Peter Rainer

Airheads, directed by Michael Lehmann and scripted by Rich Wilkes, is far from great. But it sure is ripe. It's bursting with bad ideas, half-good ideas, good and bad actors yelling and mugging. Like a lot of youth comedies, it's frenetic where it should be inspired.

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

Washington doesn’t look as if he’s having much fun, and who can blame him? Perhaps he agrees with me: Apocalypse movies, like apocalypse heroes, need some laughs, too.

The film also seems to end at least four times, which is three times too many. Better yet, it never should have started.

It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.

Sets out to demonstrate that life is about more than having sex. Inadvertently -- I think -- it ends up showing us just the opposite. As if we didn't already know.

The movie's gross-out effects are impressive but wearying. How apt that the director's name is Gore.

This is a technological breakthrough, all right, but a breakthrough to what?

Peregrym is a fresh-faced beauty and Bridges is enjoyably cranky, but the film is as bland as an Afterschool Special.

O'Sullivan's movie could easily have been made 60 years ago. This is not intended as a compliment.

It’s an indication of how much this film needed a bright break in all the grim oppressiveness that when Mary-Louise Parker shows up in a giddy cameo as a foul-mouthed boozer, the audience suddenly lit up with laughter.

Peirce is gifted, but she lacks the ability of directors like DePalma to transform schlock into something deeply personal.

It’s a miniature art history lesson that is also a rapt communion between two people who, at least in this moment, are joined in the ecstasy of creation.

The only performance worth watching is Costner's. Now that he seems resigned to being something less than an A-list luminary, he is often modest and affecting.

The writer-director Andrew Niccol is best known for writing "The Truman Show," another movie that got carried away by doomsday deep-think. The deep-think here is even sillier.

He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.

Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.

The cumulative effect is somewhat overwhelming. How could it not be?

Tatum muscles his way through the role with panache, while Foxx never gets a chance to break loose.

It's a rather lifeless re-telling of the Nativity, with greeting-card imagery and stiff performances.

Disposable, sporadically amusing.

The material veers a bit too predictably from near farce to serioso dramatics but the trajectory here makes emotional sense.

Even though The Devil's Own reportedly cost close to $100 million, it comes across as a sleek, medium-grade character study occasionally punctuated by gunfire. If this is what $100 million buys these days, can $200-million movies be very far off?

In an effort to keep the thrills coming the screenwriters scatter about too many loose ends; they don’t provide the precise cat-and-mouse plotting that used to be the hallmark of the well-made thriller but is now virtually nonexistent.

The people who made this movie have either seen too much mayhem -- or they haven't seen any.

The problem is that Allen is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing a romancer-rescuer, and since he and Helen Hunt have a rather frigid actorly rapport, we have plenty of time to notice the awkward, and barely acknowledged, disparity in their ages.

It’s all strenuously camp.

Much more silly than romantic.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

Sometimes a film is best utilized as a travelogue. Such is the case with the comedy-drama The Girl From Monaco, which isn't much of a movie but offers scrumptious views.

The living-apart scenario is contrived – there was no way for these men to share a space somewhere? – but the two actors are so good that it doesn’t much matter.

Watching actors tap out code as big buzzing screens of digital data flash on the screen just doesn’t cut it.

The plot, as it unwinds, is increasingly eye-poppingly preposterous, but it holds you anyway, not only because of its outlandishness but because Plummer, against all odds, brings pathos and dignity to a role that doesn’t deserve him.

Hartley is very adept with actors, though – or at least some of them. Posey, for her part, displays a pert quizzical quality that's very charming and very funny. And Goldblum is tailor-made for Hartley's minimalist patter.

Neil Young’s concept album turned concert tour turned movie, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen--at least not in an unaltered state.

As Leonard, Nivola isn’t bad, which is good, since the entire movie revolves around him.

There is a germ of a good idea in the notion that an imaginary suitor can be more powerful than a real one. But director Alejandro Agresti isn't the man to pull it off.

Bean represents a dismal dumbing-down of a very bright creation. Is nothing sacred?

