Tom Keogh

The script by Liu Zhenyun becomes ponderous and redundant, kept on oxygen by its lead actress’s complex performance as a child-woman with enigmatic wisdom.

The Charnel House is watchable, even if you can tell very soon what’s really going on behind mysterious doings.

The film’s bleached colors and Reeves’ trademark woodenness add to its emotional remoteness, though Basso, Zellweger and Belushi create a convincing family in crisis. Zellweger, especially, delivers a fascinating, complex performance as a damaged survivor.

Despite promising elements of mixed-genre thrills, the film is finally the underwhelming sum of too many plot devices.

Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.

The effects never really get ahead of the characters or the script's layered personality.

The film's light success really comes down to Shannon, though, the exuberant "SNL" star whose alter ego actually seems more real and sympathetic here than she does in brief TV skits.

All such good intentions collapse by the third act, when Mission to Mars becomes a tediously late pastiche of chimerical nonsense from the early 1980s.

In the tradition of "Sunrise" and "Eyes Wide Shut," crises set the characters on a kind of dreamy, nocturnal journey through chaos and fear.

It does yield solidly comic performances.

Not a waste of time, but not quite in control of its destination.

So mired in his own ludicrous equation for contemporary action pictures that it's constantly stuck in first gear.

When Phillips is out of the zone, however, Road Trip slows down, awaiting another redemption.

This is a pretty leaden cinematic experience.

For Stallone, and his original script for Driven reflects a more mature, self-effacing perspective.

Doesn't go the distance in either story or style, unwilling to liberate itself from real or presumed expectations about what it takes to sell a movie featuring teenagers.

Comes across as a deceptively streamlined comic-drama; an unnervingly violent, gritty film noir with a wink.

The would-be emotional centerpiece of his three-hours-plus adventure flick is the most juvenile romantic tale of 1997.

Look to the cast as the best reason to see this film.

This is still Ron Shelton in good -- not great, but good -- form here, and the rewards are plentiful.

If you're paying close attention, there is reason enough to find Up at the Villa a fascinating experience, almost an experiment in some ways, but it's not a fully realized work of cinema.

About two lives in which transformation is a constant, destabilizing threat to freedom and sanity. That's a very provocative premise, though halfway through the movie Doyle and Walsh abandon its potential to go for easy laughs.

What the film doesn't have, ironically, is a soul.

Rounders is more involved with the insulated, arcane world of a gambler than it is with the things that actually make a movie work, such as characters and relationships and a script that connects all its dots.

A dark comedy that squanders its potential and never quite, as they say, suspends disbelief.

It is an ostensibly serious story about being young and struggling to wrest control over one's life from the hands of fools, yet it doesn't behave like a serious drama that wants to lead us anywhere.

Simply a case of severe overreaching and the illusion that an overstuffed movie is an epic movie.

All fleeting charm where it could have been one of the most memorable films of the decade.