefits.

Movies about artists play fast and loose with truth, but this is a hoot.

Will dazzle you while establishing the world in which it takes place. After that, you may wonder whether Guillermo del Toro got amnesia halfway through.

Whatever you think of Melinda and Melinda, you have to admire Woody Allen for this: After years of criticism that he didn't use people of color in films, he's written two interracial romances.

As a movie, it's a mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

A marginally above average crime caper with one big plot twist that's pretty tough to believe but mildly interesting to consider.

I can't explain the film's main problem without giving plot points away; suffice to say that, after decades of watching Earth, Klaatu's team of observers has missed a crucial event you and I witness every day. I can tell you about the secondary problem, though: too much money.

It's watchable from start to finish, despite lapses in common sense, and it boasts a terrific cast of over-40 actors.

If you like films short, sweet and soothing, this may be exactly your "Dish."

Handsome and competently acted and prettily shot and all the other things critics say when what they really want to scream is "Aaaaaaaargh! No more Jane Austen adaptations, ESPECIALLY not Pride and Prejudice.

Nicholson operates in full-bore demonic mode in Anger Management, eclipsing gentle star Adam Sandler and satisfying everybody who's been waiting for Hollywood's Wild Man to cut loose once more.

Like all his movies except "Badlands," a taut 1973 debut, "Tree" looks gorgeous, has philosophic ambitions, meanders wherever Malick's imagination takes him and stays dramatically inert.

I do wonder why a gay director's best-known movies about straight guys, Talk to Her and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!," suggest that satisfying relationships with women are most easily achieved if they're 1) unconscious or 2) in bondage.

Most of the actors keep an icicle-stiff upper lip except for Winslet, who darts around like a finch with a beak full of sunflower seeds, and Burrows, who exudes a musk of refined sexiness.

Green knows how to convey a mood visually and develop tension with his camera. He just doesn't give people enough interesting things to say or know when to shut them up.

Jon Favreau, J.K. Simmons, Thomas Lennon and half a dozen other capable comedians drift in and out. Yet the movie seems long even at 105 minutes.

Everyone's entitled to a slump, and this is only the first blah film in five for Guest.

95 breezy minutes that typify cotton-candy filmmaking.

We get pleasure watching two sets of likeable, convincing actors move toward their foreordained futures. The film's affecting ending proves familiarity needn't breed contempt, after all.

If only Hollywood studios weren't so addicted to happy, oversimplified endings, the film might leave us shaken instead of slightly stirred.

Characters behave arbitrarily and incredibly, and a clumsy resolution brings the film to a thudding halt.

The setup doesn't make sense from the get-go.

Who else in Hollywood would've met a non-actor with spina bifida (Rene Kirby), created a role for him, then shot him dancing and skiing on his hands to show how easily he fit into society?

The real stars are the orchestrators and musicians who swaddled Spacey in a gorgeous blanket of sound.

Fanboys won't mind the absence of depth or emotion; they may even welcome it for making the film more representative of its comic-book origins. The rest of us, however, cannot rejoice at the overspending and overkill likely to come in Hellboy III.

Steven Zaillian never seems completely at home with these characters, not because he's white but because he's a cerebral screenwriter frustrated with a story that gives him little that's meaningful to say. Like Washington and Crowe, he's a chef functioning here as a short-order cook: The meal's perfectly edible but falls short of delicious.

I didn't believe most of what I saw until the last 20 minutes, and whaddaya know? This thriller finally cast the spell it had been trying to achieve and lifted itself above the pack of late-summer, clean-out-the-studio-attic releases.

The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.

The loosely autobiographical 8 Mile, an uneven but watchable drama about life in Detroit's slums, begins the shrewd transformation of vitriolic rapper Eminem into a mainstream figure.

Entertaining and preposterous in nearly equal amounts.

What keeps this from cloying? Universally good performances, led by Banderas' blazing intensity.

It's gently funny, modestly scary in spots, full of valuable but low-key observations about life.

There's an extraordinary subplot in Blood Diamond, sandwiched between a main story meant to arouse outrage and a Hollywood-clumsy finale meant to provoke a standing ovation.

So I was curious to see why we needed a two-hour documentary about the three-hit wonder who cast away his career halfway through life and coasted on celebrity status for 30 years. After seeing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, I'm still not convinced we do.

The only thing they don't take time for is characterization, which the story badly needs.

It requires an almost childlike faith to get into the spirit of Stroke of Genius, an old-fashioned willingness to believe that the world was once this way - and might, somehow, become this way again.

I don't mean to be negative, but I want Orny Adams hung naked over a pit of snapping crocodiles. That said, Comedian is a lightweight but appealing backstage film about two performers.

When will the people who adapt comic books into films realize that less can be so much more?

Someone watching Stop-Loss with younger eyes might feel the heat of the main soldier's dilemma more than I did, but I couldn't help thinking director Kimberly Peirce was presenting us with abstract ideas in the forms of half-realized characters.