Spirit's narration comes to us courtesy of Matt Damon, who, having played a horse's ass in some of his earlier movies, perhaps thought it wise to inhabit the entire nag this time around.

Even if Zhao and her co-screenwriters were more adept at establishing the family-style togetherness of the Eternals, the emotional continuity is shattered by the incessant time tripping and globe hopping. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings in South Dakota, you suddenly find yourself in Mesopotamia.

In its final half-hour, all the stops are pulled. The movie is still wildly implausible but at least it's hurtling forward. The only thing missing from the proceedings is a windmill for John to tilt at.

Alexandre Aja directs in full glop mode and the cast includes a few performers, including Ted Levine (from "Monk"), Robert Joy, and Kathleen Quinlan, who probably wish they were elsewhere.

"In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things," at least held you. Possession piddles away as you're watching it.

I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.

It’s unfortunate, if predictable, that Hollywood found it necessary to almost entirely eliminate deep think in favor of deep action. As for Johansson, I have no big problem with cross-racial casting, but she’s so glum and seemingly uncomfortable here that you wonder if maybe she didn’t harbor the same misgivings as her detractors.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

The Normandy locations are evocative, but director Sophie Barthes compresses Emma’s multiyear rise and fall into what seems like a month or so.

Under Siege 2 isn't going to convince anyone that Seagal is Brando, though he often sounds a bit like him. But, taken strictly as an action sequel, the film is a lively show. It's a formula follow-up with formula dialogue and formula action but the director, Geoff Murphy, does extremely well within the sequel's narrow limits.

When we last see a much older Moses en route to Canaan, we can at least be grateful that this film, unlike so many other movies these days, does not seem primed for a sequel.

What makes the claptrap in Starship Troopers so flabbergasting is that it's monumentally scaled.

The only saving grace is that Caine and Duvall don’t overdo the southern-coot stuff.

No doubt Be Kind Rewind will soon make its way to – um – DVD.

The drawback to Lynch's pile-it-on method is that it is reductive. One reason Wild at Heart, for all its amazements, isn't quite as stunning as "Blue Velvet" is because it seems less the working out of a single fixed obsession than an entire smear of obsessions. [12 Aug 1990, Calendar, p.29]

Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

The film has a pleasing retro-ness that often mitigates the dullness.

Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

It’s like an over-the-hill gang variant on “The Dirty Dozen,” except not as much fun as that sounds.

What it's mainly about is movie stars skittering from locale to locale while bullets whiz by and the plot thickens – or, more to the point, curdles.

It's a classic example of how a movie can be great without, strictly speaking, being good. But when something is this funny, who wants to speak strictly?

By making Nacho a do-gooder, Hess defuses Black's subversive energy. You could argue that Black also played a do-gooder in "School of Rock," but the kids in that film were a lot spunkier, and Black wasn't constantly playing for sympathy as he does here.

Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator’s trap of making the “human” characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.

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

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

The slapstick is often clunky, but Robinson has a sweet jester’s disposition that keeps many of the gags from collapsing.

We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.

Even if the film were sharper, even if it was made by satirists on the order of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern in their “Dr. Strangelove” days, I would still argue that greenlighting such a film is a blunder. The exercise of free speech does not exempt one from the consequences of stupidity.

It’s an only-in-America success story worth recounting.

A dash – only a dash – of Tim Burton ghoulishness might have helped.

The Golden Compass is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the "Harry Potter" franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects.

Pratt brings a wry derring-do to the mayhem, and the escape from Isla Nublar has its modicum of thrills.

The hardy fools - I mean, visionary pioneers - in this movie are so gravity-defying that I had to look at the press notes afterward just to make sure no computerized special effects were used.

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.

Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.

The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.

The humor is broad, the jokes not of the first freshness, and the cast, especially Bousdoukus, is hammy. And, for the record, the upscale menu, which is supposed to be scrumptious, doesn't look as tasty as the downscale one.

Biopics about civil rights icons are usually staid affairs. Cesar Chavez, directed by Diego Luna, is no exception.

If Hollywood must have franchises, we could do worse than one highlighting people who have lived a long life and are not on altogether friendly terms with technology. But imagine what this cast could do with something less tutti-frutti!

