Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

Whenever Just Friends threatens to become a total drag, Faris bops onscreen for some serious comic business - either saving the film, or making things worse by pointing out what could have been.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

What makes the film work better than its nearly unbearable cuteness suggests is the casting of Christopher Walken as the son; the movie has yet to be invented that Walken can't improve simply by showing up.

Newsies is a live-action musical, but it's only barely alive. Call it "Snoozies." [10 Apr 1992]

His [Director Mike Figgis's] techniques do make the film at least watchable.

It's pretty off-handed, more a theory of a movie than a movie itself. [05 Oct 1996]

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

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.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

Bullock's character goes through some changes, but she never turns into some unrecognizably serious actress.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

If the movie were as funny as it is well-meaning, this would be one for the ages.

When the film is not focused on Wilson, it's really not focused at all. This is a comedy ever holding itself in check, filled with plot threads and asides that seem as though they should be funny but almost always fall short of the mark.

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

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

Secret Window leaves you unsatisfied and frustrated. Depp's performance both makes the film and undercuts it. He's a poet caught in a machine.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.

I hope the producers bring Lin back for the fifth film and strip it down even more. They can lose all the human characters except Brian and Mia and simply call it F&F.

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.

The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]

Lacks suspense, momentum and visual panache.

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

Misfires on nearly every possible level.

It would be nice to say that Bruce is hilarious, rather than merely (and fitfully) funny; certainly, the premise suggests laughs more consistent and outlandish than are present here.

The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

It's easier to accept a breakup when it's clear that the two parties are mismatched, but a better, braver film would reveal what caused the initial attraction.

Unfortunately, nothing in it rings with the faintest tinkle of truth.

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.

A Good Man isn't hard to find -- it's all over the place -- but it does grow hard to bear. [09 Sep 1994]

Overdoes it and falls on its farce.

"Everybody loved him. One woman understood him," goes the ad line. But the movie makes you wonder how anyone could love this screw-up and why anyone would have a problem understanding him.

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

Equal parts fantasy and cautionary tale, a film that manages to be uplifting and off-putting simultaneously -- fortunately, more the former than the latter.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

Utterly lightweight.

Lighthearted fluff, not piercing drama. Still, a little shot of reality -- or at least an acknowledgement of same -- could have done this film wonders.

The latest in a line of quirky, feel-good British comedies, Greenfingers fits right into the breezily entertaining mold but doesn't expand it.

The surefire laugh-getter centers on using a tampon to stop a nosebleed. Watching this movie, I had to hope it could stop brain-drain.

Put simply, Mona Lisa Smile is too much of a stacked deck -- a movie too concerned with ensuring that audiences feel a certain way to risk anything like nuance or interpretation.

It's like a Harlequin romance trying to pass itself off as something deeper and more profound.

Pearce makes you see why Edie found Warhol as irresistible as he found her. His otherworldly eyes focus on both who she is and what she represents. He sees her as a star.

"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.

A low-level hoot.

Fortunately, this film doesn't have to depend on off-screen dalliances to prove its worth.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

There's pleasure to be had in a film that suggests teen life can be hard without necessarily being tragic.

The movie then becomes a story of salvation: how Murphy's Marcus, through the love of a better woman (Halle Berry) manages to rediscover both his decency and his humanity. And yet, pretty much, it stays funny. [01 Jul 1992]

There hasn't been so much pea soup spit onscreen since "The Exorcist."

This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

Terrence Howard has stolen 50 Cent's thunder - and his lightning, and his storm clouds, too - twice in one year.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

Costner succumbs to terminal self-seriousness when he makes a movie of his own either as the director or, in this case, a producer.

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.

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

It's not meant to be scary. It's meant to be Disney -- a fun and warm children's fantasy.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

It's for those of us for whom killing people with high-powered guns in the movies is not only as good as sex but maybe better -- a sacrament for our age... [A] poorly written, badly directed film.

The emotions seem genuine enough, even if Sandler is not a talented-enough actor to always pull them all off.

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

The opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

The result is a charmer that boldly marches where lesser movies - at least since the heyday of John Hughes - fear to tread.

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

Cameron Crowe crams at least three movies' worth of plotlines into Elizabethtown, and gives short shrift to all of them.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Novocaine is neither funny enough to be a comedy, nor dark enough to be a true film noir. Like the drug of the title, it just kind of leaves you numb and anxious to taste the good stuff once again.

Most of the humor is both determinedly puerile and unfunny, performed by a generic cast.

Though lovingly crafted and beautifully photographed, the movie does little to make Jones seem compelling, or even all that good.

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

It's hard to figure where it's going, and when the movie's over, it's even harder figuring where it's been. But the careening roller-coaster ride calling itself Smokin' Aces is such a hoot to be on, who really cares?

A pleasantly lightweight confection.

S.W.A.T. may be an acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics, but by the end of this routine melodrama, it might as well stand for Standard Whacking and Trashing.

McConaughey and (especially) Hudson manage to make it all work, maintaining their likability even in situations where they inevitably end up acting like jerks.

This military courtroom drama is full of questions, but woefully short of answers.

Plays like Abbott and Costello Meet Conan the Barbarian.

This may be Thornton's most arch, least persuasive performance. With Heder he's a vacant scowl. With Barrett he's a threatening yet toothless Cheshire Cat.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

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

The movie, in fact, is a lot like Willis' performance: impressive in an iconographic way, but really not nearly as much fun as it should be. It's like watching a spitting contest between totem poles. [20 Sep 1996]

A film that really has no idea what it wants to be, so it tries a little of everything, and does nothing very well.

A brain-dead buddy-movie tearjerker with semi-tasteful romance and tasteful gore mixed in with the derring-do.

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

The movie lives and dies on the energy of stepping.

To Pellington's credit, the performers eschew sentimentality.

Especially discomfiting is the stream of kids in peril.

Chasers"is a road picture with a few genuinely funny comic scenes and a number of good performances. [30 Apr 1994]

The film is achingly conventional. [03 Jun 1994]