Roger Ebert

The screenplay shows signs of being inspired by personal memories that still hurt and are still piling up in Michael's mind. Fair enough, but the film doesn't sort this out clearly, and we experience vignettes in search of a story arc.

Outlander is interesting as a collision of genres: the monster movie meets the Viking saga. You have to give it credit for carrying that premise to its ultimate (if not logical) conclusion.

As a viewer, we intuit that it is more, or less, than it seems: That in some sense, the whole project is a scam.

The first-time director is Mateo Gil, known for the screenplays of "Open Your Eyes," "The Sea Inside" and "Agora." Ironic, that the film's weakness is its screenplay.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

Because the real world scenes are in 2-D and the dream and fantasy scenes are in 3-D, we get an idea of what the movie would have looked like without the unnecessary dimension. Signs flash on the screen to tell us when to put on and take off our polarizing glasses, and I felt regret every time I had to shut out those colorful images and return to the dim and dreary 3-D world. On DVD, this is going to be a great-looking movie.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

Winner should have told us a lot more about his lawman, or a lot less.

The film itself remains pure fantasy. Sure, it's nice to think you could outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors simply because you'd been to college and read Thoreau, but the truth is they'd nail you before you got across the river and into the trees.

The movie tells us nothing we haven't heard before.

Its characters are bloodless, their speech monotone. If there are people like this, I hope David Cronenberg's film is as close as I ever get to them. You couldn't pay me to see it again.

He seems fueled more by anger and ego than spirituality and essentially abandons his family to play with his guns. It's intriguing, however, how well Butler enlists our sympathy for the character.

The characters are all over the map, there are too many unclear story threads, our sympathies are confused, and there's an unconvincing showdown in which the story's lovingly developed ambiguities are lost.

You can enjoy U-571 as a big, dumb war movie without a brain in its head.

Ty Cobb was by many accounts a mean-tempered, vicious, drunken, wife- beating, racist SOB who was impossible to spend any length of time with, and the movie Cobb faithfully represents those qualities, especially the last one.

There is a certain lackluster feeling to the way the key characters debate the issues, and perhaps that reflects the suspicion of the filmmakers that they have hitched their wagon to the wrong cause.

All this is presented in an expensive, good-looking film that is well-made by Scott Derrickson, but to no avail.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

The special effects are all there, nicely in place, and the production values are sound, but the movie is dead in the water. It tells an amazing and preposterous story, and it seems bored by it.

Takes us all the way to the rim of space only to bog us down in a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.

Whatever the faults of Tank Girl, lack of ambition is not one of them.

Sweet and warm-hearted, but there is another film with a similar story that is boundlessly better, and that is "My Dog Skip" (2000).

There are better movies opening this weekend. There are better movies opening every weekend. But Slither has a competence to it, an ability to manipulate obligatory horror scenes in a way that works.

What we have here is a dirty soap opera. It is dirty because it intends to be, but it is a soap opera only by default.

The movie doesn't seem sure what tone to adopt, veering uncertainly from horror to laughs to romance.

Bronson is a first-rate action star with a catlike grace and a nice air of menace. But here, trying to land a helicopter after only a few lessons on how to fly it, or staging a phony rape scene to distract prison guards, Bronson is given a sort of incompetency he doesn't wear well. We believe him more easily when he's strong, silent and infallible.

It isn't a great movie, but it looks terrific and makes me look forward to the next film by its director, David Ren. He has a good eye.

The movie makes the same mistake as some of the characters in it: It treats these two guys like lovable old characters instead of listening to what they really have to say.

Lars von Trier exhibits the imagination of an artist and the pedantry of a crank in Dogville, a film that works as a demonstration of how a good idea can go wrong.

The movie turns cruel and ugly, and hasn't paid the dues to earn its last scenes. Parigi had me there for a while, but when he lost me, it was big time.