An old-fashioned suspense drama with an old-fashioned belief at its core: Justice can be done in the world, and the United Nations is the global organization to do it.

The movie gets full marks for earning its G rating: no violence, no cursing, no sex or nudity, no drugs, not even a rogue cigarette blotting the landscape. It's easier to achieve this rating when your hero barely speaks and has little consciousness of the adult world, but "Holiday" proves it can be done-and should be more often.

Director Brett Ratner can't make chicken a la king out of chicken droppings, and that's what writers Simon Kinberg ("XXX: State of the Union") and Zak Penn ("Elektra") supply.

Your reaction will depend on your response to the title character, who's meant to be God or one of God's messengers.

The film delivers the goods, reptile-wise. Though the computer-generated villains look a bit clumsy at ground level, they're superb in the air.

Coppola lacks a firm grip on this material, and it starts to get away from her midway through.

A holiday fable that's not destined for immortality but goes down more easily than most of the pap Hollywood tries to feed us every Christmas.

Director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson argue that everyone deserves the love that makes them happiest, and that these two will remain miserable until they stumble upon each other.

So the science in this film of Jules Verne's science fiction classic is ludicrous. Well, how's the fiction? Not terrible.

Kapur’s contradictory feelings about his material result in a movie that works against itself. As righteous and consistent as his anger may be -- it’s displayed from the opening title cards to the final shot -- it doesn’t blend successfully with the story.

The dialogue in Craig Mazin’s script crackles at its best, and the supporting characters (led by Robert Patrick as a grizzled skip chaser) have bizarrely funny moments.

Multiple lobotomies. That's the only way to explain what happens in the middle of Hitch, whose first hour sets up one of the brightest romantic comedies in months and whose second hour tears it down.

Uproarious imbecility.

The movie Rendition asks, admittedly in a one-sided way, whether the ends justify these means.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet do exactly what’s asked of them as Frank and April Wheeler, who may be ironically named: They spin emotional wheels constantly but get nowhere.

Fair, overlong James Bond from the second shelf.

He (Horn) gets so deeply into the whirling mind of Oskar Schell, dominating every scene he's in – which is almost every scene, period – that he lifts the movie out of the realm of "Forrest Gump"-like emotional manipulation.

The picture doesn't inspire or reward high expectations, but it raises smiles.

Johansson, hair dyed brown to make her seem less glamorous, spices up this bland role.

The good-hearted Galaxy Quest delivers fun and confusion in equal measure, as it gently tweaks the fanaticism of "Star Trek"/"Star Wars" fans while validating it at the same time.

Ray Liotta and Jason Patric do some of their best work in their underwritten roles, but don't be fooled: Nobody deserves any prizes here.

Is it a bad thing that Disney has commercialized, denatured and inflated the story to make it indistinguishable from any handsome sword-and-sorcery epic? Perhaps not, for it IS handsome on its grand scale.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." Well, Rachel Getting Married is drama with the dull bits left in.

How odd that some of the most appealing elements of this new animation should be action sequences as old as cinema itself.

Heartwarming drama.

You must cast aside all rules of our space-time continuum to appreciate a fantasy like this one, though even then you might consider 130 minutes to be too much of a good thing.

DiCaprio is up to all but the heaviest emotional lifting; when he enters a maniacal phase, you wish for Martin Sheen, who did the "back to the jungle" thing better in "Apocalypse Now."

Asks questions worth pondering. I only wished the writer-director-editor answered more of them.

Has more psychological complexity than the average suspense drama, and the results prove more satisfying than not.

In the end, your reaction to "Hour" may depend on your feelings about humanity's collective common sense.

It seems perverse to say a musical is at its best when nobody is singing, but Nine is a perverse kind of musical.

If the longest and beefiest "Spider-Man" movie to date were a baseball player, it would be tested tomorrow for steroids. That won't stop "S-M 3" from hitting a home run at the box-office, where fans will roar.

Hawn always appears to be acting with a vengeance, but Sarandon just breathes her part.

An endearing, well-acted trifle with lovely intentions.

Without Gibson, this soufflé would fall pancake-flat.

You know the feeling you get when you make a meal of two mildly savory appetizers that don't quite go together, and you leave you wishing you'd eaten one hefty entrée? That's Julie & Julia. Half an hour later, I wanted to watch another movie.

Polly works best when writer-director John Hamburg gets his mind out of the water closet, and it's in there about two-fifths of the way. The rest of the time, he's assembling a hit-and-miss comedy with reasonable numbers of laughs and lots of personality from its two leads.

Bits can be extremely funny. I howled at the ranting, mustard-splotched, wiener-waving Michael Moore.

The vigorous, unsubtle acting provides consistent pleasure, once you stop expecting it to seem realistic.

Maybe this is a case of too many cooks spoiling a simple broth: The movie had four producers, five executive producers, three writers (credited ones, anyhow) and three editors.

By the end, I felt like a beetle going round and round in a toilet bowl that just wouldn't stop flushing.

