Steven Rea

Its grossness knows no bounds, and you'd have to be dead not to laugh.

Chicken Little is entirely lacking in anything "Disneyesque."

21 makes for some slick escapist fantasy. Even if, and because, the fantasy has its roots in something real.

In the end, you just feel good about these people, and that's a nice sensation these days.

The Core is unabashed Hollywood spectacle, but with a cast of up-from-indie actors that makes the cataclysmic kitsch all the more fun to behold.

Has the disjointed feel of a bunch of strung-together TV episodes.

The movie is hipper than its L.A. establishment credentials would suggest.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

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

A meditation on a life lived in the public eye, I'm Still Here is strange, riveting, and occasionally appalling stuff, any way you look at it.

Comes across as gratifying, not grating: the same way the familiarity of a well-crafted whodunit is part of the book's pleasures.

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.

The real reason to see this slight but interesting documentary is to watch and listen to the radiant Aury.

Aimed at tweenage girls and mushy romantics of all age and stripe, Penelope has a quick gait and a nice comic tone.

Admission works in stops and starts.

Lacks the visceral sweep of "Saving Private Ryan." But Spielberg's story, for all its gut-wrenching intensity, was a fiction. Dahl's movie, slower in pace and conscious of its own artifice, addresses the same issues of courage and sacrifice - and tells a true story. That's worth something. In fact, it's worth a lot.

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

Like a grade-school version of an Indiana Jones adventure.

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.

Less a movie than a collection of pretty cool action set-pieces, linked together with some seriously awful acting and dialogue that even Dr. Evil couldn't deliver with a straight face.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

Sgt. Bilko, from the late, great Phil Silvers sitcom about an incorrigible con artist scamming the daylights out of the U.S. Army, has been turned into a not-very-funny film vehicle, just as The Flintstones was transformed into a not-very-funny film vehicle, and The Beverly Hillbillies, and Dragnet before them. [29 Mar 1996, p.05]

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

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

A winner.

The film's intimations of bisexual romance have a certain innate drama that no amount of bad acting or cornball rugby matches can completely erase.

As a thriller, In the Cut, with its red herring characters and plot twists, turns dopey and predictable. As a portrait of a single woman, burned by love and wary of what's in store, Campion's movie has its trenchant, telling passages.

Apocalyptically awful romantic comedy.

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.

There are, to be sure, some impressive special effects here, and whoever Warner Bros. hires to make the new Superman movie should take notes.

A raunchy comedy that's funnier to think about than to watch.

Dull plod.

If illuminating dawns and dusks had basked Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper in a rosy glow, the mopey cuteness of Restless would have been too much to bear.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

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

A "small" movie. But in its keenly observed examination of strangers who become intimates - and of family members who remain, in part, strangers - it has big things to say.

A strange mix of showbiz whodunit and soft-core eroticism, with a couple of fine actors - Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth - wandering around stunned and stoned-looking, as if someone slipped them a mickey.

Despite its haunting artistry and its winning eccentricities, The Shipping News is a vehicle that's still very much at sea.

A knuckleheaded period piece.

Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

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.

The feeblest kind of costume drama, where the costumes have more impact than the drama and where the period details serve only as distraction, reminding audiences that things looked different back then and not much else.

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.

A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation.

A disaster of a disaster movie that veers from the parodic to the preposterous. [6 Dec 1996, p.03]

It is a good hour too long, although it does boast Christopher Walken.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

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

There's enough here to entertain - and gross out - the kiddie crowd, and parental units, too

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

Anderson, who's turned Brit in a number of TV series and films, including "Bleak House" and "The Last King of Scotland," is compelling in her white lab coat and surgical scrubs, and she brings some real tenderness to her tete-a-tetes with Mulder.

The folks at Disney's Touchstone Pictures would have been wiser, however, just to have forgotten all about this hyperactive farce.

Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.

Hickernell's film aesthetic is straightforward, narrative-driven.

Ambiguous in a satisfying, puzzling sort of way, November offers a triptych of scenarios revolving around a grim moment.

Ultimately, 44 Inch Chest has very little on its mind.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of the BP disaster in the gulf: It's a big-screen oil spill, a needless gushing of macho bluster and wild set pieces, and a waste of millions and millions of dollars.

