Peter Rainer

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

It’s a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Frankly, the most disturbing thing about Prime is that Uma Thurman is now officially an Older Woman.

Moana 2 touts the power of human (and non-human) connection, and the film will certainly connect with its target audience. But it doesn’t trust viewers enough to feel for themselves.

Ask the Dust does manage to cast a spell. The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

The law of diminishing returns is no more apparent than in the movie world. A sequel, with rare exceptions, is worse than the film it follows, and sequels of sequels fare even worse. Such is the case with Shrek the Third.

It’s not just the technique of this movie that is resolutely old-fashioned. So are its attitudes. The film may feature practically wall-to-wall monster storms but undergirding it all is a cushion of straight-arrow sentimentalism. It harks back to a rosy neverland when men were men and women stood by them.

The film is provocative but also scattershot and not nearly as conclusive as it pretends to be. The almost complete absence of naysayers in any of the sections is a tip-off that the game is rigged.

The film's one extraordinary aspect, which makes it well worth seeing despite its carefully coiffed shagginess, is Maya Rudolph's performance.

Haskins comes across as too pure. When he plays only his black athletes in the championship finals, his monomania is presented as a good thing. After all, he won, didn't he?

Scarlett Johansson plays the head zookeeper and she's a lot less mannered than usual.

The presentation has verve. But the story is confusingly told - everything is NOT illuminated - and, as the seeker, Elijah Wood is a big blank.

It’s a serviceable thrill ride.

This sentimental stew is not without its flavors, and the cast tries hard to be winsome and adorably distraught.

Gosling, as the Durst-like David Marks, is scarily effective before his performance turns opaque and horror-movie-ish.

Caine is reason enough to see any movie. He gives this clever, somewhat lumbering caper movie a deep-seated soul.

In Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, Thomas Hardy's Victorian romantic tragedy "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" proves surprisingly adaptable to contemporary India.

The movie, despite what you may have gathered from the goofy trailer, is more sweet than silly.

Color Me Kubrick is a far more modest movie, but in some ways is more successful than "The Hoax" in conveying how deeply people want to believe something is true against all evidence.

You get a strong whiff of what it must have been like to be Johnny Cash, or his exasperated manager, from this film. It would make a good companion piece to “Walk the Line.”

This story is powerful enough without our being heavily coaxed all the time how to feel.

Replete with boisterously unfunny black slapstick.

Fortunately, it never dips into bathos. These two actors SHOULD be noticed. They've crafted the most ingenious résumé of the year.

It's worth noting that this movie is loosely based on actual people – except the real-life Driss character is, in fact, an Arab. If Driss had been an Arab, The Intouchables would have waded into less navigable waters, but it might have made for a tougher movie.

I prefer the goofier approach, which is why, even though Hemsworth isn't going to be cast in "King Lear" anytime soon, he's the best thing about Thor.

It's a lot easier to follow than "Syriana." But intelligibility is about the only thing this international thriller has going for it.

What he (Ball) intends as knife-edge realism instead comes across as another con job.

In the name of unblinking realism, Szász overdoes the allegory. There are no sacrificial gestures here, no heroism, no tears. He comes on as truth-teller, but he’s only telling half the truth.

As a writer-director, Edward Burns is as industrious as an occupational therapist. He makes sure each of his people is well positioned for happiness.

But it's essentially a tour de force for Pacino, and he sustains us through the slow passages by working with a closed-in intensity that turns each scene into a kind of mini-movie complete with its own ticking time bomb. [23Dec1992 Pg. 1]

The best reason to check the film out is Ejiofor's performance, which is packed with grace and wit and pathos.

Which is not to say the movie is anything less than diverting. It’s just that diverting is often all it is.

Quaid and Church are funny, but too much of this film is not half as smart as it thinks it is.

There has to be a good reason to put yourself through yet another junkie odyssey and Candy flunks the test.

Bad Words does to spelling bees what “Bad Santa” did to Santa Claus.

Some directors can profit from the strictures of a strong narrative, but, for Linklater, the conventionality of The Newton Boys works against the glide of his free-floating style.

