Nathan Rabin

Despite its numerous missteps and miscalculations, What Dreams May Come is often a powerful, affecting piece of filmmaking.

The Chorus plucks desperately at the heartstrings, but fails to breathe new life into a tired old tune.

Uptown Girls refuses to make Fanning likable, which speaks to a certain misplaced integrity, and tends to throw a wrench in the film's halfhearted attempts at formula.

Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.

Thinner’s problems begin with a grotesquely unconvincing fat suit and makeup that make Burke look less like a big man battling obesity than a melting marshmallow man. The plug really should have been pulled on Thinner after the first makeup and prosthetics tests, since the bad design digs the film into a hole it never begins to shimmy its way out.

Its protagonists' hearts aren't lawless so much as stuck in various states of quiet desperation, and the modest charms of this observant, affecting film fortunately bear little relation to the sensationalistic label.

I don't know that Striptease could ever have been anything more than second-rate Elmore Leonard, but Moore's dour lead performance sabotages the film from the get-go.

The Spirit feels like the follow-up to "Batman & Robin" no one wanted.

Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.

There are elementary school playgrounds with substantially higher levels of verbal wit and intellectual discourse than Under The Cherry Room.

All Usher fans really seem to want out of a movie like this is an opportunity to ogle their idol for an hour and a half. And that's all this movie affords them.

There's something depressing about seeing the low-energy, family-friendly Lawrence sleepwalk through the film's sappy plot points.

Gaghan shows promise as a director, but Abandon leaves a lot of room for improvement.

In spite of a late-game adrenaline surge, the hoped-for fireworks between Li and Statham never quite materialize.

With "Super Troopers" and Club Dread, Broken Lizard has cranked out two genuinely funny movies in a row.

Hopkins delivers such a warm, winning performance that it's hard not to be won over by his loopy charm and monomaniacal passion. The film is about a man whose need for speed takes on an existential and spiritual dimension, but it's precisely its rambling, meandering, unhurried affability that makes it such a low-key pleasure.

Heartbreaker relies far too heavily on the charm and attractiveness of romantic leads whose chemistry is lukewarm at best to sell a groaning collection of rom-com clichés.

A joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners.

With dialogue as spare as its harsh landscapes, the film is so tonally dry that it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like the Farrelly brothers--it begins at a snail's pace before speeding up to a turtle's drowsy crawl.

Superman IV lacks the wonder and awe of Superman, that giddy sense of boundless possibilities. Superman had gotten old and familiar and the message-movie trappings feel tacked-on and desperate.

The gimmicky yet strangely moving new fright flick The Signal distinguishes itself not through originality, but by smartly integrating just about every popular trend afflicting contemporary horror films.

Ultimately, Lemmon's performance is what makes The China Syndrome work: The script contains its share of technical jargon and clunky exposition, but his subtle transformation from complacency to anger to panic tells the story in raw emotional terms. The China Syndrome is ultimately a story about how the potential for human error can trump science and reason, and few actors have ever been as unmistakably human as Lemmon.

The film ends with Franken contemplating a run for U.S. Senate, but it's clear that his political campaign began long ago.

Days Of Glory isn't subtle in its exploration of the racial politics of warfare, but its grim, cynical portrayal of young men considered worthy enough to die for a foreign country, yet unworthy of being treated as equals, proves bluntly powerful.

In one respect at least, the film's idiocy works for Lopez: Every diva needs at least one camp classic on her résumé, and with Enough, she's scored a howler on the level of "Mommie Dearest."

One of its great strengths lies in its surprising universality.

It does strive for substance and meaning in a way that gives it an unmistakable Barton Fink feeling, if nothing close to a Barton Fink sensibility.

Has its moments, but by the time it reaches its anticlimax, Roth won't be the only one irritated at getting jerked around for no discernible reason.