Tom Keogh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An authentically spirited popcorn movie.

Ross might have been better served by dismissing verisimilitude altogether and going for a real fable-fable to make what is essentially a very simple point about the dangers and rewards of accepting life's beautiful risks.

The filmmakers went for cheap laughs as well as for some a little harder-earned. The only thing pure about this film is the dog, and he's magnificent.

The story, ultimately, is about the classic conflict between a desire to cherish and protect one's unique gifts from a brutal world and a more practical instinct to compromise beauty.

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.

Once at sea, The Perfect Storm collapses in a heap of spectacle and a dubious piling-on of scary incidents.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The film's very premise, while initially promising, doesn't hold up to lengthy scrutiny.

This much-anticipated but terribly underwhelming black comedy represents a seriously squandered opportunity.

Rob Schneider's stab at an "Ace Ventura"-like gamble for stardom.