Steven Rea

Forceful, heart-wrenching stuff.

A Tale of Love and Darkness loses itself in dreamy imagery, in its studiously crafted aesthetic. But there are times when Portman lets the toughness, the tenacity, the emotional heart of Oz's story shine through.

Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson's alter-ego in Gilliam's film, provides the narration. If there's hagiography here, it's counterbalanced by biographical truth.

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

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

At least an hour of Man of Steel's excessive running time is devoted to the sort of crash-and-burn, slamming-into-skyscrapers CG fight scenes that we've already seen in "The Avengers" and "Dark Knight," "Iron Man," and "Spider-Man." Man of Steel is just the same old same old.

Potter explores midlife ennui, (middle-)East-West tension, theology, biology and the irrational nature of romance in this ambitious, if ultimately sketchy, drama.

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.

A silly melodrama.

Cloud Atlas is pop spiritualism, comic-book grandiosity, Zen for dummies. I can't say I didn't enjoy it on some level, but it's not the level of universal wisdom the Wachowskis and Tykwer would have us be on.

Jessica Biel is Vera Miles, the star who had the nerve to get pregnant when Hitchcock wanted her for "Vertigo." He feels betrayed, and she feels relieved, consigned to a supporting role in Psycho as Marion's sister. And Toni Collette, in glasses and a dark wig, is Hitchcock's long-suffering secretary, Peggy. Both Biel and Collette are very good, engaging.

Murray and Linney are terrific together (and apart), their notes pitch perfect, and the supporting cast is good all around.

Pinpointing the era - lovingly - is very much what Dark Shadows' has on its mind. While there's a tangle of romance and vengeance and all sorts of family matters to deal with, Burton's film is really about hippies in bell-bottoms, stoned out in their VW micro-buses.

A Kiwi nerd love story and loopy portrait of Down Under underachievers, Eagle vs. Shark offers a deadpan take on family, friendship, obsession and self-delusion.

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.

Smart and gripping - at least until the third act.

Pretty magical.

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.

In key ways, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is like Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth": a child, caught in the waking nightmare of one of history's ugliest times, confronting the horrors of a grown-up world, and dealing with them as best he, or she, can.

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.

T Bone Burnett's soundtrack has the appropriate twang to give Wenders' Hopperesque tableaux a nice, filmic poetry. But as arresting as the images are, Shepard's clunky, soap-opera banter brings most everything, and everyone, crashing down to earth.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith kicks off with panache and star power - and quickly wears out its welcome.

This based-on-real-life tale of artistic aspirations and international politics is packed with more corn than an Iowa silo.

Isn't the whole handheld "real-video" thing kind of old by now? Isn't the Shyamalanian-twist thing kind of old by now, too?

While Ferrell and Reilly are great together, hatching harebrained schemes that have no basis in reality, part of the unexpected treat of Step Brothers is watching Jenkins and Steenburgen sink to such blithely immature levels of rude and crude comedy.

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

All the running, the hiding, the escaping (from giant moles, from giant Murray) are decidedly less exciting, and compelling, than City of Ember wants to be.

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

At times soppy, sentimental and shamelessly romantic, at other moments bursting with clever barbs -- and now and then zooming in on something telling and poignant -- Love Actually is just about impossible to dislike.

Beloved spans 45 years, shifting from Paris to Prague to London to Montreal, and it boasts an especially strong performance by Paul Schneider.

Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.

It's a vivid way to contextualize Hypatia's astronomical musings, but it's kind of out there, too.

There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.

Jaw-droppingly corny. [22 Jan 1999, p.03]

There are big, jaunty gusts of music, and there are big, jaunty gusts of acting: the Heath Ledger-esque Alexander Fehling pumps up his Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with brash, boyish verve and stormy emoting.

Offers a worshipful but insightful portrait of the group - centered, of course, on its charismatic front man.

Not everyone's cup of tea, but a strong, heady brew.

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

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

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

Lacks an essential sense of purpose.

Doesn't overdo it on the 1950s period charm -- lots of tweed, old cars and bikes, great woolly sweaters and painted rowhouses -- and the performances never get out of hand, even when the plot does.

