Shawn Levy

This is harsh and acid stuff, but it's exhilarating on a number of counts. For one thing, Jenkins moves with real authority between scenes of low life, tender intimacy and gripping violence; made on the cheap, her film has the iron certainty of the best art.

Would somebody please pull the plug on James Bond? It's not that Tomorrow Never Dies is inconceivably bad. What with dashing Pierce Brosnan cavorting as 007, nifty Michelle Yeoh playing chop-socky on bad guys' heads, and a nearly-sentient BMW in Bond's bag of tricks, it's got at least as much going for it as, oh, a good Steven Seagal film. [19 Dec 1997, p.19]

it's so much fun because, like Haynes' film, it's made by people with a genuine love for the entertainment they're bringing back to life. You'd have to be a real prude not to go for it.

Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.

Despite moments of atmospheric tension and a core of compelling mystery, the film feels remote, cold and, oddly, obvious.

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.

It's hard to overestimate what a job of work was accomplished here to keep this from being a catastrophe. But The Lake House, despite its dubious foundation, proves surprisingly sturdy.

The animation is dull, the thought is fuzzy, the storytelling is vague and the music just plain stinks. It's not "National Velvet," it's sure not "The Black Stallion," it's not even "Dances With Wolves."

The highlights are the writing and the performances. There are real laughs to be had -- several scenes end on sharp, witty shards of dialogue. And whenever Eckhart, Northam or Ehle is the focus, the thing soars.

Tasty, but, finally, a little unfulfilling.

The hearty performances are undone by the forced eccentricity of the sets, the clothes, the music and, especially, the characters. The film is ugly and facile and childish in its love of its own naughtiness. Only Jill Clayburgh, as a creepy woman in whose home Augusten must live, feels human. The rest is no more real than a "Simpsons" episode -- and offers fewer laughs.

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.

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

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

To some, this will seem the height of aesthetic experimentation; to others, the most unendurable arty hogwash.

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.

There's a nifty shootout at the Guggenheim Museum and a lot of scenic travel, but little in it compels.

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

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.

To be fair, the film is trash and doesn't aspire to very much, but it's bad trash -- inept -- and that really isn't forgivable.

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

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

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.

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away.

After a cheeky, campy start, The Ninth Gate leaves you with a bitter and dull aftertaste.

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 result is minor Gilliam: still more engaging than most moviemaking, but nonetheless a letdown after such a long wait.

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

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

It offers the small delight of watching a master step back from more ardent work to put together a diverting miniature. And in the scheme of things, that's actually more of an accomplishment than it might sound. Minor Mozart, after all, is still pretty darned good.

Fabulously acted throughout.

The Baxter is so ineptly conceived, staged, written and played that you suspect it's part of a psychology experiment to see if people will laugh at anything.

The stories don't resonate, the film has a drab look and feel, and it lacks the passionate zing with which the least of Almodovar's works teems.

It's written almost without wit or romance, it's populated by bland actors, and it's photographed as if through a Jell-O mold. If this is adolescence, then senility can't come soon enough. [29 Jan 1999]

Made with disarming craft and cunning. Intermixed in the memories it leaves of horror and disgust are glimpses of impressive technique and savvy psychological insight.

As it unwinds, What Lies becomes both masterful and preposterous.

It's a heck of a character to chew into, and Spacey, never afraid to play a devil, enjoys himself a great deal.

The film manages the rare trick of improving as it unrolls from the utterly putrid to the barely tolerable. And, friends, I wish to say that sometimes that is as good as you can hope for in this racket.

If you might wish the film got deeper under the skin of the characters, you also feel grateful for the fact that you'll never get closer to them than watching it.

The young guns on board are Wong Kar Wai and Steven Soderbergh, and it's sad to report that they massively outshine the nonagenarian Antonioni.

It's a stylish and sweet film with moments of affecting brilliance that counterbalance its flaws.

Wahlberg is the centerpiece of Fear, director James Foley's surprisingly taut new thriller that's equal parts "Cape Fear," "Endless Love" and "The Wild One." [12 Apr 1996]

Phantom may not be the best entry in the series, but it's the most technically accomplished, and it makes you as hungry for the next film as you've been for this one.

Despite buoying our hopes that it might be a new-fangled sports film, ``The Program'' devolves into a doltish drama about Triumph Over Adversity, all but forsaking the pure, thrilling bloodlust of its early moments. [24 Sept 1993, p.AE16]

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

Handsomely photographed, artfully edited and acted with skill and conviction. It is also so stupid that you expect to see strings of drool dripping from the corner of the screen.

