Robert Koehler

Captures the excitement of lightning in a bottle.

Made with gentle grace and sensitivity.

Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.

Uninspired star turns from Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman suggest something less than full belief in this quickly forgettable thriller.

The effect is often soporific.

Most discomforting of all is the sight of world-class actors stuck in such threadbare material.

Fortunately bypassing a re-run of "Days of Wine and Roses" but finding little inspiration to freshen an old concept, this tragedy about a lover and a friend helplessly watching the writer's fade-out comes up short of its potential impact.

In its overwhelmingly artificial depiction of the street gangs that ruled Brooklyn's mean streets in the 1950s, Deuces Wild draws from a phony deck.

Awful and subversively spunky at the same time.

Gains much greater texture from the intercutting between the two performers than had it remained simply a Seinfeld promotional project.

Launched with a few surprising touches and a disturbingly bloody prelude, horror pic collapses under the weight of its own dull conception and weak direction, dialogue and character portraits.

Burdened with a complex flashback structure and an unemotional core, this multi-decade saga of an imprisoned Iranian poet and his family has surprisingly little resonance.

Superbly researched and constructed, pic is an improvement over last year's "The Weather Underground," which backed away from judging political terror on the left.

The latest and most calculated re-do on the formulaic fantasy of an innocent conquering Gotham.

An especially insipid example of the Hollywood message movie.

Sincere but fairly soft piece of ennobling journalism that gives a positive spin to some of Africa's seemingly intractable problems.

Often mocked and rarely understood, the movement in communal living that blossomed with Flower Power in the '60s gets its most honest appraisal yet on film with Jonathan Berman's Commune.

De Niro's reunion with helmer Michael Caton-Jones doesn't stoke the same fire as their previous pere-fils drama, "This Boy's Life," partly because De Niro's latest portrayal of a troubled cop feels so familiar.

The balance between feeling and distance is never a contradiction here but, rather, the dynamic that makes this film an especially humanistic entry in the Maysles canon.

Utterly lacking the drive and roller-coaster energy expected of top action pics, this latest try at repackaging "Speed" is a Kmart version of a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.

There are stiff politicians and there are stiff political movies, but the rigidity of the White House-based fairy tale that is First Daughter is in a category even pollsters may have a hard time assessing.

Admirably jostles and upends the fatigued killer-for-hire genre.

Demonstrates no improvement or enhancement. But the action this time is even less inspired than past battles

Mansion's drab comic strokes and narrative render the movie almost superfluous.

A sweethearted trifle.

Although Erica Beeney's script beat out more than 7,000 entries, the screen version dulls her potentially distinctive voice with deadly doses of sentimentality.

Combines the most rudimentary of Catholic-inspired good vs. evil plots with visual effects that would barely pass muster in episodic TV.