Shawn Levy

Despite the stories' brief running times, they don't manage to generate much interest or make much sense.

Isn't profound or dazzling or groundbreaking. But it's a pleasant, clever and sincere little romp, proof that you don't need to harbor heroic ambitions to create something satisfying.

The single most impressive thing about the film, in fact, is the taste that this shotgun technique gives of the mass simultaneity of the race.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

You find yourself wishing that Apatow had managed a script that was either really funny or about real people instead of this half-baked pseudo-memoir that's neither.

Swell when it purrs, when the three top stars are in full form, but it spits and hisses and screeches too often to take full hold.

It's woeful as a documentary history -- a real missed opportunity.

A film of curiosities and asides, it deliberately eschews plot in favor of character quirk, which is fine in theory and even commendable. But the quirks are lame, the ultimate conflation of story lines is clumsy.

Fiercely acted but made with indifferent craft and no palpable feel for its subject matter, Trucker takes you on a ride from intrigue to indifference.

Noisy, garish, cluttered, simplistic and often dark in content, it nevertheless sings and preens and jokes and tugs at you with such persistent verve that, exhausted, you give in.

A feature film has to be more than just an interesting theme; it needs something that constitutes drama -- conflict, journey, adventure, what have you. The Notorious Bettie Page is a perfect example of a film that has a subject but no story.

Begins with an eye on satire but dissolves quickly into grotesquerie -- and if the first tack was a bit narrow, the second is far too scattershot.

If you're one of those fussy filmgoers who demands that a movie engage somewhat higher body parts -- the heart, say, and the brain -- you'll find only intermittent comfort and joy in this high-concept, low-wattage film.

The storytelling -- the script is co-written by Verhoeven's old collaborator Gerard Soeteman -- is messy, and the result never feels real or human or vital.

Despite a cast of solid actors and a director with one of the most exquisite visual sensibilities in the business, the film is too often flat when we want it to dazzle us.

It's lovely, truly, but so heavy-handed and slipshod that it's probably best enjoyed with the sound off -- an option they're not likely to offer at the movie theater.

While Stallone likely hopes to go out with a bang, this small, manipulative movie doesn't have any real punch to it.

Miscast, constricted, loose in tone and meandering in intent, it has far fewer moments of inspiration than unintended laughter.

For what's essentially a bad movie, Street Kings is fairly tight and energetic.

Schumacher's depictions of street life are cartoonishly ludicrous and riddled with cliches -- a pair of garish hookers, for instance, can't be excused simply because one is played with engaging vigor by Paula Jai Parker.

Alas, none of it, save Kristin Scott Thomas giving a peach of a performance as a political operative, smacks of real life or vitality. Even when it evinces spasms of life, this film is, more or less, a dead fish.

A sour, deflating and ultimately unlikable black comedy about how awful life can be.

There's no reason to actively dislike the film, but that's not enough, not at today's ticket prices. Just because you're not despicable, after all, doesn't mean you're the pick of the litter.

The best thing about the film is the acting of the guys.

In the end, it's a perfectly decent, perfectly vaporous film, pretty but slight, predictable but never incompetent.

There's no doubt that Tarsem's a visionary director. Now he needs to envision a worthwhile script for himself.

Even though it largely succeeds in putting a civil face on some unpalatable material, it lacks the heat and suppleness of the best Shakespeare on film.

The film's best sequences -- the troubles of the young woman -- are gems adrift in a sea of Jell-O.

An intermittently gorgeous and evocative film that's so taken with its trangressively bloody and erotic content, it neglects such fussy niceties as coherent plotting and the creation of characters of middling intelligence, plausible psychology or sympathetic nature.

Tends to beat some plain unfunny material to death.

21 isn't insultingly stupid. But there's a gap between what we're told about its characters and what we can see for ourselves, a gap that gets larger and more frustrating as the film goes on.

The Black Dahlia has sparks of brilliance, swaths of dark intensity, unpredictable crackles of wit, some solid acting. But it's chiefly flat and ambling and dull, insufficient in musculature and overripe with melodrama.