Even with the flaws of the final half, The Avengers is grand, brisk fun. It comes tantalizingly close to reaching the level of the very best comic book films of the current generation.

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]

You'll laugh and cry at the film, but you'll bridle, too, at Brooks' clumsy technique.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

(If) you're one of those killjoys who demands logic, coherence and a semblance of human life from a movie, this one will leave you cold.

It's a small-minded and jejune film, and it feels strangely out-of-date considering how loaded it is with right-here-right-now signifiers.

Funny and appalling, doting and possessive, petty and selfless, raunchy and righteous, Jeannie is the pivot of the charming, garish, somewhat overwritten Australian comedy Introducing the Dwights.

It's dull and crude and silly and without a lick of quality.

The loudest, dumbest, slowest, least entertaining and most annoying by a very comfortable margin.

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.

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.

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.

Yet another witless, listless outing by the alleged comic minds behind such dubious treats as "The State," "Stella" and "Wet Hot American Summer."

A new political thriller, has an ending so egregiously stupid that not to reveal it would be a disservice to moviegoers.

A lifeless, confused mess, peppered with laughs, yes, but illogically and crudely plotted and smothered in tonedeaf music cues.

A light, old-fashioned, likable film that capitalizes on the personae of its three key performers and a sort of playfulness.

While his star, Jude Law, is infectiously watchable, Shyer's version of the material is tone deaf and splotchy.

It's not Allen's weakest work, not by far. But its impact is shockingly superficial.

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.

Doesn't demand much of the audience, sure, but it doesn't provide much, either. It's as if an all-star gang of would-be crooks got together to rip off...moviegoers.

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.

Tupac may not have been Denzel Washington as an actor, but he deserved a better sendoff than this film, which, by the time the silly climax rolls around, is barely worthy of Wesley Snipes. [8 Oct 1997, p.D04]

It's a handsome film, and Bridges is back, but little has been done to deepen the story into a saga, and the leading man, Garrett Hedlund, rivals Bit for inexpressivity.

Fairly lightweight, going after targets we can all agree deserve the needle. But there are five, six, seven gags you've never seen before -- real surprises- -- and the film deploys them smartly to keep you laughing and unsteady for the duration.

Under the tight wraps provided by a veteran director and a generally clever script, he (Arnold) has, in The 6th Day, his best picture in many years.

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.

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.

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

For all its bells and whistles, only when it lingers on Jones' dry wit and pained, rheumy eyes does this film about aliens ever seem alive, let alone human.

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.

Creaks and groans with pat emotionalism and rickety storytelling.

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

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

Eventually, the inconsistency wears, and the film provokes mostly indifference and restlessness.

It's a terrible picture: ugly and illogical and clumsily staged and peppered with crude, witless humor.

The trouble is that it's so lead-footed and delighted with itself even as bit after bit sinks like a lead weight.

Between the tart dialogue, the compelling lead performances, the vivid violence and the stunning cinematography, it's complete and satisfying all on its own.

The film is a pleasure that doesn't rank with Allen's best but satisfies far more than most American comedies.

An old-fashioned romantic adventure film strongly acted, ably directed and written with stolid sobriety, the film feels, save for a few moments of verbal or physical intensity, as if it could have been made 60 years ago with Ingrid Bergman in the lead.

Rubber is engaging, brisk and smart enough that the audience wins, too. It's grand, mindless fun that makes a thoughtful point.

As two-dimensional animation, Sinbad is passably attractive, reaching a visual height when it arrives in the surreal, shifting Tartarus.

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

Fuqua has made three films before his newest, Tears of the Sun, and they've all begun well enough but then collapsed under the weight of his heavy-handed visual technique and his indifference to plot, character and logic.

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

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

When the picture hits high gear, your qualms vanish one by one, and the script, credited to four writers, grows into its own.

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.

You've never been quite this close to a movie star, and after enduring the experience you'll likely never want to repeat it.

Perhaps this is what fans want from a movie like this: to sit back as if in a Jacuzzi and get a quick impression of history and Rome and such. If so, Howard, Brown and company likely have another monster hit on their hands.

One Day, despite its attractiveness, never manages to find a way to bring the conceit fully to life.

If you've never seen any anime, set your sights on fun and leave your hard nose for drama and fine dialogue at home.

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

The film is amped up to insanity in its language (both verbal and cinematic), in its ironic embrace of teen-salvation movie clichés, and in its depiction of a small town as a ghetto hell. But just when you think they've gone too far, the Trost brothers 1) go further and 2) wink.

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.

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.

It's never subtle or clever, but it's big, loud and clear.

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.

The plot is like a sudoku puzzle with all but one square filled in.