The sadness and almost Chaplinesque pathos that ensues is well wrought and Close, although she is so recessive that at times she seems to fade into the ether, is quite touching.

Roth's deep-dish introspection would be difficult for any movie to achieve, but with the right cast and more passion, we might have been pulled right into Coleman's psychic prison. The Human Stain isn't a movie of ideas, and it's too inert to be a probing character study. No stain is left behind, just a wan watermark.

Gyllenhaal is one of the most gifted actors of his generation and, along with Joaquin Phoenix, he takes more chances than just about any of them. He deserves a movie that risks as much as he does.

The honey runs thick in The Secret Life of Bees, and so does the treacle. The cloying dullness sets in early, although not from the first frame.

The children are under the aegis of Miss Peregrine – played with divaesque triumphalism by Eva Green – who is capable of transforming herself into a falcon.

In addition to being a beloved author and illustrator, Beatrix is also presented as an early feminist and environmentalist who took control of her literary empire and saved vast acres of luscious farmland from greedy developers, eventually bequeathing property to Britain's National Trust.

This is Téchiné’s seventh film featuring Deneuve, and it’s not one of the better ones. (The best is probably 1986’s “Scene of the Crime.”) Still, it has its true-crime fascinations, and, until its misbegotten 30-year flash-forward to Maurice’s trial, it has a silky allure of sun-kissed depravity.

It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.

Great on atmosphere and less good on everything else. That’s not entirely a knock.

A weepie for audiences under the (mistaken) impression that independent movies are always more emotionally honest than Hollywood movies.

The audience for Hannibal is far more primed for a good time; if the film is a hit, it will be because Lecter has been cartoonized; his ghoulish panache, his double entendres about cannibalism, and his pet phrases like "goody-goody" and "okeydokey" all serve to make him a figure of fun.

Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.

Aside from these two actors (Downey/Rourke), Iron Man 2 isn’t much of a whoop-de-do.

Thanks to Tukur, what we get here is still something: a stunning portrait of a good man caught in a widening inferno.

Marginally better than its predecessor, but the same problem still remains: Cars just aren't very interesting as anthropomorphic animation vehicles (pun intended).

It has its modicum of suspense, and Brendon Fraser, who stars as intrepid professor Trevor Anderson – who does indeed journey to the center of the Earth – is his usual heroically affable self.

First-time director Andrew Scheinman -- one of the partners in Castle Rock Entertainment -- may have too much of the Billy in himself to bring out the true roisterousness of baseball. He manages the movie with too soft a touch. The film's injected pathos isn't true to what most adults respond to in the sport -- let alone children. [29 Jun 1994, p.F5]

This camp farce has its moments of high hilarity, and Sedaris is a spark plug, but it's wildly uneven.

It's all a bit hokey, though the mountaineering footage is often spectacular.

Some of the fairy tale effects are marvelous; but the odyssey from darkness to light is unduly long and sloggy, and Stewart, with her contemporary edge, seems to be acting in the wrong era.

Joffe for the most part amps up the melodrama without tearing Greene's complex weave, but everything unravels toward the end with some staggeringly bad staging. It's as if the film itself had been mugged.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

[The movie's subject] sounds like great movie material, but the film, except in flashes, doesn't do it justice.

All this gloomy masochism is made palatable because of the performers. And yet we must ask: Is this any way to show off two of our finest actors?

The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.

Equal parts preachy and melodramatic, The Company You Keep never quite figures out what it wants to be.

The real passion here is the almost erotic thrill that acting still holds for Moreau.

Powerful, uneven police drama.

Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.

It’s an odd fable: Viktor is the mysterious visitor who shows us what the American Dream is all about--in the movie’s terms, compassion for others--without ever wanting to become an American himself. He's a spiritual twin to E.T., who also had trouble phoning home.

Both actors are a lot better than this material requires – or deserves.

It isn't just the violence that is overplayed. There is so much creepy-Gothic Sturm und Drang in The Passion that at times it seems as if Clive Barker should get credit for the story along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Brit Marling, who starred in and co-wrote Cahill’s debut feature, “Another Earth,” is very good as Ian’s lab assistant and eventual wife, and a young Indian girl named Kashish, a nonactress I would guess, is unforgettable.

