Steven Rea

Strip away the video-game visual effects, the endless chases and zero gravity shootouts, and Total Recall comes down to this: What is reality?

Students of sound design and horror-movie scores should see - or hear - Closer to God, which elicits more creepy scares than its transparent plot warrants, thanks to an unsettling audio mix and pulsing, percolating music from Thomas Nöla.

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar.

Forte and company have managed to make crude and lewd dunderheadedness laugh-out-loud funny here and there, and that, I guess, is something of an achievement.

Luckily, Statham is up to the task. Which is a surprise, because he's never, ever done anything like this before.

Sure, there's a witty reference to another, vastly more momentous legal drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall's film debut). And yes, Farmiga gets to call out Downey, and stay in character, for "that hyper-verbal vocabulary vomit thing that you do." Small pleasures, in a bigger mess.

Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.

Shameless in every way imaginable, Me Before You milks the pathos for all it's worth, but milks the comedy, too.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

Black Nativity offers a whopping serving of Yuletide emotion. And it's a musical - with plenty of wailing and rapping on the side.

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

Chan's signature mix of screwball comedy and gymnastic derring-do landed him his own cartoon series a few years back, and The Medallion -- with its bumbling spies and bounding star -- is about as cartoonish as live action gets.

It seems sadly apt that the Daddy Warbucks figure played by Jamie Foxx in the new Annie is a cellphone mogul. Because Foxx is pretty much phoning in his performance.

For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

The Night at the Museum tent pole has played fast and loose with history, and with our knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the past. But I'm pretty sure a capuchin monkey never urinated on teensy-weensy figures of a cowboy and a Roman emperor as they ran for their lives from a lava flow in ancient Pompeii. That happens in Secret of the Tomb, and it seems like a fitting way to retire the show.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

Gritty and compelling up to a point, but cheaply exploitive as well.

Devoting more time to the setup than to the follow-through, Tower Heist doesn't really build suspense so much as it builds impatience - for the thing to be over.

Classy but ultimately unsatisfying film.

Visually, taking its cues (mostly) from Van Allsburg's Hopperesque art, The Polar Express is eye-popping. Storywise, however, it can be eyelid-drooping.

Rourke and Roberts! Dueling kings of B-movie excess and cable-TV schlock, together again on the big screen! Talk about chemistry!

Boasts exceedingly high levels of improbability and an embarrassment of continuity and character shortfalls, but still has a certain bubbleheaded charm.

It's low-grade Casablanca - an ill-fated love affair, rife with murder and deceit, with World War II as a backdrop and a farewell scene that has something to do with getting to Paris.

There are winning scenes between Wilson and the three teens as they train in various martial arts (like Mexican Judo - "as in Ju-don't know who you're messing with!") and get tips from clips of "Fight Club" and "The Untouchables."

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

Elevated beyond its cutesy contrivances and mawkishness by some extraordinarily good performances.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

Never mind the cool, convincing effects (and they are cool), The Day After Tomorrow teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences. It's pure escapist fare, a popcorn gobbler.

Strange and gloomy.

Has a breezy, Altmanesque air, as it tracks the mini-dramas of its crisscrossing characters.

A yawning affair that would be a perfectly fine video rental but doesn't really require the big screen.

Baked and half-baked, Tenacious D does manage to give the term potty humor a new meaning. That's some kind of genius, right?

TMNT has a cool, noirish sheen. There's an attention to detail in the visuals and sound design that pushes it up several notches above most kiddie fare. It's not art, dude, but it will do.

The film is just middling. A clever line here and there, a debonair Dempsey wink, a cute Monaghan nod, and another Bill and Monica reference to tie things all together.

Steeped in attitude - a smart-alecky, insider sarcasm that can be pretty clever at times, but also pretty insufferable.