Any movie that employs an oven mitt and a plumber's friend in a childbirth scene cannot be all bad, and I laughed a lot.

At the end of the movie we are conscious of large themes and deep thoughts, and of good intentions drifting out of focus.

The movie comes to life when Murphy and Wilson are trading one-liners, and then puts itself on hold for spy and action sequences of stunning banality.

Innocent Blood is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities. More's the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.

The film is not a compelling drama so much as a poignant observation of a sad situation.

In The Hottest State, Hawke uses fairly standard childhood motivations for his unhappiness and reveals too little real interest in the Sara character.

All through the movie, Scream 4 lets us know that it knows exactly what it's up to - and then goes right ahead and gets up to it.

On some dumb fundamental level, Airport kept me interested for a couple of hours. I can't quite remember why. The plot has few surprises (you know and I know that no airplane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed). The gags are painfully simpleminded (a priest, pretending to cross himself, whacks a wise guy across the face). And the characters talk in regulation B-movie clichés like no B-movie you've seen in ten years.

It may not be brilliant, but who would you rather your kids took as a role model: Crocodile Dundee, David Spade or Tom Green?

The screenplay, written by first-time director Marc Fienberg, fervently stays true to an ancient sitcom tradition.

After the bite and freshness of "Analyze This," Mickey Blue Eyes plays like an afterthought.

All of this grows tiresome. We're given no particular reason at the outset of The Loneliest Planet to care about these people, our interest doesn't grow along the way, the landscape grows repetitive, the director's approach is aggressively minimalist, and if you ask me, this romance was not made in heaven.

When I heard that John Cusack had been cast for this film, it sounded like good news: I could imagine him as Poe, tortured and brilliant, lashing out at a cruel world. But that isn't the historical Poe the movie has in mind. It is a melodramatic Poe, calling for the gifts of Nicolas Cage.

The story touches many themes, lingers with some of them, moves on and arrives at nowhere in particular. It's not a story so much as a reverie about possible stories.

The movie remains an actor's exercise--too much dialogue, too much time in the room, too much happening offstage, or in the past, or in memory, or in imagination.

Might be fun for younger teenagers who want to be reassured that people in their 30s still behave like younger teenagers.

Lethal Weapon 4 has all the technical skill of the first three movies in the series, but lacks the secret weapon, which was conviction.

Pesci has a lot of scenes that strike just the right note.

The first five or 10 minutes of Airplane II -- The Sequel are genuinely funny -- so funny I thought maybe this movie was going to work. That turned out to be a premature hope. The new inspirations quickly run out, and Airplane II turns into a retread, plundering the same situations and characters that made the original Airplane so funny.

Heaven help the unsuspecting families who wander into Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights expecting a jolly animated holiday funfest.

Grumpier Old Men is not terrifically compelling, although it is probably impossible not to enjoy Matthau and Lemmon acting together.

The movie's funny in the opening scenes and then forgets why it came to play.

Now let me ask you: Can you think of any reason the character John Miller is needed to tell his story? Was any consideration given to the possibility of a Chinese priest? Would that be asking for too much?

The photography is undeniably beautiful, but there comes a point when we've had too many mountains and too little plot. All that holds the movie together is the screen persona of Eastwood, who is so convincingly tight-lipped that sometimes you have the feeling he knows what's going on and just won't tell.

The film chronicles their criminal career in a low-key, meandering way; we're hanging out with them more than we're being told a story.

[Stone] gives us provocative notes and sketches but not a final draft. The film doesn't feel at ease with itself. It says too much, and yet leaves too much unsaid.

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.

There is a lack of drama and telling detail. When events happen, they seem more like set pieces than part of the flow.

Batman & Robin, like the first three films in the series, is wonderful to look at, and has nothing authentic at its core.

A long, flat, curiously muted film about the heavyweight champion. It lacks much of the flash, fire and humor of Muhammad Ali and is shot more in the tone of a eulogy than a celebration. There is little joy here.