It has all the raw materials for greatness -- a brilliant concept, a sharp cast, the jokes -- and still doesn't come together. You could do a lot worse than Hollywood Ending, but you could also do better.

Had the film been more tempered in its textures, had Cassavetes chosen a surer attitude toward his subjects, it might have been devastating. As it stands, though, it's far more showy than substantial.

There's a handful of good scenes (some of the vengeance that's wreaked is priceless) and it's generally well-played. But the soul of the thing isn't distinct enough from the bitterness it portrays.

The people behind Eight Legged Freaks were absolutely correct not to make it too loopy or too dark. But they ought to have made it too something. Real fun is never this tame.

As it progresses it becomes a sloppy mix of modern and antique, and the limits of its lead actors and its script become evident.

The film is nothing much to look at and has trouble swallowing its own clichs and implausibilities.

It's hooey, but it's hooey that picks up in the second half, not exactly redeeming itself but fitfully engaging.

Though intermittently entertaining, it's too long and rarely insightful in new or meaningful ways.

McGregor is a real charmer, a young Malcolm McDowell with a Scottish lilt; Brain Tufano's photography manages to be both rich and stark at once; Hodge's script has some genuinely arch lines. [03 Mar 1995]

Though it's handsomely made and peppered with seamlessly achieved visual glories, Narnia is ineptly acted, crudely staged and burdened with a score that only a masochist could love.

The result is an overly long, overly cute film that is far too tickled with its own naughtiness. It truly is an instance of if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film.

No matter your opinion on where we're headed, this film will give you some crucial information about where we've been.

Watching it is like filling up on baklava: Later you may feel really guilty, but you don't exactly complain while it's going on.

Never quite catches fire. They take a crackerjack premise and a comely, committed leading lady and turn in a merely OK film.

It's an often lovely, constantly assured film that now and again burps forth a really remarkable vision. But it's also half-nuts -- maybe three-quarters.

The Illusionist might trick some moviegoers into thinking it's clever, deft, old-fashioned fun. But I urge those folks to stay home with a real classic romantic thriller on DVD or cable to remember the difference. This film doesn't even manage to breathe old life into the forms it apes.

The combination of emotional anemia, predictable plotting and tepid language makes what might have been a crackerjack treat play like a soggy piece of popcorn.

A sweet but weightless and witless romantic comedy, Sandler is not only deeply unfunny, he's deliberately unfunny.

Alas, the drama surrounding him (Caine) rarely rouses anything but yawns.

At 118 minutes it's longer than "The Philadelphia Story" or "Annie Hall" or "When Harry Met Sally" or "500 Days of Summer" or, well, you get it. Working from a script by Dan Fogelman that wasn't overly bright or sharp to begin with, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa dawdle and stretch and repeat themselves, until what should have been light and brisk becomes leaden and overdone.

Washington makes it fun, which is about the best it could hope for.

Acted with earnest commitment and scored and edited with jazzy, laconic grace, "Lights" tells us absolutely nothing we haven't heard before -- and often -- in sports films

It's a handsome film, but the pace is continually gummy and the set-ups stiff and artificial. Most crucially, nothing in it vanquishes the sensation that we're being sold something superfluous -- like a service contract for a carton of eggs.

The crudeness with which Mottola made "Superbad" suited that film; here, a similarly rudimentary technique detracts and distracts.

There’s quality throughout, but, visual verve aside, the enterprise is dull, heavy-handed and dispiriting.

It's alternately mind-boggling and patience-testing, mixing astounding sequences of over-the-top invention with scenes of inept acting and indifferent filmmaking.

A dull, uninspiring film that combines pedestrian acting, lackluster special effects and deadly pace with a pseudo-religious theme.

Not much in the way of captivating magic, but all the expected notes are duly played. Hope springs eternal for the next film in the series, though: Columbus is handing the reins over to Alfonso Cuaron, an actual movie director.

There's almost nothing to grab onto. It's like a gorgeous graphic novel with a protagonist and story that vanish utterly from the mind as soon as the last page is turned.

Pleasant and light and builds nicely within its own self-circumscribed intent.

Yes, you can enjoy bits and pieces along the way, more than a few, even. At the end of this journey, though, you feel more exhaustion and relief than catharsis or satisfaction.

