Kasdan has assembled a stellar cast of supporting players to lend this low-key tale some interest.

Ultimately, the film can't help but disappoint. Movies where you're continually waiting for the other shoe to drop are never as much fun as those where you never expected the first one to fall.

The results are sometimes too frenetic, the laughs too obvious and predictable. But director Joel Zwick paces things well, and leavens the lunacy with enough seriousness (including a wonderfully poignant exchange between Toula and her brother) to keep the film grounded in the real.

It's the strangest comic misfire yet from Wes Anderson.

It's a rhythmless, graceless piece of filmmaking. But if you have an ounce of misanthropy in your body, a picture like this can draw it to the surface the way a leech draws blood.

The movie's main strengths are its use of the real United Nations as its prime location and Pollack's ability to stud this movie (as he also did "The Firm") with players who do supporting-character equivalents of star turns.

They put the material on lifts - and end up tripping into TV dramedy land.

Well-paced, scathingly funny satire of the fashion industry and its eminently lampoonable pomposity.

There's little time for nuance in Stop-Loss, and it doesn't deny any of the film's power to wish Peirce would occasionally slow things down enough to let her audience ponder what they're seeing.

The story seems fresh and alive. They also had the good sense to cast Dunst, at 19 already one of Hollywood's finest and most consistent actresses.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.

Ice Age snaps with visual wit whenever director Wedge breaks the stale story to pieces and pumps in some bracing fresh air. So it's fitting to find, when the final credits roll, that he played Scrat.

There's enough wit to keep audiences of whatever age happy.

Thanks to Suvari, audiences laugh nervously at the mortification of soul and flesh, but she doesn't really do them much of a favor. She simply keeps them watching as a would-be gross-out comedy turns into would-be gross-out tragedy.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

Like the coolest train set a kid ever had. It's not real and the faces on the toy people don't look human, but it has bells and whistles galore and will take you as far as your imagination allows.

A funny, touching mood piece.

The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.

Performances by Jim Caviezel and Richard Harris make this a great adventure.

Simply twiddling with the fine-tuning on the central character is not enough to warrant remaking a film. Both Glover and Willard deserve better.

It's a courageous, moving, organically funny picture.

The movie needs more incident and complication; it's modest to a fault.

Overall, you're left wondering why every big novel needs to be a movie. White Oleander would work better as a four-part miniseries -- or at least as a less conventional screenplay.

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

Everything about this film is drenched in adrenaline.

Star Maps is the work of a talented group of young actors and filmmakers anxious to try as much as they can and see what works. Not all of it does.

This isn't your father's Stuart Little, but youngsters will be delighted. Mostly.

All honesty, rebellion and suffering, but no depth.

Has the fingerprints of earnest, first-time filmmakers all over it.

Foxx is magnificent, taking a role that could be exorbitantly showy (actors playing the mentally disabled tend to forget the word "restraint") and turning in a performance that's controlled and mesmerizing.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

The movie mostly proves that cutting-edge humiliations are best absorbed in 25-minute segments on HBO.

It's Cheadle's rich emotionality and sense of humor that have gone seriously missing in Traitor.

Blue Crush is such a blast to look at, it seems a shame to talk about its formulaic plot, cliched dialogue and absolute predictability.

Clearly a spiritual descendant of the old Looney Toons cartoons; it's not hard to imagine Daffy, Bugs, Porky and their pals in the starring roles here. And that's a cinematic pedigree worth cherishing.

The performers are all keen at expressing different variations on uptightness and with-itness. And McDormand is sensational.

The symmetry doesn't work. Capitalism is an economic system; democracy, a political system. Perhaps Moore should have come out and said what he really wants to see us adopt: a democratic socialism.

The film -- florid, excessive, brash -- owes its success to bravura performances by Sean Penn as Eddie, Robin Wright Penn as Maureen and John Travolta as Joey, the third leg of a triangle. The three play their parts with an abandon that keeps the film buoyant and luminous. Most of all, these three superb actors give us permission to enjoy the film's terribly flawed characters rather than to judge them. [29 Aug 1997]

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

Role Models has a tart surface and a heart of goo. The movie grows more obvious as it goes along.

he Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

The performances of Luna and, especially, Reilly, make the film more enthralling than it perhaps deserves to be.

With a grating combination of naivete and arrogance, The Green Mile consistently overplays its melodramatic material, including a portrait of a black man that is as breathtakingly offensive as it is earnest.

