Lawrence Toppman

The Hulk has a split personality: Two-thirds come from director Ang Lee, one-third from '60s comic book creator Stan Lee.

Treadaway gives a restrained performance that never begs for pity but earns plenty; he shows the day-to-day difficulty of living without simple necessities while retaining hope and dignity.

Decent acting forestalls the inevitable collapse for a long time.

Sandler proves even a hardened Israeli secret service agent can be an imbecilic juvenile.

It really gets gloomy.

The saga regains its grandeur with a complicated but easy-to-follow story. The characters are as satisfying as the effects.

Don't be misled by the chopsticks and cherry blossoms: Memoirs of a Geisha, for all its exotic casting and locale, is our friend "Cinderella" in a kimono.

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

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.

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

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

Depp gives yet another introspective, slightly mopey performance -- Graham never begins to act (and never has begun, as far as I know). But they're surrounded by an authentic, first-rate English cast.

[A] warmhearted, conventional and irresistible dramedy.

Oscar-winners Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo turn up in cameo roles anyone could have played. Kosinski was smart to limit their screen time, because it’s awkward to have actors with weight and charisma hanging around those who lack both.

Hank Greenberg was to Jews what Jackie Robinson was to African Americans: a great athlete, handsome and hard-working, who took the first line of abuse from bigots and proved that his people belonged at the highest level of professional sports.

Rarely connects with reality.

You can't root for Ronnie. You can't identify with him. You can't hope he gets the girl – any girl. But you may want to look on with stunned fascination as he ticks away, ready to explode.

In our post-Tarantino world, Fuqua shows remarkable restraint. The long, efficiently filmed battle doesn’t douse us in blood; for once, PG-13 is the proper rating for a violent film.

Its familiar story has pleasing quirks.

It's a run-of-the-mill action film that falls short of the 1976 original - and, for that matter, the 1959 western "Rio Bravo," which inspired the first film. The characters run out of energy and personality long before they run out of bullets.

The casting of Daniels, Tyson and Saint, all of whom underplay effortlessly, was shrewd.

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.

sSo pleasingly forgettable that I spent most of the movie mentally casting American actors for the inevitable remake.

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.

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

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

The special effects look like a high school science project: The giants are clearly rear projections behind the real actors, and that snake is as rubbery as a garden hose.

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

Plotting has never been writer-director Allen’s strong point, and the story falls apart. It depends on coincidences that are unlikely individually and ridiculous together.

As a film, it's flabby and utterly predictable.

The actors were mostly nondescript, sometimes noticeably clumsy. Stunt coordinator Dion Lam brought a bit of freshness to the martial arts choreography, but the rest of the film was as stale as a week-old carp on a fish vendor's pushcart.

As warm and reassuring as grandma's hugs.

There's nothing more painful than watching comics tank, and Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World is a 95-minute wince.

Is Josh Hartnett attracted to cinematic bombs, or do movies merely self-destruct once he signs on as the leading man?

An intermittently preposterous, drawn-out but sometimes entertaining story about an unstoppable ex-Marine.

Every era gets the Robin Hood it needs…Now director Ridley Scott and writer Brian Helgeland have given us an intelligent, layered story suited to our grim, patience-trying times.

Sean Bean makes a positive impression as the caring but puzzled captain of the flight, though Peter Sarsgaard flies at half-mast as a clumsy air marshal.

RocknRolla is a copy of a copy of a valuable original, and you know how faint and unintelligible those can be.

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

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]

Nair and screenwriters Matthew Faulk, Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes have faithfully carried most of the main characters over from the novel but have changed its point of view.

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.

Filmmakers have presented an unvarnished drama about Marshall University and the people who love it, and the results are inspirational.

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

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

If you fell in love with the big-hearted sentimentality of Rent when you saw it onstage, the film version will remind you why. If you think Jonathan Larson's musical is ponderous agitprop, the movie won't change your view.

The movie remains quiet and deliberate, a synonym for “boring” in some minds (though not mine). In the end, it becomes an allegory for the times in which we live.

The rest of this well-intentioned picture never reaches (Washington's) level of subtlety and intensity.