Facing Windows is rich stuff. Maybe too rich. But thanks to fine performances and a grounded script, the pieces of this intriguing little puzzle all manage to fit.

Just misses being great. The dark shaman mysticism doesn't entirely mesh with the earthbound quest across the wild and glorious Southwest. And the ending, with its shoot-outs and sacrifices, has a choppy, unneccessarily complicated feel.

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.

A satisfyingly screwy New York story.

If only the screenplay had more going for it than hackneyed homilies and living-in-the-ghetto stereotypes. If only first-time director Sunu Gonera had a surer hand, a knack for something bolder, wilder, goofier.

Not as consistently or uproariously funny as "American Pie," but it does have a Zen zaniness that gives it center as well as edge.

An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.

There are so many things wrong with Luhrmann's Great Gatsby - the filmmaker's attention-deficit-disorder approach, the anachronistic convergence of hip-hop and swing, the choppy elision of Fitzgerald's plot, the jarring collision of Jazz Age cool and Millennial cluelessness. But at the crux of things, the problem is that it's impossible to care.

Has a glorious good time satirizing the extravagant lengths to which the military and intelligence establishments will go if they think there's a payoff at the other end.

For all its visual delights, Magic in the Moonlight, the 44th feature written and directed by the admirably industrious Woody Allen, has to be one of his bigger duds.

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

Oh so slight and forgettable.

The momentum Stiller has built up - his character's globe-trotting derring-do, the care and consideration on display in his directing - carries the movie a long way. Falling short of fantastic, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is still a fantasy to enjoy.

With its rebellious themes and pharmaceutical props - Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax all get doled out - Charlie Bartlett isn't going to win any awards from parent-teacher groups. But the underlying message of the film, with its nods to "Catcher in the Rye" and - '70s throwback here - "Harold and Maude," is a good one.

Throw in some business with the CIA, add a small army of Serbian thugs and a mysterious Croatian beauty, and The Hunting Party picks up speed, careening through the forests where the Fox may or may not be hiding out. Whatever fate awaits, it can't be good. But it can be fun.

It's all head-spinning and lovely - and a little exhausting, too.

One of the problems with The Dark World is that its monsters and angry armies and visual effects are interchangeable with Peter Jackson's Tolkien pics, with Clash of the Titans, with The Avengers, with Man of Steel, and on and on. These superhero movies. These Middle Earth movies. These mythic god movies. It's getting hard to tell them apart.

The contrast to Ramis' last picture, the inspired Groundhog Day, is marked. [12 Apr 1995, p.F03]

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

Ultimately, it's the romance that feels forced and phony, not the group meetings, the confessions, the anguished moments alone.

Now in his late 40s and hairier than ever, Jeremy seems a simple enough, likable guy, and he has no pretensions about what he does. And no apologies either.

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

A sleek little meditation on beauty, desire, love and time. Now and then, it's fairly sophisticated stuff.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

With its themes of family tradition, heated passion and parent-daughter conflict - not to mention lots of splendid preparing-the-meals sequences in the Aragon kitchen, and not to mention the contents of Keanu's case - A Walk in the Clouds could just as easily been called Like Wine for Chocolate. But anyone hoping for a second helping of the sensual romance of Like Water for Chocolate will come away disappointed. The movie's glinting incandescence is oppressive. [11 Aug 1995, p.14]

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

Puccini for Beginners, which takes its title from its heroine's passion for opera, isn't just another trendy toe-dip in sexual experimentation. It may not be the real world of New York, or even of most relationships, but it's worth a visit.

A goofy combination of screwball farce and Dogma-style verite grit and gloom.

Feels stagy, stiff and entirely unnecessary.

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.

There's whimsy and raunchy humor here, but also an underlying sense of darkness and despair.

Bobby has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve). But it doesn't have its screenplay anywhere - or at least, anywhere near the heft that its subject demands.

What's up in The Duke of Burgundy is a straight-faced homage to 1970s European erotica, full of soft-focus nudity and soft-core kink.