Around the Bend doesn't inspire one to care.

What distinguishes The Dilemma in this genre is its resounding unfunnyness, its emotional dishonesty, and the general unlikability of its cast of characters.

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

It's the magic of movies, not a movie that comes close to achieving real magic.

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.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

Satire should be knife-sharp and whip-smart, and The Nanny Diaries never is.

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]

The film never gives you a real sense of what drove Darin on, fighting a heart ailment (from childhood rheumatic fever) and fighting an industry and press that wanted to pigeonhole him.

Occasionally clicks into full-speed farce mode, but never for long - or for long enough.

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]

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

Any movie that considers the possibility of an afterlife, or the possibility that there isn't one, without first getting all postapocalyptic about it, merits some respect. Stay, Mia, stay!

Bloody, bone-chilling fun.

There's real hypocrisy here. If a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to offer a voyeuristic experience - and not a ridiculous experience - have some integrity about your nudity. Despite what the filmmakers may want to believe, there isn't a lot else going on here. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, not so much.

McKellen, Hanks and Tautou - and Alfred Molina, as a bishop with an agenda - are no slouches when it comes to emoting, but screenwriter Goldsman's rigorously faithful interpretation of Brown's flatfooted prose stylings is the filmic equivalent of putting big chewy baguettes in the actors' maws.

The picture uses humor and a heartfelt conviction to tell a story about discovering your destination in life.

It's a big stuffed turkey of a movie, just in time for the holidays.

Diaz works that trademark mix of ditziness, sexiness, and brassiness.

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]

This In-Laws feels, in the end, formulaic and unnecessary, especially when the original is yours for the renting at the video store.

The Farrellys manage to have their cake and scarf it down, disgustingly, too.

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

A boldly sappy melodrama that plays on - and off - racial stereotypes.

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

Easily one of the loosest, most satisfying comedies to hail from the prolific writer/director in a while.

Shot in Panama, with a cast of local Indians and B-tier Latino and Anglo actors, End of the Spear has neither the marquee heft nor the artistic gravitas of "The New World."

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."

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

Shows glimmers of great drama, but jettisons too much essential cargo (character development, relationships, plot, common sense) in an effort to be lean and clean.

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

The closest FF:ROTSS gets to wit is when Johnny convinces a reluctant Reed to attend a bachelor party, after promising the uptight groom-to-be that there won't be any "exotic dancers."

For a while, Firewall whips up the accordant dollops of suspense and dread, but it's not long before the timely issue of identity theft takes a backseat to old-fashioned Hollywood villainy, unnecessary (and nonsensical) red herrings, and STUFF THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Entertainingly creepy.

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

A modest and obviously heartfelt endeavor.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

Frankly, the wow factor isn't that great.

The Paperboy is over-the-top every which way you look.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Gritty, jumpy and rife with cliches.

The moral of Taken 2? If you're going on a family vacation, be sure that the human-trafficking ring you put out of business in that far more satisfying and suspenseful thriller from a few years ago doesn't know how to find you.

Aimed at teens and tweens, the almost-squeaky-clean Step Up 3-D shamelessly piles on the corn, stacking it so high that it's bound to tilt over and collapse.

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

The Situation deserves credit for not trying to reduce the events in Iraq to facile equations. There is corruption and cynicism on all sides: the U.S. diplomats and military, the Sunni leaders, the thugs in cop uniforms, the local powerbrokers.

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.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

The playwright, actor, director and drag queen (yes, his bewigged and be wild Madea makes a brief and totally gratuitous appearance in his new film) knows how to give human dimension, and a dimension of humor, to the cliches and stereotypes.

One moment it's farcical comedy, the next it's gruesome melodrama. The movie never finds the right tone.

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

Hesher has its genuinely affecting scenes, but too much of the time it feels false and shallow.

Someone should check Joe Carnahan for performance enhancement drugs. Smokin' Aces, the wild ride of a movie he scripted and directed, is so pumped up, manic and mayhem-packed that it practically shoots sweat off the screen.

A likably energetic star vehicle for English sports god Vinnie Jones.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

The trailers already have given away the "surprise" cameos in The Expendables, so try not to blink when Stallone goes into a church (shades of John Woo) to meet his mystery boss, played by a bald-pated, trademark smirking Bruce Willis.

