Lawrence Toppman

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]