Rene Rodriguez

It's a perfect role for Jolie, whose seductive looks always seem to be concealing something dangerous, even predatory, and she brings out a looseness in Pitt, who fares much better in comedic roles than when playing things straight and stoic (i.e. Troy).

When Ephron gives Ferrell and Kidman a musical number that's supposed to be sweet and uplifting, the movie feels downright creepy.

The movie is sloppy and scattershot, and proud of it. It wears its slipshod, anything-for-a-laugh structure like a badge of honor: Smith is nothing if not self-deprecating.

Six years after its release, "City of God" is still electrifying and fresh: It hasn't aged a bit. City of Men, though, already feels strangely stale.

It's much easier to linger on his youthful idealism than on how that idealism eventually manifested itself. It certainly makes for a much prettier picture. But when your subject is Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara, it is disingenuous.

A psychological thriller in serious need of both psychology and thrills, Cassandra's Dream is a wan, exceedingly minor drama by Woody Allen, who has started to recycle himself in London the way he had long been recycling his New York City pictures.

It's an exploitation B-flick with a grade-A cast. [17 Mar 1995, p.5G]

Turns resoundingly dumb in its last 40 minutes.

Suffers from a fatal lack of purpose. This sleek, visually inventive but frustratingly flat movie is made up entirely of throwaway bits -- occasionally amusing, even ingenious bits. But still, they're just bits.

Certainly pleasant, and occasionally endearing, but it's also strangely empty and unsatisfying, like hearing about someone else's wild dream: You can appreciate the details, but you don't really care how it turns out.

Great actors can do more than carry a movie on the strength of their performances: They can also elevate it to a height it does not necessarily merit, and for much of In the Valley of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones does exactly that.

Like binging on a bottomless box of truffles: Tastes good and sweet at first, but after a while, you start feeling a little green.

Emotes mightily but says precious little.

Aside from the thin characterizations, The Eagle never manages to convey the importance of the heroes' quest.

Bottle Shock often feels out of place on the big screen, but it would probably play a lot better as a weekly half-hour TV show.

The Brothers Grimm gives you plenty to look at, but it's not much to see.

A continuous parade of slaughter.

The movie is an exceedingly slight tale whose entire second half consists primarily of special effects and wonderful set designs.

There's terrific, spontaneous chemistry between Sandra Bullock and Denis Leary. Watching them bounce lines off each other is one of the biggest pleasures of Two If By Sea, a helter-skelter concoction that's part romantic comedy, part heist film and part New England travelogue...But Two If By Sea (which Leary also co-wrote) is a mess in the story department, with so many different elements competing for screen time, its stars' considerable charm ends up too diluted. [15 Jan 1996, p.5C]

An artsy bore.

Although the picture is nominally the story of a man with a murderous temper, it is less a thriller than a metaphor for the plight of illegal immigrants.

This laborious, talky, fleetingly engaging, ultimately silly picture is about as good a movie as anyone was ever going to wring from Dan Brown's inescapable bestseller.

Dragonheart is a silly, foolhardy epic, a movie so thoroughly misconceived it's as if its creators set out to make a big, expensive film few people would want to see -- and one that would frustrate those who did. [31 May 1996, p.5G]

You can only string an audience along for so long with scary masks and sudden appearances at the window, and after a while, the suspense starts seeping out of The Strangers, because you realize that's all there's going to be to the movie.

Evans – always a reliably dynamic and vivacious screen presence – can't do much to bring the character to life. As far as superheroes go, Cap remains a bit of a stiff.

While We’re Young starts off as an empathetic, funny look at middle age and winds up as profound and schematic as a Neil Simon play — or, for the younger set, an episode of "The New Girl."

The Fountain is probably too muddled and half-baked to even attain cult status -- but you can still see what writer-director Darren Aronofsky was striving for, and even if his reach exceeded his grasp, his intentions were both admirable and worthy of respect.

By the halfway mark, even the most devoted Gibson and Foster fans will start wondering when the movie will do something beyond superficially showing off its stars. It's not until the end that you realize that's all Maverick has to offer -- and it's not enough. [20 May 1994, p.G4]

Where the book was preciously and carefully crafted, the movie just feels precious.

After a funny, highly promising start, Don't Come Knocking starts to fall apart, displaying all of Wenders' weaknesses, too.

The movie is pleasant overall and occasionally comes up with a big laugh. When the movie's over, though, it evaporates from memory, just like a one-night stand that didn't go nearly as well as you'd hoped.

