Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

Romanticism fights stoicism to a draw, and the movie grows ever more static, too. Down to the quasi-ambiguous hate-crime finish, Brokeback Mountain comes as close to being a still life as you can get with human characters.

Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

A History of Violence is a hollow story from an empty graphic novel.

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking.

Doesn't match the impact of its predecessor, which both revived and reimagined the zombie-film genre.

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.

A visual feast of colorful stop-motion animation, offers many bite-size delights. Ultimately, though, it isn't nearly as flavorful as Roald Dahl's deliciously perverse children's book, upon which the movie is based.

Let's just say this is a perfect film for penguin lovers who also are devoted members of the Green party - and leave it at that.

Let's get it out, loud and clear: Jerry Maguire is not a sports movie. It's a stealth chick movie, wrapped in a swaddling of jock stuff so that it gets through guy radar without setting off the missile defenses.

It lacks even Tarantino-esque vitality. It moves more like a busted concertina.