Really should have been made 60 years ago. It would have been timelier, with its tale of life in the remote north of that country during World War II. The juicy overacting, stereotypes and dramatic exaggerations would have been more in keeping with the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The filmmakers have a vision of the way Shakespeare can be made vibrant and vital to modern viewers, with or without the lofty original dialogue.

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.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

The cheesier it got, the more I liked it.

Easy to like.

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

For the first time since "Chasing Amy," I realized why people like Ben Affleck.

The dialogue includes double entendres that are rather clever, if you're mentally at the age of 11.

Writer-director Patty Jenkins makes an impressive debut, showing savvy that often eludes old pros.

Without a plausible script, crisp dialogue or rounded characters, the majority of the picture will sag gracelessly.

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]

Only in the last half-hour do the usual Emmerich absurdities pile up: I laughed outright at the character who, past 65 and diagnosed with a massive brain tumor that will kill him within months, cannot be stopped by a ferocious beating, being stabbed in the neck with a sharp implement, then being crushed against a wall by an SUV moving at a minimum of 30 mph.

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.

The big names in the cast add atmosphere in small doses, especially when Haysbert and Glover combine.

The plot's as thin as a debutante's cigarette case.

I knew blues music can make you feel you're not alone when your woman has gone, and rock your soul when you're on top of the world. But until I saw Black Snake Moan, I didn't know it could also cure nymphomania.

The movie ends so abruptly you might wonder if a piece is missing, and it relies on one extraordinary coincidence I couldn’t swallow. Yet scene by scene, I found people I knew or wish I knew: Ben’s romantic advice to the straight but awkward Joey would give any boy confidence about himself.

By the end, an end that has a little too much melodrama to it, we can only shake our heads in wonder.

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

Bullock and Reeves have an unusual kind of charisma, one that works best when they're apart. Though the filmmakers sometimes put them in the same frame for visual ease, they mostly occupy different times.

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.

A mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

An unforced, sweet-natured story about people who find small ways to touch others and rediscover the good in themselves.

A frantic, heartless hodgepodge of pieces from James Bond movies, Indiana Jones adventures, "Star Wars" and half a dozen legends.

These pros lift this button-pushing blob of faux folksiness to a higher plane than it deserves.

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.

300 is a huge step forward in visually sophisticated storytelling.

(The filmmaker) never does achieve the breakthrough with her father that she and we hoped for.

It's a fable that descends rapidly into nonsense.

Forget the bug-eating, cow-spearing and one-upsmanship of TV's "Survivor." The real results of isolation and deprivation unfold in The King is Alive: madness, suicide and murder.

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.

If you’re worried that the re-teaming of Clooney and Cate Blanchett in a World War II movie signals something like “The Good German,” fear not: She’s better here, playing a French art historian who worries the Americans will “rescue” the art in order to steal it for their own country.

Brooks gives himself the last word, appearing onscreen for the first time amid chorus girls oozing PG-13 pulchritude. "Go home!" he says. "It's over!" Could he be referring to his career?

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

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

The acting is solid.

Crash. Kick. Stab. Punch. Talk (briefly). Smash. Chase. Screech. Shoot. Mumble. That's the wearying pattern of Safe House. Had "think" been an action verb, the movie might have risen above the knee-jerk excitement of the second-tier, "Bourne"-style spy thriller. But it never does.

A melodrama that reaches the heart but hardly ever convinces the head.

To call the film “unwatchable” is to unfairly insult Josée Deshaies; his lush cinematography delights the eye when the camera roams around Saint Laurent’s workrooms. But “incomprehensible,” “interminable” and “immaterial” all apply.

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

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]

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

A movie for people fascinated by toilets and Sabbath.

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

The movie's weirdness isn't organic; it's imposed, like barber-pole stripes painted on a prison wall.

They've never been farther into outer space than in The Big Lebowski. Fans (myself included) may cackle at absurd situations and in-jokes. But director Joel and producer Ethan, who write together, have never made so much clamorous ado about nothing. [6 March 1998, p.7E]

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.

The film seems almost intentionally bad in most ways, as if Gilliam were expressing a suicide wish for his directing career.

Any of the key relationships would have been grist enough for one movie's mill, but "Feast" crams them all together.