Beautiful Creatures tries terribly hard to establish its own mythology of magic and witchcraft and Southern-fried adolescent angst. This isn't Hogwarts, though, and it's not even Forks High from Twilight, but boy, you know Warner Bros., the studio behind Beautiful Creatures, wants it to be!

An international caper with James Bond and Tom Clancy overtones - and Austin Powers undertones, too.

It's not easy being macho while you're shivering like a frozen puppy, but Kutcher pulls it off.

13 Hours, by its very subject matter, can't help but tap into the confluent veins of politics and patriotism.

The dialogue rings tinny in the ear, as if enunciated in the phony arc of a stage light.

Terminator 3 moves at not-quite-breakneck speed, and the shape-shifting, metal-melting special effects aren't exactly spectacular.

Offers a gripping mix of sexual heat and nasty menace. It's "Dead Calm" meets "Very Bad Things," with English accents.

A squirmingly strange and brutal study of sexual power, masochism and mother-daughter madness.

The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.

Beautiful to behold but lacking in any kind of palpable dread or suspense.

Instead of gleaning something from real life, the great minds behind Friends With Benefits slapped their ideas together based on screwball classics, "Sleepless in Seattle" bits, and a keen analysis of Hollywood hackery.

With so many good Austen adaptations out there (the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, Emma Thompson and Ang Lee's splendid Sense and Sensibility), Becoming Jane seems a bit flimsy by comparison.

Tonally askew (Altman-esque one minute, Austin Powers-esque the next), Inherent Vice is a sun-glared, neon-limned muddle of noir plotline and potheaded jokery that not only doesn't make sense, but actually seems to try hard not to.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

Comedy, pathos, and some schmaltzy couplets about the changing seasons follow forthwith.

A downer of a drama.

It's "The Deep" reimagined as an Abercrombie catalog.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Gyllenhaal, in the pivotal role, brings a scruffy, boyish charm to the proceedings, but his big scenes with Hoffman and Sarandon are one-sided - he's not in the same league, and comes off as a bit of a cipher.

Although it's fascinating, intelligent and scathingly accurate in its depiction of a certain milieu, The New Age is a more problematic picture than 1991's The Rapture - where Mimi Rogers played a sexually adventurous woman who finds spiritual succor in fundamentalist Christianity. [23 Sept 1994, p.03]

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action, Outlander boasts a super-serious Jim Caviezel in the title role

At a certain point in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you expect Caesar to say, "Et tu, Koba?" Maybe a bit obvious, but it would have shown some wit.

As for Duff, she's bright-eyed and bubbly, though her singing talents are nowhere near as awesome as Raise Your Voice's who's-going-to-win-the-big-scholarship plotline requires.

What's maddening about Angel-A is that Besson is so brilliant with his visuals - and so in love with his two leads and the city they're parading around - that you desperately want the story, and the characters, to make some kind of emotional sense. This, however, does not happen.

There's lots of zero-g action in Ender's Game - even old Han Solo takes a whirl.

How do you say "tearjerker" in Spanish?

Empire, with its double-barreled shoot-outs, its predictable carnage and conflict, and a rush-job of a resolution, is ultimately just one more urban gangland genre flick.

Taylor Hackford directs crisply, unpretentiously. Patti LuPone goes Latina, playing Lopez's soap opera-addicted mom, and Bobby Cannavale is a Palm Beach cop with an eye for Leslie. The action is fast and furious.

Breaking and Entering is smart and smartly done, as it describes these inter-circling worlds - the well-to-do Brits and the newly deposited foreigners, trying to shake off their homeland tragedies and start anew.

The special effects are effective, though not terribly special. While director Minkoff pays homage to past masters of the genre, the past masters were better at this game than he.

Very slight and, in the early going, slightly annoying, Coffee and Cigarettes is a long-borning Jarmusch project.

The Trigger Effect asks some important questions about society's increasing reliance on technology (and how we take the high-tech infrastructure of daily life for granted), but the questions are wrapped in a bleak, humorless allegory about alienation and rage. [30 Aug 1996, p.03]

Too cute for its own good, Larry Crowne is nonetheless hard to dislike.