Bound by Honor contains some effective performances, some moments of deeply felt truth, and a portrait of prison life that I assume is accurate. What seems to be missing is a clear idea of why the movie was made, and what the director, Taylor Hackford, wanted to say with it.

The material might have promise as a black comedy, but its attempt to put on a smiling face is unconvincing.

Seems Like Old Times is another one of those near-misses that leaves a movie critic in a quandary. It's a funny movie, and it made me laugh out loud a lot, but in the final analysis it just didn't quite edge over the mystical line into success.

The concept is inspired. The execution is lame. Anger Management, a film that might have been one of Adam Sandler's best, becomes one of Jack Nicholson's worst.

Big Top Pee-wee is as guileless and cheerful as Pee-wee’s first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s not as magical. It has too much plot, somehow, and not enough wide-eyed discovery in which everything is new to Pee-wee every moment of his life. He seems almost from Earth in this movie.

The problem with Die, Mommie, Die, a drag send-up of the genre, is that it spoils the fun by making it obvious.

The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.

Skillfully made, but it's not necessary...On the other hand, should you see it, the time will pass pleasantly.

Coffy is slightly more serious and a little more inventive than it needs to be.

A typical Kitano film in many ways, but not one of his best ones. Too many of the killing scenes have a casual, perfunctory tone.

This is a bitter, sour movie about two people who are only marginally interesting.

I was not bored during A Good Man in Africa. Just uncomfortable, as the characters thrashed about in search of a purpose.

It's based on some DC Comics characters, which may explain the way the plot jumps around. We hear a lot about graphic novels, but this is more of a graphic anthology of strange occult ideas.

Great Balls of Fire gives us a Jerry Lee Lewis who has been sanitized, popularized and lobotomized. Even then, the story ends in 1959 - before most of the events for which "The Killer" became notorious.

A home invasion thriller that may set a record for the number of times the characters point loaded pistols at one another's heads. First we're afraid somebody will get shot. Then we're afraid nobody will be.

About as good as a movie with these characters can probably be, and I am well aware that I am the wrong audience for this movie.

A rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure from one of the most gifted comic filmmakers around.

The Mephisto Waltz, which is inferior to "Rosemary's Baby" on all sorts of fundamental levels like direction, photography and acting, is fatally inferior in its understanding of the supernatural. If a horror movie is to be taken seriously, it has to pretend to take horror seriously. And this one doesn't.

Benton has made better movies, but this one has no organic reality.

An odd, desperate film, lost in its own audacity, and yet there are passages of surreal beauty and preposterous invention that I have to admire. The film doesn't work, and indeed seems to have no clear idea of what its job is, and yet (sigh) there is the temptation to forgive its trespasses simply because it is utterly, if pointlessly, original.

A conspiracy thriller that begins well and makes good points, but it flies off the rails in the last 30 minutes.

The movie isn't as funny or entertaining as "Evil Dead II," however, maybe because the comic approach seems recycled.

The movie was produced by Seinfeld, and protects him. The visuals tend toward the dim, the gray and the washed-out, and you wish instead of spending a year with their store-boughts, they'd spent a month and used the leftover to hire a cinematographer.

The movie never convinced me that much chemistry existed between the cop and the ex-con. And, for that matter, I wasn't much moved by Macaulay Culkin's performance as the smart little waif.

Bertolucci can direct great set pieces, of course, and some of his biggest scenes (like the outdoor dances that are his favorites) are spectacular. But he needs well-defined characters to anchor his stories, and he seems more confident when he drills into their psyches instead of spreading himself all over the ideological map.

To be fair, this tawdry dose of pulp fiction ("inspired by real events") is not a complete waste of time. It offers the marginal pleasure of an all-star cast slumming their way through a thicket of routine plotting, almost laughable dialogue and the constant blaze of tommy guns.

The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.