They have turned a brief, appealing, honest autobiography by Susanna Kaysen into a long, appealing, rather dishonest film.

Writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris must figure the blinking lights on Angela's screen will cloud our brains. They ask us to ignore plotholes the size of craters... Nor does director Irwin Winkler shoot scenes suspensefully. [28 July 1995, p.9F]

Mighty Joe Young is based on the 1949 film of the same name, and it's nominally more aware of '90s concerns: destruction of the gorillas' habitats, illegal hunting, trade in animal body parts. On the other hand, it's no more enlightened about the intrinsic value of these clever, emotionally complex creatures. [25 Dec 1998, p.13E]

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

Is this just silly filmmaking, or have Ivory and Jhabvala succumbed to the Francophobia that gave us "freedom fries" in the congressional cafeteria?

The chorus backs the soloists powerfully, and they are as fresh as the rest of the film: fat and fit, homely and handsome, young gods and old codgers – in short, people you might really see in Greece. Reality in a musical? That alone makes it worth your open-eared attention.

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]

The film robs mermaids of everything exotic and remarkable about them in mythology.

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

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

A loosely woven crazy quilt of other, better movies.

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

Part of the film's failure to arouse real horror is the languid direction; not enough seems to be at stake emotionally.

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

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

One of the opening scenes of The Accountant consists of puzzle pieces being dumped on a table, and that’s a fine metaphor for the film.... A few pieces can’t be made to fit, and two of those are big ones. (More on that in a minute.) But the rest of the story has been well-constructed, and the picture it gradually reveals keeps you guessing up to the final scene.

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

Birth, which should never have been conceived, is obscure in every way: visually, philosophically and psychologically.

Director Richard Donner finds a few startling images for bloody battle scenes, but awful dialogue prevents the actors from giving performances of any depth.

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

Whedon has made a superb template of an action film.

Did anybody expect it to be a metaphor for modern America?

Anonymous is fun – if you take the anti-Shakespearean tale as events set in an unreal, alternate universe.

A mediocrity at any time, because of its implausible script and bland characters.

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.

One of the most heartbreaking, unforgettable dramas in years.

The writer-director waited until he had the clout, budget and prestige to attract a top-flight cast, then turned Colored Girls into a movie with a little less darkness but plenty of heart and guts.

Stuff yourself with popcorn, let the gray matter rest and enjoy what may be the best two hours of nonsense you'll see this year.

And what of Roger Avary, the writer who shared the Academy Award for writing with Tarantino? He continues to plummet toward oblivion with The Rules of Attraction, which ranks with the Great Pyramid of Khufu as a monument to self-indulgence.

There's a potentially good story rattling around somewhere inside this broken, self-contradictory and finally meaningless film.

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

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.

If you wanted to, you could see this movie as an allegory about people who love each other but can never connect. Or maybe it’s a warning to parents who turn a blind eye to children’s failings until the family self-destructs.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

A long, slow pity party full of characters who constantly bemoan their fate while telling other people not to pity themselves.

Without Essel, this might have been a run-of-the-mill dark comedy. With the 86-year-old British thespian, it's a wickedly funny and audacious movie in which she puts her capable co-stars in the shade.

There is indeed a murder - two of them, in fact - and the movie proceeds strictly by the numbers laid down long ago in some by-the-book Hollywood writing class.

I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the Pirates of the Caribbean experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts. To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused.

Bay's movie couldn't be more timely; whatever you think about this subject, you might admire his attempt to come to grips with it in a summer blockbuster.

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

A taut, consistently surprising political thriller with a sting in its tail.

The special effects, with one painful exception, hold up beautifully. But the people have no personalities, the story is unconvincing, and the whole movie is as shallow as the puddle left on a flat roof by a 20-minute shower.

Now You See Me can’t quite claim to be the ideal crime drama – that would be “The Usual Suspects,” which justly won an Oscar for its script – but it’s only one level down.

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 filmmakers fall back on melodrama fairly often.... Yet there’s freshness in the storytelling.

On the scale of summer action films, this is to the “Transformers” sequel what an Andy Warhol print is to a first-grader’s refrigerator painting.

Grant handles the slapstick humor gracefully and speaks his lines with sincerity and warmth.

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.

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.