The tiny, intrepid rodent is so cute it's impossible not to ooh and aww, just looking at him. Which is a good thing, because you'll need something to get you through the long stretches of fairytale pastiche that make up this overwrought yarn.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

A modest and obviously heartfelt endeavor.

All the elements of Eggers' story are there; the emotional and psychological resonance is not.

Some of the most tasteless and un-PC comedy in the film is also the funniest - Farrelly Brothers-style humor that plays off the Bateman character's physical limitations.

Arnold's Wuthering Heights has its doom-laden moments of urgency and heartache, but vast swaths of the (longish) film just seem to meander across the muddy hills.

Sweet-natured but overdone, over-long film.

The paper's motto is "All the News That's Fit to Print." But all that news doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a 90-minute doc.

With visual nods to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and a fairly faithful adherence to the tenor and tone of the Korean scare genre, The Uninvited doesn't startle and shock so much as it lulls you into a series of unsettling, hallucinogenic set pieces.

With his sleepy, So-Cal inflections, Costner is an actor who summons urgency and drama with, well, I'm not sure exactly how he does what he does. He's the least dynamic of stars, but still, he is one.

Despite a strong cast and a willingness to lampoon the fundamentals of fundamentalism, Saved! isn't as funny, or as wicked, as it should be.

While it flirts with "After School Special"-ness, at least has the courage to address racial and cultural cliches with a degree of honesty.

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

Parental units who manage to remain conscious through the kiddie-centric proceedings can either savor, or groan at, Malkovich's bespectacled Octavius barking punny, celebrity name-dropping orders to his minions.

A handsome-looking movie that's full of the muted greens, browns and grays of the tony Hamptons, director Williams' tale never quite finds its footing.

Beyond turbocharged. It whooshes along at warp speed. And still, despite some awesomely choreographed stunts and the two stars' pedal-to-the-metal appeal, the movie seems endless.

Don't run off before the credits start to roll, though: The Incredible Hulk ends with a jokey cameo by a certain movie star with his own newfound superhero franchise.

As a character study, City by the Sea is engaging. As a police thriller, it's not all there.

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

With the exception of a few stakes and crosses jumping from the screen, some bloody sprays here and there, and one creepy, claustrophobic car ride, the 3-D glasses are a hindrance, not an enhancement.

Easily the trippiest and goofiest of the five addled adolescent vampire romances based on the Stephenie Meyer books.

Everything about An Unfinished Life's screenplay is cliched and predictable, but the actors manage to elevate the proceedings above and beyond shameless soap.

An elaborate origins story with more datelines than an issue of Condé Nast Traveler (Oxford! Miami! Argentina! Poland!), X-Men: First Class has some fun trying to explain how Professor X, Magneto, and all those mopey mutants came to be.

Goes somewhere the first "Hellboy" never ventured: into the Realms of Tedium.

As a meditation on the vicissitudes of love, on the need for people to connect, and the struggles that come by both making and missing those connections, the movie is wading-pool deep.

As a bratty, punked-up sci-fi romp crammed with pop- cult references (everything from Baywatch to Batman, Stiff Records to The Wizard of Oz), Tank Girl has energy to burn. [31 March 1995, p.3]

A bizarre counterculture jukebox musical.

Has its effectively nasty, chilling moments -- and it also brings body piercing to new heights of ickiness.

Flipping his cigarette lighter and snapping deadpan retorts, Reeves plays the demon-hunting detective with Keanu-esque panache.

It would be curmudgeonly to count all the ways in which The Hundred-Foot Journey is unsurprising, unrealistic, unnecessary.

Stylishly spooky and featuring a hammy, cigarette-sucking performance from Gena Rowlands.