By the end of the film, Leo is beginning to sound suspiciously like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Robotic, and more than a little peeved.

This is one of the smarter, more honest scripts to be filmed in quite some time. And Jenna Fischer, star of "The Office," gives one of the smarter, more honest - and vulnerable, and tough - performances by an actress on the big screen in an even longer stretch.

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.

As funny as it is sick (and it's plenty of both).

It has enough buzzing wit and eye-popping animation to win over the kids - and probably more than a few parents, too.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

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.

The big shift between Carpenter's B-movie and filmmaker Jean-François Richet's comic book-style remake is that instead of a troop of bloodthirsty gang members encircling the precinct, the bad guys here all look like good guys.

The Signal is a road movie turned upside down and inside out.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Deadpan and a bit dopey, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has a shaggy charm, and the chemistry between the tuneful twosome's would-be Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty makes up for the inevitable rock-and-roll road movie cliches.

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.

At its best, the film is undeniably tender. Sweet, even.

Fast, funny.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

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.

There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

A charmer.

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

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.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

Carpenter, an old hand at this horror stuff, delivers some convincingly creepy effects, but the narrative lacks any sustained dramatic pulse - its gallery of hallucinogenic scenes doesn't add up to much more than, well, a gallery of hallucinogenic scenes. [03 Feb 1995, p.5]

Sitting in the theater, watching Knight of Cups, you hear an incredible amount of thought-balloon babble, but you don't hear anything approaching the sublime.

Whether or not the story makes any sense, The Promise promises to transport - and does.

Fans of Brooks and his wry, dry neuroticism will not be disappointed as he whines and whimpers around New Delhi.

Unravels a bit heading toward its finale, as buildings explode and characters are forced to explain themselves and their nefarious motives. But the payoff at the end - at once kind of radical and gratuitous - delivers a wallop.

Scott's reimagining of the legend of Robin Hood has more heft than it does humor, more soulful brooding than snappy thrust-and-parry retorts.

Several notches above the usual gay-themed indie, and mostly manages to avoid -- or at least legitimately deploy -- the gratuitous throbbing beefcake scenes that are part and parcel of the genre.

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

If only RocknRolla's characters were at all believable - even in the context of its own cartoon universe.

It's old, old hat.

As silly as Multiplicity is, there is an adult sensibility at work here. The movie gets some of its biggest laughs when the clones, one after the other, proceed to break rule number one: No clone nooky. There's nothing explicit about the sexual shenanigans, but the duplicates' respective dalliances with the missus serve as the basis for much of the comedy. [17 July 1996, p.E04]

A whimsical tale of serial murder in the English countryside, Keeping Mum benefits immensely from the charm and pitch-perfect gravitas of Kristin Scott Thomas.

John Dies at the End isn't deep. But it is deeply amusing, in the sickest possible way.

Hysteria is a romantic comedy, not an erotic one.

Wincer shoots the whole thing - which is dressed up with cherry-red vintage fighter planes and boxy Pan Am Clippers and offers a few sequences in Thai lagoons of gloriously shocking turquoise - in a manner that renders even surefire stuff (collapsing rope bridges, horseback rides through crowded Manhattan streets) ho-hum. Kids of a certain age may be distracted by the bright colors and broad acting - the film is, at least, devoid of any gratuitously nasty violence - but most audience members who find their way into the theater will wonder when the Ghost Who Walks is going to walk off into the sunset. It ain't soon enough. [7 June 1996, p.03]

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.

Burns' writing style is full of tepid Woodyisms about sex and romance, with Allen's Jewish guilt supplanted by the Christian variety. [23 Aug 1996, p.03]

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.

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.

War is hell, war is cruelty, war is toil and trouble, war is just a shot away. But is war a snooze? Well, by the time Enemy at the Gates has run its course — it sure seems that way.

The Killer Inside Me is tough, disturbing stuff: We're tagging along with a sociopath as he explains himself, reveals himself, works things out inside his head.

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

It's a sorry spectacle, watching garden gnomes being robbed of their dignity.

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]

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

Epic piffle.

A fairly dreadful melodrama drenched in self-pity.