A witless, listless muck-up that sends you reeling from the theater with thoughts of suicide instead of a chipper grin.

Now The Matrix Revolutions is here, and a verdict is justified. The death penalty seems a little strong, but can we lock this franchise up and forget where we put the key?

A limp and annoying picture.

Fact is, Starting Out is pretty dry stuff as a movie, even as it's enlivened by vivid acting.

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.

What it plays like is a trifling story strung out to great length without much narrative drive, tinged with some disturbing racial undertones.

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

Too often monochromatic, programmatic and just plain lost.

By the time of the fabled match -- which you could swear lasts a full 90 minutes -- it's all you can do to keep your skin from crawling off your body and slinking to the safety of another room. Do yourself a favor: Follow it.

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.

It’s offensive, really, this blatant pandering to emotions.

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

Effectively cast and shot with exciting immediacy.

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.

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.

So shapeless, pointless and witless a film that it can be explained only by surmising that the people who made it were bombed at the time.

It's simply an awful, awful film.

It adds up to a chatty film of genuine visual interest and occasionally sharp acting but no visceral appeal or satisfaction. It's a movie that plays like a book -- that is, watching it is more like reading than a thriller should ever be.

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.

Like his (Carrey) early work, it's not a particularly good film -- insipidly staged, inanely plotted, too weak to withstand the weight of any inquiries into logic or continuity -- but Carrey's energetic mugging, particularly early on, makes it relatively painless.

Noisy, random and hard on the eyes.

It's awful. Awful. That's all. Keep walking. For the love of all that's holy. Keep. Walking.

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.

Banderas' direction is a bit of everything and a lot of not much.

In a way, the film is a kind of experiment: Can you lop off the bulk of a classic work and still have something worth seeing? On this evidence, the answer is, despite the best intentions and some fine work, sadly no.

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.

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

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

At one and the same time it feels like a decent-but-not-great film of his '70s period and a perky and tart entry in his modestly successful revival in the last half-decade. Neat trick.

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.

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.

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

Marcus, like the real-life Jackson, survives being shot nine times. But this film is dead on arrival.

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

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.

Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.

Incomplete, shrill and smug.

Feels like a tonic for its makers, a means of clearing the palate after a series of rich meals. For viewers who appreciate risks, it should be just as refreshing.

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.

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 by-the-numbers recipe that ought to have shot off at least a few sparks, is as drab as the inmates' prison blues.

Brainless, witless, inept, ugly and crude,

The few chuckles the film affords come early, and too often the script desperately tries to repeat them. By the end, it's not funny or happy -- just over. And you're glad for it, the one true emotion you feel in the whole two hours.

Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.

The acting is the strongest thing about the film. Pitt nicely balances the dashing and wounded sides of Tristan's character. [13 Jan 1995]

You need to accept the fact that practically everyone in the picture, particularly the leading lady, is a boneheaded nitwit.

It's a Ritalin-deprived sensibility, but it keeps you skating over the dull spots, in which the film unfortunately is rich.

An ugly, stupid movie it turned out to be. Incoherent, arbitrary, hyperactive and dark enough to make you fear you've gone blind.

Befitting a film about Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven is dark and grisly and ghoulish. But it also has qualities that Poe's work never does: It's dull and mechanical and, most of all, phony.

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.

Remove the razzle-dazzle provided by Azaria, Hoffman, Baldwin, the gross jokes and that ferret, and you wind up with a pretty dull and ordinary face.

An unsteady and uneven film, which bangs up against its ambitions gracelessly and distractingly.

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.

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

For all the beauty it struggles to bring forth, Snow Falling on Cedars is painfully prosaic.

Although there is some gimmickry, this is one of the most straightforward versions of the Tempest ever filmed, making it edifying as well as -- when Taymor hits a groove -- dazzling.

For a Hollywood studio movie, you see, The Mexican is remarkably strange and eccentric with a plot like a wrinkled bed sheet and a black comic sensibility that consistently swerves away from the cliches that have been established in this Age of Tarantino.

A stultifying bore.

It's not that The Beach is a stinker, exactly. It's that nothing in it -- and that includes the gifted DiCaprio -- ever feels other than perfunctory.

Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.

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.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

Tt is a comeback, and if it leads the director to better work, it can be forgiven as a warm-up.

Transcends politics and forces us to consider just what it is we ask of young people who answer the call to duty.

As someone new to the material, I found Jackson’s film soulful, respectful, masterful, horrifying, rending and emotionally true. It may not be the Lovely Bones that you have in mind, but it’s a fine and powerful one.