Directed by Clark Johnson in an efficient and occasionally exhilarating style that points to the Emmy-winner's TV cop-show pedigree ("Homicide," "The Wire," "NYPD Blue").

There's nothing Disneyesque about this bomb except the forced levity of its musical score.

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

What this arid and arty exercise offers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Krueger's comedy doesn't always spark, but its underlying intelligence - not to mention Graham's eyes - shines through.

Feels thoroughly canned.

Completely unappealing people.

Delivery Man, with its democratic band of half-siblings and its feel-good view of humankind, is what it is: a reproductive remake that will make you laugh. More than once or twice.

Where Mike Figgis' film, with Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, bore deeply and darkly into emotional territory, The Center of the World turns out to be just as fake as its setting.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

A creaky, cliched, feel-good family drama about learning to stop and smell the roses - and planting a vegetable garden while you're at it - Uncle Nino is shameless, sappy fare.

An innocuously smutty road comedy.

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

Batman v Superman lacks the levity (forced or otherwise) of a typical Marvel Universe entry. But Snyder's superpowered epic does have a sense of import and grandeur about it.

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Cute, cloying and catastrophically predictable.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

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.

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

The script is boilerplate, the wit pretty much witless.

Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.

Christopher Walken has the best moments in the whole thing, portraying the wacked-out auteur of the Gwen-and-Eddie vehicle. Sadly, he's only in America's Sweethearts a few hilarious minutes.

Loaded with careening car chases and rooftop runs, glass-shattering shootouts and exploding fireballs, Killer Elite offers more than enough to keep action junkies happy.

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

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.

City Slickers I managed to poke fun at the whole Iron John/discover-your- maleness movement at the same time the film was able to embrace it. But while City Slickers II tries for the same mix, it doesn't work. Instead, we get shots of three smelly, unshaven guys getting blubbery and hugging each other. [10 June 1994, p.03]

"Lousy times make lousy people," someone opines, and maybe that's the point Romero's trying to drive home.

Quite literally the blockbuster of the year.

A comedy about friendship, faith and the acting life, Le Grand Role is unabashedly corny and tear-jerking - and still quite likable.

This violently comic caper has some spunky charm going for it -- but has a lot of self-consciously hip, studied wackiness going against it.

In Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith wears his heart on his sleeve - and on his pants, socks, boxers and backward-facing baseball cap.

He emerges stinking, and so, alas, does Fathers' Day. [9 May 1997, p.03]

It's the emotional equivalent of a big shrug.

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

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.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

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

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

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.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

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.

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.

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.

A noisy, not particularly charming collection of skits and skirmishes.

By the end of Machine Gun Preacher, its title character has become a cartoon.

Does the world really need another movie about a married guy wandering blindly into an affair, or the married gal who can't decide whether to remain faithful or fool around?

To say that The Grace Card piles it on is an understatement of profound dimensions.

The title Brooklyn's Finest is drowning in irony, of course, but Fuqua's moves are less obvious: His film is classical and gritty, his violence makes you want to duck and run.

Somewhat fleeter and more engaging than its predecessor.

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

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

Doesn't take itself seriously, and that's a good thing.

The film, in its early going, also has a nice light humor about it, and an engaging, albeit tragic, love story.

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.

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

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.

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

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.

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

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.

How'd this thing get made?

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]

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.

I'll be darned if I can think of a more excruciating, ponderous, remarkably unfunny and inert cinemagoing experience to come down the pike in ages.

From the street corner to the boardroom to the White House, the same paradigms are in play, Brown argues.

Morel and his crew certainly know how to stage action: the fight scenes and shootouts, the stairwell pursuits and motorway mayhem, are as good, if not better, than anything to come out of Hong Kong in a long time.

The problem with NATM:BOTS is that Stiller, Adams, and company seem to be pretending that they're having fun, too.

Wildly ridiculous and thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Nostalgia for the '80s - big hair, Madonna, cocaine, big hair, Duran Duran, more cocaine - is all well and good. Unless it's practiced with the charmless ineptitude of Take Me Home Tonight.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

An astoundingly humorless, sentimental meditation on the magic wheel of life, this oddball endeavor - clearly invested with a lot of passion - is too dark for children and too dopey for adults. [02 Jun 1995, p.05]

A frighteningly unfunny comedy. [17 Feb 1995, p.05]

Taken for what it is - 'tweenage escapism - Stormbreaker is moderately fun.

