Roger Ebert

The movie is simply not clear about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. It is heavy on episode and light on insight, and although it takes courage to bring up touchy topics it would have taken more to treat them frankly.

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

Both the lottery scene and the anti-union material seem to be fictionalized versions of material in the powerful documentary "Waiting for Superman," which covered similar material with infinitely greater depth.

On a few occasions it's very funny, but it never quite goes over the top and gets the big laughs it is obviously aiming for.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care.

The more I think about Simon Magus, the less I'm sure what it's trying to say.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie.

A technically proficient horror movie and well acted.

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

The film is bold and passionate, but not subtle, and that is its downfall.

The movie’s a big, slick entertainment, relentlessly ridiculous and therefore never boring for long.

A family movie that some will find wholesome and heartwarming and others will find cornball and tiresome. You know who you are. I know who I am. This is not my kind of movie.

I guess there's an audience for it, and Ice Cube has paid dues in better and more positive movies ("Barbershop" among them). But surely laughs can be found in something other than this worked-over material.

The movie is pretty cornball. Little kids would probably enjoy it, but their older brothers and sisters will be rolling their eyes, and their parents will be using their iPods.

The plot is easily summarized: "Dumb and Dumber Meet Dumbbell."

Sweet Dreams begins with more energy than it is able to sustain.

Unfortunately, I was also convinced that trapped within this 98-minute film is a good 30-minute news report struggling to get out. Shearer, who is bright and funny, comes across here as a solemn lecturer.

We're left with a promising idea for a comedy, which arrives at some laughs but never finds its destination.

The plot becomes a juggling act just when it should be a sprint. And there's another problem: Is it intended as a comedy, or not?

The Warriors is a real peculiarity, a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism. There's hardly a moment when we believe that the movie's gangs are real or that their members are real people or that they inhabit a real city. That's where the peculiarity comes in: I don't think we're supposed to. No matter what impression the ads give, this isn't even remotely intended as an action film. It's a set piece. It's a ballet of stylized male violence.

She's the One plays like an overhaul of “The Brothers McMullen” with a larger budget, and it's time for him to move on.

But, lord, the characters are tireless in their peculiarities; it's as if the movie took the most colorful folks in Lake Wobegon, dehydrated them, concentrated the granules, shipped them to Newfoundland, reconstituted them with Molson's and issued them Canadian passports.

Peter Sellers was a genius who somehow made Inspector Clouseau seem as if he really were helplessly incapable of functioning in the real world and somehow incapable of knowing that. Steve Martin is a genius, too, but not at being Clouseau. It seems more like an exercise.

A film that depends on deceiving us has got to play by its own rules. If we are going to be deceived in general, fine, but then we can't be cheated on particulars.

A film that little kids might find perfectly acceptable. Little, little, little kids. My best guess is, above fourth-grade level, you'd be pushing it.

I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that the new punk version of "Romeo & Juliet" makes of Shakespeare's tragedy.

This is a movie that has its commercial concept written all over it; it's so painstakingly crafted as a product that the messy spontaneity of life is rarely allowed to interrupt.

You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.

Too much self-pity.

Stick It uses the story of a gymnast's comeback attempt as a backdrop for overwrought visual effects, music videos, sitcom dialogue and general pandering. The movie seems to fear that if it pauses long enough to actually be about gymnastics, the audience will grow restless.

Like many other cultural experiments (minimalist art, "Finnegan's Wake," the Chicago Tribune's new Friday section), it is more amusing to talk about than to experience.

People may go to see Eddie Murphy once, twice, three or even six times in disposable movies like Harlem Nights, but if he wants to realize his potential he needs to work with a better writer and director than himself.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

The whole movie is so solemn, so worshipful toward its theme, that it's finally just silly.

The movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.

It’s too much of the same material, spun out into a wearying series of sword fights and romances.

The target audience for "Rugrats" is, I think, kids under 10. Unlike both insect cartoons, the movie makes little effort to appeal to anyone over that age. There is something admirable about that.

It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.

Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from hell.

There are laughs, to be sure, and some gleeful supporting performances, but after a promising start the movie sinks in a bog of sentiment.

Is The Lover any good as a serious film? Not really...I wanted to know more. I believe true eroticism resides in the mind; what happens between bodies is more or less the same, but what it means to the occupants of those bodies is another question.

The performances are strong, although undermined a little by Anselmo's peculiar style of dialogue, which sometimes sounds more like experimental poetry or song lyrics than like speech.