At 80 minutes, it feels truncated and abandoned -- a sketch of a comic thriller rather than the real thing.

While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.

Far too often, the film has to submit to the inevitable and stop so that Affleck can struggle like a yoga student to bend his face into a human emotion. He even cries. So might you.

You're likelier to shrink in astonished horror from it than laugh.

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."

When Bekmambetov is in full stride and the gore, oaths and silver bullets are flying, it's a kick. The title may sound like a joke, but Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is serious fun.

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.

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.

Awfully sloppy entertainment, built on a script with only a glancing acquaintance with logic, filled with uneven performances and staged with a near-amateur touch for comedy.

How the mighty (De Niro and Hoffman) have fallen? More like how the mighty have pile-driven themselves into the solid mass of rock at the core of the Earth. . . .

It's exactly the film Jarmusch wanted to make, but it's also smug, excruciating, borderline pointless. You could call it a deliberate effort to invert the conventions of the thriller; you could also call it, more rightly, a self-deluded disaster.

The trouble is that the film forsakes one sort of energy for another, and the downshift is a drag.

A carnival of stupid coincidences, paper-thin characterizations, and inept staging, lighting and montage.

A frustrating combination of inspiration and routine, acuity and dullness, originality and fashion. Part web-of-life indie film, part troubled teen drama, part suburban satire, part comic book fantasy, it vacillates between the engaging and the silly, buoyed by energetic performances but pulled underwater by self-satisfied writing and direction.

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.

A slick and exciting film

Tired, clumsy and appallingly ugly to look at.

A feel-good movie that doesn't think it needs to rub people's noses in the happy stuff to get its points across or eliminate all the disturbing shades to make a uniformly glowing whole.

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.

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

Takes a fabulous idea and overplays it, making an average picture out of some truly extraordinary material.

There are bits of this film that titillate, undeniably, but mainly you wait for the comic to bring out the big guns, and then he leaves you feeling more teased than tickled.

It adds up to a truly taxing couple of hours: ham acting, visual noise, aural torture, elementary plotting and unconvincing emotions.

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 dreary, overlong and occasionally laughable classical epic about the great Macedonian world conqueror, it's guilty of a sin that no Stone film has ever committed: It's boring.

To be fair, there are moments when the film seems better than, finally, it is.

Something of an unforgettable experience.

It all passes quickly, as far as that goes, but when it’s over it passes entirely. And something that sells for a premium price ought to linger.

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

A genial and watchable film.

Like a dog walking on its hind legs across a freshly waxed floor -- awkward, slow, deliberate, seeking approval -- the action thriller Reign of Fire gets from start to finish, somehow, without tumbling into complete disaster.

Pretty much the worst recent example of a genre.

It's deeply ordinary, depressingly shabby stuff.

A story that would be charming if recited at the dinner table tries to carry a feature film, and it's not even close to the task. The result is screamingly bad.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

Better luck trying to find out what truly happened to the real Earhart than trying to diagnose all that's wrong with this hapless film.

In Be Cool, a wonderful cast essays a lively script and manages to make a decent film out of it.

Drowns in flat, clumsy and obvious direction.

The problem is that so little in this version of All the King's Men speaks to the here and now or even speaks clearly. It feels like a repertory exercise -- and not a very successful one at that.

A sequel that never rises to the giddy pitches of skewed humor that the original managed to toss off with such unexpected glee.

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

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

The nearest thing to W. E. is Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," which tried to make a sympathetic victim of another of history's most notorious royal wives.

The liveliest thing here is the keen sense of regret you feel at seeing two TV icons reduced to supporting characters in a lame movie that trades on their good names.

In I'm Reed Fish, Jay Baruchel is cast as a leading man with two attractive girlfriends, and, sorry, I'm frankly more prepared to accept Stephen Hawking as an action hero.

Never dull visually, but it's certainly monomaniacal and heartless thematically.

The man has gifts -- but acting and, it's increasingly clear, storytelling aren't among them.

By the time the film reaches its convoluted, bombastic and preposterous climax, any sense of real magic that it once conveyed has utterly vanished.

It may be mindless and sexless and humorless, but Jumper jumps.

The stifling piety of this film -- which regards anything old and vaguely arty as next to sacred -- needs some serious airing out.

There are a few chuckles, a few head-scratches and, thankfully, very few missteps. It charms.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

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.

Dazzling to look at but dreadful to listen to, the film is a tug-of-war of coolness and dreck.

A terrible, terrible movie. Its creators have a swell idea at the core, a wonderful leading lady, and several stalwart comic players in support, and they make of all of that a picture with the wit of an armpit fart, the verve of a boxwood shrub, and the appeal of a long night in an ER waiting room.