Unfortunately, Mission: Impossible - which assembles a new Impossible Missions Force and plops it down in Kiev, Prague, London and Langley, Va. - doesn't have the momentum or suspense of De Palma's best pictures. It moves, awkwardly at times, from one elaborate set-piece to the next. [22 May 1996, p.E01]

Although the sequel retains its predecessor's breezy retro spirit, The Mummy Returns is a mite darker and scarier and the effects a little spiffier.

It is Rapace, the Swedish actress who gained worldwide recognition as Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," who ends up the true heroine of Prometheus.

A campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy.

It's earnest, but it feels beside the point. Blood Diamond's real point: box office.

It's a hokey piece of melodrama in a movie that cheats its characters - and its audience - out of some emotional truth.

The film only occasionally comes to life - it's too literal (and literary), too studied, too still.

Like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Malkovich plays a star long past his glory days in The Great Buck Howard, but continuing to do the only thing he knows. The tone of the two films couldn't be less alike, but the story arc of the central characters graphs the same.

A Good Man in Africa, which has been adapted to the screen by Boyd from his first novel, isn't an out-and-out dud, but it too seems to have been sucked dry. [09 Sep 1994, p.03]

The filmmakers' narrative device of framing Quinn's tale as a feature-length flashback doesn't pay off - we get a goody-two-shoes moral lesson at the end, and a look at movie studio aging makeup gone wild.

Been there, done that. As thrilling a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese continues to be, and as wild a performance as Leonardo DiCaprio dishes up as its morally bankrupt master of the universe, The Wolf of Wall Street seems almost entirely unnecessary.

A wholesome little drama aimed at the pre- and early-teen crowd.

As solid as Cranston, Leguizamo, Kruger, Bratt, and all the rest are, the built-in constraints of the movie format don't do their real-life counterparts full justice.

Stymied by a clunking script, crammed with expository exchanges and urgent blather.

Gretchen Mol stars as a 35-year-old virgin deflowered in lusty romance-novel fashion on a trip to Mexico. Her hunky lover-boy's name? Jesus Christ (played by Justin Theroux). The segment? "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain."

Clones makes the Frodo-speak of "Lord of the Rings" sound like Noel Coward.

Moderately compelling and clinical. This isn't "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; this isn't even "Klute."

22 Jump Street's scattershot approach to comedy is rooted in the belief that for every anatomical, scatalogical, sexual, or pop-cultural reference and pun gone awry, another will stick to the wall like, um, bodily fluid.

Barnz tries, at least a bit, to acknowledge the heroic and historic legacy of the union movement and its rightful place in the contemporary labor landscape. But much of the blame for the sorry state of Adams Elementary, and the school system at large, is placed at the union's feet.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is really about watching paint dry. S l o w l y.

Ultimately, the movie's a bust.

This ninth installment in the Marvel mutant superhero franchise is rife with urgent and (dare we say?) apocalyptic comings and goings, with characters and confrontations that seem at once familiar and befuddling.

This mildly amusing tale of infidelity, blackmail, class differences and corporate greed not only strains credulity - it strains for laughs.

One of the problems with the way Mamet resolves Mike's predicament is that it's ridiculously implausible - even in the context of a far-fetched fight story.

Admission works in stops and starts.

Finding Amanda isn't bad, and there is some smart, jagged humor.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

There's a difference between velocity and momentum, and while the chases, shootouts and close-quarters combat rarely flag, our interest does.

In some ways, American Reunion is the Charlize Theron indie "Young Adult" all over again: In both, a small-town high school reunion is the setting for a lot of nostalgia and narcissism and nasty behavior.

With border crossings and familiar buddy-cop movie tropes (think Lethal Weapon, think 48 HRS, think The Heat), the Wahlberg-Washington express hits lots of comfortably familiar notes. And more than a few viciously uncomfortable ones, too.

The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.

An enjoyable throwback to the way monster movies used to be made.