Here’s a valuable moviegoing rule: Just because you use up an entire handful of hankies doesn’t mean a movie’s great. But Stamp and Redgrave are the real deal.

Although Casanova is far from a stinker, I can't join in the chorus of praise for what is essentially a coy farce replete with arch performances and even archer dialogue.

War Dogs ends up being no better than its protagonists at delivering the goods.

This is a kid’s fantasy of how to be bigger and badder than anybody else. As for Washington, no doubt he now has his very own franchise.

This is certainly the grubbiest Holmes in movie history.

An exuberantly garish French movie.

Better than bland but never quite rises above the level of a pretty good TV movie of the week.

The filmmakers's attempts to balance out the gung-ho shoot-'em-ups with an overlay of "fairness" are rudimentary. The movie works us into a frenzy of righteous revenge, it makes us cheer each kill by the FBI warriors, and then it tells us that this violence only breeds more violence.

This is low-grade satire. The shocks to the system in Buffalo Soldiers are nothing more than cheap thrills.

The trite story has plenty of distasteful moments, but Wahlberg and Yun-Fat justify their growing reputations as capable Hollywood actors.

This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.

Unearths not only those thirty-three miners but also several thousand tons of clichés.

The film is meandering and highly uneven, but Robert Downey Jr. is truly oddball as a venomous drama critic, and watching that ball once again roll through Bill Buckner's legs is torture (for Red Sox fans anyway).

Danijel, who cares for Ajla while at the same time carrying out his mission of ethnic cleansing, is the least fully explored character in the movie, which leaves a big blur at its core. Still, this is an impressive piece of work that doesn't flinch from the atrocities that no doubt motivated Jolie to make the film in the first place.

Rapp has clearly been influenced by such lyrically disaffected '70s movies as "Five Easy Pieces." He brings out in Deschanel a sense of yearning, an avidity, that hits home.

Taymor's flower-powery phantasmagoria is ambitious but ultimately tiresome.

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

Despite its exuberant perversities, Waters’s take on erotomania is almost quaint.

Robert Towne's screenplay is less opportunistic than many of his efforts in recent years, although it still contains moments designed merely to shock or titillate.

This movie is altogether too nice. I prefer sports movies with more sass and snap, like the films Ron Shelton (“Bull Durham”) used to make, or even parts of “Moneyball.”

Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian?

Could we please declare a moratorium on funny-sad movies about dysfunctional families, especially families that come together for the holidays?

My worst fears were confirmed almost from the start. In order to inject some pep into the proceedings, Law has been encouraged to play Wolfe as a motormouthed rhapsodist who seems less inspired than unhinged. He’s exhaustingly exuberant.

Rappoport is a powerhouse performer but the movie is an unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.

The film’s political scope is wide, beginning in 1917 and extending for sixty years, and, especially in the first hour or so, the antic, magical tone of Rushdie’s novel is sustained.

It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilirating.

Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."

This is the kind of movie where we’re not supposed to know at any time who is playing whom, but since the characterizations are glossy and paper-thin, it’s difficult to get worked up about who gets fleeced.

The well-staged opening sequence, which depicts the riot at the 1913 Paris première of "Le Sacre du Printemps," is, alas, the film's high point.

It's a pleasant time-killer, nothing more. But nothing less, either.

It’s all fairly entertaining and eminently disposable.

Sadly, it lacks the classic awfulness that might have lifted it into the pantheon of Truly Bad Movies. Instead, what we have here is a garden variety bad movie, of which there have been all too many lately.

Why are Steve Carell and Tina Fey wasting their time, and ours, by appearing in the miserable comedy Date Night?

The problem with Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia, as with most movies about deeply troubled artists, is that for the most part we are seeing the troubles and not the artist.

The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.

Pound for pound, Ami is a heavyweight.

They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie "Real Steal."

Framed as a cautionary thriller about the perils of high-stakes terrorism, but I took away a different message from it: Don't forget your briefcase at the airport.

