Lisa Alspector

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

People frequently cover the camera lens with their hands or refer to the "documentary" being filmed, as if to assure us that what we're seeing is real.

May persuade you to identify not with race-car drivers but with race cars.

The movie occasionally makes an unexpectereference -- though with more desperation than wit.

I never thought I'd see a slapstick animal action movie about the beauty of interracial relationships and nonmarital sex, but that's what this is, and kids seem to love it.

It's tempting to accuse director and star Kevin Costner of taking the idea of vanity production to a new level in this frontier adventure based on a book by David Brin.

It's hard to be diverted by a tale whose emblematic romances and terminal cuteness serve an agenda that seems particularly dated today.

It’s a heart-tugging scenario undermined by a striking hypocrisy: obscuring a hot-button issue in casting, some actors with Down's syndrome have minor roles, while Penn plays the lead -- and chews the scenery.

This serious if assaultively stylish meditation on faith uses traditional elements of religion-based horror in a way that's more innocent than calculating.

Tiresome, blood-filled comedy.

The feature has some lovely effects.

More of the abundant sight gags and slips of the tongue originate in bathrooms and bedrooms than are actually set there.

The filmmakers uphold an unfortunate tradition in movies based on TV shows by busily adding superfluous plot elements.

It makes me sick all over again just describing this--the most affecting scene in a sluggish would-be comedy that reflects the dubious state of the art of fat male comedians exploiting themselves in 1997, the year its star died.

This limp 1998 comedy tries hard to be both irreverent and ethical by suggesting that deceit motivated by self-interest is OK as long as no one gets hurt.

This culinary fantasy is mildly inspired.

The perfectly acceptable shtick executed by Williams--whose I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself seduction techniques ought to make him a hotter leading man--occasionally justifies the relentlessly light tone of this preachy 1998 comedy-drama.

Two obnoxious, swaggering brothers -- whose sexual naivete is supposed to make them endearing as well as pathetic -- find happiness in this more schmaltzy than funny Saturday Night Live spin-off.

All the movie's free-form horror phenomena might have been more interesting if the plot didn't keep insisting on a systematic explanation for them.

An intriguing noir whose conceptual sophistication is partly undermined by naive execution.

Neither the love nor the loss in this tear-jerking romance contains much drama.

Jas lots of action, drama, comedy, and corn -- and few pauses, which is striking.

Poorly paced action comedy.

The inevitable isn't worth the wait.

The movie's repeated attempts to combine seriousness and humor as in a blender give it a dysfunctionally earnest tone.

Initially tolerable but increasingly stupid thriller.

It's almost always night and almost always raining.

This derivative concept movie is tiresomely slick as well as shamefully sloppy, and someone should issue a restraining order requiring writer-director Darren Stein to stay at least 100 yards away from irony.