The Jessica Lange character is wrong because she isn't selfish enough. In the original, the character was a tough dame who had married the fat spider for money, and was looking out only for herself. Here the character's motivations are marred by soft bourgeois values like affection and career dreams. The original film had a good girl and a bad girl; the Lange character wants to be both.

There's no way I can recommend this movie to anyone much beyond the Tooth Fairy Believement Age, but I must testify it's pleasant and inoffensive, although the violence in the hockey games seems out of place.

Watching the movie, I enjoyed the settings, the periods and the acting. I can't go so far as to say I cared about the story, particularly after it became clear that its structure was too clever by half.

A plot like this is so hopeless that only acting can redeem it. Lopez pulls her share of the load, looking geuninely smitten by this guy and convincingly crushed when his secret is revealed. But McConaughey is not the right actor for this material.

The movie is afraid to be - yes - Politically Incorrect. It isn't really critical of anybody's behavior, and it sketches its campus fringe groups in broad, defanged generalizations. Beneath its facade of contemporary politics, it's another formula film in which the kids want to party and get drunk, and the adults are fuddy-duddies.

It's just a sound-and-light show, linked to the marketing push for Pokemon in general.

There are some nice things in "Slamdance." Hulce has a certain dogged charm as the hero who draws cartoons in the spirit, if not the style, of Gary Larson, and who is extremely upset that there is a dead body in his apartment. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a sound, three-dimensional performance as the ex-wife who has to decide if this guy is worth the trust - and the trouble. And Harry Dean Stanton remains quintessentially himself.

The opening scenes of Johnny Dangerously are so funny you just don't see how they can keep it up. And you're right: They can't. But they make a real try. The movie wants to do for gangster films what Airplane! did for Airport, and Top Secret! did for spy movies.

It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won. I might not have cared in a better movie, either, but I might have been willing to pretend.

Children should not be allowed within a mile of this film, but it will appeal to "Jackass" fans and other devotees of the joyously ignorant.

Contraband is based on an Icelandic thriller named "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," which leads you to suspect that neither New Orleans nor Panama City is particularly essential to the plot. That film starred Baltasar Kormakur, who is the director of this one, perhaps as a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.

A screenplay with the depth and insight of a cable-TV docudrama.

Simon's not in a lighthearted mood, and so the silliness of the story gets bogged down in all sorts of gloomy neuroses, angry denunciations, and painful self-analysis.

Spike Lee misjudged his material and audience. He doesn't find a successful way to express his feelings, angers and satirical points.

At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.

Life with Mikey is a good-hearted retread of many other movies about friendship between a hapless adult and a wise child.

Little Darlings really wants to be two movies at once: A fairly serious film about teenagers and sex, but also a box-office winner like "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs." That's why we get awkwardly forced comedy like the food-fight scene. The movie also suffers from uncertain direction.

There are images of astonishing beauty in Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi, sequences when we marvel at the sights of the Earth, and yet when the film is over there is the feeling that we are still waiting for it to begin.

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. The Iron Lady fails in both of these categories.

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.

It's a rambling, unfocused biography of Wyatt Earp, starting when he's a kid and following his development from an awkward would-be lawyer into a slick gunslinger. This is a long journey, in a three-hour film that needs better pacing.

Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.

Like the original 1963 movie and the TV series, it expects us to be endlessly amused by a dolphin that does things that are endless but not amusing.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

The movie is more concerned with the story line (premiere-fire-threat-rescue) than with painting the time and place.

Why didn't they make a baseball picture? Why did The Natural have to be turned into idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford? Why did a perfectly good story, filled with interesting people, have to be made into one man's ascension to the godlike, especially when no effort is made to give that ascension meaning?

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

Possesses the art and craft of a good movie, but not the story.

The film's redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.

As someone who believes most movies have too much music, I was surprised to find myself noticing how little is in Mr. Destiny. In the quiet, an innocent little fable grows, blossoms and is harvested, to no great moment.