Depp is disappointingly recessive here, as he often is when he's playing characters who don't have an antic streak.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

Connery (an actor as well, and the son of Sean Connery) keeps the performers honest, and a few of the father-son tussles, with their admixture of love and envy, are powerful.

Doc Hollywood draws its energy almost exclusively from cliche. The cornball rowdiness is partially redeemed by the good cast.

Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.

Not everything in this ambitious comic escapade works, but Coppola, along with his sister, Sofia, is a real filmmaker. It must be in the genes.

A heavy dose of movie-colony narcissism posing as warts-and-all honesty.

It’s both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit.

Except for a few brilliant flashes, mostly from Peter O'Toole as Hector’s father, the Trojans' magisterially woebegone King Priam, Troy is a fairly routine action picture with an advanced case of grandeuritis.

It's not only Phoebe whose daydreams go out of control. Daniel Barnz, the writer-director, also goes a bit flooey. There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

Director Robert Stromberg, making his debut as a director after supervising the visual effects for movies like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Avatar,” lacks the transcendent touch.

Directed by Kevin Lima and produced by Dan Rounds, it moves briskly, and, if it doesn’t make a star out of Goofy, it doesn’t trash him either. It lets Goofy be Goofy.

Director Tamra Davis and screenwriters Sandler and Tim Herlihy scatter the bad jokes like fertilizer. Nothing sprouts.

Irons gives a deft performance as a man who is both entranced and flummoxed by his disciple, but the role itself is in most ways skimpily conceived. Hardy’s homosexuality, for one thing, is never really touched upon, as if that would somehow taint the proceedings.

The movie is twinkly and antiseptic so that when tragedy hits big in the final half hour, it seems coercive. It's like a pipsqueak Terms of Endearment.

The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.

For most of this movie, things are exactly what they seem--mediocre.

Lawrence is terrific at playing tough, as she also demonstrated in her previous outings with Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook” and, especially, “American Hustle." But maybe it’s time for her to take a rest from him for a while. There’s a lot more to this actress than bold and brassy.

There are fine, wry moments tucked inside the curdled whimsy.

My favorite voice/animation combo, however, is Stephen Colbert's very terrestrial president of the United States.

Since Mr. Bean rarely speaks a complete sentence, the effect is of watching a silent movie with sound effects. This was also the dramatic ploy of the great French director-performer Jacques Tati, who is clearly the big influence here.

Stone may think he's made a movie about the toxicity of the Bush presidency, but what we have instead is a cautionary tale of a decidedly lower order. As far as I can make out, the real message of W. is: Don't vote for anybody who talks with his mouth full of food.

Noah Taylor does startlingly well by this role, but the conceit behind the film is a bizarre piece of wish-fulfillment.

If Concussion really stuck its neck out, it would have been the better for it. The film comes on as hard-hitting, but it’s weighted down with protective gear.

Without her (Kelly Macdonald), the generally well-acted The Merry Gentleman would descend into terminal lugubriousness.

Schlesinger doesn’t really have the low-down skills to pump up the pulp. He’s so concerned not to relinquish his credentials as a “serious” director that the film, instead of seeming serious, seems mostly silly--not scary enough to function as a crackerjack thriller and not complex enough to work as a psychological drama.

Fukunaga has a fine, spacious film sense and a gift for action, but the doomy, heavy-handed plot devices and overwrought, overacted gangland set pieces betray a novice's hand.

The pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film's frayed sleeve… Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it's a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows [12 Oct 1990]

There's a hushed, rapturous quality to its best parts, though, and the emotional interplay between Ricky and Marina has a scary immediacy that the movies rarely achieve. Almodovar dares a lot in this film. [4 May 1990]

This farce set mostly aboard a transatlantic flight stuck in midair never launches.

It doesn’t help that most of the film is shot in a thick gray-green overlay that sets an immediate tone of abject dreariness. I’m not implying that Portman should have included high-kicking musical numbers to lighten the mood, but there is a Jewish tradition of mining the black comedy in tragedy that the film would have done well to avail itself of.