Illuminated by dim candles and the rare glimmer of sun, the movie is grainy, closed-in, and likely to cause spasms of claustrophobia.

Jobs is a just-the-facts - and fiddling-with-the-facts - dramatization, forgoing any kind of deeper psychological exploration of the man and his motivations, his demons and dreams.

The movie would pour nicely onto a thick stack of pancakes.

The Hip Hop Project, a documentary about Kazi and the young men and women he mentors, isn't quite as successful as Kazi himself - a Bahamian orphan and teenage street hustler who turned his life around, and got folks like Queen Latifah, Russell Simmons and Bruce Willis to help out him and his project.

Fails on a couple of levels. It never really gives you a sense of the psychology, the root causes behind Glass' elaborate frauds... And since we don't know the why, the how becomes considerably less interesting.

At best diverting, at worst an almost self-parodic compendium of French film cliches.

I Am Legend is essentially "28 Days Later" . . ., or "28 Weeks Later" . . ., only with millions more for special effects, and with nothing approaching the heart-pounding, bloodcurdling power and smarts of the two British-made yarns.

Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.

It's a cinematic feat, an art lover's dream, but as a moviegoing experience, Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark is something of a letdown.

Femme Fatale is glossy, glamorous cinema as collage. Maybe all the pieces of a truly good film noir are here, but the filmmaker has opted simply to toss them into the air and let them fall where they may.

This film is a philosophical musing -- a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.

There are chases that feel way too long, and dialogue that feels flat. Affleck and Thurman make a handsome duo, but there's no spark between the actors.

A kind of Tracy/Hepburn rom-com with a "Dead Poets Society" backdrop and dollops of human failing for added drama, Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche - a matchup that makes you want to like Fred Schepisi's film, even when it becomes impossible to do so.

Ready-made for Valentine's Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

Cross Dog Day Afternoon with This is Spinal Tap and you have the concept behind Airheads: heavy metal trio seeking record contract holds radio station employees hostage, much mayhem and moshing ensues.... Airheads isn't nearly as good as its antecedents, but it does manage to produce a stream of lowbrow laughs. Or smiles, anyway. [5 Aug 1994, p.3]

Echoing the lessons learned from "HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey," the message of Transcendence is that computers should not be allowed to become sentient.

As Hopkins himself goes wild-eyed and FX-ed with popping veins, The Rite gives up on asking us to take it seriously.

Like Liam Neeson's "Taken" series, Costner's 3 Days to Kill finds its absentee-dad action hero facing off against hordes of goons and gorillas - not to rescue his loved ones, but to prove himself to them, and maybe get a little extra quality time, too.

A pumped-up, plotless montage of extraordinary landscapes, colorful wildlife, and interesting people performing feats of derring-do.

In a way, The TV Set suffers from the same syndrome as the industry it's parodying: bland and compromised, it feels as if it's been fine-tuned and focus-grouped within an inch of its life.

As stories go, The Astronaut Farmer is engaging, even if it serves up a kind of Plains State brand of Rocky-esque hooey.

For all the film's gritty verisimilitude, The Messenger is not the great Iraq War movie that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is.

Tries too hard to be playful and sensual, wacky and romantic, and comes away feeling fake and prefabricated instead.

It's hard to feel compassion for these Masters of the Universe. I'm not even sure Chandor wants us to, but if he doesn't, then what's the point?

Whether he's smacking into an iceberg or flopping topless onto a sandy beach, DiCaprio is still maddeningly lightweight.

Is Django Unchained about race and power and the ugly side of history? Only as much as "Inglourious Basterds" was about race and power and the ugly side of history. It's a live-action, heads-exploding, shoot-'em-up cartoon. Sometimes it crackles, and sometimes it merely cracks.

Where "Run Lola Run" was like a perpetual-motion machine, The International seems to forever be stopping in its own tracks. Tykwer takes coffee breaks to explain the convoluted and dicey plot.