Stripped of its poetry, some of the devices of the tragedy of the Moor come off here as woefully contrived.

lLght and likable - a low-budget "Steel Magnolias" without pretense.

There are tiny glints of humor and intelligence at work, and the action and animation rockets along slickly and stylishly. But unlike the protagonists of almost any and all of the Pixar titles, Astro Boy's namesake lacks even an iota of soul.

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

The movie's combination of unabashedly fun carnage, cool special effects, and tongue-in-cheek dialogue keeps the ball rolling (albeit at reduced speed), until the last of the titular terrors has bit the dust.

Think Jerry Lewis doing Eminem, or maybe it's Eminem doing Jerry Lewis (or maybe it's Pauly Shore doing Vanilla Ice), and you've got B-Rad.

If you're going to take another stab at this tale of a taunted, traumatized teen who exacts fiery revenge on, well, everyone, then Kimberly Peirce is the director to do it.

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

In Time is that kind of movie: Philip K. Dick for knuckleheads.

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.

Monster brings the horror stories of everyday life down to a recognizable level -- even as the actress inhabiting that story remains startlingly unrecognizable.

Tomorrow Never Dies sticks to the Bond formula without bringing anything new, or particularly inspired, to the proceedings. (Besides a lot of shameless product placement, that is.)

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

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

Love Is Strange has a gentleness about it, and an empathy, that inspire.

A moody cyber-noir with not much on its mind but looking good, Blackhat is a must-see if you like your dialogue (romantic, dramatic, subtitled Cantonese) peppered with techspeak.

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.

A cartoon that's truly cinematic in scope, and a story that's compelling and heartfelt - even if the heart belongs to a big, four-legged herbivore.

The Next Three Days is genre fare - no pretensions, no nonsense.

The real problem isn't with the actors, it's with 1) the source material, a highfalutin romance novel with a clever literary conceit, and 2) LaBute's clumsy, uncomfortable efforts to telescope Byatt's book into a workable movie.

A likable, low-budget high school comedy.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

Alas, something happened on the book-to-screen operating table: Yes, Running With Scissors is rich, twisted, insane, mordant and ridiculous, but it is not funny. Not at all.

If your idea of a fun night out is to be manipulated by freaky sound effects, jumpy edits, and point-of-view shots of ceiling fans whooshing menacingly, Insidious is the film for you.

Yea or nay, love or hate, the portrait that Streep delivers in Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic biopic is astonishing.

As for Bale, he seems to have lost his compass. His accent strays, his famous intensity wasted on clunky dialogue.

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

Filmmaker Kormákur orchestrates all this with broad strokes and winking intrigue, although the line between hambone melodrama and irony-tinged satire gets walked across a few too many times.

A charmingly off-the-wall little tale. Black doesn't do anything he hasn't done before (in fact, he's already done his remake of King Kong!).

Washington's portrayal of a down-to-earth, dedicated detective is what we've come to expect from the star: intense, meticulous, likable. But there isn't much depth to his role. [16 Jan 1998, p.03]

Casa de Mi Padre is at its best (a relative term, mind you) when it's at its silliest and most surreal.

300 is "Gladiator" for the gamer set.

A gloriously tacky horror movie with an inclination toward the occult, The Mother of Tears hails from the Italian schlockmeister Dario Argento, who photographs his Euro movie star daughter, Asia Argento, with something more than paternal pride.

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

Heartfelt and artfully shot, the movie - with little Rodrigo Noya, wearing big eyeglasses, in the title role - is too sweet for its own good, even as some of its characters do things that aren't terribly sweet at all.

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

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.

Alas, it's a throwback that's thrown its back out - limping along, trailed by battalions of stereotypes and ammo rounds of cliche.

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.

Black's caped "luchador" grows on you. Like a fun guy.

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.

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle.

Easy to like, and easy to forget.

The real problem is that there's nothing to George but the movie's props.

Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.

A likable if not exactly groundbreaking comedy.

It is a yarn. But it's so full of passion, poetry, and humor that it becomes, for the time, quite real.