It too has no particular reason for being (except, of course, to complete the series and cash in). It's sprightly and inoffensive, though. And, for those who care, it satisfyingly ties up the various plot strands that were flapping in the breeze from the last installment. Back to the Future futurists will feel complete. [25 May 1990, p.C1]

We are treated to all manner of worshipy recollections from a stable of Thompson's admirers, including, believe it or not, Patrick Buchanan and James Baker. Who said gonzo politics doesn't make for strange bedfellows?

There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."

It's the kind of cutesy idea that doesn't ring remotely true.

If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.

Taking a cue from the “Batman” series, the film is dark and thudding and overlong.

Zemeckis tries to juice things up by staging numerous chase scenes up and around London, but do we really need "A Christmas Carol: The Action Picture"?

Rosen­thal serves up a hilarious documentary of his travails developing "The Voroniny," or, as it was known in development, "Everybody Loves Kostya."

It's movie-making as match-making.

Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in Taking Woodstock -- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away.

The entire film takes its cue from Cage's spritzes and jags; it's a delirious performance in a delirious landscape.

However you slice it, The Eagle is hokum, but modern-day Scots may get a kick out of the film's depiction of their ancestors as mud-caked hellions. Modern-day Romans will have to settle for less.

Fred Schepisi, one of the world's great directors ("The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," "A Cry in the Dark") is working at half-speed in The Eye of the Storm, a convoluted family drama derived from a Patrick White novel.

The Brothers Bloom is much more interested in showing off its own smarts, such as they are, than in challenging the audience's.

The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring.

Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.

By skewing the film into a father-son inspirational saga, the filmmakers sell out the best possibilities in their material. Lurie clearly wants Resurrecting the Champ to be "more" than a sports movie, or a newspaper movie. Ironically, he ends up with less.

Despite never having made a movie before, and utilizing comparatively primitive camera and recording equipment, Kurt and his son Ian crafted a movie unlike any other in the rock-doc genre.

It's never altogether clear why this visually blah and dramatically bland movie needed to be made at all (or why it wasn't made for television instead). The only answer I can come up with is that Murray wanted to show off with a cigarette-holder.

Turn the River becomes a standard fatalistic misfits-on-the-run movie with more than its share of improbabilities. It's as if Eigeman didn't realize how good the best parts of his film were, and so went ahead and trashed them.

There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.

The film is best when it focuses on Barnabas's culture shocks in this brave new world. Depp has fun with the character's bafflements without camping it up. What's missing overall is the sense of fun Burton once evinced in films like "Beetlejuice."

What rescues Eagle vs. Shark is its focus on Lily. Although Horsley overdoes the winsomeness, she is genuinely appealing. Love erases Lily's geekiness and in its place stands an attractive young woman.

Whereas the original, directed by Joseph Sargent, was essentially a well-oiled B movie, the new incarnation, directed by Tony ("Enemy of the State") Scott, is bristling with high-tech gimcrackery and over-the-top camera flourishes.

Art as a passport to healing may be what audiences are craving these days, but the poultice provided by this movie couldn't cover a paper cut.

The plot slogs along and family secrets are hauled out, each more implausible than the next.

Money Monster turns into an unintentional parody. Investing in this movie would not be a safe bet.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

This movie is a one-of-a-kind experience – blarney carried to rhapsodic heights.

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive--not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives.

Do we really need another Hulk movie? I was one of the few critics who actually liked Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," but it didn't exactly ring the cash registers or clamor for a continuation.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

Another charmless Hollywood thriller.

A character as psychologically complex as Guerin -- whose drive may not have been fully comprehensible even to herself -- needs a lot of room to expand on screen. Schumacher and Bruckheimer box her in.

Maudlin.

An odd amalgam of soap opera and street-level realism, with, alas, the former trumping the latter.

It’s essentially a buddy-cop romp with the usual assortment pack of graphic gruesomeness.

Judged on any kind of rational level, this film is a mess, and Fairuza Balk, as a punky friend of Howard's son, gives the single most annoying performance I have ever seen. But Franz Lustig's cinematography has a Walker Evans-like power.