What it lacks, though, is any sense that these people - are real.

Grisly stuff. The movie, shot in Australia with an Aussie and British cast, makes "127 Hours" look like a walk in the park.

The MST3K folks have gone all-out and found a movie in actual color to lampoon: This Island Earth, a 1954 Universal sci-fier with a no-star cast, low-tech special effects and a logic-defying plot. It's a perfect vehicle for Mike, Servo and Crow to go after - and following a brief prologue that brings MST3K novices up to date, that's exactly what they do. [19 Apr 1996, p.03]

Skarsgard's performance is bold and raw (and reminiscent of vintage Jack Lemmon in its earnestness).

Plays around with some interesting notions, such as the nature of reality, the nature of humanity, and the nature of spiffy apartments with sleek bathroom fixtures.

There is plenty in Star Trek Beyond for diehard Trekkers to enjoy, and director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) guns the action sequences.

Never as much fun as (Woo's) old Chow Yun Fat-starring Chinese pics.

Bedtime Stories does have a comic buoyancy, even as its plot trots on a predictable course. Perhaps the different accents and sensibilities have something to do with that.

Terribly slight and a little off.

McCarthy's screenplay, a tangle of doublecrosses and dead men, has just been published. Those who really want to know what's going on would be advised to buy a copy.

It's not that Fay Grim isn't amusing. It is, in that deadpan, skewed way that indie auteur Hartley's pics always are. But there's not much else going on here.

Impossibly arty and, at times, narratively incoherent, Filth and Wisdom still has its goofy charms.

It is possible to bring substance, as well as poetry, to the vignette form, but more often Paris, Je T'Aime is merely mundane.

While Choke, adapted for the screen and directed by Clark Gregg, is by no means a disaster, it is disappointing - and oddly dull.

The Hornitor and Scorpitron vs. Ninja Falcon Megazord matchup, produced with a snazzy mix of models and computer animation, deftly evokes the spirit of good ol' Godzilla movies and Japanese cartoons. It'll have you standing in your seat yelling, Go! Go! Power Rangers! Or, at the very least, keep you from dozing off. [30 June 1995, p.05]

Teeming with socially awkward misfits, Gentlemen Broncos is not without its absurdist charms, although Hess (who co-scripted with his wife, Jerusha) pushes the envelope in ways it doesn't need pushing.

Lacks an essential sense of purpose.

It says in the beginning of the film that Two for the Money is "inspired by a true story." Problem is, it's just not that inspired.

As scripted by Cathy Rabin and directed by Santosh Sivan, Before the Rains is never less than compelling, but never more than adequately realized.

Visually dazzling but ultimately dizzying ride, a trippy suspenser that gets tripped up on its own deja vu voodoo.

A black comedy, a character study, and a thriller, Lord of War lacks the gritty, hell-bent hilarity of David O. Russell's contemporary war pic, "Three Kings."

Emily Watson, looking at home in her '40s frocks, plays Angus' mother - coping not only with her son's obsession with what she believes to be an imaginary friend, but also with her own worry and grief about her husband at war.

Washington offers another of his rock-steady performances, playing a career civil servant with a couple of secrets of his own, but confident, diligent, ready to go the distance for the city he loves.

The problem with Captain America: The Winter Soldier is that there's too much going on: the Marvel Universe stuff, the WikiLeaks-ish paranoia stuff, the video game-ish CG visual effects stuff, the epic John Woo-ish everybody-pointing-a-weapon-at-everybody-else face-off stuff.

Yes, there's a hastily added new ending - an ending that doesn't make sense when you think about it. Not that it's worth the effort

Williamson's screenplay doesn't match the cleverness of his conceit; it lacks the requisite archness and wit.

Easy to like, and easy to forget.

Doesn't run very deep, or resonate with profound meaning. But as a thoughtful fable, laced with humor, the picture has its charms.

Doesn't have the dramatic heft to warrant all its angst and anguish.