Kilcher is lovely. But sadly, Ka'iulani is a perfunctory biopic of the sort one might encounter on television during Women's History Month.

Knowing has about a half-dozen screenwriter credits, which may explain why scenes crash up against one another - smart, stupid, far-fetched, compelling. And the trouble is that Cage walks (or runs) through them all, treating each with the same level of intensely goofy seriousness.

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

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

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.

Throw in the music -- a wall-to-wall whorl of Eastern modal dirges, thumping rock and Celtic-y skirl -- and you've got a veritable cinematic rhapsody of war.

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.

Elegiac and corny and not really convincing on any level (especially when it comes to its treatment of women - be they hookers, or waitresses, or girls on the town), Stand Up Guys nonetheless holds some fascination just for the off-the-charts affectedness of Pacino's performance.

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

It's sick. It's stupid. But it also is undeniably adept at skewering social hypocrisy, lancing the boils of political self-righteousness, and poking fun where others fear to tread.

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

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

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.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.

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

The premise of Village of the Damned remains wonderfully scary: that an alien life force has descended on a community, inseminated its women, and spawned a gaggle of evil brainiacs with platinum-blond hair who can read your mind and do funny things with their eyes. [28 Apr 1995, p.3]

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."

Almost absurdly quiet and observant, The Limits of Control is about the space between the action, the steps along the way.

A wickedly funny, Naked Gun-style parody that conflates old-style private-eye pics with Shaft and, yes, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

More a deification than a documentary.

A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.

If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before "Pulp Fiction," it - and Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.

Just about the only folks likely to find this humdrum hybrid of "Mission: Impossible" and "The Wind in the Willows" worthy for consideration are non-discriminating pip-squeaks.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

This Romeo and Juliet is hard to take seriously - and simply hard to take.

Wild Target is the sort of farce where nothing, essentially, is at stake, even as cars crash (including an original Mini Cooper), bullets rip, and knives get hurled with deadly velocity.

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

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

Isn't exactly fraught with psychological depth and nuance, but as a stalker-stalkee suspenser, the pic has some nice things going for it.

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]

Penn's over-the-top tirades and bullying threats are still there - it's a wild and woolly performance that isn't always as menacing as perhaps the actor intended it to be.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

Owen is all right as the harried husband whose relationship at home has turned frosty, but the essential heat between him and Aniston is missing. The actress succeeds in shedding her "Friends" persona, but there's something missing here, especially as things get knottier.

The offbeat comedy is not entirely devoid of charm, but its derivativeness is almost embarrassing.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

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.

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

It is by turns illuminating, exasperating, sloppy, redundant, a head-spinner, and a headache.

A bummer.

Shaquille O'Neal and Dr. Phil open Scary Movie 4 with an achingly unfunny couple of minutes of severed limbs and errant hoop shots.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

Cold and stylish, slick and violent.

Catastrophically overdone.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

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

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

From its jungle forays to its waterfall tumbles to its deadly spider bites - is entirely, utterly unoriginal.

The best stuff in this dopey, intermittently amusing live-action cartoon is the look that the film's effects and computer crews have given New Angeles - the ruined urbanscape of Southern California after an 8.5 quake and a massive tidal wave have sundered the city. [04 Nov 1994, p.05]

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

By the end of the film's two-hour stream of Be-Here-Now-isms, anyone left in the audience will be wanting to yell, "Put a sock in it!" to old Soc.

Beastly offers a thoroughly dopey reread of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale.

There's little of the seen-it-all, wise-guy acerbity that made his character in the X-Men trilogy stand apart from his fellow mutants. Here, he just glowers.

There's nothing original, nor compelling, about Twist.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.

Clash of the Titans is ancient Greece at its cheesiest. It's a big hunk of feta comin' at ya in 3-D.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

What a mess.

It's the cars, and the mega-horsepowered action, that matter most. With its driver-POV spinouts, wrong-way chases, and multilane median jumps, the movie is a roaring revel of an automotive fantasy.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

In fact, no one in The Gunman looks happy. And what happened to chivalry? If a fierce squad of goons is coming after you and your ex, whom you still love, and there's only one Kevlar vest to throw on, don't you offer it to her? Apparently not.