The movie is only 84 minutes long, including credit cookies, but that is quite long enough. All the same, it's fitfully amusing and I have the sense that Spanish-speaking audiences will like it more than I did, although whether they'll be laughing with it or at it, I cannot say.

This movie, in fact, is almost the story of his metamorphosis, from likeable young actor to faceless action hero.

Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

Towelhead presents material that cries out to be handled with quiet empathy and hammers us with it. I understand what the film is trying to do, but not why it does it with such crude melodrama. The tone is all wrong for a story of child sexuality and had me cringing in my seat.

Did I care if Largo Winch won his struggle for control of Winch International? Not at all. Did I care about him? No, because all of his action and dialogue were shunted into narrow corridors of movie formulas.

The film is competently made, and the attractive cast emotes and screams energetically.

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

That it works as well as it does is because the stars, Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, have an easy rapport and some good one-liners, and the film is short and manic.

The most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is.

Has slick production credits and performances that are quite adequate given the (narrow) opportunities of the genre.

True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story.

Repo Men makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

To spend 82 minutes watching Not Another Teen Movie would be a reckless waste of your time, no matter how many decades you may have to burn.

From beginning to end, we've been there, seen that.

What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.

My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.

It fulfills every one of our expectations with a deadening safeness. It is about a man who wants a child so that he will leave something after himself, but it never convinces us that he has a self to leave.

I can't recommend the movie, except to younger viewers, but I don't dislike it. It's "Coach Carter" Lite, and it does what it does.

One wonders how In the Mouth of Madness might have turned out if the script had contained even a little more wit and ambition.

Iron Will is an Identikit plot, put together out of standard pieces. Even the scenery looks generic; there's none of the majesty of Disney's genuinely inspired dog movie, "White Fang."

The film's failure is to get from A to B. We buy both good Sam and bad Sam, but we don't see him making the transition.

There are moments of sudden truth in the film; Freundlich, who also made "The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997), about an almost heroically depressed family at Thanksgiving, can create and write characters, even if he doesn't always know where to take them.

The screenplay feels unfinished, the direction is ambling, but the performances are interesting.

Everyone in The Other Side of the Bed, alas, has the depth of a character in a TV commercial: They're all surface, clothes, hair and attitude, and the men have the obligatory three-day beards.

The beauty of Twilight Zone -- The Movie is the same as the secret of the TV series: It takes ordinary people in ordinary situations and then (can you hear Rod Serling?) zaps them with "next stop -- the Twilight Zone!"

They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of Antitrust if they'd kept one eye on the Goofy Meter.

Steven Spielberg, a gifted filmmaker, should have reimagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.

The actors are splendid, especially Sarah Polley and Sean Penn, but we never feel confident that these two plots fit together, belong together, or work together.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

It must be said that this movie is sweet and innocent, and that at a certain level it might appeal to younger kids. I doubt if its ambitions reach much beyond that.

Seems conventional in its ideas about where it can go and what it can accomplish. You don't get the idea anyone laughed out loud while writing the screenplay. It lacks a strange light in its eyes. It is too easily satisfied.

Individual moments and lines and events in I Heart Huckabees are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement.

This question, which will instinctively occur to many viewers, is never quite dealt with in the film. The photographers sometimes drive into the middle of violent situations, hold up a camera, and say "press!" - as if that will solve everything.

It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.

The movie is mostly about our nasty heroes being attacked by terrifying antagonists in incomprehensible muddles of lightning-fast special effects. It lacks the quiet suspense of the first “Predator,” and please don't even mention the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures, which lacked the subtlety of “Mothra vs. Godzilla.”

The movie might have had a chance if it had abandoned all the false sentiment and simply acknowledged Crawl as the cretin he is. John Belushi would have known how to play this part.

Youngblood is not a bad movie, and indeed has moments of real conviction. But it is doomed by its plot, which is yet another example of what I like to call the Climb from Despair to Victory (CLIDVIC, rhymes with Kid Pic).

The movie is entertaining enough in its own way, and Sean Connery makes a splendid King Arthur, but compared with the earlier films this one seems thin and unconvincing.

The word preposterous is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness.

The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies.

There are forces here you couldn't possibly comprehend...You can say that again.

The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

The movie's strategic error is to set the deadline too far in the future. There is something annoying about a comedy where a guy is strapped to a bomb and nevertheless has time to spare for off-topic shouting matches with his best buddy. A buddy comedy loses some of its charm in a situation like that.

Slight and sometimes wearisome.