Flaccid remake of a tough 1966 original.

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

Good acting from the three principals – four, if we count Max Thieriot as the son – keeps this leaky craft afloat for quite a while.

This is his (Kutcher) most relaxed and sensitive work on film.

Some movies need a suspension of disbelief. Simone requires a suspension bridge. And as fast as you try to build it, the movie keeps tearing it down.

Long, utterly predictable and always bland.

It falls back on straightforward horror tactics, executed competently but without flair. It takes liberties with the second half of the book, including one big change that will leave fans of the novel growling with disbelief and disapproval.

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.

It's made with seriousness, intelligence and craft, and filmgoers who aren't put off by the slow pace of life in 1380 should see it.

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

If you wait through the credits, you get one last joke in the fine print: The actors shot the whole movie in Hawaii, on the fabulously lush island of Kauai. So while they were shooting a story about indulged prima donnas, they were working themselves in one of the most tourist-friendly spots on Earth. You've gotta smile at that.

Though the writing doesn't work, you have to give Burns credit for shrewd direction. He gets the best performances I've seen from Graham and Murphy.

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.

The movie gives away its shifty-eyed villain almost immediately. What it doesn't give away is why he betrayed his trust, who wants the president dead or what they hope to gain by killing him.

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.

One of the rare action films that needed to be longer. Then changes in mood wouldn't be so abrupt, and director Peter Berg and writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan would've had more time to reveal things we want to know.

Four Brothers immediately joins the Good Idea, Bad Execution club. Hardly anyone seems to care about its believability - not director John Singleton, writers David Elliott and Paul Lovett or some lackadaisical actors.

A pretty good movie. It just isn't a very good "Sleuth," exactly.

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

The opposite of memorable.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

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.

Represents everything that over-budgeted Hollywood can possibly get wrong in a period piece: It feels both long and slow, it's unfocused and self-contradictory, its generic characters are played too broadly, it's anachronistic..

A safe same-sex movie the family can embrace. At heart, it's a Britcom: a British situation comedy with superficial characters, mildly naughty humor and a familiarity that may make even homophobes comfy.

“Blood” may carry us into the past, but the unhappy effects linger today, like pollution darkening a sky that never turned completely blue.

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

A tale that ought to dispel the clouds of mystery surrounding life gathers them into impenetrable fog.

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

The lack of attacks lets us concentrate on emotions rather than explosions.

Like the story, Kline builds in intensity: He has no flowery speeches that would be untrue to his character, but he leaves a clear impression of a man who values knowledge and the imparting of it above all else.

Salva's view of the universe is bleak, but he communicates it with scary sincerity.

When Allen revives his plodding "Manhattan Murder Mystery" as the even duller Scoop, I snore.

Visually compelling, relentlessly loud and so shallow you need just a fragment of your brain to follow it.

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

The whole thing's as phony as a funeral oration from a pastor who never knew the deceased.

The shreds have vanished in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, which runs at that speed during its stunts but is utterly out of gas in every other way.

The script's hokiness flattens the performances.

After the box-office failures of "The Emperor's New Groove" and "Treasure Planet," I wonder whether Brother Bear might not be the last traditional bit of Disney animation for a while.

McFarlane’s at his best when he breaks new ground.... Yet too many things get repeated from “Ted.”

Logan's so carried away by computerized magic that he forgets to make sense.

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.

Fuqua and his writers, Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo, have delivered not only the most satisfying and plausible action movie in months but one that's accidentally timely.

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

Looks as if it were thrown together as carelessly as slum housing.

Might have been funnier if it had been put together with more care.

Vertical Limit is like riding a roller coaster for two hours. First it's frighteningly exciting. Then it's mind-numbing

I've just seen The Core, and I have a piece of advice for Hilary Swank: Don't quit your night job.

The movie is as padded as Allen's jelly belly.

Flat as a Moravian cookie, flat as a sailor's wallet after a month in port, flat as the average European's impression of the Earth in A.D. 800.

“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.

Once, for no reason, Franklin whirled the camera around 360 degrees while two people were having an ordinary conversation. I suspect he must have been as bored by then as I was.

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?

Its crass good humor makes it an enjoyable, reasonably faithful but over-the-top successor to the original.