Most of the love in Feast of Love is unrequited, untapped, or unfulfilled. The fine cast, which includes Jane Alexander, Selma Blair, and Radha Mitchell, is also somewhat underused.

There are enough pleasantries and good jests in this new film to make a meal.

It's slobby, goony, and gross, also occasionally funny, but not occasionally enough.

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.

Not awful, not wonderful, Jack the Giant Slayer is a midrange fairy tale epic that’s a lot more ho-hum than fee-fi-fo-fum.

The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.

It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.

Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.

Noé shoots his sequences in long, unbroken takes, and the unblinking horror that results is, I think, the opposite of exploitation. There has been so much lurid bloodletting in the movies that you might think nothing could faze us anymore. Think again.

Kevin Spacey gives a bravura performance as superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper's uneven but often loopily entertaining Casino Jack.

Poison Ivy suffers from a basic dramatic hitch. We in the audience are so far ahead of the people on the screen that there are no surprises, just the inevitable sound of the inevitable shoe dropping.

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast.

A film with an intriguing premise and likable performances but not much excitement. [13 Oct 1990, p.F13]

The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.

The film is never less than intelligent and never more than accomplished.

The only real acting in this movie comes from Janet McTeer and Charles Dance as Will’s aggrieved parents. They bring some ballast to this blubberfest.

Just because The Fountain is different doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's borderline unwatchable, though this hasn't prevented the Oscar buzz from buzzing.

As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.

If you are not already familiar with Williams’s best plays and film adaptations, this musty magnolia of a movie won’t encourage you to seek them out.

Director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque have made a textbook example of the "what were they thinking?" movie genre. Judging from the befogged look on some of the actors’ faces, they must have been wondering the same thing.

The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has an undeservedly high reputation as a master stylist. He's more like a master window dresser.

The Program tries to travel light and heavy, and the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-think doesn’t gel. Latham, who has previously bestowed upon us the ersatz pop reportage of “Urban Cowboy” and “Perfect,” doesn’t tunnel very deep into the world of college athletics. What he and Ward come up with is fairly standard stuff that seems derived mostly from old movies.

On the plus side, this is probably the only film ever made that credits a “Moose Unit.” There are some great shoots of moose.

His drug-smuggling underworld, specifically the Amsterdam-New York connection, is likewise drably depicted. Is this because director Kevin Asch and screenwriter Antonio Macia deliberately played it down, or are they just incompetent? I’ll be charitable and vote for the former, but sometimes sensationalism is preferable to being altogether unsensational.

Once around the block with these folks is more than enough.

Something happens to Robin Williams in serious roles. He becomes so drab that it's almost as if he's trying to efface himself from the screen.

The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.

So why is everything so thuddingly fun-free?

A high-class weepie for adults who disdain the lower forms of four-hankiedom.

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

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

Werner Herzog, better known as one of the finest living directors, plays a bad guy with Teutonic relish. If he doesn't watch it, he'll have a whole other career for himself playing dead-eyed villains.

The disjointed, self-conscious, over-the-top stylistics are supposed to make it seem avant-garde but mostly it's just annoying. The artsy clutter gets in the way of the crime story, which is pretty flimsy to begin with.

French Kiss tries to be a glass of pink champagne, but some of the fizz has gone out of the bottle. But director Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter Adam Brooks cram so many potshots into the piece that, after a while, it makes you laugh anyway.

The Saint exists almost entirely as a vehicle for Kilmer's quick-change smarty-pants swagger, and it's inconceivable without him. He's great fun to watch--a squirish master thief with a wide streak of lewdness.

The dramatic arc of Roger Dodger may be banal, but Kidd manages some marvelous moments.

The role fits Fox like a glove but perhaps at this point in his career he should be scouting for something less form-fitting.

The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.

Director Rupert Goold keeps things appropriately creepy, but True Story is no “Capote.” It’s all buildup with little payoff.

A sloggy, heartfelt piece of quasi-magical realist storytelling.

The film isn't helped by Kline's cameo, although his comic timing is impeccable. The problem is that what he's timing – the role of an aging ego-swelled roué – is very tired stuff.