There’s a creepy subtext to all this, especially when Tim uses his time-travel gifts to woo an American girl without her assent.

Reilly is a good foil for Ferrell, but too many of their scenes together have the effect of improv night at the comedy club.

Ostensibly it’s a tradition versus progress fable. In actuality, it’s a movie furiously, perhaps intentionally, at odds with itself.

I wish the movie weren’t quite so sappy about the spiritually redemptive powers of fine cuisine. Sometimes a meal is just a meal.

Black and Kyle Gass started their acoustic/heavy metal rock music comedy act back in the late 1980s. Gold albums and HBO shorts followed, now this. Still, any movie featuring Jack Black with an appearance by Sasquatch is not a total loss, and, for those who care, we learn the origin of the group's name.

Cloying as much of this stuff is, it's not cynical. Curtis seems genuinely convinced that love is all around. Far be it from me to say otherwise. We don’t speak the same language.

Vitkova’s direction is big on long lingering shots of dreariness. With a 2-1/2-hour running time, that’s a lot of dreariness.

Cuaron is a special talent, and, as botched as Great Expectations often is, it's the kind of failure that deserves an audience--if only to experience Cuaron's way of seeing, which is at its best in the early parts of this film.

The cast…is first-rate, but each is given a single note to play.

Ends with a bunch of goofy outtakes--which are as dismal as the rest of the movie. How do you decide what to leave out when there's nothing worth keeping in?

Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama. Damon has his low-key charisma and Van Sant captures the enraged anomie of the community, but, except for one big plot twist, everything in this film is telegraphed from the first frame.

The philosophic notions in I Love Huckabees are ultimately not much more than window dressing for some fancy slapstick.

About two-thirds of the way through, Rendition takes a bad turn and sells out most of what made it worth watching in the first place. Witherspoon is given little to do except look weepy, Freeman's change of heart is Q.E.D., and the radical Islamist subplot overwhelms the action, which becomes so confusingly structured that I thought the projectionist had misplaced a reel.

This “Field of Dreams” field has been plowed so many times that the land is no longer arable. Isn’t it time to cultivate a few new cliches?

Love & Other Drugs is a slick weepie made by smart guys who want you to know they're better than the schlockmeisters. They've outsmarted themselves.

Take the Lead mixes classical dance with hip-hop gyrations and features perhaps the most scrubbed set of delinquents since "West Side Story."

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

Party Girl has the courage of its own no-braininess.

Essentially The Conspirator is a courtroom drama with occasional bulletins from the outside world. It plays out to its predictable end with the doggedness, if not the verve, of a "Law and Order" episode.

At best, Helena's wiggy adventures recall such Jean Cocteau films as "Orpheus" and "Blood of a Poet." At worst, they resemble the Vegas act of Cirque du Soleil.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.

Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.

The problem with all this don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it dramaturgy is that ultimately everything is sacrificed for effect. When you're dealing, as Ritchie is, with explosions of real violence and viciousness, the hyperslick technique can't accommodate the real pain that comes with the territory, or ought to. What we're left with is a cackling amorality -- not a philosophy of life, just a posture.

Himmler in one of his letters says that “in life, one must be always decent, courageous and kind-hearted,” and “decent” is apparently how he saw himself right up to the time he swallowed a cyanide capsule after he was captured by the British.

You can believe this man (Jones) left his family because he felt born into the wrong tribe. Now if only he had picked the right movie . . .

The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That’s a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.

Poehler is the life of the party and steals just about every scene, although there's not much to steal.

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

Whether this is all a case of life imitating art or vice versa matters little. Few of these movies aspire to art. What counts is the trajectory of uplift.

The Great Gatsby isn’t simply a classic American text: In Luhrmann’s hands, it’s also the greatest self-help manual ever written.

He's a mishmash of cultural opposites, and his motormouth swagger is fitfully amusing. So is his backhand.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

By bringing the story into Iraq, Grant Heslov courts tastelessness. Gooniness and Gitmo don't mix.

Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight is a “serious” movie attempting to be lighthearted. It deals with the same issues that Allen’s idol, Ingmar Bergman, often grappled with – namely, the battle zone of reason versus mysticism – but offhandedly.

The result is perhaps the most elegantly shot, and certainly the most disturbing, of the recent fantasy films.

Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair’s uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Watching this film is a little bit like getting mauled and tickled at the same time. The filmmakers have given the whole shebang a hefty levity, and that's not easy to accomplish in a full-scale disaster movie.

It's all rather sweet but instantly evanescent.

Keys takes a scattershot approach to Cuban music, filming not only specific artists, like Los Cohibas and Los Zafiros, but also street musicians in the barrio and just about everywhere else he can find them.

As hig concepts go, You Don't Mess With the Zohan" takes the cake.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

Bee Season, at its core, is about something powerful: The ways in which family members wreak destruction on each other with the best of intentions.

Given the fact that Life was co-written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who co-wrote the wacked-out “Zombieland” and “Deadpool,” the film’s glum earnestness is doubly disappointing.

My favorite moment in the movie: Astrophysicist Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) insisting on wearing only his underwear because he says he thinks better that way. Hey, whatever works.

Al Franken is good enough, he's certainly smart enough. So, doggone it, why is "Stuart Saves His Family" so mediocre?

Mostly a snooze. Maybe if Buscemi himself had starred in it things would have turned out better.

It’s a major performance (Ruffalo) in a minor movie.

This unrated documentary, which contains no hard-core shots, could have used more hog and less hedge, if you catch my drift: When Jeremy drones on about his quest to be cast in mainstream movies, dullness sets in.

Still, in its own Saturday-morning-serial kind of way, Attack of the Clones is a commendable example of the sort of movie we once loved and then outgrew. Of course, if it was even better, we wouldn't feel as if we'd outgrown it.

Connery and Zeta-Jones not only look great together, they work well together.

The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.

Wise, who is noticeably older than the 29-year-old Ruskin was at the time the events occurred in real life, gives a tense, implacable performance, and Fanning is touching. The movie, however, directed by Richard Laxton, could use a lot more oomph.

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

Fortunately, most of the malarkey in this movie seems intentional in the same Sunday-afternoon-serial way as the Indiana Jones movies (some of which Johnston worked on).

In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.

Art School Confidential mostly just makes you feel bad - period. It puts you in a foul mood and leaves you there.

Strutting around for most of the film in her leather rocker duds, Streep’s Ricki Rendazzo is almost as much of a concoction as her witch in Into the Woods. She wears her uniform as a taunt and also as a way of defining herself. She’s a woman out of time – a superannuated hippie.

By the end, 10 Items Or Less has the obnoxiousness of a vanity project. Freeman is having a better time than we are.

Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

More entertaining than it has a right to be. It's pulpy and preposterous, and yet it gets at a real truth.

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

There's good bad taste and then there's just plain bad bad, which is what describes most of Brüno.

It's all a bit like "Girl Interrupted" shattered into a thousand shards, but Page somehow manages to come through with a performance despite the director's distracting technique.

At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?

The only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?

At its best, though, Blue Chips is really about the wiggy, muscle-twitch world of high-pressure college athletics. The movie is best around the edges, when it's jamming and anecdotal and not taking itself so heroically seriously.

The only surprise to me about this movie is that there no jokes about kilts – a serious omission in an otherwise entirely predictable farce.

It's a sideways view of a national trauma. The large cast includes standout performances from such unlikelies as Demi Moore, playing an alcoholic crooner, and Estevez himself, as her long-suffering husband. Everyone in this film is powerful.

It's all kind of silly and amorphous, but the scenes between Yi and Cera, whether or not they were scripted, have a babes-in-the-wood loveliness.

In U-Turn Stone is reaching for the pulp without the politics. He's trying for noir as ritual dance. But Stone is too frenzied a filmmaker to keep the dance steps simple.

A wee Boy Scout would have done far better in the wilds. It’s tough to think "Waiting for Godot" when what you’re watching is closer to "Dumb & Dumber."

A frail little caper movie that’s overawed by its cast.

