Lisa Alspector

This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.

Nobody ever shuts up in this schmaltzy, mannered drama.

Even the most shocking elements of the story are made bland by childish overkill.

Stylistic excess, comedy, and romance often help make extremes of cruelty and horror function as cathartic metaphor, and all three figure, not always successfully, in this sequel.

The plot is more convenient than intriguing, the characters more cartoonish than iconic--especially the heroine, who grapples with feminism in a way that should have been fascinating.

Unlike Michael Jordan, this 45-minute large-format movie demonstrates mostly unrealized potential.

Provides glorious escapism without asking you to turn your brain off.

There's tenderness, humor, a gratuitous body double, and splashy lighting in this ho-hum action drama, which takes itself at times too seriously and at other times not seriously enough.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

Slower, more earnest, and not as gory.

Would be sweeter if the fair maiden weren't such a pill and more exciting if the villain weren't quite so nasty.

The characters--their motives at once obvious and obscure--are almost painfully fascinating.

DeVito's low-key midlife crisis is consistently moving, but Spacey, saddled with the role of provocateur, is demonically boring.

Conveys little sense of a connection, as if di Florio had made it mainly because she had access to a celebrity.

A musical number or two might have balanced the overdetermined politics and spectacle in this version.

Disarming-misfit story, which combines elements of a road movie, romance, small-town idyll, and police procedural.

This movie's story must have been computer generated along with its animation.

After a slow setup, this charming fable wisely spends most of its time on the golf course.

As the driven competitor who learns to make hubris work for him, Jared Leto gives a complex performance that suggests a deep, intriguing interior to the character even as he maintains a convincing one-dimensional facade.

Becomes blandly idealistic.

This spiritual thriller is too wooden to be taken as seriously as was clearly intended.

The theories about sexuality and trauma artfully advanced in this previously unreleased 1975 debut of director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl) are more nuanced and intuitive than those of most schools of psychology.

But Peter Hyams, who's both director and director of photography, forces us to constantly strain to see what isn't there, until ultimately the screen explodes in welcome light, a cathartic finale in broad visceral terms even if the drama hasn't inspired much emotion.

Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.

This moving story is full of breathtaking compositions, gorgeous spectacle, and inspiring philosophies articulated by sympathetic figures.

The movie's strength is in its comedy; a tragic subplot feels merely manipulative.

Where other King stories and hundreds of other movies simplistically exploit the archetype, this tale intricately relates the actions of its young evildoer to the more abstract forces bearing down on the adults.