Shawn Levy

May not carry great emotional or intellectual weight, but, in a slim and fetching way, it's peachy.

Has enough kicks and verve to keep the winter blues at bay, at least for a little while.

It's a deeply uneven film that can't decide if it's a satire, a joke, a thriller or a heartstring-tugger, and in dithering in its tone and its aims it ultimately turns out to be none of the above.

Meadows loses control as he goes along, veering into assorted noodling and sacrificing the knife's-edge clarity of the early going for something arty and artificial.

An absorbing film, acted with real force by all parties and directed with competence and assuredness if something less than inspiration.

The result imparts something of the emptiness of Johnny's existence and, if you're not partial to either the fellow or the technique, might very well drive you up a tree.

A strangely passive film, dutifully ladling out its bits of filmic wizardry and expanding Lewis Carroll’s fantastical mythos in a promising new direction without any palpable sense of glee or verve.

Carrey’s Scrooge is deliciously pinched and credible. As, indeed, is this film -- that is, when it feels like Dickens and not a theme park ride.

Has a sweaty, weary, often intimate feel, with the human aspect dominating the mechanistic. Donner can't help but push it over the top now and again, like a bodybuilder flexing his muscles when he spots a potential mate. But he contents himself with aiming for small virtues more often than grand impact.

For all the technical beauty of Marie Antoinette, there's nobody at home at Versailles.

Less and less a skillfully creepy B-movie and more and more a plea for ecumenical reform.

Silly, simple and sophomoric -- and also intermittently hilarious and, surprise of surprises, directed with unexpected craft.

You ride along with a movie like this with a big, dumb grin on your face and no guilt. Not one of this summer's megabucks movies felt this frisky or fun.

It's a handsome and spry movie, and it might even have managed to be a good one if there were even the least chance of believing that Wood, who can't weigh 145 pounds dripping wet, had the slightest chance of hurting anyone with one of his wee fists.

Spins a complete, thoroughly satisfying yarn from a short-form series.

The story told in Garbo: The Spy is so outlandish that you almost feel as if you're watching a mockumentary. But it appears to be entirely true.

A rather routine thriller that's got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.

While the plot of The Hunted is tiresome and the character development is phlegmatic, the picture holds fascination in its determination to trim away chat and guff and focus on tempo and filmic textures.

You either come into Nacho Libre ready to surrender yourself to Hess' quirks and smirks or you don't. Middle ground is virtually impossible to imagine.

David Lynch's Inland Empire left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.

There is life to The Proposition, though, and brutal, pitiless life it is. If it breathed more (and if Huston had spoken less), it might have been remarkable. As it is, it's monotonous, grim and uneven.

The film wastes itself on silliness and scattered threads before very long, truly squandering a brilliant promise.

A tug-of-war between a bracing vision of a truly infernal crime spree -- complete with engaging whodunit storytelling -- and a sometimes clumsy period drama.

The jokes are sparse and predictable, and the storytelling is, too. But Buscemi and Gershon have great fun with their roles, and Pitt is strangely agreeable about the whole thing. Bully for him.

For all the flash and sparkle, there's little heat. The Dreamers wants to be "First Tango in Paris." It's more like "Last Tango Under Glass."

It's professional, smart, quick-footed and snappy -- enviable traits in both a prizefighter and a nice little B-movie.

There are mysteries and twists in Blood Work, but its real work isn't ratiocination but healing and connection. Outwardly it's a detective story; really it's a tale of the heart.

Tautou is, as ever, radiant and deep and affecting, but a film about such an extraordinary personage as Chanel shouldn’t feel so ordinary and wan.

The film is masterful in many ways, and brilliantly acted by its lead player, Eriq Ebouaney, but it's often overly dense and fast with information, background and ideas.

Privy to virtually all phases of the debacle, the filmmakers have created the behind-the-camera equivalent of a slo-mo crash test.

The effect is to turn a brain-optional shoot-'em-up into a military recruiting commercial, which may not be an accident.

"Waltz" requires you to be on board with it from the start and doesn't often enough rouse itself to magnetize you if you're not.

The increasingly crude plotting and stock dialogue are killers. All the beauty the eye can hold can't, in this case, fool the ear and brain into falling for Coppola's strained tale.

In comparison to others who struggle against real travails (the young Buck Brannaman, say), he (O'Brien) seems spoilt, entitled, impatient, shrill and mean.

Tangled is a lively, funny, deft and delicious musical in the vein of Disney's 1989 classic "The Little Mermaid."

