Tom Keogh

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.

Brother Nature at least enjoys moments of deep-end mania from Killam and Moynihan.

A wonderfully witty homage to the very king of disco movies -- "Saturday Night Fever."

The kind of minor work that may very well speak greater volumes about (Stone's) thoughts and feelings right now than another masterpiece would.

Perhaps in an effort to tell a PG story about an all-ages storyteller, Te Ata lacks vitality, pulling its punches and sometimes resorting to a cheesy shorthand. (A scene featuring Greene’s reservation leader and a racist senator is especially cheap.) Despite that, Te Ata lingers in the memory as a tale of an artist’s promise — and fulfillment.

It's a complete drag.

If you’re partial to the Northwest outdoors, co-writer and director Alex Simmons (best known for documentaries) makes the long trip a visual treat, too. Indeed it is time for fresh air.

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.

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

Director John H. Lee keeps the action taut and often deeply felt when it comes to sacrifices and losses. But the script is often bogged down by deifying MacArthur.

Drama, swift action, and low-key, character-driven comedy.

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

It's sporadically funny but often unfunny, the latter worse than not being funny enough.

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's very effective.

A huge surprise: a startlingly resonant yet unabashedly entertaining slice of American history, a popcorn movie with complex observations about, of all things, racism.

What makes Hit and Runway uniquely fun, however, is the unapologetic extent to which Livingston and Cohen turn it into an index of beloved Woody-isms.

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

What follows is a post-setup hour of imaginative action and dazzling stunt work, all taking place on one of cinema’s great self-metaphors: a speeding train changing scenes every few seconds and heading toward an unknown destination.

A pulsing, wooshing, visceral experience that amounts to great fun and an entirely disposable movie.

With its boyhood-to-manhood tropes (growing up means getting a girl’s attention and winning an idol’s respect), London Town can’t be taken too seriously. But it’s nice to see part of the Clash’s populist legacy in a fan’s journey.

If McCulloch can draw this much humanity out of his actors, and do it in comedies with a deceptively easygoing poignancy, he's definitely a director to watch.

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.

Lawrence's style is purely will-it-stick-the-wall-or-not, and when it doesn't he looks pretty puny up there on the big screen.

Though Dough is often in danger of running off the rails with improbable and unnecessary plot twists, it is always essentially entertaining and warm in its observations of hope rekindled through simple relationships.

The film's bemused but genuine respect for the ingenious obviousness of a bygone cinematic language is quite moving.

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

Bell can sculpt a funny moment to polished realization, but deprive it of oxygen at the same time. It’s not until late in the film’s third act that a different feeling emerges, a looser hand that provides room for characters to be more warm and human than pieces in a constricted design.

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.

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

Gun Shy can't rise on wobbly legs, and its real potential is lost for good.

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.

Captivating an audience from the get-go and drawing our attention and emotions ever deeper into the layered mysteries of a dreamy fable.

Will eventually be remembered as a disposable farce, but one that leaves a happy memory.

A careful, intelligent, and seamless design that makes room for a couple of unexpected twists.

Let your children have their childhood while you have a rare, grown-up experience at the multi-plex for a change.

Within this uncertain world, Lopéz-Gallego relishes such noir staples as fatalistic shadows, eruptive mayhem and terse, ironic dialogue. But he and his cinematographer, Jose David Montero, also carve out fresh visual territory.

An excruciating misfire.

While we may like what we see, it's impossible to comprehend what much of it means or why we should care.

A mixed bag, all in all (casting Huey Lewis was not the best idea), but worth seeing.

It does yield solidly comic performances.

Pali Road — an engrossing psychological thriller with a trapped damsel’s very sanity on the line — demonstrates how an enigmatic story can unabashedly overflow with disorienting puzzles and perverse twists, all for the sake of blurring the line between reality and illusion.

What we have here is a small story in an oversized setting.

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

In more careless hands, Middle Man’s deranged farce could have resulted in an unchecked, undisciplined movie with nothing to say. But beneath the roller-coaster madness here is an earthbound terror that art is meant to reveal.

Mercury Rising could have been a terrific movie with a little more gumption. [3 Apr 1998, p.G5]

Quite smart, sensitive, and relatively sophisticated.

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

A sequel from hell.

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.

Despite the stakes, Mendeluk can’t scare up any particular urgency, largely because everything is so contrived and inauthentic.

This is pretty much a lazy film with a few lighthearted moments and no substance.

The true star of this film, funny and often breathtakingly lovely, Zellweger carries virtually every scene in which she appears -- which aren't nearly as plentiful as one might like.

Merely reconfigures the same predictable gross-out jokes, sentimental platitudes, and decorative sex that figure into half the screenplays in circulation.

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

It's insulting and devalues the experience of watching not just this film but all films.

Can anyone but a lapsed Catholic possibly be interested in this unpleasant, anti-Papist creepshow?

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

As with most non-Disney animated features, Trumpet of the Swan does make the Mouse look like a genius.

Don't be surprised if you exit Here On Earth feeling both moved and incredulous.

It's not just bad, it's ugly. Not just stupid but really aesthetically displeasing. The sooner this movie disappears from sight, the better.

There's a lost opportunity here.

Looks plain silly without an appropriate tone or sustaining context.

Custom-made for an audience of mouth-breathers.

We don't even have Joe Eszterhas to blame for this one.

Pours on some of the most ridiculous dialogue heard in a feature film in a long time.

I would rather have been scraping gum off my shoe than sitting there another minute.

A painfully unfunny movie.

God-awful.

Ripped works best as a middling series of gags about being far too many tokes over the line.

Watching Left Behind's plodding screen adaptation may make you feel the Deity has already abandoned us to a shockingly dull post-apocalypse.

I don't like Say It Isn't So, but I understand its karmic inevitability.

The film isn't merely bungled. It's starved and battered by Lichtenstein.

Nearly incomprehensible story.

Looks and moves like a film whose vital organs were yanked before shooting commenced.

Dreadful suspense piece that has "Mystery Science Theater" appeal written all over it.

Could have afforded to be a little loftier and still be quite funny. Instead, it's a waste.

We're forced to listen to misogynistic rantings devoid of wit, entertainment value, or even authenticity.

A black comedy that never gets black enough to inspire Farrelly-style decadence.

D’Souza manipulates viewers’ passions while telling them who to blame for their bile. As for Hillary, D’Souza asserts she wants to nationalize all our industries and steal all our money. His lack of evidence undercuts his message.

A satisfying love story about two very different people with a common cause, people who endure trials of trust and faith in each other.

Director Park Hyun-gene skillfully engineers the inevitable triumph of the heart over every kind of human foible, and — why not? — a viewer is temporarily hooked.

Writer-director Jo Sung-hee subtly evokes American Westerns and “X-Files”-like weirdness while dreaming up such pulse-quickening set pieces as a shootout in a fog-filled room.

[A] warmly revealing documentary.

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