RoboCop is a solid near-future action pic that poses moral questions about artificial intelligence and remote-control combat systems without getting too preachy or ponderous about it.

Dreamy and impressionistic, full of debauchery, drugs, disco, and dazzling couture, Saint Laurent is a biopic that picks its moments, leaving backstory behind.

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!

There'd be a lot less strife and starvation, disease and dread, if Nancy Meyers ruled the world.

The Getaway isn't going to bore anybody, but it's not going to do anything else either. [11 Feb 1994, p.03]

Dangerous Beauty, by any name, embodies no such thing. [27 Feb 1998, p.12]

If Weitz's Golden Compass feels, at times, too crammed with exposition and big set pieces, the film nonetheless works far more successfully than the first Potter pic - the leaden "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" - did translating its source material.

Tunney, brimming with coltish, neurotic energy, holds the screen like a true star. She brings the role, and the movie, to life.

Zany screwball farce.

A big comedown from "The Fighter," Contraband finds Wahlberg in default mode: With his Popeye biceps and broody stares, the actor can do a character like Chris without even thinking about it - and that's what he does here.

If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.

All manner of subplots weave their way through the film, which teems with "colorful" characters and saccharine cliches. But, like the first film, it's next to impossible not to find diversion in the company of such stalwarts as Dench and Nighy and Smith. And George Thorogood is, happily, never heard from again.

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.

Has an empty, soulless feel.

No great shakes, The Baxter nonetheless has a quiet loopiness going for it. And it has the absence of a laugh track going for it, too.

Peter Jackson devotees may not like to hear this, but Jack the Giant Slayer is far more accomplished, visually speaking, than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Snooze, I mean, Journey.

Alternately tedious, cliched and unintentionally funny.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

Directed by veteran stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, Snitch is shot with a mix of nervous close-ups and weirdly vertiginous angles.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

Dumb, dumb, dumb - borrowing scare tactics from Hitchcock and other suspense masters, but forgetting basic story.telling essentials such as character development and logical exposition.

Tonally, Casino Jack is all over the place: exaggerated comedy, cartoonish high jinks, then heavy-handed melodrama (a third-act face-off between Abramoff and his wife, played with no center of gravity by Kelly Preston, comes out of nowhere).

Not exactly a hundred million dollars' worth of classic comedy.

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

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

Intermittent moments of mild amusement ensue.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

It's totally down-to-earth, as real as a trip to the supermarket.

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

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Michael Elliot, the Philadelphia native who wrote Just Wright as a vehicle for Latifah - and who was on set for most of the shoot - says that Common's earnestness, and eagerness, and his sense of responsibility in carrying the movie, were palpable.

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

A wonderfully crafted, smartly acted study of a complex old coot.

A thoroughly satisfying mix of mayhem and mindless fun.

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

Birth makes its oddball supernaturalism seem completely, compellingly real.

The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

Clunky and unsurprising.

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.

The fundamental problem with The Night Listener is the manner in which the boy, Pete, is depicted. Rory Culkin gets the tricky job of bringing the role to life, and he does it well, but it's still a trick. Or is it?

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.

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.

There's a xenophobic element to Taken's premise, to be sure - the idea that travel, even to Western Europe, isn't safe for Americans, and that foreigners (Albanians, Arabs) are by nature shifty and sinister.

Diaz gets her own voice-over monologue, as does Patric - the different points of view functioning like stanza refrains, born in shared familial anguish.

Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

Worse yet, Romeo Is Bleeding - which is extremely bloody - just isn't all that fun. [4 Feb 1994, p.12]

Simplistic and jingoistic. But it's also explosively fun.

Shot on the cheap, with cheesy animated credits and comic-panel "Bams!" and "Pows!" splashed across the screen, Super has a jokey, low-rent quality (or lack of quality) that could be endearing, if Wilson's performance weren't so nihilistically dull, and if there were somebody in the picture who had a soul.

Sly, sophisticated and surprising.

Stevenson is big and swarthy and not altogether without credibility, but he's got as much charisma as a potato.

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

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Offers a sometimes lyrical, sometimes gut-turning portrait of war seen through the eyes of children.

Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.

Director John Crowley trots his crew around London, working up a suitable amount of suspense. And paranoia.

It lacks the resonances of Gilbert's book.

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

Little White Lies wants to capture something momentous and meaningful in these people's lives. But ultimately it's hard to care.

Dedication works anyway, thanks to Theroux's jumping visuals and Crudup's jumpy performance.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

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.

Aniston and Zahn are sweet together - their respective characters have built up psychic armor to keep the outside world at bay, and each breaks down the other's in revealing ways.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

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."

Flat and predictable.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men.

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.

The problem with Wide Awake, which was shot by ace cinematographer Adam Holender in rich, autumnal tones, with interiors full of inspirational shafts of light, is that there isn't a genuine moment, or character, in the whole thing. [27 Mar 1998, p.14]

It addresses the essential human need for dignity, for freedom, for mastery over one's life.

How bad is Prince of Persia? Whether or not director Mike Newell is to blame, the action sequences lack verve and scope.

Their apartments are chic, the architecture is impressive, the restaurants richly appointed. And yet, while the atmosphere and cinematography of director Leon Ichaso's grandly conceived movie evoke The Godfather series (as does its theme of brother vs. brother in a criminal underworld), Barry Michael Cooper's screenplay falls short of any such epic design. [25 Feb 1994, p.03]

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.

The trouble with Alfie - apart from the film's existence, and the wrongheaded idea of remaking a minor classic - is that not a soul is likable.

There's not a believable character, nor line of convincing dialogue to be found.

A testosterone-fueled road movie that displays the same Apatow-ian obsessions, and raunch, as "Pineapple Express," "Superbad," and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

For all its flaws, offers an enjoyable look at the machinations of moviedom and fame, and a look into a future where what is real and what isn't becomes scarily blurred.

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

A crazed symphony of the supernatural. The elements don't hang together, but Kasdan delivers real scares, and real hoots, in the midst of the mayhem and madness.

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.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

Burns' movie shows a Woody.esque affection for a certain slice of New York and its denizens (with the angst and neuroses quieted down a notch or two).

Is Final Fantasy decent sci-fi? Yes, more than decent.

Compared to "Ray," which takes Ray Charles' unique life story and manages to make it feel like a cliche, Kinsey is total sophistication and nuance.

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.

Eva Longoria brings a crisp swagger and fluent Spanish to her role.

For sheer audacity and adrenaline-fueled carnage, Shoot 'Em Up hits its target pretty much dead on.

Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.

Too long (and it sure ain't taut), but it brims with passion.

It isn't frightening. Sometimes, in fact, it's laughable.

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.)

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful.

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.

Boasts exciting competitive track cycling footage.

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."

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

May not be great cinema, but it nonetheless deserves attention.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

Eisenberg (who starred in director Fleischer's far better Zombieland) does his usual Eisenbergian thing, more slacker and less hacker, but still hitting the same notes. And Ansari squawks and yelps, like a parrot with a grudge.

Fairy-tale-like musing on true love in cynical times.

It'd be nice if Jason Statham and Ben Foster, The Mechanic's mentor/protege duo, could crack a smile. Once.

It's riveting stuff, but unlike Tarantino's work - layered with casual irony, deadpan dialogue and encyclopedic pop-cult references - Killing Zoe is what it is and nothing more: a nihilistic crime film, steeped in carnage and chaos. [14 Sep 1994, p.E02]

Scary Movie 3 is a veritable time capsule of of-this-moment kitsch, schlock and bad taste. And it's funny, too.

It is at once inspiring and troubling.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

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.

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

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.

The spike-heeled, postfeminist pajama-party sisterhood that is Charlie's Angels is back, and it's serious dress-up time.

A conventional, button-pushing but emotionally affecting tale.

Virtually every set-up and set-piece in this extravagantly tedious adventure is misleading, or worse, irrelevant.

Although the story has more than a little Lion King deja vu-doo going for it, Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is likable as both a man, and then a bear.

A TV-movie-ish love story laden with heavy-handed metaphor... The Theory of Flight is feeble stuff.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.