Robert Burks' cinematography is outstanding, and composer Bernard Herrmann supplies one of his strongest, spookiest scores... A major influence on the movies and movie-making style of Brian De Palma (among many, many others), Vertigo has a dreamlike eeriness and a climax that is, well, downright dizzying. [29 Nov 1996, p.04]

Down Periscope is not, alas, a wacky Naked Gun-style parody of submarine movies. It's more a mild-mannered comedy in the triumphant-underdogs vein, pitting Dodge and his USS Stingray crew against a high-tech Navy fleet and its high-strung general (Bruce Dern) in a series of maneuvers off the Atlantic coast. [01 Mar 1996, p.14]

Thank goodness for Leslie Mann. If not for the nutball charm of this tight-wound whirlwind, the dispiriting Hollywood sex comedy The Other Woman would be close to unbearable.

While The Sitter isn't that dumb, or dreadful, there really isn't much going on here.

What a mess.

Harry Connick Jr. acquits himself best of the lot.

Often incomprehensible (a combination of jumpy editing and lots of thick British Isles accents) and hardly ever entertaining - even unintentionally.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

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.

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.

The kind of glossy, Hollywood-forged waste of time that would depress even the most happily lackadaisical retiree.

If Taking Lives starts off with a modicum of wit and creepy-crawly scares, it winds up somewhere else altogether: in the cliche-strewn land of preposterous red herrings.

An overblown hodgepodge of volcano-baked desertscapes, Egyptoid-gone-baroque architecture, and gladiator-geared storm troopers with goofy headpieces, The Chronicles of Riddick bears no resemblance to the movie that spawned its namesake.

Let sleeping bros lie.

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.

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.

Even at just 90 minutes, Balls of Fury - with its caricatures of the Asian underworld, with its G-man malarkey and gay jokes (Feng keeps an all-boy bevy of sex slaves) - begins to outstay its welcome.

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.

I nodded off watching Just Visiting.

The real Radio, and the real coach -- seen together in the movie's feel-good epilogue -- deserve better.

What Never Die Alone is is a hackneyed tale of vengeance set in the 'hood, teeming with stock characters, slo-mo gunplay, and rampant misogyny.

A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

An efficient, if not exactly inspiring, espionage thriller, full of high-tech gadgetry (surveillance drones! flash drives!) and low-tech action (car chases! shootouts! a shovel to the head!).

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

Yes, bestiality in a PG-13 movie. It's the end of life as we know it.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

As a piece of filmmaking, What the Bleep isn't exactly transcendent stuff. But as an entryway into new ways of thinking about the self, the universe, and the vast infinite whatnot of whatever (you know what we mean, oh wise one), this little movie is big.

It works here and there. And then it doesn't.

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.

Williams, going full throttle as the desperate deposed kiddie icon Rainbow Ralph, is, well, simply exhausting.

A forced-march comedy.

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.

Full of kerplunkingly unfunny jokes and ex-"Saturday Night Live" cast members turning up to do shtick.

Amazingly, though, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, cowriters and codirectors of The Words, have the audacity - and the skill sets - to pull this all off. They wrest emotional truth out of hokum. They also wrest intelligent, nuanced performances from their cast.

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.

An astoundingly senseless thriller.

Maybe the best reason to see Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is to catch a glimpse of the real Finca Vigia, the property, with its house and pool, gardens, and tree-lined drive, where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote - and famously drank - from 1939 until 1960. Pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls were banged out here; so, too, The Old Man and the Sea.

Connoisseurs of giant, gnarled chunks of charred flesh, rejoice! There's plenty of it -- or stuff resembling it -- in the slasher-fest convergence of two killer franchises.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

An alarmingly charmless attempt to evoke the elegant romance and jaunty, jet-setting intrigue of the aforementioned titles, The Tourist is notable for the total absence of movie-star heat that movie stars are paid unseemly sums to radiate.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

A wild, wacky, wide-screen reimagining of the vintage radio serial and TV series, the film - with Armie Hammer in the hat and mask, galloping across Texas righting wrongs, and Depp as his trusty Indian sidekick, Tonto - is an epic good time.