For Your Eyes Only is a competent James Bond thriller, well-crafted, a respectable product from the 007 production line. But it's no more than that.

There is something intrinsically silly in this story, and unless you can find a way to believe in it at some level (even on the level on which Peter Pan believes in fairies), it's just a lot of feathers. Many of them from horses.

It tries to be the best bad movie that it can be.

A splendid movie while its hero is preparing for his flight and actually experiencing it, but it's not nearly as interesting once he descends to earth.

The Little Drummer Girl lacks the two essential qualities it needs to work: It's not comprehensible, and it's not involving.

A love story about two people with no apparent chemistry, whose lives are changed by a stranger who remains an uninteresting enigma. No wonder it just sits there on the screen.

It's never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

Its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with.

It's so determined to be crude, vulgar and offensive that after a while I grew weary. Abbott and Costello used to knock out funnier movies on this exact intellectual plane without using a single F, S, C, P or A word.

The charisma of such actors as Gandolfini, Pitt, Liotta and Jenkins depends largely on their screen presences and our memories of them in better roles.

The movie is curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn't work.

Actually two movies, one wretched, the other funny. The funny one involves the Jennifer Tilly scenes.

OK, OK. They're good dancers, and well-choreographed. You can see the movie for that and be charitable about the moronic plot.

It might work on video for viewers who glance up at the screen from time to time. The more attention you pay to it, the less it's there.

The kind of performance Penn delivers in I Am Sam, which may look hard, is easy, compared, say, to his amazing work in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown."

Lacks some of the idiocy of your average teenage rom-com. But it doesn't bring much to the party. It sort of ambles along, with two nice people at the center of a human scavenger hunt. It's not much of a film, but it sort gets you halfway there, like a Yugo.

Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

Kafka, as subject or character, simply doesn't fit into the world of this film. Soderbergh does demonstrate again here that he's a gifted director, however unwise in his choice of project.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.

Brando doesn't so much walk through this movie as coast, in a gassy, self-indulgent performance no one else could have gotten away with.

Competent formula entertainment, but doesn't make that leap into pure barminess that inspired "Anaconda."

All of the characters are treated sincerely and played in a straightforward style. It's just that we don't love them enough.

It's strange about Stir Crazy. We go in with big expectations, and we laugh so much at the beginning that we're ready for the movie to launch itself as a hit. And then it all goes flat and we come out disappointed.

There are a lot of logical gaps in this movie.

The movie's fatal flaw is to treat her [Moore] like a plucky Sally Field heroine. That throws a wet blanket over the rest of the party.

The comedy bogs down in relentless predictability and the puzzling overuse of naughty words.

As we switched relentlessly back and forth between A and B, I found that I wasn't looking forward to either story.

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there.

Dad is a case of a movie with too much enthusiasm for its own good. If the filmmakers had only been willing to dial down a little, they would have had the materials for an emotionally moving story, instead of one that generates incredulity.

Follows the "Lock, Stock" formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song.

D. C. Cab is not an entirely bad movie -- it has its moments -- but if it had used more actual taxi-riding incidents and more recognizable driver types, it could have been a little masterpiece.

I praised "Lovely & Amazing," which also features a romance between an adult woman and a teenage boy. But "Lovely & Amazing" is about events that happen in a plausible world (the adult is actually arrested). Tadpole wants only to be a low-rent "Graduate" clone.

The movie cuts back and forth between two preposterous plot lines and uses the man on the ledge as a device to pump up the tension.

You may be able to find parallels between these characters and those in "The Breakfast Club." On the other hand, you may decide life is too short.

There may be possibilities here, but they're lost in the extraordinary boredom of a long third act devoted almost entirely to loud, pointless and repetitive action.

Wants to make larger points, but succeeds only in being a story of derangement.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.

Begins with a thought-provoking idea from Philip K. Dick, exploits it for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it.