Had Williams chopped away more pointedly at the rambling script, he might've had something memorable.

A charming but only partly satisfying portrait of its subject.

Its heart is never anywhere but in the right place.

It's in its aspiration to depict deceit and obsession, selfishness and recklessness, bitterness, revenge and fury that the film's power lies. There and in Clive Owen's sure and powerful hands.

Wrapping the whole thing in a sentimental ending turns it into a fraud. The Campaign might have been truly -- and appropriately -- scabrous in other hands; those of the "South Park" guys or Mike Judge, say. But director Jay Roach and writers Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy play it safe and down the middle. No actual political contributors or candidates need fear harm.

If you've a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of Snow White and the Huntsman.

Handsome and perky and built around a story so simplistic that it almost feels like it wasn't written down.

There are moments of levity throughout the film, but it’s made with pedestrian craft and feels more like a set-up and a series of vignettes than a compelling yarn. Chiefly, it demonstrates just how accomplished the Coens are even when their films seem offhanded and easy.

There are moments of pleasure, humor and, yes, terror to be had here all the same.

Offers a few laughs and a moment or two of drama, but it's finally more of a conceit -- and a familiar one -- than a film.

They almost got it really right with Lucky Number Slevin, but they also almost got it horribly wrong.

There are movies that reach for the top. There are movies that go over the top. And then there is Smokin' Aces, a slick, shallow and sometimes quite enjoyable action film that is so far beyond over-the-top that it likely mistook the top for the bottom as it burst through it on its way to who knows where.

A breezy, dumb and lightweight film that has the benefit of not trying terribly hard to be about much of anything and succeeding (bravo?).

There is such a thoroughgoing nastiness to the plot and dialogue that the film almost achieves a level of buoyancy.

The film is sugary, simplistic and riddled with cliches -- yet it still manages to absorb you in its story and even carry you with some of its emotions.

It's all polished and slick and credible, but it never truly engages. Perhaps it's because Irving's story is well-known; perhaps it's because of the script's repetitions and tangents; or perhaps it's simply because Hallstrom himself is ambivalent about his protagonist.

The film feels superficial even for something set in the fashion world, and after chronicling Sassoon's unlikely ascent, it all starts to feel air-kissy and fluffy. There is a great story here, though, and Sassoon is undeniably inspirational.

There are wonders here, but there are as many things that just plain make you wonder. By the end you're too addled to be truly moved.

The lack of sentimentality and rhetoric is refreshing. It's a grown-up movie about some harsh facts of life.

Incendies was likely a crackling thing to read, but it's not quite so vivid as a finished film.

It isn't art, it's will-o-the-wisp thin, but it might well make you squirt your soda through your nose. And as there seem to be a number of people willing to pay good money for that sensation, there's glory for you!

It's easy to imagine that some folks will find the film rapturous, but it's equally clear that there are others whom it will drive crazy.

So heavy-handed and blatant in its posturings and so incomplete at 73 minutes that you simply feel like you've been harangued more than educated.

In a world in which "Borat" is a global brand, there's certainly a place for Tenacious D -- who, after all, are merely the greatest band in the world: Just ask 'em.

The quality of the craft at the best moments of the film is undeniable. But it depends, finally, to how well you can embrace a young man named Horn -- a terrific gamble for a film and a subject of such size.

As a film, Inside Job is polished enough, and fueled by piquant indignation, but it's also often scattershot and meandering.

A genuinely handsome film, and it tells a story that is well worth knowing. It's a kind, gentle and sweet holiday confection. But my Christmas wish is that the DVD comes packaged with the book.

It's breezy enough, though, as a romantic comedy. And the stakes at risk in it are more grown-up and weighty than those in most Hollywood fare. Like Allen himself, you could do worse.

Agreeable and warm, is content for the most part merely to allude to complexity and darkness in the lives of its subjects.

For all Smith's dedication and Mann's abilities, Ali remains a figure too big for even the big screen to contain.

The story told by I'm Going Home is small and perhaps not terribly universal. But there's something poignant about an artist of 90-plus years taking the effort to share his impressions of life and loss and time and art with us.

As an action film it roars forward with agreeable, transporting energy.

Franju conjures images -- sometimes gory, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastical -- that genuinely haunt: the essence of the cinema distilled.

Kudos to the makers Red Tails for paying homage to a remarkable group of men and their genuinely heroic deeds, and a hat-tip as well for the idea that the best way to tell the story was the old-fashioned way. But would that the film's old-school aura felt knowingly retro rather than dutifully rote.