The skill of the actors, who invest their characters with small touches of humanity, is useful in distracting us from the emotional manipulations, but it's like they're brightening separate rooms of a haunted house.

Lots of sight gags and one-liners are attempted, but few of them succeed. The cast is talented but stranded in weak material.

If the crime elements in K-9 are routine, the relationship between Belushi and the dog at least has the courage to be goofy.

Each scene works within itself on its own terms. But there is no whole here. I've rarely seen a narrative film that seemed so reluctant to flow. Nor perhaps one with a more accurate title.

As preposterous as the plot was, there was never a line of Hackman dialogue that didn't sound as if he believed it. The same can't be said, alas, for Sharon Stone, who apparently believed that if she played her character as silent, still, impassive and mysterious, we would find that interesting. More swagger might have helped.

Give Shadyac credit: He sells his Pasadena mansion, starts teaching college and moves into a mobile home (in Malibu, it's true). Now he offers us this hopeful if somewhat undigested cut of his findings, in a film as watchable as a really good TV commercial, and just as deep.

There is a curious problem with Birthday Girl, hard to put your finger on: The movie is kind of sour. It wants to be funny and a little nasty, it wants to surprise us and then console us, but what it mostly does is make us restless.

The movie is unconvincing. At the end, Jim is seen going in through a "stage door," and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie.

All of the materials are in place for a film that might have pleased Orwell. But somehow they never come together.

The Crucible is a drama of ideas, but they seem laid on top of the material, not organically part of it.

They (fans) know what they enjoy. They don't want no damn movies with damn surprises. I am always pleased when moviegoers have a good time; perhaps they will return to a theater and someday see a good movie by accident, and it will start them thinking.

Beloved evokes some of the fine moments in the careers of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, but it doesn't re-create them.

The movie's problem is that it loads the casting in a way that tilts the movie in the direction of a Harlequin romance.

It's nice enough, it's sweet, I loved LaPaglia's work, but there's nothing compelling here.

A mushy and limp musical fantasy, so insubstantial it keeps evaporating before our eyes. It's one of those rare movies in which every scene seems to be the final scene; it's all ends and no beginnings, right up to its actual end, which is a cheat.

An ordinary film with ordinary characters in a story too big for it. Life has been reduced to a Lifetime movie.

So determined to be clever and whimsical that it neglects to be anything else.

My problem with Borstal Boy isn't so much with the facts as with the tone.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is as violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises -- a real Grand Guignol of a movie. It’s also without any apparent purpose, unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose. And yet in its own way, the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it’s well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

Watching this film was a cheerless exercise for me. The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it's disgusting.

There's a way to make a movie like The Tourist, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't find that way.

It wants to be a movie in search of a truth, but it's more like a movie in search of itself.

The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.

A Burning Hot Summer failed to persuade me of any reason for its existence.

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.

It makes little sense, fails as often as it succeeds, and yet is not hateful and is sometimes quite cheerfully original.

The movie is probably ideal for those proverbial young girls who adore cats, and young boys, too. I can't recommend it for adults attending on their own, unless they really, really love cats.

He can take a licking and keep on slicing. In the latest Halloween movie, he absorbs a blow from an ax, several knife slashes, a rock pounded on the skull, a fall down a steep hillside and being crushed against a tree by a truck. Whatever he's got, mankind needs it.

[Garai and Luna] must be given credit for their presence and charisma in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and together with the film's general ambiance, they do a lot to make amends for the lockstep plot.

The basic idea of Uncommon Valor is so interesting that it's all they can do to make a routine formula movie out of it. But they do.

The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.

I believe it is as cruel and senseless as the killings in "Elephant," but while that film was chillingly objective, this one seems to be on everybody's side. It's a moral muddle.

A turgid melodrama with the emotional range of a sympathy card.

Compared with the sensational stunts and special effects in the Bond series, The Saint seems positively leisurely. The fight scenes go on too long and are not interesting, the villains aren't single-minded enough, and the Saint seems more like a disguise fetishist than a formidable international operative.

It's not that I don't like it. It's that I don't care.

Alfred Hitchcock called Rope an “experiment that didn’t work out,” and he was happy to see it kept out of release for most of three decades. He was correct that it didn’t work out, but Rope remains one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names.

Since the predator is imaginary but the people who made this film are not, Predator 2 speaks sadly of their own lack of curiosity and imagination.

A step or two down from the first and second, but it has some very funny moments, and maybe that is all we hope for.