First-time director Swicord brews an atmosphere of geniality and warmth and brings a modicum of momentum to a happily discursive book.

Luckily, the new The Incredible Hulk is more like those 80-page special issues that comic-book publishers sold in the early 1960s for a quarter, packed with old, favorite story lines.

One of the unique virtues of the cinema is its ability to bring history to life with engrossing detail and gripping immediacy; East-West does this.

Romantically nostalgic, a love letter to growing up in simpler times.

This depressing look at love isn't quite worth enduring.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

The whole thing is too giddy to be taken seriously and too much of a confection to leave much of a lasting impression. But for 140 minutes, at least, it should give non-fanboys at least an idea of what all the fuss is about.

Say 'I do' to Best Man.

This delightful, if perhaps too calculatedly winsome, comedy presents seniors who are coping with emotional and physical losses and challenges them to act like the young people they still are at heart.

It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The result is a highly critical and impossible-to-dismiss examination of the administration's rush to war that is sure to move both sides of the political spectrum to apoplexy.

Not a perfect 10, but its imperfection is what makes it gripping and bewitching.

Would have been better served if Carrera had spent a little more energy developing his story and less on emphasizing his message.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.

The Clearing reminds us what a riveting presence he (Redford) can be.

It offers top actors in Fiennes and Richardson, plus a rare joint appearance by the sisters Redgrave.

What gives Notorious its staying power is what happens before AND after its hero's death.

Depends on breezy attitude and effortless delivery for its success.

John Turturro's farce about life and theater that is by turns elegant and bawdy, but always transfixing.

It's absolutely the classiest big-screen version of chick lit we're ever likely to see. But it still has all the lasting flavor of a Chiclet.

Point Break has its areas of excitement, but on too many occasions the movie just lies there -- even when it does, however, the film still manages to look and sound good.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

"Happy Accidents" should retire Tomei's status as part of a show-biz urban legend and establish her once and for all as one of our most versatile and engaging performers.

Don't go expecting a good time to be had. But by all means, go to revel in a movie that, for about two-thirds of its length, is Mamet at the top of his game -- intelligent, tightly crafted, densely layered.

Has the grisly appetite, if not the execution of the original. What it also has are monstrously good Ralph Fiennes and Edward Norton, plus a fine young Hannibal to save it.

If only it had a plot mere humans could follow.

A film as clever and embracingly ribald as this shouldn't have to resort to cliche in the end; director Nigel Cole should have kept his girls in Britain and kept the mood light.

Murray is very funny in the early going when his irritation-shtick is allowed full play; when he turns doughily benign in the late going, he's much less interesting. [17 May 1991]

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

Nell doesn't jell. Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. [23 Dec 1994]

Accomplishes a delicate balancing act, that of entertaining the audience with the thrills and adventure of the Andrea Gail's final journey.

An action-adventure flick that could turn into this generation's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

The Summer Olympics may offer more intricate, arduous and high-stakes spectacles, but nothing will top the last half-hour of Gunnin' for That #1 Spot for adrenalized high spirits.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

The Last Mimzy displays a gentle touch and the best of intentions. But the film's message never quite becomes clear; what, exactly, are young minds supposed to take away from this film?

At over two hours, Breakfast on Pluto is too much of a merely pretty and pretty good thing.

The sprawling canvas ultimately dwarfs the plucky title figure and makes him seem too small in every way.

Gordon deserves credit for at least attempting to deal with political themes, and the tension isn't bad either.

The actors here are uniformly excellent, and the story has a definite lightweight charm.

Perhaps the best thing about Better Than Chocolate is that it works as a comedy of characters, not of morals. If there's such a thing as a screwball same-sex comedy, this is it. [10 Sep 1999]

Yes, the movie asks hard questions, but it would be better - or at least more honest - if it weren't so insistent that everyone arrive at the same answer.

A quietly resonant movie about the painful alliance between single mothers and their daughters, and the complicated drama of separation.

Despite stellar work from the cast, the movie seems as emotionally distant from its audience as its characters are from each other.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

Misfires by constantly tossing out liberal feel-goodisms.

The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

A more honest version of "Summer of '42."

Shyamalan plows the same old ground of juiced-up surprise endings.

A smart comedy about a smart blonde -- that would be a sensation. But a dumb comedy about a smart blonde turns out to be not bad.

Moonlight Mile leavens the mood occasionally, but it cheapens things by insisting that everybody onscreen and in the audience leavethe theater smiling.