The Good Shepherd, for all its noble intentions, manages to make even espionage boring.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough of Brando and Kilmer: Too much screen time is eaten up by the monsters, plotting their perfunctory uprising against their creator. Worse, the confusing climax never comes close to fulfilling the promise of the opening credits sequence (the best of any movie this the summer). But The Island of Dr. Moreau has sublimely weird moments in it that are hard to shake, and for starved horror fans, nowadays you take what you can get. [23 Aug 1996, p.5G]

James Franco looks more bored and distracted in Rise of the Planet of the Apes than he did when he was hosting the Oscars: Watching the movie, I kept waiting for him to pull out his iPhone, aim it at the camera and take a snapshot while mugging sheepishly. Has there ever been a film with a less engaged protagonist?

The movie wants to be an exploration of family ties and the various ways in which the people we love respond in times of crisis, but the drama is unconvincing, the characters are ill-defined, and Fischer, so good on The Office, seems a bit incomplete without Jim at her side.

Fascinating in concept but a disaster in execution.

Stone isn't the straightforward thriller it appears to be, but the alternative turns out to be dull and lifeless. At least the title is apt: Like a rock, Stone has no pulse.

A pastiche so derivative and pointless, it leaves you wishing Allen had not bothered.

Starts out feeling formidable in scope and theme but ends up awfully small and precious.

The movie takes an excessively long time to cover short narrative ground, and the plot is muddled enough to confuse the target audience. [24 Mar 1993, p.E5]

The last 40 minutes test your patience -- and intelligence -- in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does:

The movie is intentionally elusive, like a memory you can’t quite fully recall, but the result has all the depth and weight of a greeting card.

Suffers from an episodic script and an overly long running time plagued by too many dull, laugh-free patches.

The screenplay by W.D. Richter (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) turns Needful Things into a pitch-black comedy -- a rather lifeless one, unfortunately. There are more laughs than scares, though the movie still carries a creepy undercurrent of nastiness that pops up periodically, to great effect. [27 Aug 1993, p.G5]

Here, finally, is a superhero movie your AP English teacher can enjoy.

There's a fine little western lurking inside Open Range: Too bad it gets drowned out by director Kevin Costner's pretentiousness. Almost everything in the movie feels inflated, overblown, drawn out.

Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much.

The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.

If nothing else, the movie proves even the rich and famous make boring home videos.

The result is earnest, admirable and more than a little dull -- a pedestrian movie about a remarkable subject.

A facile treatment of a complicated subject.

It's not that Fear of a Black Hat isn't funny: It is, on occasion. It's just that much of this rap music spoof, done in the style of a mock Spinal Tap documentary, feels woefully out of date. Two years ago, it might have been a hip, must-see comedy: Today, it plays like a warmed-over rerun. [24 Jun 1994, p.G6]

Most of Wells' details are there, and so is the basic premise, but the soul of the thing -- the point -- is missing.

As a director, Talkington has a good sense of pacing: The movie rarely stands still. But too much of Love and a .45 is simply poorly executed rehash. [18 Nov 1994, p.G19]

John Wick reminds you this actor deserves better. Reeves makes the movie entertaining in a background-noise way, but he can’t give it any gravity, even when the filmmakers pull the cheapest trick in the book to get the audience to root for the hero and hiss at the Eurotrash villains. Someone get this man some good work, quick.

The only thing the movie lacks is a pulse.

Notorious excels at showcasing Wallace's music and his magnetism as a performer: It fares less well at giving that music a proper context.

Nowhere near as insightful as Boyz N the Hood, nor as uncompromisingly truthful as Colors, South Central still has some worthy things to say. But the film continually resorts to stock situations to express them. [22 Oct 1992, p.F8]

Oh, what a hollow experience Dark of the Moon is! Bay is so afraid of boring his audience, he pitches every scene at the same high volume right from the first shot, and the effect is exhausting.

A relentless descent into a psychedelic hell, a rambunctious feel-bad epic.

This might have been OK for cable, but as a night out at the movies, it feels like a bit of a cheat.

The Runaways ultimately feels too lethargic and conventional for the wild story it tells.

Jarmusch has never seemed quite this baffling -- or quite this dull.

Too much of this well-acted but dangerously slow thriller feels like a preamble to a bigger, more complicated story, one that never materializes.

Someone apparently forgot to tell Harrison Ford he was starring in a comedy when he was cast in Morning Glory.

Like a lot of the elder Cassavetes' work, She's So Lovely contains moments of truly fine acting, its characters are all sharply drawn, and its story never seems to go anywhere. [29 Aug 1997, p.5G]

The Golden Compass comes close, and its originality cannot be denied, but it never quite crosses over into your heart. It stops at your eyes.