A long wallow in misery and, after a while, the pain morphs into polemic.

The entire remake has been dumb-dumbed by John Hughes, who wrote the script and produced.

Freeheld is certainly timely, though, given its ponderous approach, less than invigorating.

The Ballad of Wallis Island is both modest and magical. One of its co-stars, Carey Mulligan, has described its tone as a “gentle euphoria.” That phrase perfectly expresses how this wonderful movie – directed by James Griffiths from a script by Tom Basden and Tim Key – transports us.

See it after you've eaten dinner. And don't see if you've recently been to "Ratatouille."

A few stirring shoot-'em-ups help relieve the logjam of cliches. Director George P. (Rambo) Cosmatos does an OK job at the O.K. Corral. But even the good stuff goes on for too long.

It’s all meant to be funnier than it is.

Freilich includes interviews with three generations of kibbutzniks and some fascinating historical footage going back to the 1920s.

It’s a clunky, over-the-hill gang escapade enlivened only by the presence of the three Oscar winners, all of whom are so far beyond the movie’s meager demands that to say the actors are overqualified would be the grossest of understatements.

Writer-director Massy Tadjedin cuts back and forth between these twin temptations. Will Michael succumb and prove Joanna correct in her suspicions? Will Alex's French accent conquer all? Do you care? I didn't.

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

The animation is of variable quality; the story is a garbled pastiche of "Oliver Twist" and "Little Miss Marker;" the songs, including four by Charles ("Annie") Strouse, are eminently unhummable. [17 Nov 1989]

Sometimes a movie thinks it's one thing (charming) when it's really something else (creepy). Such is the case with writer-director Stephen Belber's Management.

Director Barbet Schroeder is too elegant an artist for this material, which veers between routine cop-movie conventions and high-toned malarkey that seems a lot closer to Dungeons & Dragons than to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

Depp and Rush are still in there plugging away. They’re troupers, but the series is all used up. If there is to be another sequel it will have to be called "Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit's End."

It’s another one of those films, like “Book Club,” in which the cast far outshines the material.

The result is this metabiography that says almost nothing about the great photographer's life or art.

Potty jokes and bawdy gross-outs predominate, and the few good laughs are swamped by the overall laughlessness.

Twisted and outrageous but ultimately artificial. Albert Brooks did this art-reality thing a lot better years ago in "Real Life," his takeoff on PBS's "An American Family," and was sidesplitting besides.

A movie that has more sap than a pine forest.

Wilson does his callow good-guy routine (if you close your eyes you'd swear he was his brother, Owen) and Thurman looks as if she'd rather be stalking prey in "Kill Bill."

Leo, in particular, seems poleaxed with good intentions. Her Lois wins the Most Understanding Wife award.

Beyond being a showplace for crash-and-burn effects, Poseidon seems to be stumping for togetherness.

There is nothing magical about seeing one’s umpteenth car chase. Mark Ruffalo plays the weirdly scruffy FBI agent on the case, while Morgan Freeman, in super-slow mode, plays a famous magic debunker. He’d make the ideal critic for this movie.

A richly appointed period piece, it features kingly tantrums, mistresses, bodices, roaring fireplaces, incest, and mutton. It also features sharply enunciated, period-perfect dialogue in which nary a contraction can be heard.

Something is going on all the time, even if that something is oftentimes clumsy, nonsensical, or flat. But the sheer whoosh of the story line keeps you watching anyway.

What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.

The film somehow manages to be both a turn-on and a turnoff.

It should all be sharper and funnier than it is.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.

There's something foul about staging the assassination of a sitting president in order to push a political agenda that could just as easily have been put forward without resorting to such sensationalism.

At its best it's refreshingly offhanded. It's a hit-and-miss movie that's worth seeing for the hits.

I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.

The Good German is a prime example of a movie made by highly skilled and intelligent filmmakers that nevertheless seems misguided from the get-go.

Director Brad Silberling and screenwriters Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver can't figure out how to play a lot of this material. They pour on the sentiment and then they pour on the dopiness. The ghosts in this movie aren't the only ones who lack resolution. So do the filmmakers.