An ungainly fit of three stories that have no business being shoehorned into the same movie.

It fails to make us care, even a little, about the characters and what happens to them. There is nothing at stake.

Possibly the funniest movie ever made about Catholicism. It confuses the phenomenon of stigmata with satanic possession.

An efficiently made thriller, cheerfully gruesome, and finally not quite worth the ordeal it puts us through.

The story of Black Rain is thin and prefabricated and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, so Scott distracts us with overwrought visuals.

There is undoubtedly a movie to be made about this material -- a different movie.

The movie itself isn't as interesting as the conversations you can have about it. It duplicates Thomas' miserable world so well we want to escape it as urgently as Thomas does.

Essentially just a promotional film for Jordan as a product. It plays like a commercial for itself.

The movie has terrific if completely unbelievable special effects. The actors had fun, I guess. You might, too, if you like goofiness like this.

It has been written by people who want to prepare kids for the worst.

When the hero, his alter ego, his girlfriend and the villain all seem to lack any joy in being themselves, why should we feel joy at watching them?

Educating Rita, which might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.

Sweet, in its meandering way. It has no meanness in it, no cynicism, no desire to be anything other than what it is, an evocation of the fun of living your life as a skateboarder.

Then they annoy us by trying to deny the attraction while the plot spins its wheels, pretending to be about something.

The first 30 minutes of the movie gave me lots of room for hope. It was fast-moving, it was visually spectacular, it was exotic and lighthearted and filled with a spirit of adventure. But then, gradually, the movie began to recycle itself. It began to feel as if I was seeing the same thing more than once.

This is the kind of film that isn't as much fun to see as it is to hear about.

When the suffering of real children is used to enhance the image of movie stars who fall in love against the backdrop of their suffering, a certain decency is lacking. Beyond Borders wants it both ways -- glamor up front, and human misery in the background to lend it poignancy.

Battle looks like the last gap of a dying series, a movie made simply to wring the dollars out of any remaining ape fans.

It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns and worms. Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.

What Ferrara needs for his next film is a sound screenplay...He has gone about as far as a director can go on pure style.

The movie is a first-time directorial effort by Justin Theroux, a splendid actor, son of the writer Phyllis, nephew of the novelist Paul. He might have done better to have taken on something by them.

Jennifer Garner is indeed a charmer, but she's the victim of a charmless treatment in 13 Going on 30.

This is Spielberg's weakest film since "1941."

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

Too clever by half. It's the worst kind of con: It tells us it's a con, so we don't even have the consolation of being led down the garden path.

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.

Support Your Local Sheriff is a textbook example of the evil influence TV has on the movies. It's essentially a lousy TV situation comedy dragged out to feature length for no good reason.

I guess it's a tribute to The Man With Two Brains that I found myself laughing a fair amount of the time, despite my feelings about Martin.

Everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.

Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.

Here's a case of two actors who do everything humanly possible to create characters who are sweet and believable, and are defeated by a screenplay that forces them into bizarre, implausible behavior.

This movie wasn't made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold 30 million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party.

Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.

Disney continues to make movies like Gus and people continue to pay to see them, but the process seems futile and this time even the mule seems bored.

The Mothman is singularly ineffective as a threat because it is only vaguely glimpsed, has no nature we can understand, doesn't operate under rules that the story can focus on, and seems to be involved in space-time shifts far beyond its presumed focus. There is also the problem that insects make unsatisfactory villains unless they are very big.

For the most part, Halloween II is a retread of “Halloween” without that movie's craft, exquisite timing, and thorough understanding of horror.

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story.

The fight scenes in Bulletproof Monk are not as inventive as some I've seen (although the opening fight on a rope bridge is so well done that it raises expectations it cannot fulfill).

The kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.

What distinguished Stand by Me was the psychological soundness of the story: We could believe it and care about it. Now and Then is made of artificial bits and pieces.

The story is such a compilation of cliches that I hesitate to describe it, for fear of being taken for a satirist.

An intriguing plot is established, a new character is brought on with a complex set of problems, and then all the groundwork disintegrates into the usual hash of preposterous action sequences.

Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we've seen the originals, and these aren't the originals.

So the movie is daring, and well-acted. Yet it isn't very satisfying, because the serious content keeps breaking through the soggy plot intended to contain it.

Mars Attacks! has the look and feel of a schlocky 1950s science-fiction movie, and if it's not as bad as a Wood film, that's not a plus: A movie like this should be a lot better, or a lot worse.