The movie, starring Rogen as a mall cop with anger management issues, is essentially a goony romp flecked with disturbing eruptions of violence.

As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.

Best viewed as an oddball career move rather than as a successful movie.

Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.

This ghastly swatch of pulp horror is compelling at the most basic level, but so little is going on in it that you might as well be watching a sadistic lab experiment performed on mice.

Trashy and lurid as this movie is, it’s certainly not boring, and it keeps its star in hog heaven throughout.

The movie is a decidedly mixed bag, in part, because of the equally pronounced disparities between Burton and Carroll – and between Burton and Disney, for that matter.

What follows is a phantasmagoria that is more cheesy than transporting.

Even though none of these guys is ready to kick the bucket, The Big Year has an unmistakable affinity with "The Bucket List."

Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

It’s respectable, safe, intelligent – and a bit dull.

Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.

Knight of Cups isn’t quite as fancy-flimsy as “To the Wonder,” which, as I remember it, consisted mostly of Ben Affleck gazing dazedly at wave formations, but it’s close enough.

Allen isn’t doing anything terribly deep-dish here, just gussying up the standard crime-movie tropes. To what end? His point, I think, is to demonstrate that human beings, no matter how educated, are capable of justifying the most awful acts.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

It's a beautifully austere piece of work -- it's rare to see a film these days that's as carefully designed as this one. But the design hasn't been given enough human contours. It's as if the film makers had forgotten the raging emotions that all that design and austerity were supposed to repress. [07 Mar 1990, p.F1]

It would have better if Brooks had invested more time trying to discover what makes AMERICANS laugh.

Dano is still doing his ethereal, creepy underacting routine, but, compared with De Niro's scenery chewing, he seems almost dignified. The film, written and directed by Paul Weitz, has many touching moments and many more hokey ones.

Hartnett has been stuck in the young-adult heartthrob mode for some time now, but this comic thriller may launch him into meatier fare.

I much prefer Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” to all this doomy somberness. Why take the legend so seriously?

If you're young enough to have missed some of the better Lemmon-Matthau pairings, like "The Fortune Cookie" or "The Odd Couple," then Grumpy Old Men won't seem so grumpy. [25 Dec 1993, p.2]

It’s not simply that it’s “too soon” for such movies. That’s highly debatable. More to the point is that the stark reality of these explosive events as we live through them – in the news, in real time, on TV and through investigative documentaries – potentially outflanks any attempt to dramatize them using embellished scenarios and famous actors.

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

In Moving Midway, Cheshire chronicles not only the history of the move but also of the family members, past and present, who occupied the place, and, most pointedly, the slaves who worked its fields, some of whom turn out to be related.

The effect is a bit like watching "Gone With the Wind" with a dumpling substituting for Scarlett O’Hara.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

Just because Cole Porter's biography was botched and airbrushed in "Night and Day," starring Cary Grant, doesn't mean De-Lovely, which is up-front about Porter's homosexuality, is a whole lot better.

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

Hartley turns what might have been a lurid pulp thriller into a freeze-dried art thing. He squeezes all the juice out of pulp. [19 May 1995]

Even the humor is played too broadly – another notch and we'd be in "Monty Python" territory, though not half as witty.

It's a powerful subject, but director McG and screenwriter Jamie Linden haul out every cliché in the playbook.

Michael Apted's direction veers into listlessness, but there is, at times, a pleasing elegance to the production, too. It doesn't assault you. Small favors are better than none.

Overlong and repetitive as it is, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, at least delivers the goods.

It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.

An unconvincing talkathon that might have worked better on the stage as a two-man showpiece.

Now that it is at last on screen, my reaction is ... what's all the fuss?

In supporting roles, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, the equally valiant house slave Newton makes his common-law wife, and Mahershala Ali as Moses, the leader of the renegade slaves, provide some powerful moments.

The good news is that, even though one must pace oneself through the dull parts, usually involving Mr. Popper's dullish family, he's in pretty good form whenever he's getting physical.

Wilkinson artfully deepens a character who in Wilde's original play was rather boobish. It's a marvelous performance in a pretty good film.

Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.

As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.