There are occasional moments of wisdom, drama and emotion, but we never quite forget the blunt confession of one of the founders of the world championship, who admits that the whole thing began as a joke. Psst, buddy: it still is.

You're looking for the mammoth home run, and the film is merely a bloop single.

Somehow Lee fails to make it speak to us. His heart is in the right place, but like many of the crowd that swarmed Yasgur's farm, he has rather lost his head.

See it for the star. Penn makes a film that in many respects feels low scale and ordinary into something painfully human and real.

Despite the whiplike pace of events and the compelling realism of the martial effects, the film is dead in the water whenever it pauses to make a human gesture or consider, heaven help us, an idea.

There's a breeziness to Soul Kitchen, good performances by Moritz Bleibtreu as Zinos' slippery brother and Birol Unel as his fanatical new chef, and a peppy soundtrack.

The film is shot (by Dan Lausten) with a credible creepiness, and it teems with clever touches. [17 Apr 1998]

It's a long film for such a familiar story.

An engaging spectacle of energy and special effects built around a doomy mood and an ensemble cast vigorously pursuing a story line that isn't nearly as snazzy as the dressing.

As a manipulator of images and emotions, De Palma has few equals, and this is his most gripping film in at least a decade. Viewed simply as cinema and not as political rhetoric, it's often a kick in the guts -- even when it makes you roll your eyes.

Anyone looking for a full-bodied account of the woman, her deeds, and her place in history shouldn't be encouraged to linger too long with The Iron Lady.

While a splendidly acted and worthily grown-up movie, too often has the feel of a potboiling soap opera, with twists and turns that range from the grimly ironic to the absurdly sensational.

Deeply strange, oddly shimmery movie.

The actors make the trauma in Another Happy Day feel real. But it's too often undercut by directorial fussiness that feels more academic than personal.

It's gory, it's bleak, it's shamelessly tricky -- and it's also a good deal more fun than it had any right to be.

The film holds charms for everyone but in a very unusual way: If some audience members feel cheated at the halfway mark, others will feel that the film is finally getting started. Nifty!

It's got some great action sequences and is peppered with genuinely dazzling images. It's also subtly infused with Mann's favored themes of men-at-work and the high price of loyalty to duty. But it hasn't got sufficient meat to warrant its draggy length.

It's an agreeable, sometimes hilarious picture that looks at the world of comedy from many vantage points, chiefly the apex.

Disconnected and even disoriented, Assassination Tango is an atmosphere in search of a reason.

This is Hollywood Hornby: not terrible, but not worth crossing a busy street for, and nowhere near as memorable as what the Sox did last year.

It's Herzog-light, in a way -- more travelogue than dissection. But it's filled with small riches, not least of which is the director's amazing narration. Can't you just imagine him reading "Green Eggs and Ham"?

Ellroy's bully-boy schtick is getting stale, and Moverman is overly beholden to it.

It does a nice job of balancing stillness and action, but it hits weakly when it hits at all and falls short of the small grandness to which it aspires.

Because there was anarchy and randomness in Thompson's life and work, you find it in Gonzo.

It hardly needs to hang its head around the original, and it bolsters Brewer's standing as a talent of note.

It IS a film that deflates you too often, despite its efforts to impart a sense of soaring. In the end, where the Wild Things are is in your imagination and in Sendak’s pages, not in this big-hearted but ultimately faint simulation.

Atmospheric and genial, and you've got to love the spectacle of a dog driving a car or parading around town like the unofficial mayor.

There's atmosphere and tension and dark humor and some truly shocking gore throughout. But the positive impression all of that makes pales next to a headscratching finale that is admittedly well-executed but is also undeniably perverse and borderline random. Maybe you'll go with it, simply out of shock. I, alas, could not.

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

It's a good movie, mind you, with great bits in it, but it still falls short of rapture.

It's not that Hangover II is a notably bad movie. It's more that nothing in it seems to justify all the effort spent to add a new but nearly identical series of episodes to the original.

The problem here is we never get much more than the pretty, the quaint and the comfortingly familiar. There's a place for such stuff in the world, yes, but that doesn't make it art.

Alan Arkin is charm itself as the girls' dreamy father. Indeed, director Christine Jeffs coaxes only good work from the whole of her cast.

There’s a lot of hate in this film. But a lot of talent, too. It borders on despicable, but you can’t ignore it.

Ultimately well-made but only intermittently gripping.

Creaks and groans with pat emotionalism and rickety storytelling.

In all that empty space, the film gets a bit lost.

