Lisa Alspector

Failed romantic comedy.

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

Challenges us to reconcile its snapshots of earnest entrepreneurs, colleagues, and fans with its long takes of her disillusionment.

Instructive comedy, which is marvelously neutral toward a type of sexual and domestic relationship that's often exploited or overblown.

The running joke about coffee enemas will date this innocuous, crowd-pleasing adventure comedy.

Dead-on imitations of some of the characters from the television series created by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly will seem pointlessly stylized to viewers unfamiliar with the old sitcom.

Until the diverting special effects take center stage, this story, about an alien intelligence that builds an army out of flesh and metal, pathetically exploits genre conventions without generating self-reference, camp, or thrills.

With minimalist and universal fantasies as their points of departure, the superheroic deeds evolve only incrementally beyond the realistic -- a deeply satisfying process.

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

This friendly, briefly exciting story (1998), inspired by John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, achieves a nice balance between caricature and nuanced characterization and even manages not to be cloying.

Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn are too good for this embarrassing remake.

Satisfying in small ways.

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 blunt comedy suffers from poor pacing, colorless dialogue, and subpar performances by the two leads that reveal just how much a director contributes to our perception of what a star is.

Much of the three-hour movie takes place in the prison, but the resonant characterization, expansive plotting, and judicious use of exterior locations and flashbacks remove any sense of claustrophobia or sluggishness.

This bright noir, with gleaming cinematography by Jeffrey Jur, is as single-minded as a short story, but the premise is almost too clever.

This mildly moody SF thriller belabors standard dramatic conceits involving jealousy and sexual betrayal.

Rowan Atkinson's recalcitrant TV character is the hub of this 1997 feature that will disappoint fans and nonfans alike.

Kelly is a supple and courageous storyteller, boldly free-associating as he mixes parody and satire with earnest psychodrama and coming up with plot points no one could anticipate.

Boring, irksome family movie.

Doesn't quite support the weight of its allegory.

It's hard to tell whether these characters are meant to seem as staunchly symbolic as they do when they deliver some of the back-story-heavy dialogue.

Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable.

By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.

For all the high-tech allusions and middle-tech illusions, the movie--the 23rd in an immortal series--draws its power from its grittiness and unresolved allegory.

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

At once a light comedy and a reasonably serious meditation on the perils of fame.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.