Factory Girl lives fast and dies young, but the corpse it leaves isn't really all that good-looking.

A movie that, like its title character, is meandering, unstructured and only dimly aware of what it’s doing.

As the film builds toward a ludicrous finale, it poses a question: Foster is a far better actor than Charles Bronson, and Jordan a much better director than Michael Winner, so why is The Brave One so much less satisfying than "Death Wish"?

As in so many films directed by actors, there's a generosity shown to performance that results in many lifelike moments.

Drowns in flat, clumsy and obvious direction.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

The thrill, alas, is gone -- and Fellini seems to know it better than anyone. [11 Jun 1993, p.15]

Lively, cheeky, dense and, ultimately, too flip, clever and torturously twisted to be fully engrossing.

Though the film occasionally rises to moments of genuine emotion and wit, it slips appallingly into corniness and hokum before coming to an abrupt and unconvincing end.

Strip off the superfluities, and it's a chamber play about people with nothing in common talking about what, at their core, they have in common. A film meant to remind us of our shared humanity mainly unites us in frustration with its thick, gummy progress.

A draggy affair livened occasionally by bursts of color or raw emotion, but just as often convoluted and hackneyed. It's a case of a film taking on, admirably, more than it can chew.

This Diary of a Wimpy kid is too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point.

The Dictator has a few laughs along its bumpy path, but not enough of them to indicate that Cohen has found a means to escape the shadows of his early career and forge a second act for himself.

Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.

Still, if it doesn't go down in film history as a key moment in Roberts' career, it might very well be remembered as a breakthrough for one of its trio of rising stars.

The chief thing he (Susser) has going for him is Gordon-Levitt, whose intense immersion in his overwritten character is laudable if the result isn't exactly likeable.

As it stands, the film is more often self-absorbed than self-aware.

It's a strange, uneven film, hilarious in moments and tin-eared in others, alternately subtle and hammer-handed, acid and dull, as schizophrenic as "Signs" and probably, like that film, best enjoyed in discrete chunks rather than as a whole that needs to be digested equally all at once.

Isn't a bad movie so much as one that feels like an amateur version of material from more accomplished works -- a movie that not only isn't sure what it really is but doesn't seem terribly much to care.

A handsome picture, with lots of nifty borrowings from the "Star Wars" galaxy, but it's never particularly compelling as a story or as a vehicle for emotions, and when it's over you have a feeling of still waiting for it to get started.

An impressive work in many regards -- the acting, the photography, the pace -- but it would've been even more so had Egoyan gone with his gut and been less indulgent of his brain.

That strong presence in the center almost makes Lola Versus watchable even as it starts to get formulaic, preachy and tiresome.

We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

With so much potential, The Valet is disappointingly flat and wan, with few of the moments of cringe-and-laughter-inducing mortification that are Veber's stock in trade.

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.

Incomplete, shrill and smug.

It's a handsome film, and made with verve, but too often the tone wobbles and far, far too many of its jokes hit with a splat.

Tepid, boilerplate production.

Fair Game, a murky potboiler based on memoirs by both Plame and Wilson, makes a hash of these piquant ingredients.

A deeply weird film, accomplished, gripping, disorienting, icily adept and barking mad at once. It makes for invigorating viewing.

Mendes has extraordinary gifts, but he has leveled them at the Wheelers like a firing squad. Strangely, he evinced no particular moralizing agenda when making films about the mob or the military. But put ordinary people in his sights and he's venomous. It's unbecoming -- and it should be worked out in private, not in a movie theater.

Buscemi shoots with a cloudy, melancholic air that suits the material and does nothing to prettify the setting. But you can't sense any of the surprising energy or subversive wit that characterizes his best performances.

As it stands, this is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.

As a director, Hanks makes some nice choices (Larry Crowne lives in a very naturally integrated suburb, for one) but there's little in the film that doesn't feel made-for-TV.

Not a great movie -- not even a great sci-fi action movie based on toys. But it is brisk and eye-catching, it builds to a truly impressive action set piece, and it's the most fully-realized 3D film since "Avatar."