There's little that will surprise anyone who's seen or read Grisham's work before, but it plays with slick competence, and there's that killer-diller showdown in the middle as a payoff.

If it happens to lose you as you wander through this strange land, at least it does so to the accompaniment of captivating visuals and music.

Feast is set and was shot in Portland, and if nothing else it makes the case that we live in one gorgeous city.

There are moments here so out of whack that you almost wonder if David Lynch isn't snickering somewhere at having fooled everyone into thinking someone else made the film.

You can only kick against it so long before you succumb to its sheer energy and verve. Waters and company simply have too much fun for some of it not to reach out and touch you through the movie screen. If you can stand the pace, you'll likely leave happy.

A genial and watchable film.

Despite the film's claim to be an anatomy of a pop culture craze, it's deeply parochial and has an opportunistic feel at its core.

It's old-fashioned, sometimes accomplished, syrupy and, at its intermittent best, absorbing.

The story is slight and somewhat less than engaging, despite nice supporting turns from Emily Blunt and Ricky Jay.

While the urban texture and the unapologetic work of Basinger impart a sophisticated air to what is essentially a downtrodden-teen-makes-good film, that is, finally, just what 8 Mile is. That's not a bad thing, but it's nothing to rap home about, either.

It's often flat and dull, and it can be heavy-handed with the little acorn-that-will-yield-the-famous-oak bits that so often dot biographical films about the youthful lives of famous figures.

The Amazing Spider-Man is agreeable. And occasionally it's more. But, as with the American remake of the Swedish film of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," you can't help but feel that you've not only heard the story before, but that you you've seen it before, too -- and recently.

Pierce never pulls these pieces together satisfyingly, and the result is a botched effort to put a human face on a genuinely alarming situation.

Despite a strong start, Only Human loses its grip on all that merry energy and comes to feel more like a sitcom than like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" or "Some Like It Hot," to name just some of its forebears.

Only a shadow -- if an agreeable and harmless one -- of its predecessor film.

There are hints lately that De Niro is trying to build a fourth, restorative act to his wayward film career, and he brings some real fire, without which Stone would be helpless.

Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist," "Coal Miner's Daughter") keeps things low-key and low-tech, which makes some of the cliched Bondisms a bit easier to swallow.

Beneath its frantic surfaces, Narc is terribly ordinary, built on a mystery that will puzzle only those who have never watched a TV cop drama.

You can't help but feel a connection to Downey and Foxx and, to a lesser degree, a rooting interest in the story. But try as Wright might, he never figures out a way to bring us in -- much less manipulate us -- cinematically.

There's real craft here and a vision that's nothing if not unique.

Clever but, alas, largely forgettable.

A fascinating, masterly, frustrating film, it only passingly touches on the heart and sharpness of Anderson's previous work and rather brings to mind the famous complaint of the emperor in "Amadeus": "too many notes."

Affleck is in the middle, engaging in derring-do, pitching woo to Uma Thurman and making the whole thing come off as less exciting than it should have been.

The result is a modestly accomplished, modestly agreeable, altogether forgettable film.

If the movie is largely familiar, its passion and craft are noteworthy.

There are flashes here of a more involving movie, but, as if living up to the cliches associated with her name, filmmaker Lee is content to sit quietly and let others talk.

A slick and exciting film

Strictly texture, a romp over the surfaces of Andy Kaufman's life with not much insight into its core.

It's a thriller, and a large one, and it's got a couple of terrific performers in the center.

May not be as successful as it is ambitious, but you could do worse than to spend a few hours there.

Hardcore might have been confused and crude, but it was never guilty of being tepid, like this film.

Franco is rather astounding, looking and sounding plausibly like Ginsberg and talking about complex ideas in a genuinely relaxed tone.

Mikhalkov plays the jury foreman, allowing himself a bit of business that eventually erases itself, amounting, effectively, to nothing. Alas, too much of this splashy film is just like that.

This is a grim, often lifeless tale played with such humorless intensity that watching it is far more like an endurance contest than a love affair.

A handsome, somewhat draggy and abrupt film that's more memorable in snippets than as a whole.

There's a sense of self-satisfied naughtiness to the film that undercuts any claims it can make to being transgressive.

It's a heavy, moody film, mimicking in its form something of the mental state of its central character, which is a nifty trick. But the quality of the craft doesn't draw you in, nor does Gosling's aloof and inward performance.

It's never more than an intro to a man who merits volumes.

The movie swings back and forth from awesome to awful so regularly and rapidly that it's like a jai alai match.

In some regards, watching Passione is like being cornered by actor John Turturro and forced to watch a slide show of his trip to Italy.

