Baseball, Boston and Drew Barrymore. Certainly sounds like a winning combination.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

For most of its meandering running time Harsh Times is just a rough South Central L.A. buddy movie.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

A Dirty Shame is certainly dirty, and maybe it's even a shame. But this is the John Waters we've come to know and cherish, and that alone is cause to celebrate.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

The talented and quirky-pretty Sarah Jessica Parker gives an excruciating performance. It's a keenly self-conscious caricature - the bold, showy kind that often wins awards yet sends audiences running from the theater.

It's a rugged, almost chauvinistic celebration of American get-up-and-go that never acknowledges, even implicitly, that our get-up-and-go got up and went. It might be characterized by words begin with G: gusto, guts, gumption, gee whiz and gosharootie, though, er, never G-spot. [14 Jan 1994]

The climax and epilogue are the juiciest, most tough-minded bits in the movie. Too bad Mayer didn't work his way backward from the end.

Cabin Fever may not be a horror classic, but it's definitely an ideal midnight movie.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

Unabashedly sentimental and just as unabashedly cliched.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Feisty and good-humored, and if it doesn't have deep characters, it is chock-full of personality.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed.

There's less here than meets the eye, not to mention the ear, nose, tongue and fingertip.

Needs a story.

Extreme Measures, a new medical thriller with Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman as doctors with differing views on medical ethics, is an episode of "Beauty and the Beast" grafted onto an episode of "ER" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

Will remind filmgoers that one of the chief pleasures of going to the movies is a good old-fashioned swoon

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Meandering, forgettable trifle.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

This is a movie for genre fans only; there's not an aspect to it that should appeal to the rest of the world. It's neither original nor inventive, and while its young cast works hard, there's not even a standout performance worth recommending.

Nothing seriously detracts from the film's overall brilliance.

Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.

A cautionary tale, a warning not to gather all of your neurotic friends in one room - or better yet, not to have so many neurotic friends.

Phone Booth may not be awful, but it's puny.

Hanks tries his hand at a king-size heartless comic role, and flubs it terribly. He looks slack and pasty and, what's worse, sounds slack and pasty.

This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

Goes to such great lengths to show the greatness of its Navy diver hero that it neglects to add much depth to his character - or the story.

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

Offers jaw-dropping visuals, but its troubling images of violence may cause this revolutionary effort to miss the evolutionary boat.

By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.

The movie never seems to force its connections or its revelations upon us, but merely discovers them in their provocative places; in short, it doesn't seem to be working very hard, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving: There's a grand, clever and ultimately satisfying plan under all the running around and bumping into each other. [27 Sept 1996]

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Unpretentious and brashly exploitative.

Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Becoming Jane isn't just a soap opera - it's a soft-soap opera.

A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

It's impossible not to be exhilarated by the energy and determination that infuses every frame.

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

In a society where athletic competitions are too often likened to war, the recognition that everyone's equal once they're off the playing field is a welcome reminder of that little thing called perspective, not to mention sportsmanship.

The Craft casts a spell with a cast of four kicky young actresses, atmospheric California settings, cool special effects and the attitude of a music video. [03 May 1996]

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

It rarely strikes the right tone and ultimately falls short of what one would expect from a collaboration between director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

No matter how "mock" this epic gets, it isn't mock enough. The "D" in the title must stand for dead weight.

If you feel yourself glowing after Love Actually, you might be suffering from sugar shock.

A campy riot of retro cool, a warm and fuzzy ode to the '70s buddy cops.

Huckabees boasts an impressive cast, and every one of them is fun to watch. But there's a strong sense that no one really knows what's going on here.

Painfully boring.

This is definitely a post-"Field of Dreams" movie, at home in an era that specializes in building ersatz old parks, like the honey at Camden Yards. I love that place, even if it's more theme park than ball yard (I also love theme parks). But "The Sandlot" isn't a theme park or a ball yard; it's a con job.

But the fine performances of all three leads rise above the cliches, giving the film a sense of reality that both impresses and inspires.

Playing by Heart is a disheartening example of how episodic, prime-time- style storytelling has taken a stranglehold on Hollywood films, even at their most "independent." [22 Jan 1999]

Put the tango in "To Sir, With Love," and you've got Take the Lead.

The comedy of manners becomes strictly a comedy of bad manners.

A pleasant little confection that leaves behind the sneaking suspicion it should have amounted to so much more.

The cognoscenti will no doubt follow the plot permutations a little bit more easily than those of us on the outside. But even we of the uninitiated will appreciate the cleverly escalating tension. [18 Nov. 1994, p.12]

Mirrormask is a gorgeous psychedelic cameo of a movie.

Painfully earnest, The Astronaut Farmer is, sad to say, a bunch of hooey. It's Frank Capra without the genuine heart, certainly without any sense of perspective.

Even a full week after seeing it, I'm still influenced enough by the film's many enchantments not to be overly concerned with its flaws.

There's way too much blarney in Evelyn.

It's not hell, but limbo, junior high-school style.

There's a power to Woman Thou Art Loosed that transcends its limitations, a determined, heartfelt belief in the possibility of redemption.

The Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

In The Last Samurai, the body count is almost as high as the dead-brain-cell count.

By the time it reaches its supposedly crowd-pleasing finale, Baby Mama may have self-respecting comedy fans (and even Tina Fey fans) crying uncle.

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

A mistaken message is a price a filmmaker pays when he tries to load weighty themes like the cycle of violence on an overgrown boy who scoots around on a bicycle.

Pointed and satiric. Best of all, one must hasten to admit, it's pretty funny.

The animals in Road Trip are pretty hilarious; as a five-minute short on cable TV's "Animal Planet," this film would be a stitch.

The result is a passionate, enthralling film that isn't afraid to take chances - even if it sometimes should be.

The whole plot is a shambles. And yet none of this matters much when you're laughing as hard as this film makes you laugh.

A refreshingly unpredictable and fizzy comic fantasy. It tickles the fancy even when it strains credibility.

Dunston Checks In checks in somewhere between cute and zany. It's never really funny, but director Ken Kwapis has a low flair for slapstick that occasionally ignites a spark or two.

The story's more sober elements are regularly leavened by hip visual flourishes and even some quiet comedy.

The cinematic equivalent of a beautifully wrapped gift box with nothing inside.

Superior family fare.

Spending more time with Downey's character would have benefited this movie no end.

Intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way.

The film ultimately is a letdown, leaving too many questions unanswered and ending in a gesture that doesn't really solve anything.

Has a sweetness to it that's irresistible, and its techno, trance and jungle soundtrack is as infectious and hypnotic as a contact high.

As with so many recent literary adaptations, it was the writing that was the art, not its infrastructure of plot and character.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

Memoirs of a Geisha was never primed to be a film that burns down the house.