William Arnold

It is a fairly routine exercise in New Millennium movie mayhem.

The movie itself cannot begin to match its delicious high concept. It's offensively funny in places but it can't sustain itself for a feature length running time and it's not nearly as clever or as fun as it should be.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.

While Keira Knightley brightens things up as Guinevere, the casting is otherwise lackluster.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth.

The Man Without a Face also manages to be an expression of Gibson's well-known political and sexual conservatism. It goes to some lengths to pay homage to John Wayne (three times) while the anti-war left of the '60s is brutally caricatured as a bunch of effete snobs, and the women in this movie are just in the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.c1]

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

It's in English, but the actors speak it with tortuous accents that are a constant struggle to understand and make them seem like foreigners in their own land. Spanish with English subtitles would have served this story much, much better.

There's an enjoyably literate style here and some humorous moments.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

Witherspoon shines. She's never looked better, and she carries herself with both her usual comedic flair and a surprising elegance.

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.

A fairly routine heist drama and a never especially believable puzzle film.

It has its charms, but fails to strike a similar emotional chord.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.

It’s a comedy, a romantic star vehicle, a thriller, a horror movie and a quasi-environmental parable that's calculated to appeal to all demographic groups. It's not enough of any one of these things to be particularly engaging.

In the end, it's just a pointless downer.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

Its heart is in the right place and it resists the temptation to junk up the story, but Depp does nothing with his character and the movie has little of the unique wit or panache that would make it appealing to an older-than-10 audience.