One thing the movie does well is skewer Bill Clinton. Though Hayes works for him and nominally defends him to detractors, we see old sins rehashed: Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, his impeachment.

It combines elements of "Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars" and James Bond flicks with generically satisfying results.

The director is strong on setups, and the hunt for the virus is tense. [10 Mar 1995, p.1F]

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

I admire Cameron Crowe for daring to write and direct a movie as strange as Vanilla Sky. I lament the casting of Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz in the leads.

A mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

If you wanted this "Snicket" movie (and the presumed flood of sequels) to be faithful to the novels, you have come to the wrong franchise.

The details of the story, crucial in a picture that's at least partly a mystery, remain a tangled blur.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance knew he was dealing with a story full of coincidences when he adapted M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans, so he avoided melodrama by holding himself and his excellent actors in check. The result is a movie that crackles quietly without flaring up into an emotional blaze.

I can safely say I've never seen anything as ridiculous as Live Free or Die Hard. I'm not saying my 10-year-old self didn't enjoy a lot of it.

Foster and Yun-Fat each show about three-quarters of their characters.

Spade, who almost invariably plays smug or smarmy characters, proves he really can act.

Though it starts slowly, it lumbers toward greatness in the last third and restores him [Lucas] briefly to the top of his class.

So what's the motivation for the earnest, handsome, well-acted, unenlightening, workaday J. Edgar in 2011?

The film goes from stylish to ghoulish to foolish.

Whether or not you think of this as a knockoff, it has a ripeness “Twilight” never did.

Bullock good, but King reigns in movie sequel.

It is a gimmick, rather than an idea worth exploring.

Weitz has done one remarkable thing in "Company" that doesn't strike you until later: He's given us a functional family that overcomes difficulties with patience and effort.

Where the musical falls short is – well, music. Hooper's quest for realism leads singers to sob, choke off sentences or drop into inaudible whispers during grand melodies. A musical ought to convey emotions too large for speech: sorrow, joy, love that can't be expressed in ordinary ways. Turning songs into vocalized dramatic monologues misses the point.

This giddy summer extravaganza does deliver aerial thrills with eye-dazzling visuals and ear-smacking (though beautifully designed) sound.

Willis, who'll turn 50 a week from Saturday, has this kind of hero down pat. He may never again get or demand the complicated dramatic roles I think he could handle, but he's well-cast.

Letters covers less emotional ground than its predecessor, because Eastwood and first-time writer Iris Yamashita (who shares a story credit with Paul Haggis) allow Japanese soldiers only three modes of behavior.

It's not the dark comedy it wants to be - that would be "M*A*S*H" with a more modern setting and more gruesome consequences - but it's worth a look.

At times, the animatronic effects used to create the wolves are too obvious, and the one-by-one kill-off plotline employed in so many horror films gives The Grey a plodding predictability. At nearly two hours, it's also too long.

Watching Wedding Crashers is like stuffing yourself with raw cookie dough. It's a guilty pleasure that goes down easily, but you can't help wondering what it would've tasted like if someone had finished the job.

It takes its plot from the 2001 German film about a workaholic chef, dumbing down the original slightly and inserting a couple of phony crises. You're spared not only subtitles but subtlety.

Few actors can match Carrey's ability to change his features and body language.

Nothing in the longer Frankenweenie is new.

The supporting cast is almost uniformly good, from Conchata Ferrell as a sympathetic waitress to Erick Avari as a corporate type with a surprisingly big heart and a hidden silly streak. Turturro relishes his quiet overplaying and steals the bulk of his scenes.

The portrait of Elizabeth Sloane grabs your interest, partly due to the presence of Jessica Chastain in the title role.

The romance seems tacked on as a way to humanize this character; there's no reason the nurse would take up with a brash, secretive American.

Certainly satisfies our hunger for a light, bright dessert, yet it may leave you hungry for more.

When we have to spend time with Beast and Angel and Nightcrawler and Cyclops and Psylocke and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, still strong), the movie too often becomes a parade of cameos. Apocalypse has no personality, merely the malevolence of a megalomaniac.

Creature is refreshingly and intentionally silly, in an era when horror has devolved mostly into torture porn and high-tech, computer-generated assaults on our senses.

Most crucially, we don't learn what brought the four women together; Olivia's so much younger than the others that there's no reason to think they'd ever have befriended her.

All of Barnyard is odd. Oddly funny much of the way, oddly serious when it makes room for the early death of a beloved character or the hushed birth of another, oddly musical with its melange of hip-hop and reggae and hard rock and bluegrass.

Yet for all the fun the sequel provides, the series shows signs of wearing out quickly, unless characters get developed thoroughly and in unexpected ways.

He (writer/director David Gordon Green) fired his arrow straight at a worthwhile target, but it fell a little short.

The new team thinks that if mayhem is funny, five times the mayhem will be five times as hilarious. That’s not how movie math works, and too many scenes spin out of control.

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?