It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

The best I can say is that it’s another tour de force for Gyllenhaal, although his intensity isn’t matched by the movie itself, which sacrifices much of its power by too often settling for easy, nut-brain effects.

It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.

Less a documentary than a love fest for Al Franken, this scattershot movie, shot over two years, follows the zigzag trail of political satirist Al Franken as he feuds with Bill O'Reilly, campaigns against George W. Bush, and helps establish Air America.

Ought to have been state of the art. But there's not a whole lot of artistry to be found in this movie.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.

The omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange, stringy white-gray hair flowing, and Daniel Brühl is Domscheit-Berg. Condon and his screenwriter Josh Singer don’t quite know what to make of this duo, perhaps because the men didn’t quite know what to make of each other, either.

You can't beat this film for demented heart-tugs though. When Prymaat looks at a big pile of cone-like eggplants in the supermarket and lets out a momentary shriek of horror, you know you're watching nutbrain perfection.

Michael Douglas plays US Secret Service agent Pete Garrison, and his jaw has never seemed tighter.

Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.

The most interesting plot development – Frankie starts falling for Sam – is nipped in the bud. Some things even a soap opera won't stoop to.

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

Directed by Allen Hughes and written by Brian Tucker, the film is a collection of crime noir oddments that don't add up to a full meal.

The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.

A couple of scenes directly reference the Iraq war and the Holocaust (where the humans are herded into cattle cars), and this is taking things much too seriously. This is a big blow-'em-up franchise movie. It should not under any circumstances be confused with a Statement.

It has a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit but it also has high-road pretensions. It’s a violent movie that wants to make an anti-violence “statement,” the oldest ploy in the boxing film genre.

What begins as a pretty good comedy devolves rapidly into a high-flown example of Hollywood messagemongering.

What is missing here is any real sense of what it must have been like for two great writers to be living together, especially in that era, with its push-pull of progressivism and parochialism. This is a movie about fireworks where nothing ignites.

He is the least intrusive of great directors, and Boxing Gym, which is about a gym in Austin, Texas, is so offhandedly observant that, for a while, you may wonder if much of anything is really going on.

Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.

Words and Pictures is a minor effort from Schepisi, but minor Schepisi still trumps most of what’s out there.

The Catcher Was a Spy, directed by Ben Lewin and starring Paul Rudd as the Ivy-educated Berg, who was fluent in seven languages, is a much more pallid experience than this eminently juicy subject deserves.

Movie actors are notoriously inarticulate about their craft, but what about movie directors? If the documentary Great Dir­ectors is any indication, the returns are a bit more promising.

This John Hughes production (citywide) based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip is pretty tepid tomfoolery but at least it’s not assaultive in the way that most kids’ films are nowadays. It’s trying for giggles instead of guffaws.

The hang-loose grodiness of these films has its charms, and the Ray-Banned team of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, at its best, is good vaudeville.

There are some virtuoso moments (the discovery of the mutilated corpse is extremely well done and blessedly ungraphic), but overall the result is much less than prime De Palma.

Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in "Little Miss Sunshine."

Species is a pretty good Boo! movie. It's not the kind of sci-fi film that's going to give Stanley Kubrick any sleepless nights, and it may not give the rest of us much sleeplessness either. Its primary purpose in life is to unleash a lot of gloppy morphing and mutating and make us go -- all together now -- eeeuuuh. [07 July 1995, p.F8]

The movie is a straightforward nuts-and-bolts affair of no particular consequence, except for Neeson’s performance, which rightly does not resolve the question: Was Felt acting nobly or vengefully?

It radiates intelligence. Of how many historical epics can that be said these days?

Lola is, in other words, a believable heroine for our times.

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

Deft and fast-moving, but shouldn’t a musical have at least a few songs you can hum on your way home?

Chen Shi-Zheng, well regarded as an opera and theater director, makes his feature film debut.

A movie like Hart's War, for all its realistic trappings, is essentially escapism. And yet it inadvertently pushes the 9/11 button. The real world is going to intrude a lot this year at the movies. Better get used to it.