The stick-figure people in the script haven't the slightest chance of making an impression, and you're more excited at the prospect of the next big wave?

This isn't at the same level of quality as Yen's "Ip Man 2," which played earlier this year and was one of the best martial arts movies in a long time. But it is entertaining, even if it does ask you to suspend boatloads of disbelief.

The film is thus more of a technical showcase than a human drama. It's diverting enough until it gets dumb, but so strong from the start is the certainty that dumb is on the way that you can't get too vexed when it finally arrives.

If all you care about is bang-bang, then Act of Valor should satisfy you. But if all you care about is bang-bang, then you're invalidating the very reason the actual SEALS appear in this film: to put a human face on their dangerous work.

A garish and fascinating little movie that comes bouncing in the wake of Bennett Miller's "Capote" like a yipping puppy trying to keep up with an elegant show dog.

"Juno" was accused (wrongly, in my view) of having things both ways: being cute and cynical, edgy and sentimental. Young Adult, despite the fun afforded by Theron and Oswalt, seems content to have things neither.

With all its pedestrian moments, the film still has the power to sweep you up.

Ullman and May make something intermittently memorable of an otherwise minor film.

Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, both of whom work with such subtlety and depth, rescue the film from Rudolph's seemingly native inability to keep it steadily on course.

Spider-Man 3 is a likeable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size.

An engaging if not riveting film based on David Benioff's adaptation of his own novel. It's not nearly Lee's best picture, and it's guilty of a few wrong turns that only a confident filmmaker could make, but it's assured and, perhaps more importantly, reassuring.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

It's so steeped in the coldness and inhumanity of its protagonist that it's ultimately more clinical than absorbing.

It's peppy and cheesy and filled with life and humor in just the way, you imagine, that Susann might have enjoyed.

Crude both in form and content while at the same time capable of evoking explosions of shocked and, often, shamed laughter.

There's enough realism to keep a soccer buff like me happy, but the film is aimed at the young at heart, and I think they'll love it.

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

It's gory, really gory, gratuitously and often inelegantly.

You're guaranteed never to have seen anything like it; objectively speaking, it's a wonder.

They say that history is written by the winners. Well, this is the story of Saint Laurent as told by his surviving partner. And it's, oddly, less about the man than about his things.

Merry Christmas is long and ponderous, but for a few moments, its heavy hand is refreshingly light and agile, and you feel something other than frustration.

It's a moderately compelling historical record, but of far more interest as an artifact than a film.

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

The Coens have often been accused of coldness toward their characters, but the verve and wit of their films reveal genuine compassion and heart. Based on the evidence of this film, the Pangs aren't quite there yet.

An unsteady mishmash of snot-nosed humor and treacly Hollywood sentimentality.

Gross, sophomoric, offensive, nasty, cheap and mean -- and so funny again and again that you plumb near forget all that's reprehensible about it.

Director Ang Lee displays enormous verve and flair. He creates ingenious transitions between scenes, deploying split-screens in a clever variation on comic book panels and, as ever, drawing coolly impassioned performances from the cast.

It's often a vivid film and paints its small niche well, but only in the final passages, when AIDS changes everything, does it feel full-blooded.

While they've managed to make a funny movie, they haven't made a great comedy.

iI’s a film more content to amuse than truly to probe or feel.

Like "Red Road" it's slow-moving and sometimes grueling, but it's more of a chronicle than narrative, a series of slices-of-life rather than an unfolding and increasingly engrossing enigma.

The new film is a nauseatingly unsteady medley of brilliance and foolish nonsense.

No doubt this is a sincere film. But its wobbly technique prevents it from ever reaching a point.

Lots of people have crazy stuff happen to them once or twice. Some people are magnets for crazy stuff. And then there's Joyce McKinney, who is like a factory where magnets for crazy stuff are made and warehoused.

Filled with energy and visual pizzazz and at least strives for something more than dumb entertainment.

There's a daring to Everything Is Illuminated that commends it somewhat more than its achievement deserves.

A dark, violent film, it has undeniable visual power and sporadic moments of wit. There's quite a bit of fun, but it's not the cheery entertainment you might be hoping for from your favorite porker. [25 Nov 1998, p.D1]

An exquisitely mounted and achieved film (shot, as it so happens, on Paris sound stages), it tells a story so protracted and uneventful that you wonder if writer-director Tran Anh Hung isn't pulling your leg. [08 Apr 1994, p.AE15]

The result is a handsome but deeply fractured tale.

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.