Notes on a Scandal isn't humorous or witty enough to sustain black comedy, and it isn't insightful or deep enough to suggest a contemporary tragedy. All it does is put an eloquent veneer on petty meanness.

It's like a breeze so slight it doesn't leave a tickle.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.

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

The pleasures of Ocean's Thirteen are so slight as to be eminently forgettable. Most of the "twists" in the plot are of the ho-hum variety; it's not that one sees them coming, but that they don't amount to much when they show up.

A low-level hoot.

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

Director Martin Campbell and a quartet of screenwriters dump in everything from the rise of the Confederacy to the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. What escapes them is the cool, clear line of action that would enable Banderas and Zeta-Jones to flaunt their amorous charms without huffing and puffing and stretch their swashbuckling muscles with dash, not balderdash.

The movie comes together like a nihilistic jigsaw puzzle - with a few pieces removed for that special, indefinable dash of pseudo-density.

The sad truth is that the film squanders almost all of its inspiration in the first 20 minutes or so.

The whole movie is too predictable, its conflicts either forced or simplistic.

With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

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.

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

There's a funny premise at the core of Are We Done Yet? Too bad the movie doesn't do much with it.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.

Hartley is grasping at, and only fitfully achieving, an overall tone of mordancy - formally called "black humor" - rather than believability. [25 Oct 1990]

Heartstrings are pulled mercilessly in Dreamer.

In the end, the movie proves to be, like Brosnan's character, a tarted-up cliche: a whoremonger with a heart of gold.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

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

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

The movie finally comes to life when Liu turns up.

There's a self-loathing at the center of Friends with Money that makes it a tad unpalatable, as well as a sameness, a dependence on cliche, that makes it seem trite.

JFK is entertaining, if only because the cast of characters in the New Orleans underground is so bizarre. [20 Dec 1991]

Too bad it shortchanges the music and fails to provide much evidence for Wilson's appeal.

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

It's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways.

It's easy to be offensive in a movie; it's much harder to be funny. Which is why Scary Movie emerges as such a waste; when you're so good at the latter, why keep falling back on the former?

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

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

The gleefully campy moments will earn Johnny Mnemonic cult status. Part of the movie's problem, though, is that it can't decide if it's a cautionary tale or a satire, and it falls apart when it tries to do both. [27 May 1995]

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

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.

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

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.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

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

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.

Doesn't break any ground -- but it looks good in a tight sweater.

The movie is occasionally cutesy. That's the worst of it. You can't call it gross, but it is cutesy.

Jack Frost can't possibly straddle its emotional shifts between morbidity and sheer nonsense. [11 Dec 1998]

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

Neither Grimm comes across as especially interesting to watch, and neither does anything in the movie offer much to get excited about.

As it is, Hoot doesn't accomplish anything a picture book of the Everglades and a few well-chosen Jimmy Buffett tunes wouldn't do better.

With all the good will in the world, I couldn't warm up to Kit Kittredge. The movie is like a 1930s or 1940s short about Americans pulling together, stretched out to feature length.

Just don't think about what's going on, and you should be OK.

The movie fails at the primary steps of turning Rejas' mind inside out and dramatizing the contradictions in his heart and soul.

It wasn't shot in Annapolis and doesn't have an original thought in its head. Other than that, Annapolis is a fine film.

Read like a long, anguished prayer, but on screen it looks an awful lot like blasphemy.

In fact much of Guilty By Suspicion takes place in a trashy roman a clef zone, with bigger-than-life versions of famous moments and people; the trouble is, the bigger they are, the less like life they seem.

Next may be the silliest movie of 2007.

This is harmless fun for the holiday season, but Tim Allen doesn't give movie the punch it needs.

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.

But the film's most annoying error is the arrogant conceit of revisionism. It postulates a world that did not exist, because it exorcises the entwined concepts of communism and Cold War.

There's no innocence left in Shrek 2. The helter-skelter story and throwaway gags emerge from a sensibility that confuses gossipy knowingness and jadedness with wit.

Everything about this film is drenched in adrenaline.

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.

Graeme Obree was a champion bicycler who, by all accounts, rarely took the easy way out. Too bad this movie version of his life doesn't follow suit.

The end result is more a lecture than a film; audiences may come away understanding what went on, but for most, the emotional connection will be lacking.

Smashingly stupid.

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.

Johansson bequeaths the welcome sight of a talent in full bloom to this wilted, dark whimsy of a movie.

Gory but lifeless.

There's not a moment in Against the Ropes where you forget this is perky Meg Ryan up onscreen, talking trashy and acting tough.

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see.

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?

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.

Plot-wise, this is strictly paint-by-numbers stuff.

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

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.

This peculiar film is more than one beer short of a six-pack. It's part massive folly, part screwball tract and part steel nerve, even a little heroic. [25 May 1994]

As disposable as aluminum cans without the promise of a cash return.

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

Like watching a 90-minute game of the video game Asteroids - all bang and no buck.

Even the cartoon Pink Panther in the credits seems off - at once too glitzy and too fey, more Peter Allen than Pink Panther.

Most of the fun to be had with Thr3e is to spot the movies from which it cribs. Beyond that, what one has is a conventional psychological thriller that cheats too often and depends on actors determined to play only one note.

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.

High School Musical 3 wore me out, but I'm not the target audience. My favorite high school musical was "Hamlet 2."

The original Rocky would have found a way to ground that encounter in reality, to engender honest emotion and give audiences an Everyman hero both noble and believable. This film is too busy worshiping its hero to bother.

Instead of exploding, it implodes.

A bit like a real-world horror film with "heart," right down to the trick ending.

Well, it's better than "The Phantom Menace."

New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.

Despite its adrenalized actors, Tape is a tired return to the roots of the American indie movement's popular surge a dozen years ago. It could have been called "sex, lies and audiotape."

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

If it weren't for a few genuine Chan novelties and the presence of the goofy Jennifer Love Hewitt, this much-delayed and re-edited mess would be a total loss.

It's too film-savvy for kids who won't catch the allusions to Clark Gable and W.C. Fields, but it's too film-simple for buffs and too boring for adults and too magenta-bright for critics. It's completely human proof! [26 Mar 1997]

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]

Instead of being supple and expansive like the book, this Little Children is heavy-handed and snarky.

This movie's biggest contribution to film history will be resurrecting Davies' reputation as a natural comedian stuck in deadly costume pictures because her lover wanted her placed on a pedestal.

It's not a comedy-drama, really. It's let's-all-share therapy in beautiful Boulder, Colo.

Despite the nice touches at the corners, the center does not hold. In I Think I Love My Wife, there's too much emphasis on the Think.

Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.

One gets the feeling Kaufman was so intent on putting fury and fanaticism on-screen, he forgot about having it serve any greater purpose. Which makes Quills the film equivalent of one of de Sade's novels: artifice, without art.

This is a movie about guns blazing, men punching, speedometers straining and explosions exploding. On all those levels, it succeeds just fine - which makes for a great amusement-park ride, but perhaps not much of a movie.