Michael Atkinson

The characters aren't convincingly written, rarely if ever behave like believable humans, and consequently don't matter to us in the least.

Pushes the standard tropes of gay romance movies a few more steps toward full-blown cliché-dom.

To say that it's dull barely scratches the surface.

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

A tepid, pretentious indie that flies from the memory like a tissue in a twister.

Joffe's latest is a formless, inanimate lump.

One of our very few consummate movie star actors, Washington can't quite elevate this dismal material as he's been able to do in the past, but he retains his dignity.

It's a chilling piece of legal hysteria, and ripe for nasty farce. But Pooh plays it all for buffoonish pratfalls and fart jokes.

An earnest but fatally amateurish and stereotypical melodrama about fraternity hazing.

Oak-stiff and witless, but a few scenes muster up embarrassed chuckles.

Flows like day-old cement.

The movie is so slovenly in its animation and graceless in its writing that few viewers over the age of 9 are likely to notice.

Every other line is a coy Oirishism, and Brosnan, despite being Irish, isn't any more convincing than twinkly-eyed barmaid Julianna Margulies.

Eisenstadt has nowhere to go with her catalogue of relaxed urban crazies, and at 79 minutes, the movie is padded out by four song interludes too many.

Director Vicente Amorim's dramatic instincts evoke after-school specials (most of the drama entails the clan's brooding teenager chomping at the parental bit), and his visual ideas are restricted to aping "City of God's" fish-eye ambience and hectic editing.

Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.

Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.

Diesel himself has the personality of a golem and a knack for dialogue delivery that suggests recent oral surgery.

The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.

Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.

It's a campy, juiced-up ker-splat, busy with clumsy pyrotechnics and never nearing the vicinity of satire.

Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.

It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.

Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.

If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.

This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.

Gardos, an experienced film editor, has little narrative sense, and decent performances (except from Kinski, who just worries and huffs around) are left out to dry.

Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.