Suffers from sludgy pacing, flat writing and acting, and a strange and puzzling fondness for scatology and coarse language.

Think of the worst Spielberg thriller or one of Hitchcock's dull late career works, then make it ugly and fill it with bad performances; voila: The Happening.

Does nothing right and, blessedly, vanishes swiftly like the aroma of a nasty belch.

Best laugh at the movies all autumn.

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

The opportunity to give Jolie the room to swagger like the "Charlie's Angels" or "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" ladies is utterly squandered, and a video game franchise that might've resulted in a hoot of a film -- has been blown to dust.

All in all, it's hard to dispute that House of D declares its own worth on arrival.

It's a terrible movie, ugly to look at, tediously drawn out, unfunny in every cell and fiber of its being.

It's a film that's at once too much and not enough, laughable and groovy, dead serious and a total joke. And I mean no disrespect by any of that.

It's a yawn for the most part, depending on dull characters and uninvolving twists.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ("Super Troopers") will never be mistaken for an artist. But he's competent with crude humor and manages to balance affectionate parody and rote imitation.

This one is shot, recorded and edited without so much as a pinch of craft -- it's one of the ugliest big studio films in a long while.

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

This one's painful.

Such a staggering, start-to-finish disaster that you don't know how to begin detailing its outrages and failings.

Price of Glory won't make anyone forget "Raging Bull" or "Rocky."

fFat, dull drag.

It's fitting that Black Knight, the new time-travel movie with Martin Lawrence, should arrive at the start of the Christmas season, because the season gives us the perfect word to describe it: humbug.

Its breeziness keeps it from ever being completely bland or flat.

Tends to beat some plain unfunny material to death.

Gets behind the armor and the camouflage to give viewers a clear if brief view of the men and women who fight and die under the American flag every day in Iraq.

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

Isn't a particularly good movie if what interests you is the art of film -- cinematography, editing, screenwriting, staging, little things like that. But if you're chiefly interested in turning off the upstairs lights and relaxing with a few laughs, you could do a lot worse.

The Road walks a tremendously daring and delicate line between inspiration and horror, and it does so not only in the events it depicts but in its very air and atmosphere. It was unforgettable on the page, and it impresses equally, or at least it does so remarkably often, on screen.

In the end, the intelligence of the dialogue and crack acting are wrestled to the ground by the zealous politics, the formulaic narrative and a wan and flaccid air unusual from the reliably nifty Parker.

Washington can't save a picture that spends so much time worrying about a heart that it loses its head.

It's as sullying and disheartening an experience as the movies can offer .

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

A movie so lame that Keanu Reeves lends it gravity with his mere presence.

Few movies feel quite so perfunctory or needless or pointless as this one.

In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.

You still marvel at the visuals -- cinematographer M. David Mullen has done miracles with what must have been a microscopic budget -- but you're less invested in the tale. Which is a pity, because it might have been a perfect little potboiler. As it stands, it's merely pretty darned good of its type.

Ugly, dull, bloodless, dumb, and phony to its core.

This isn't an ordinary film built on a remarkable performance; it's a poor one with a gem at its core. Penn can elevate it to mediocrity, but he cannot make it fly.

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

As the struggle toward something new and different overwhelms the film, it becomes less and less human, less and less funny and less and less worth the effort to meet it on its own terms.

Freddie Prinze Jr. gives cute a bad name.

If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture View From the Top were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.

The comic moments are fewer, flatter and far, far less welcome.

A movie built on one joke -- an old one -- and an incoherent, even idiotic plot.

A resolutely awful film, it makes you want to swear off sex, comedy, Rupert Everett movies, flowers, yoga, children, roast beef -- many of the best things in life, in fact.

A nitwit script, full of pedestrian dialogue and building to a laughable climax, dooms the picture.

If the film doesn't touch the original, it doesn't hit rock bottom, either.

A special-effects-and-chase-to-the-death movie, with little special about it.

As to claims that the book provides a path to enlightenment, I'm an agnostic. But I can swear on a stack of ancient scrolls that the movie plays like 90-odd minutes of purgatory from which you feel you may never escape.

A vile, stupid and ugly movie lacking utterly in pep, thrills, humor, finesse or morals, a dissipating waste of time, money and human resources.

Myers' Cat, with a voice that crosses Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion with Mel Blanc's Bugs Bunny, is generally fun, possessed of an anarchic playfulness that balances his sometimes bawdy tendencies.

An ugly and insipid film.

A forehead-poundingly bad picture.

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

A movie of such rank stupidity and appalling taste.