I'm all for movies that create unease, but I prefer them to appear to know why they're doing that. Super is a film ending in narrative anarchy, exercising a destructive impulse to no greater purpose than to mess with us.

There's nothing much wrong with the film; my complaint is that there's nothing much right about it.

A little more zip, and Hero might really have worked. It has all the ingredients for a terrific entertainment, but it lingers over the kinds of details that belong in a different kind of movie.

Reeves has many arrows in his quiver, but screwball comedy isn't one of them.

The movie has a certain mordant humor, and some macho dialogue that's funny. Woods manfully keeps a straight face through goofy situations where many another actor would have signaled us with a wink. But the movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.

Watching the movie made me think of those subteen career novels I used to read in grade school, with titles like Brent Jones, Boy Reporter. They were always about how some kid got a lucky break and got hired by a newspaper, where of course he quickly learned the ropes and scooped the world on a big story, after which he got a telegram from the president and went off to college with a rosy future ahead of him. Those books came from a more innocent time, but Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead has been made in the same spirit.

Tells a pointlessly convoluted version of a love story that would really be very simple, if anyone in the movie possessed common sense.

As an achievement, Computer Chess is laudable. As a film, it's missable.

In this film there is a scene where something is said in English pronounced with one accent, and a character asks, ''What did he say?'' and he is told -- in English pronounced with another accent.

A high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it’s an established brand not protected by copyright.

The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value; is too much fable to be convincing as life.

As a movie, it knows little about men, women or television shows, but has studied movie formulas so carefully that we can see each new twist and turn as it creeps ever so slowly into view.

There are small moments of real humor.

There's a lot of potential charm here, but the director, Emma-Kate Croghan, is so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they're in.

Assembled from the debris of countless worn-out images of the Deep South and is indeed beautifully photographed. But the writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, has become inflamed by the imagery and trusts it as the material for a story, which seems grotesque and lurid.

She’s Having a Baby begins with the simplest and most moving of stories and interrupts it with an amazing assortment of gimmicks. It is some kind of tribute to the strength of the story, and the warmth of the performances by Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, that the movie somehow manages almost to work, in spite of the adornments.

True Colors requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief; it demands a willful abandonment of incredulity.

It proceeds so deliberately from one plot point to the next that we want to stand next to the camera, holding up cards upon which we have lettered clues and suggestions.

In the end, I'm conflicted about the film. As an accessible family film, it delivers the goods. But it lives in the shadow of "March of the Penguins." Despite its sad scenes, it sentimentalizes.

It's one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.

The movie is all the more artificial because it has been made with great, almost painful, earnestness.

Amusing enough to watch and passes the time, but it's the kind of movie you're content to wait for on your friendly indie cable channel.

Here, the charm doesn't happen because the movie doesn't care about them as people. They have little human dimension; they are the tools of the plot, and it's unfair to ask actors to supply qualities that the screenplay doesn't account for.

The sex in the movie is so mild that I assumed the R rating was generated primarily by the gay theme, until I learned the R is in fact because of too many f-words.

If there’s anything worse than a long, slow, boring buildup to a payoff, it’s the buildup without the payoff. This movie doesn’t feel finished.

Of the two co-stars, what I can say is that I’m looking forward to their next films.

The result is a tiresome exercise that circles at great length through various prefabricated stories defined by the advice each couple needs (or doesn't need).

It's a muddled, sometimes-atmospheric effort.

Chop off the last two or three minutes, fade to black, and you have a decent film.

By the end of the movie, I frankly didn't give a damn. There's an ironic twist, but the movie hadn't paid for it and didn't deserve it. And I was struck by the complete lack of morality in Demonlover.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

What's lacking is a little more depth. This is a movie that covers a lot of distance in only 87 minutes.

A brave and ambitious but chaotic attempt at political satire.

Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) If a 9-year-old kid can break your code, don't kill the kid, kill the programmers.

I will say that the attempt to reinterpret the memorable closing shot of "Blood Simple" is so gauche and graceless that I involuntarily moaned in disgust. I docked the film another half-star just for that.

Not very funny, and maybe couldn't have been very funny no matter what, because the pieces for comedy are not in place.

There should be a special category for movies that are neither good nor bad, but simply excessive.

The movie’s failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and special effects, when it might have been more fun to make a satirical comedy about punk teenagers.

Well, you can't fault the actors. That must mean it's the fault of the writer and director. Take is a monotonous slog through dirgeland, telling a story that seems strung out beyond all reason, with flashbacks upon flashbacks delaying interminably the underwhelming climax.