The two actors are at their best when Emma and Dexter get emotionally naked. It's mildly enjoyable to listen to the self-deprecating banter people use to conceal anxieties, but we connect to them most deeply when they bare their souls.

There are usually good reasons why a movie gets shelved for more than a year, however well-acted it may be and however well-meaning its message. Many are on view in Penelope.

Doris Day will be 89 in two weeks, which makes her exactly half a century too old to play the lead in Admission. That’s a pity, as perhaps only she could have done it justice – if it had been made in 1958.

A question: If you hire actresses from England, Kansas, Ireland and Michigan, shouldn't someone teach them all to do believable Southern accents -- and remind them to keep doing those accents as the film goes on?

And in the end, maybe the question of Dennis' origin is irrelevant. He tells David he's come to Earth to try to understand human beings, and that quest is worth a lifetime's effort -- whatever planet you call home.

Characterizations are rudimentary, performances dull.

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

This might all have been silly fun -- as it was in the 1999 version -- except for the carelessness of the whole picture.

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.

By riffing off two iconic American narratives of the last 35 years, "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos," it has changed the template for animation, making a timely film that still deals with timeless children's themes.

Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."

Carrey rolls his eyes and waggles his arms, and Leoni keeps up with him while pushing less hard. He externalizes, she internalizes, and the balance works as it might in a good marriage.

Without Gibson, this soufflé would fall pancake-flat.

Campion has no clue how to sustain suspense and no actress of the caliber of Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman or Kate Winslet (her recent leading ladies) in the main role.

Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe attempt light romantic comedy in A Good Year, and the results are as grindingly discordant as a punk band writing a suite of waltzes.

A sometimes clever, sometimes clumsy movie.

The Girl Next Door is to "Risky Business" what near-beer is to beer. If you're desperate for a mild buzz, you might make it do.

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

Without a philosophical payoff, without characters whose relationships resonate in our hearts, without explanations for situations that beg for explanations, what are we left with? To quote another great writer of battle scenes: "a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying -- nothing."

The conversion to 3-D has left the movie looking grim and dim. Almost every scene, whether indoors by candlelight or upon the open ocean, seems awkwardly dark; competent 3-D effects don’t compensate for this distraction. Equally drab are the performances, except for Gleeson and Whishaw.

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

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

When Elle Woods watches "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for inspiration in the middle of Legally Blonde 2, you have to admire the nerve of the people who made this comedy: "Smith" is to LB2 what jumbo jets are to ultralight gliders. But nerve is all they've got.

If you're going to serve up a half-baked idea, you might as well have Sigourney Weaver do the cooking.

You cannot always judge movies by their titles, but you sometimes get good advice. The sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, supplies its own five-word review.

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

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

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

The warm performances give the film momentum, but writer Audrey Wells and director Peter Chelsom (who chops dance sequences clumsily) often stumble.

The British actor, best known as Loki in the “Thor” and “Avengers” series, disappears into the character’s skinny body and twangy voice.

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.

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.

If the spate of action movies must continue, especially at Christmas, let more be like "Daylight." [6 Dec 1996, p.13E]

Man on Fire is as ludicrous as "John Q," "Virtuosity" and "Out of Time," yet substantially more violent, artificial, self-conscious and dull.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Lil' Bow Wow deserves a better-made film than this pleasant, sloppily assembled fairy tale.

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

As Disney-fied as "Pinocchio," barely challenging the images Americans have treasured for 150 years.

Just Will Ferrell doing the same man-boy shtick he usually does.

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

It's a drab jumble of meaningless action, dull characters and animation as flat and superficial as its story.

As a vegetarian, I'm grateful that Around the Bend -- an extended commercial for KFC passing itself off as a heartwarming family drama -- is a loser.

Melvin Van Peebles wrote and directed the biting "Don't Play Us Cheap" 30 years ago to complain about racial stereotyping in films. But Hollywood never listened. It kept playing African -Americans cheap in mainstream comedies, whether the directors were white or black. Deliver Us From Eva -- is one of the worst recent offenders.

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

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.

It's hampered further by a piece of star miscasting unmatched in recent memory: Julia Roberts' archly evil queen remains as jaw-droppingly dull as her costumes are jaw-droppingly gaudy.