A harmless and mildly amusing family comedy.

Duplicity zips from one elaborate piece of hugger-mugger to the next. But at a certain point (for me, it was Rome), boredom sets in.

If you're in the mood for some enjoyable depravity, Bitter Moon is quite a trip. [15 Apr 1994, p.05]

A stage-y but likable ensemble piece.

Perhaps to compensate for the absence of compelling drama and tension (and a few continuity gaffes), Scott has retreated to his TV commercial roots and crammed Hannibal full of busy, art-directed visuals.

A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.

Maybe it's time for a moratorium on Ike-era coming-of-age pictures. Going All the Way, a faithful but belabored adaptation of Dan Wakefield's autobiographical 1970 novel, certainly suggests that it is. [10 Oct 1997, p.04]

An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.

Directed in workmanlike style by Underworld: Evolution's Len Wiseman, has its share of wild stunts and spectacular carnage, but it feels pokey and predictable, too.

Efron, who wears an "All glory is fleeting" tattoo on his back and a soulful look on his face, gets to be more of a grown-up in The Lucky One than in most of what he's done before.

The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.

The best reason to see Along Came Polly is the supporting cast.

Lockout is genre all the way. The film wears its colors proudly, but it also, alas, wears out its welcome.

Hoodwinked may be a poor cousin to the Shrek franchise, but this made-on-the-cheap computer-animated feature still has more style and snarky gags than Disney's recent CG hit, "Chicken Little."

For soccer aficionados, Kicking & Screaming boasts some fairly cool play, courtesy of Alessandro Ruggiero and Francesco Liotti, two kids who play "the Italians."

Sappy, sentimental and redeemed only by the quiet radiance and fidgety intelligence of its leads, Last Chance Harvey is a fantasy about mopey middle-agers getting a second chance at love.

A mild and merry romp about family, friends and sexual identity.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

No amount of accomplished acting and directorial skill can conceal the fundamental silliness of Outbreak's storyline, its inconsistencies, and the miraculous coincidences necessitated by its plot. [10 Mar 1995, p.3]

The movie devolves into a kind of high-tech Flash Gordon, with Ra as a cross- dressed Ming and Russell and Spader as the heroes required to chase big lugs with ray-guns around the inside of a pyramid. Things get pretty brainless before it's over, although Russell does get to deliver a great send-off line. [28 Oct 1994, p.5]

Invincible works, simply but provocatively, as a parable about the oppressed and the oppressors, victimhood and fanaticism.

I'm not sure what kids are going to make of Matilda and its perception of an adult world crawling with menacing, malevolent despots. They'll probably love it - and the film's resourceful, resilient star. Parents, on the other hand, might be squirming in their seats from DeVito's unrelenting send-up of the crass and the cruel. [02 Aug 1996, p.05]

Wood, for her part, can appear sad, or seductive, or mysterious, or happy, or lovestruck, or deeply troubled. Gabi is also very good with a gun, so look out.

There's a sign on the way into Norway, or at least a sign that somebody from the film crew put up: "On the eighth day, God created baseball." If amen is your answer to that, then The Final Season is the movie for you.

Watts' Evelyn is a tricky character - it should be entertaining having her around in the cloven-in-two-to-cash-in-at-the-box-office final installments.

A lot of energy and effort has gone into this endeavor, and I can't say some of it's not fun. But more of it, alas, is just tedious. Say uncle already.

Then Death feels the need to intrude again. And again. If his accent weren't so charming, his voice so resonant, it would be depressing, all this meddling and mortality.

The Internship itself would be kind of charming, too, if this Google-recruitment film, this 119-minute commercial for Googliness, weren't so downright creepy.

Take "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," throw some "Antz" on it, and you have The Ant Bully.

A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG, T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)

There's a lot of rambling and shambling going on in these overlapping stories, often to the point where Explicit Ills no longer feels like it has a point.