Spacey is turning into another Robin Williams: Between this film and "Pay It Forward" he cops the prize for the Sappiest Performances by an Actor Previously Known to Have Great Talent.

Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.

His performance in Gold, as Kenny Wells, isn’t quite up to his Oscar-winning work in "Dallas Buyers Club," but it’s nevertheless a rousing feat without which this movie would have far less to recommend it.

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

Lee is very good at creating a sense of free-floating dread, but he, and his screenwriter Mark Protosevich, don’t have a real flair for pulp.

Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.

One of those movies designed as an Oscar make-over for its star. It didn’t work in this case. Aniston was not nominated for Best Actress, perhaps because the film is so obvious about what it’s up to.

Simon Pegg, of "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," is onscreen almost constantly in Run Fatboy Run, and his mugging and smirking and preening wear out their welcome fast.

The collision of sleek melodrama and old Woody Allen stand-up routines is at times oddly effective and at other times just odd.

Bay and his screenwriter, Chuck Hogan, adapting the nonfiction bestseller “13 Hours,” by Mitchell Zuckoff and the members of the Annex Security Team, resolutely avoid any overt political inferences.

There is nothing surprising about the way this overlong movie, written and directed by David Dobkin, plays itself out.

The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.

So relentlessly giddy and hyperactive that it doesn’t really need a movie review--it needs a prescription.

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

I’m not sure that depicting Rove as a demonic Wizard of Oz does much more than stir righteous indignation among the already indignant. A more pertinent and challenging mission would have been to show just how the public can be gulled by Rove's dirty tricks in the same ways again and again.

This rousing documentary directed by Kevin Tancharoen and shot during two live concerts in New Jersey, is a nonstop campy celebration of youthful pizazz.

I kept expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to traipse onto the scene. Alas, he doesn’t.

It’s still a bit early in the long careers of these actors, especially Kline, to be playing creaky codgers. It’s bad enough when Hollywood casts women over the age of 30 as grandmothers-in-waiting. Now we have to endure an onslaught of famous veteran actors complaining about their hips.

People who see Sinbad for its star power--a big selling point in the movie’s marketing campaign--are being oversold.

In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it’s a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis’s anguished mug. There’s an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.

If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.

Too often the sequences in this movie play out like snatches from a terrific play that somehow got lost along the way.

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.”

Tomb Raider, sloppily directed by Roar Uthaug, would not be worth watching without Vikander, who darts, leaps, and pummels her way through this mediocre escapade with a winning fierceness that makes you wish she had paired up with Indiana Jones in his heyday.

The visuals are irrepressibly witty and so is the script, which morphs from the classic fable into a spoof on "War of the Worlds." I prefer this version to Spielberg's.

The more moralistic 21 gets, the less enjoyable it is.

Altogether fascinating.

The special effects tricks are often nifty, but where's the wit? Memoirs of an Invisible Man doesn't earn its seriousness. It fades into invisibility while you're watching it.

If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for Just Cause will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater.

A central dictum of any mystery thriller is this: Make your protagonists, especially your villains, worth caring about. The Girl on the Train, directed by Tate Taylor from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson, falls down on the job.

An OK action film, but only the humorless will find it heretical – or educational.

Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.

Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?

The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

This is a half-baked movie about a half-baked person, but it has a fine, melancholic afterglow.

At its best, the movie makes you feel like a kindred spirit.

This half-baked fairy tale always seems to be on the verge of becoming charming but despite a good cast it never quite succeeds.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

The thinness of the movie, which is what is intermittently enjoyable about it, is at odds with its sob-sister pretensions.

Monumentally unromantic.

No better than the first – which means it will probably be creamed by critics and make a jillion dollars. But really, standards are standards.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

The whole thing is piffle, but it moves fast enough to stay entertaining.

Most of it plays out as sub-medium-grade farce, but Carrey has some funny calisthenic bits where he appears to have the pliability of a rubber toy.

For all its triteness, Sheridan's sentimentality has its poignancy: This adolescent boy is all set up to live out a halcyon life he'll never have.

Campion is dabbling in several different types of movie here: police procedural, film noir, romantic melodrama, sex fantasia. None really succeeds.