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

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

One of the best things about real Americans is that we can stand criticism. Informed or idiotic, scholarly or superficial, it's all welcome.

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

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

Goodman exudes doltish kindness, Dillon a hapless gentleness, Reiser a vulgar buoyancy. Douglas turns in the best performance.

The picture isn't nearly enough on any level: not scary, not suspenseful, not complex, not atmospheric.

Kilmer is adequate, though he's always more interesting when allowed to play a character with a dark side; Patterson's too squeaky-clean for Kilmer to exploit the most useful part of his range. [12 Oct 1996, p.4G]

A crackling rendition of Dan Brown's novel, siphoning off unneeded fat and fancy and leaving us with a streamlined train of a picture that never stops moving.

Any story from the "Patch Adams" team of director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk is bound to end up floating in a soup of moral homilies, and "Bruce" does.

A movie that's smarter than its trailer - in fact, totally different in tone and content? That's news, and it's why The Break-Up is a pleasant surprise to the open-minded.

Fans expecting horror won't want a thought-provoking, well-acted courtroom drama about the intersection of religious belief and the law.

Reminds me of the golden retriever that lived next door long ago: endearing, consistently sweet-natured, ready for a brisk turn around familiar territory as long as no strenuous intellectual demands are ever made.

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.

The Farrellys have always danced along the tightrope between funny-disgusting and just plain gross in "There's Something About Mary" and "Shallow Hal." If the ratio was about 50-50 at the best of times, it's now 30-70 in favor of crassness.

Tries with intermittent success to juggle two stories.

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.

Studios can release movies even more insultingly dumb, crudely assembled and cheaply produced than this one, though such an achievement will require some effort.

If you have a strong stomach, a weak sense of disbelief, an active interest in Denzel Washington or Angelina Jolie and a temporarily inactive brain, you may enjoy it awhile.

The most radical thing about the movie, the thing that may make it most appealing to modern audiences, is that the filmmakers say both sides are right.

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

The "Puppetoonish" characters in Hoodwinked didn't bother me: They're primitive and inexpressive, but their personalities come through. In fact, the problem is that their personalities do come through: They're all wackily sarcastic, unfunny nonentities.

Not even the repeated sight of Jessica Alba in a bikini, the camera caressing her like the eyes of a strip-club patron, can lift this leaden refuse off the ocean floor.

Ang Lee adds to the mythology with the sweet, gentle Taking Woodstock.

A middlebrow hybrid that should satisfy most fans of spy movies without blowing them away.

Embodies all that's wrong with the sellout culture of Hollywood.

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

I expected Get Rich or Die Tryin' to be gritty, scary, maybe disturbing or thought-provoking. What I didn't realize was that it would be so dull that any other effect it could have made was wiped away.

Watchable family films are so rare these days that we shouldn't put a stake through one with so much heart.

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.

A painfully honest film, yet it's also painfully slow, drawn-out and simplistic in too many spots.

The writer-producer-director of American Dreamz makes nearly every mistake in the satirical book. His targets are either too easy or too dated. He's inconsistent in his attitudes toward them. His stereotypes are stale.

This installment, which is subtitled "Give Us Your Money, Sheep," really isn't a Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all.

Last week, the American Film Institute named "It's a Wonderful Life" the most inspiring movie in the history of the English language. The film was initially a flop, but it's now considered so perfect that nobody would dare remake it - under that title. Folks who see Click will have no trouble connecting the dots.

A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.

It's common in Hollywood to describe a disappointing film this way: "Well, it certainly looks great!"

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Fans of their grossest stuff needn't fear: The Farrellys are still the guys who put the last three letters in "crass," and their potty humor was too extreme for me once or twice.

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.

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.

You could dismiss it, as I do, as an impenetrable and insufferable ball of pseudo-philosophic twaddle.

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.

A good critic likes nothing better than to go in with low expectations and be proven wrong. EuroTrip makes me a good critic. I'd have sworn I'd never laugh again at somebody assaulting a mime, but this goofy comedy makes even that ancient concept fresh.

Ferrell's ideally suited to man-boy characters, and that's what Phil Weston is in "Kicking."