Spacey does what can be done with the material, but it never achieves takeoff velocity.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

Not realizing that Inkheart is based on a famous fantasy novel, I had the foolish hope the movie might be about books. No luck. Wait till you hear what it's about.

What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle.

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.

Maggie, Eric's mother, and Angie the manager are the most fully realized characters in the movie, which doesn't offer a single positively drawn male homosexual.

The screenplay by Kaufman, Crichton and Michael Backes is not about much of anything important, and Connery's deep penetrating wisdom takes away some of the suspense: If he knows everything that's going to happen, why keep us in the dark?

Timecop, a low-rent "Terminator," is the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.

I won't tell you I didn't enjoy parts of Bad Company, because I did. But the enjoyment came at moments well-separated by autopilot action scenes and stunt sequences that outlived their interest.

The stars are Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep -- arguably the two most distinguished American movie actors under fifty. They have a genuine chemistry together on the screen and undeniable charisma. And that's it in this movie, which gives them not one memorable line of dialogue, not one inventive situation, not one moment when we don't groan at the startling array of clichés they have to march through.

The movie feels so plotted, so constructed, so written, that I found myself thinking maybe they shouldn't have filmed the final draft of the screenplay. Maybe there was an earlier draft that was a little disorganized and unpolished, but still had the jumble of life in it.

It looks good, it moves quickly and it is often a jolly good time. As mindless swashbuckling in a well-designed production, it can't be faulted. The less you know about the British Empire and human nature, the more you will like it, but then that can be said of so many movies.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.

Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.

All of the cliches are in the right places, most of the gags pay off and there are moments of real amusement as the Australian cowboy wanders around Manhattan as a naive sightseer. The problem is that there's not one moment of chemistry between the two stars.

This is a good idea for a movie. Unfortunately, in Brainstorm it remains basically an idea. The characters take such a secondary importance to the gadget that we never feel much for them.

Meryl Streep is indeed poised and imperious as Miranda, and Anne Hathaway is a great beauty who makes a convincing career girl. I liked Stanley Tucci, too, as Nigel... But I thought the movie should have reversed the roles played by Grenier and Baker. Grenier comes across not like the old boyfriend but like the slick New York writer, and Baker seems the embodiment of Midwestern sincerity.

You wouldn't think Hope and Jonathan Winters, those masters of timing, could possibly make a dull and sloppy comedy, but they did, and their method is instructive.

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Parables are stories about other people that help us live our own lives. The problem with the French film Ricky is that the lesson of the parable is far from clear, and nobody is likely to encounter this situation in his own life.

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

I don't think Fat Albert is up to speed; in its meandering, low-key way, it seems destined more for a future on de-ved, returning to the video world where the characters say they feel more at home.

Isn't bad so much as jumbled...You get the sense of too much input, too many bright ideas, too many scenes that don't belong in the same movie.

A clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

The movie has slick production values and a few clever lines, and is an invaluable illustration of the Principle of Evil Marksmanship. This principle, you will recall from my Glossary of Movie Terms, teaches us that in the movies the bad guys can never hit anything with a gun, and the good guys can hardly miss.

My attention was held for the first act or so. Then any attempt at realism was abandoned, and it became clear that the house, and the movie containing it, were devices to manufacture methodical thrills. The explanation, if that's what it was, seemed contrived and unconvincing.

All heart and has the best intentions in the world, but what a bore. It's a beat slower than it should be, it makes its points laboriously, and the plot surprise would be obvious even if I hadn't seen the same device used in exactly the same way earlier this year in "Chasing Liberty."

All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off.

A typical Horatio Alger story, with rats playing more prominent supporting roles than they customarily did in Horatio Alger.

It's a shame the plot is so contrived, because parts of this movie are really pretty good.

The movie is pleasant, sedate, subdued and sweet, but there is not a moment of suspense in it.

The quality of the acting is so much better than the material deserves.

Dolls remains only an idea, a concept. It doesn't become an engine to shock and involve us.