Because Crowe is hamstrung by his role, he never strikes the requisite sparks with Cotillard. This is quite an achievement, since her beauty is on par with Provence's.

It’s nice to see oldsters cavorting in kaboom movies, but a little of this stuff goes a long way.

Parker is bland throughout. Maybe all those episodes of "Sex and the City" have soured her on this sort of thing.

I suppose it's a good thing that this movie has so many crisscrossing subplots. If one gaggle of whiners gets on your nerves, rest assured the scenery will soon change and another will take center stage.

This final installment jettisons most of the Zen mumbo-jumbo from the first two movies in favor of lots of very loud explosions. Since I didn’t take the mumbo-jumbo seriously to begin with, my letdown was minor, but aficionados may feel like they’ve been played for suckers.

Soppy, schematic weepie.

If the movie accomplishes nothing else, though, I hope it inspires the curious to actually sit down and finally read “Moby-Dick.” It’s an extraordinary yarn. Really.

Has its lewd funniness, though not often enough to make it worthy of not only "Bad Santa" but, more to the point, "School of Rock."

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

Like many a Hollywood political drama, Lions for Lambs carries a full head of steam that is indistinguishable from a lot of hot air.

I realize Legally Blonde 2 was not intended as scathing political satire, but I wish someone out there in movieland did indeed have just such an intention these days.

What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

The film has so many moodswings that watching it induces whiplash, and just about everybody in it, from Winslet on down to Judy Davis, playing the dressmaker’s crotchety mother, flagrantly overdoes it.

Barely rates faint praise.

Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.

Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.

Return of Living Dead 3 isn't bad for what it is but it's the genre itself that needs reanimation.

What keeps the film watchable, aside from the vibrant musical numbers in the nightclub, is Garcia's obvious love for the Cuba of his ancestors, of his dreams. A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch.

The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.

The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked one, made me long to re-watch "Zorro the Gay Blade," the great spoof starring George Hamilton. In that film, the Spanish accents were meant to sound deliberately fake.

The romantic comedy 27 Dresses will work best for people who have never seen a romantic comedy. If you have, you might find it amusing to tally up the steals – I mean, homages.

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone's first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt.

Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.

The trouble with pet projects is that too often they are unduly do-goody, and so it is here.

Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.

Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.

A frustrating blend of the sharply funny and the ploddingly generic. Although he does them well enough, we don’t really need Ron Shelton to give us the same old skidding-U-turn cop-thriller theatrics. He’s a much more distinctive talent than this crass spree allows for.

None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

It probably won't matter to its core audience that The A-Team doesn't make a lick of sense.

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.

The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.

This one doesn't have enough zesty ideas to revive the breed.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

Movies don’t become great by association, and Wonder Wheel is a far cry from “Streetcar.” There are ample flaws in this film, but they certainly don’t rise to the level of tragic.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

Awash in spurious sentimentality and sniping.

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.

Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.

And so the chief complaint one can lodge against Lyne's film is central: It's not that funny. Which is another way of saying that, for all its controversy, it's not that daring.

Daldry and his screenwriter Eric Roth make the mistake of showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers – it's a mistake because its graphic power seems more exploitative than cathartic – but they otherwise thankfully refrain from pulling out all the stops.

Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?

Don't go to this movie on a full stomach. Better yet, don't go.

I don't mean to imply that this film is any good or that it contains an ounce of genuine insight. But as a template for the big-baby genre, it's invaluable.

Barely engaging spy thriller.

Best when it's morphing into seriousness. Too often the comic bits seem like sops to the audience.

Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.

It’s possible to enjoy White Sands from moment to moment because the actors are avid and the New Mexico locations are delicately beautiful. Still, there’s something disconcerting about this anything-for-effect style of filmmaking. It doesn’t add up to anything satisfying.

Shriner's direction has an Afterschool Special blandness, but those mechanical owls are quite realistic. While the film was in production Hiaasen said that he had "nightmare visions of the gopher in 'Caddyshack.' " He needn't have worried.

Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.

Both as a writer and as a man, Salinger was nothing if not unconventional. Rebel in the Rye is so tasteful that it practically slides off the screen.