If you don't already know who Bruce Campbell is, it will set you searching for other Bruce Campbell films on the theory that they can't all be like this. Start with "Evil Dead II," is my advice. Not to forget "Bubba Ho-Tep." In fact, start with them before My Name Is Bruce, which is low midrange in the Master's oeuvre.

Because I had, in a sense, already seen this movie, it didn't have surprises or suspense for me, and the actors on their own aren't enough to save it.

It's not technically true to say the movie cheats, but let's say it abandons the truth and depth of its earlier scenes.

It seemed to me that the movie had raised too many serious issues to turn into a visual exercise at the end. It's a set piece when a dramatic scene is needed.

I am not sure why this isn't very funny, but it's not.

Strangely enough, the long-awaited meeting between Connery and Miss Bardot is a flop. They look yearningly at each other a lot, and once he puts his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise no sparks are struck.

Great energy and creativity went into the construction, production and direction of this movie, but it doesn't have a story that does justice to the production.

Wrath of the Titans relentlessly wore me down with special effects so overscale compared to the characters in the film that at times the only thing to do was grin.

Grass is not much as a documentary. It's a cut-and-paste job, assembling clips from old and new anti-drug films and alternating them with pro-drug footage from the Beats, the flower power era and so on.

The movie fails to work up much excitement, and the title song by Bob Dylan is quite simply awful.

Fair Game works as a thriller for anyone who lives entirely in the present.

This movie is, of course, intended as a comedy, and it has some funny moments. But it's just not successful, and I think the reason is that Hamilton never for a second plays Zorro as if he were really playing Zorro... When a movie sets out a create a funny Zorro, that's bringing coals to Newcastle. By playing every scene for laughs, Hamilton has nothing to play against.

This is a disappointing, misguided movie that has all of the parts in place to be a much better one.

There are some good performances here, by Jack Magner and Olson in particular, and some good technical credits, especially Sam O'Steen's editing. It's just that this whole Amityville saga is such absolute horse manure.

There is nothing wrong with the performances. All of the actors are professionals, although none have as much fun as Shelley Winters, who is the actor everyone remembers from the 1972 movie.

Has it come to this? Do we need the additional emotional jolts of blindness, paralysis and amputation in order to accept a story about young love and kids succeeding by luck and pluck? People who are handicapped must find that these movies range from the depressing to the contemptible.

Its moments of fascination and its good performances are mired in the morass of romance and melodrama that surrounds it.

One fundamental problem with the movie is that John Travolta is seriously miscast as a nuclear terrorist. Say what you will about the guy, he doesn't come across as a heavy.

Watching this film I reflected that there are only so many Cracker Jacks you can eat before you decide to hell with the toy.

The film itself is on autopilot and overdrive at the same time: It does nothing original, but does it very rapidly.

Jessica Biel all but steals the show as Stacie.

Slap-happy entertainment painted in broad strokes, two coats thick.

The basic mistake in the movie isn't in the pacing, but in the storytelling. They've made the movie about its less interesting major character.

There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.

There's too much contrivance and not enough plausibility, and so finally we're just enjoying the performances and wishing they'd been in a more persuasive movie.

Bride Wars is pretty thin soup. The characters have no depth or personality, no quirks or complications, no conversation.

The movie seems to be going for a highly mannered, elliptical, enigmatic style, and it gets there. We don't. [15 Feb 1972]

Of these characters, the rival played by Lucy Punch is the most colorful, because she's the most driven and obsessed. The others seem curiously inconsequential, content to materialize in a scene, perform a necessary function and vaporize.

The performances by Miller and Graynor are high-spirited enough that you yearn to see them in worthier material. The potential is there. If there's anything more seductive to Manhattanites than sex, it's a cheap apartment overlooking Gramercy Park.

Blanchett, Crudup and Gambon stand above and somehow apart from the absurdities of the screenplay.

Surprisingly good in areas where it doesn't need to be good at all, and pretty awful in areas where it has to succeed.

If you like the comic strip, now in its 56th year, maybe you'll like it, maybe not. Marmaduke's personality isn't nearly as engaging as Garfield's. Then again, if personality is what you're in the market for, maybe you shouldn't be considering a lip-synched talking animal comedy in the first place.

Predictable to its very core, and in a funny way the predictability is part of the fun. The movie is in on the joke of its own recycling.

Seems curiously unfinished, as if director John Landis spent all his energy on spectacular set pieces and then didn't want to bother with things like transitions, character development, or an ending.