Has a made-for-TV smallness (it will probably be a big hit on cable), and it never quite vanquishes the nagging suspicion that you could be spending your time better elsewhere.

May be the grandest looking film ever made on the subject, but it lacks the most essential element of all: passion.

Not even Sherlock Holmes could make much sense out of the overplotted, murky mess that is "Sherlock Holmes," although Arthur Conan Doyle's legendarily brainy detective would probably never buy a ticket to a movie as elephant-footed as this one.

Never feels like anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon pumped up to big-screen dimensions.

Planet of the Apes is never quite boring -- the movie is constantly giving you something new to look at -- but it's still a disappointingly dull and underplotted ride.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

The movie is quick and breezy for its first half-hour, then seems to grind down to a deadened pace: The actors' routines lose their freshness, and the nonexistent story line becomes apparent. The jokes get worse, too. Fortunately, at 80 minutes, the film is too brief to drag. [21 April 1992, p.E7]

Does the movie bear any relation to the video game? Not much. Do the dinosaur effects steal Jurassic Park's thunder? Keep dreaming. Will kids want to see it? Depends on how big Nintendo fans they are. Super Mario Bros. is like watching somebody else play a video game: It's flashy, colorful and wholly uninvolving. [29 May 1993, p.5]

The more hellish the story gets, the sillier and less involving the movie becomes.

You never really get the sense Zhang is taking the movie seriously, so you can't either. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop proves that American filmmakers aren't the only ones who can bungle remakes of foreign movies.

Mother and Child is good when it takes a harsh, unsparing look at lament and the burdens we carry throughout our lives. Then it goes for your tear ducts, and we're suddenly stranded in Lifetime TV territory.

At heart, The Ghost and the Darkness is essentially Jaws with paws -- at one point, you can see the lions' silhouettes circling under a sea of roiling dry grass. It has all the requisite elements for a sweeping, old-fashioned jungle adventure -- except the adventure. [11 Oct 1996, p.6G]

Depp and Burton are two gifted, like-minded artists whose affinity for oddball characters and humor makes them natural creative partners. But they also enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: Too often, they seem to be making movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.

The third -- and thinnest and weakest and least funny -- installment in Ice Cube's popular Friday series.

Feels like a cobbled collection of ideas and conceits rather than a stand-alone story.

Jingle All the Way is at its best when piling on the slapstick, which director Brian Levant ( The Flintstones ) wisely does often. [22 Nov 1996, p.6G]

The acting is better than Ivy deserves. Barrymore is surprisingly good, bringing the right amount of sexuality and mischief to her performance without coming across as ridiculous. It's tough for someone known mostly as a child actor to break into more adult roles, but she pulls it off. [04 Jun 1992, p.F3]

Set almost entirely in one location and shot in widescreen to accommodate its ensemble cast, The Invitation seems tailor-made for a talented filmmaker who wants to show off skills within the constraints of a small budget. But the script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (who somehow still find work after having written The Tuxedo, R.I.P.D., and Clash of the Titans), is flimsy and nonsensical in the manner of cheap, straight-to-video-not-even-VOD horror pictures, and Kusama’s direction is clumsy and uninspired. She also telegraphs too many of the plot’s twists.

A severe bout of sequelitis afflicts this eagerly awaited but only sporadically amusing follow-up.

If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through.

Plays like a colorful but inert timekiller that you might tolerate while dozing off in front of the TV, but only because you are too sleepy to reach for the remote control.

It's the kind of movie for which the phrase ''you've never seen anything like it before'' was invented. The question is whether anyone would want to.

So superficial and formulaic that even Garner's mega-watt grin can't completely save it.

In The Monuments Men, director George Clooney takes a wild, stranger-than-fiction true story and turns it into a dull, prestigious slog.

The coming-of-age tale The Way, Way Back is sweet, heartfelt and utterly trite and predictable from beginning to end.

Even if you're willing to overlook the preposterous plot holes in its premise, Accepted pushes its luck in its final half-hour.

Lives or dies by your ability to buy the sight of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman snuggling in bed and enjoying hot, torrid sex. This may seem like a superficial approach to such a lofty, serious movie, but it is an insurmountable problem.

Beautifully crafted, intricately plotted and obviously a labor of love. It is also a mess.

Lacks the one element that the filmmakers were most desperately aiming for: A genuine sense of fun.

Jam-packed with plot and characters, Thunderheart nonetheless drags along from scene to scene, never building any momentum or cumulative dramatic effect. It's a dull, muddled whodunit, an exploration of the relationship between Native Americans and white Americans and a tale of soul-searching by an uninteresting character. And none of it works. [3 Apr 1992, p.G13]

It's beautiful to look at, but there's little there to savor.