There are two basic weaknesses. One is that the boy supplies the point of view, and yet the story is not about him, so instead of identifying with him, we are simply frustrated in our wish to see more than he can see. The other problem is that Gong Li's character is thoroughly unlikable.

Nothing here about human nature. No personalities beyond those hauled in via typecasting. No lessons to learn. No joy to be experienced. Just mayhem, noise and pretty pictures.

The film is lame comedy surrounded by high-energy blues (and some pop, rock and country music).

A sweet film, mildly pleasant to watch, but it's not worth the trip or even a detour.

Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

A seriously confused film that makes three or four passes at being a better one and doesn't complete any of them.

Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours is an attempt to take a 1950s crime classic and remake it by turning up the heat, but Cimino has set the heat too high, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with dialogue even a True Detective editor would question.

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.

Working within the limitations of the star rating system, I give four stars to the subjects of this movie, and two stars to the way they have been boiled down into cute pictures and sound bites.

The baseball action isn't very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing.

But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.

Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly.

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there.

"Kolya" was as emotionally authentic and original as Dark Blue World is derivative and not compelling.

I could not for a moment believe that this movie was intended as a plausible portrait of how casinos work, how gamblers work, and especially of how casino managers work. To enjoy this movie, you need more than a willing suspension of disbelief. You need a faith in disbelief.

Watching Just My Luck, I wished I were a teenage girl, not for any perverse reason but because then I might have enjoyed it a lot more.

Gets off to a start that's so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it's going to be about gimmicks, not characters.

Poignancy. Lessons to be learned. Speeches to be made. Lost marbles to be rediscovered. Tears to be shed. The conclusion of Hook would be embarrassingly excessive even for a movie in which something of substance had gone before.

Not a very entertaining movie; it's a long slog unless you're fascinated by the undercurrents.

I am not a mind-reader and cannot be sure, but I think a lot of children are going to look at this movie with perplexity and distaste. It's just not much fun.

A pointless exercise in "shocking" behavior.

It doesn't even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind -- a big, heavy lump. But in the midst of it, like a visitor from another movie, Lee Marvin desperately labors to inject some flash and sparkle. And he succeeds in bringing whole scenes to life. A good actor can do this, but it's a waste when he must.

El Crimen Perfecto has energy, color, spirit and lively performances, but what it does not have are very many laughs.

Mad City might have been more fun if it had added that extra spin--if it had attacked the audience as well as the perpetrators. As it is, it's too predictable.

So enigmatic, oblique and meandering that it's like coded religious texts that requires monks to decipher.

This movie has a screenplay written and filmed by people who must think nobody in the audience has ever seen a movie before.

All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.

Take away the basic human appeal of Fox and his love interest, Gabrielle Anwar, and what you have left wouldn't fuel 22 minutes of a sitcom.

This is the kind of movie that some kids would probably enjoy - it's filled with technology, special effects and action. But it just doesn't make any sense. And It lacks the wit to have fun with its time travel paradoxes, as last year's wonderful Time After Time did. It just plows ahead. Or behind. Or somewhere.

If you have seen ads or trailers suggesting that horrible things pounce on people, and they make you think you want to see this movie, you will be correct. It is a competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People Movie. If you think Frank Darabont has equaled the "Shawshank" and "Green Mile" track record, you will be sadly mistaken.

What I felt as I watched Scooby-Doo 2 was not the intense dislike I had for the first film, but a kind of benign indifference.

The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.

This is a fairly bad movie, and yet at the same time maybe about as good as it could be. There may not be an 8-year-old alive who would not love it.

I don't require that a movie have a message, but in a message movie it is helpful to know what the message is.

I'm not sure the movie should have pumped up the melodrama to get us more interested, but something might have helped.

Starting Over actually feels sort of embarrassed at times, maybe because characters are placed in silly sitcom situations and then forced to say lines that are supposed to be revealing and real. When the gags do work, and occasionally they do, it's more a matter of acute social observation than good writing.

Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!

The director, Jared Hess, who made "Napoleon Dynamite," a film I admit I didn't get, has made a film I don't even begin to get.

A disjointed thriller with two many characters rattling around.

Chronicles doesn't pause for much character development, and is in such a hurry that even the fight scenes are abbreviated chop-chop sessions.

Comforting, even soothing, to those who like the old songs best. It may confuse those who, because they like the characters, think it is good. It is not good. It is skillful.

It takes a lot of patience to watch The Russia House, but it takes even more patience to be a character in the movie. To judge by this film, the life of a Cold War spy consists of sitting for endless hours in soundproof rooms with people you do not particularly like, waiting for something to happen. Sort of like being a movie critic.

This movie, for all its noble intentions, is a bore.

There are good lines of Wayne dialog and good exchanges with Ben Johnson (as the cook) and some scenes in which you can see that even Wayne thinks Gabriel looks ridiculous as an Indian. And these scenes help pass the time and help you forget how wooden and uninteresting Hudson is. Which is pretty wooden and uninteresting indeed.

I would have loved to see a genuine love story involving Ice Cube, Nia Long, and the challenge of a lifelong bachelor dating a woman with children. Sad that a story like that couldn't get made, but this shrill "comedy" could.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.

If you want to see a great movie about a couple of kids endangered by a sinister guardian, rent "Night of the Hunter." Watching The Glass House has all the elements for a better film, but doesn't trust the audience to keep up with them.

It has some of the simplicity and starkness of classical tragedy, but what made me impatient was its fascination with the macho bloodlust of the two families.

The Punisher is so grim and cheerless, you wonder if even its hero gets any satisfaction from his accomplishments.

Waters follows these characters through their 15 minutes of fame without ever churning up very much interest in them.

An unconvincing, harmless action movie that at its best moments is a pale echo of "Raiders."

Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity.

It's a kid movie, plain and simple. It didn't do much for me, but I am prepared to predict that its target audience will have a good time. I'm giving it two stars. If I were 8, I might give it more.

Suffers from a fatal misapprehension. It thinks it is about date rape, when actually it is about alcoholism.

The message behind all of this is difficult to nail down. Mars and Venus? Adults who haven't grown up? The last fling syndrome? Doing what you want instead of doing what you must?

What we get in Analyze That are several talented actors delivering their familiar screen personas in the service of an idiotic plot.

It wants to make Stuart Sutcliffe the focus of the film, and it’s never able to convince us there’s a story there.

The problem with "FD3" is since it is clear to everyone who must die and in what order, the drama is reduced to a formula in which ominous events accumulate while the teenagers remain oblivious.

I felt too much of the movie consisted of groups of characters I didn't care about, running down passageways and fighting off enemies and trying to get back to the present before the window of time slams shut.

The material never really takes hold. It seems awkward. It lacks fire and passion. Watching it was like having a pale memory of a vivid experience.

I didn't much like the first film, and I don't much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks.

The movie tells no clear story and has no clear ideas.

It is happy to be goofy.

Star Trek is over for me. I've been looking at these stories for half a halftime, and, let's face it, they're out of gas.

Perhaps because the film makes me feel so crawly, it is actually good. Yet still I cannot like it.

Although Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been praised as a milestone in American literature, this film version brings into question how much of a story it really offers.

Whom do they make these movies for? What exercise in self-deception inspires them to go to such effort and expense for what is obviously going to be a lame exercise in retreadmanship?

Most of the running time is occupied by action sequences, chase sequences, motorcycle sequences, plow-truck sequences, helicopter sequences, fighter-plane sequences, towering android sequences and fistfights. It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.

It will appeal to the large Indian audiences in North America and to Bollywood fans in general, who will come out wondering why this movie, of all movies, was chosen as Hollywood's first foray into commercial Indian cinema.