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.

Will keep kids happy and parents mildly entertained.

The cast doesn't impress, the story doesn't compel and the characters are too bland to make people remember them.

The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.

A modest comedy that does indeed stir a few chuckles out of its knuckleheaded trio of bad boys, it grows almost shockingly disturbing when it portrays armed robbery as amusing and the implicit death threat of the firearm as a joke. In this respect, it's the ugliest movie of the year. Or, no: It's merely the stupidest. [02 Dec 1994]

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

Knowing offers mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

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.

Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

Fitfully thrilling.

Painfully boring.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

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

The whole cast is good. It's too bad all that good work isn't in service to a better, or certainly more original, script.

Paycheck is one of those movies in which all the ingenuity went into the original idea and none into its execution.

So minimalist that you wouldn't miss much if you watched semi-awake and listened to a friend's running commentary.

Confetti overdraws on an audience's generosity.

Despite the tenderness between them, Rose and her perfect younger man have the sickest mother-son relationship since Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" - and Mikey seems just as brainwashed.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is nothing but "The Natural" with Will Smith playing the bat.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

Killing Zoe lacks the incisiveness, the tightly controlled irony, and the blank verse power in the profane dialogue that enabled "Reservoir Dogs" to transcend its admittedly horrific violence. [25 Nov 1994]

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]

Think you know where this film is going? You do, and the best thing about Must Love Dogs is that it takes only 88 minutes to get there - short enough to enjoy the film's modest, well-worn pleasures, but not so long that you feel your time could have been put to better use elsewhere.

The Banger Sisters stands as proof that no movie is so bad it can't be redeemed by a single stellar performance. That performance is by Susan Sarandon.

Eventually becomes cliched, predictable and crude. And that's a real sin.

Lovely to look at and listen to but doesn't reward any closer study.

Analyze That is no surprise, and pleasant is about the most you can say for it.

The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

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

Imagine a Three Stooges short with a feel-good ending, and you get the idea.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

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.

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

It ain't art. But as a cinematic house of horrors, it more than fills the bill.

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.

Reading this book and watching this movie, as with "The Devil Wears Prada" a year earlier, I'm convinced that chick-lit books are formula - and chick-lit movies are baby formula.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

So much of Three to Tango is calculated to push the proper emotional buttons that it's ultimately unsatisfying.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

A misstep or two aside, you don't have to belong to Mensa to know kids will enjoy it.

Terrific looking in the extreme, The Beach is the movie equivalent of vacation reading: no more demanding -- and no less satisfying -- than a sandy paperback left on a damp towel.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best Star Trek movies are the even-numbered ones. Nemesis may keep that streak alive, but barely.

Stripped of texture, even the sharpest comments come off as bromides.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

Initially an amiable sci-fi thriller that toys with the paradoxes inherent in time travel, it finally gets drunk on them. It becomes an incomprehensible stew of versions and revisions, until there's no there there and no then then.

Unlike Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," Lopez seems a little too comfortable in her new duds, which prevents the audience from rooting for her with passion, rather than just appreciation.

This picture evaporates midway through because the story itself is a one-liner. Yet it also has a cast that gets into the silliness.

Nothing really connects; it's not fluid and roaring but a collection of set-pieces. [25 Feb 1994]

This fake-feminist thriller hides its sadism under a show of sympathy for its beleaguered heroine.

All the young talent in Hollywood is not enough to energize a movie that takes forever to get nowhere.

The Wild suffers from a breakneck pace that seems to exist only so that director Steve Williams can earn his nickname of "Spaz."

There's many a slip between the page and the stage, to which The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, ploddingly attests. [26 Sep 1997]

It bears roughly the same resemblance to the Bennett Miller-Dan Futterman-Philip Seymour Hoffman masterpiece as the now-forgotten "Valmont" did to "Dangerous Liaisons."

This fourth "Terminator" film is the ultimate heavy-metal parody. Better make that travesty, because there are next to no moments of comedy.

It might be a solid hook if we thought their love was grand. Instead, it's kind of creepy.

So much love has gone into the physical details and the music of Robert Altman's Kansas City that it's a shame the movie isn't up to the effort. It's a movie you yearn to care for, but it refuses to allow you: It's too busy being singular to be good.

A film made by people with more heart than skill.

Bubble is the moviemaking equivalent of the worst narrative journalism. Every bit of "human interest" is so painstakingly planted, so determined to be applauded for its observation and sensitivity, it ends up seeming as slick and bogus as the worst Hollywood blockbuster.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed.

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

The Matrix Revolutions blends feather-brained, starry-eyed camp and rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle -- so it's at least more entertaining than the second Matrix film, which hung in the air like a noxious cloud.

The political correctness of Class Action verwhelms its sense of life. It turns into just another movie. [15 Mar 1991]

Standard-bore action stuff, in which a macho stud superstar blows away lots of bad guys while struggling to make the world a better place.

The special effects turn out to be not very special and not very effective, and the movie never achieves the lunatic grandeur of the truly demented. Stargate is strictly for the peanut gallery.

How much adorable can one person take?

If you change the course of history, the world will experience a different kind of chaos. That's a time-honored movie cliche. Terminator 2: Judgment Day chooses to go against that philosophy, noisily and with some monotony.

Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture.

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

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

Signs of fatigue are all over the film itself.

The movie is so determinedly lightweight that it floats above the fray, stopping only for the occasional mild chuckle.

There are the gadgets and the effects. But Cats and Dogs definitely could have been more fetching.

From the start, this movie sets the bar high -- then, unfortunately, runs smack into it.

Even if Scream 3 lacks the punch and verve of the first two installments, it manages to wring some ironically metaphysical comedy from the movie-within-a-movie motif.

In Robert Gordon's script, Handler's hilariously literate bouts of psychological torture develop no consistent tone, voice or momentum.

It's a promising concept, albeit melodramatic, but what keeps the movie from halfway working is its infernal preciousness. [03 Sep 1993]

This film feels like a desperate attempt to squeeze a few last bucks out of what was once a very obliging cash cow.

At one point, Liotta's character complains that he has ended up "in an episode of 'McHale's Navy.' " That's not too far off. If a sitcom is all you really want out of Operation Dumbo Drop, by all means, put on a parachute and jump. [28 Jul 1995]

Auto Focus is a gutless wonder.

More palatable than "Norbit" but equally uninspired, Murphy's benign, pedestrian Meet Dave mostly gives us "Mr. Ed," with a bit of Crazy Eddie mixed in.

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]

There is some plot, but it is wispy at best and frequently gets in the way of the music.

It's actually surprising that Chan is as engaging as he is. He's a canny performer in a canned-goods movie.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

The blend of chic histrionics and ultra-bright daylight imagery make much of the movie resemble a network soap opera with an on-location interlude. It looks as cheap as life is held in Medellin.

Great casting ideas, like Glenn Close and Christopher Walken as "the King and Queen of Stepford," don't pay off, because the filmmakers' increasingly desperate twists alter the basis of the characters.

Proves that marionettes can be as foul-mouthed and profane as their cartoon counterparts, but not nearly as clever.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

The movie felt slow and didactic; it lacked the kind of forward thrust that a narrative mechanic such as Spielberg would have engineered.

Maybe the best way to see Serendipity is to take a cue from the characters and wait a few years.