August: Osage County is the movie equivalent of Denny's Lumberjack Slam breakfast. If eggs, bacon, and toast aren't enough, throw in some ham, some sausage, pancakes, and hash browns. And then throw in more ham.

That the film, directed in swift strokes by F. Gary Gray from a screenplay credited to Kurt Wimmer, doesn't really work - unrelentingly grim, unintentionally funny - is almost beside the point. It's a wild concept.

Oleanna is Mamet's form of intellectual hazing, and we seated in the theater are, alas, his victims. [11 Nov 1994, p.05]

There is a lot of finger-pointing. Assertions are made, theories offered, but not much in the way of certainty.

A massive compendium of youth-movie/pedal-to-the-metal cliches. But man, is it fast!

Scott shoots and edits Unstoppable with roller-coaster momentum and an eye (and ear) on that roaring tonnage of steel.

An OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

A likable if not exactly groundbreaking comedy.

Mostly about delivering thrills, and chills, and this it does with moderate success and a bunch of fast, no-nonsense edits.

Unlikely to be remembered in decades to come - or even in months to come, once the next teenage dystopian fantasy inserts itself into movie houses.

Lacks the origin-story freshness of its predecessor (even if the inaugural Garfield Spider-Man came only five years after the final installment of the Sam Raimi-directed Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy). It lacks a charismatic central character, too.

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.

There isn't a real, flesh-and-blood figure in the bunch. Everything about Red Tails - the breaking down of racial barriers, the military achievements, the courage and sacrifice - is diminished in the process.

Circumstance is more interesting for its cultural views than for its insights into love, sex, family angst, and rebellious youth.

A roiling, boiling mix of blaxploitation, sexploitation, Tennessee Williams and the Tennessee outback.

Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

Barrymore and Collette bring life and charm to a screenplay that needs all the life and charm it can get.

An entertaining history lesson. That is, a history lesson that synopsizes and simplifies a complex life and complicated times into easily digestible panels of action, intrigue, martyrdom and sticking it to the papacy.

In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip."

When it works - and it doesn't half the time - it's as if Monty Python were back, putting its merrily imbecilic stamp on the dark world of terrorism.

More a deification than a documentary.

There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters. Now You See Me is not that movie.

Nunez's dialogue, and the paces he puts this threesome through, just don't ring true. Coastlines is the stuff of pulp, seriously at odds with what the writer-director has always done best. That is, show the inner workings of people, their needs, their fears, their small dreams.

It's not just Hollywood convention that gets in the way of the story, it's the lack of depth, heft and heart at its core.

Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.

In truth, despite more corn than Mel Gibson grows on his farm in "Signs" (another Shyamalan effort), After Earth is worth a look.

There is a lot of shield-your-eyes ickiness in District 9, a lot of violence and gore. What there is not a lot of, however, is humanity - even in the film's depiction of the inhumanity humans are capable of.

Despite all the stock characters and scenarios, Fox and company manage to bring things to life. And cut some hair.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

A meditation on guilt, remorse and redemption -- is unrelentingly heavy.

Neither fish nor fowl (nor extraterrestrial), and that's a problem. Craig, handsomely craggy, plays it straight, and like Eastwood's Man With No Name, he doesn't have much to say.

Moving within its wild and wacky and improbably true scenarios (some of them, anyway) are people you don't really want to know. Stop the presses: War makes people rich. Stop the movie: These people, who cares?

It's bleak business, and as it hurries toward its explosive, expository conclusion, the film becomes nonsensical, too.

Too much of the action in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit takes place on laptops, thumb drives, and video monitors.

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

Laced with a venomous wit, and turning progressively creepier as it unfolds, writer-director Jon Reiss' movie offers a black-humored study of suppressed rage, sexual gamesmanship, domination and subordination.

The Rocker can be amusingly dopey, with its "Spinal Tap"-ish lampooning of rock idioms - and idiots.