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.

Has its heart in the right place, and could have been an insightful rumination on corporate shortsightedness and mid-life obsolescence. Instead, it's another one of those Hollywood films whose feel for the workingman's life seems to come exclusively from other movies.

Friedkin still has it: The car chase is the best thing in the movie, though so unconnected to the plot it could have been added without changing Eszterhas' script a whit. But, that excitement over, the movie ultimately self-destructs in the matter of its own ending. [13 Oct 1995]

In Spy Kids 2, Rodriguez tries to hold his family-spy saga together with the digital equal of rubber bands and chewing gum.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

You don't see The Doors, you survive it. [01 Mar 1991]

A Goofy Movie is filled with rock sequences that aren't hard enough to please real teen-agers but are too hard to attract any grown-ups. The music sounds like it was composed by Marie Osmond on PCP. [07 Apr 1995]

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

Too bad director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs didn't look more closely at their source material, a 2001 German film called Mostly Martha. That film used the same basic premise but injected real conflict into the mix, in ways sexual, culinary, even ethnic. That film tried to do something, even while it was entertaining us.

The film's ardent sentimentality, as magnified by the schlurpy music, is straight Chaplin, but not as good. The Film's subtext of sight-gag and clown-dance is also straight Chaplin, also not as good. [16 Jan 1990, p.3C]

There's a dollop of charm and a deluge of formula in Sleepover.

Anyway, the movie turns out to be hyperslick, quite well made in the technical sense (beautifully photographed and designed) and somewhat shallow, another exploration of that perennial and passionate teen theme, fitting in.

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

Dubowski's movie is an act of hope that the basic human needs of the gay Orthodox will someday be reconciled with their faith.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

Unwisely bills itself as a comedy.

"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.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

Utterly lightweight.

As gripping as Hard Candy is, one can't quite shake the feeling that we're the ones being exploited by its mordant blend of kinky revenge fantasy and push-me-pull-you moral vision.

The movie includes a few good one-liners, but that's really all it is -- a forum for putdowns and sassy dialogues.

A feel-good us-against-them tale that panders mercilessly to its audience, yet displays a few moments of honest humor.

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day -- That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit.

Thank heaven for William H. Macy, whose portrayal of Happy's sheriff strikes the only honest note in a film that earns its laughs the cheap way.

Especially discomfiting is the stream of kids in peril.

It's a family film done as a trip film. It is a trip, but it's a bad trip.

Watching a Pokemon movie is like drowning in a sea of cute.

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

There's enough kinetic energy in Jumper to light a thousand houses. Unfortunately, there's no one home in any 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.

This is a movie that falls short only because it insists on grabbing for so much.

Johnny English never builds any momentum, and Atkinson simply isn't a good enough actor to mine continued laughs from repetitive material.

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 one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.

It's hard to see Franklin's fingerprints on the material. It's as if he directed with his gloves on.

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.

Silly stuff, made all the more regrettable by the apparent skill with which the movie was made everywhere but in the screenplay department. The sheer lunkheadedness of Sebastian Gutierrez's script is impossible to ignore.

At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.

There's no clear plot, no memorable villains, no real logic. But there sure is action.

Unless you think "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was the height of genius, there's little reason to sit though another version.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

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.

It's turned Stone's Catherine Tramell from a warning sign for the dangers of wanton sex into the last thing you'd figure - a bore.

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

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.

This is a strange and indeed foolish film. [29 Apr 1994]

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

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.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

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?

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

A sword-and-sorcery saga that desperately wants to be another "Lord of the Rings," Eragon succeeds in being only the palest of imitations.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

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

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

The best thing that can be said about this Yours, Mine and Ours is that it's inoffensive.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

Now we get a lazy Eddie in Norbit, a lackluster attempt to make a gross-out romantic comedy. When I say lazy Eddie, I mean imaginatively lazy.

Fans of horror-comedy probably will enjoy this movie, even though chuckles outnumber scares.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

The movie's one bright spot is Gonzalez, a refreshingly natural young actor who needs to get out of B-movies.

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.

The transgression that dogs much faith-based art - and leaves its stain on The Last Sin Eater - is the inability to divorce art from agenda; that is, you can feel the filmmaker forcing the round peg of evangelism into the square hole of creative excellence.

It's possible that a smart, insightful, sharp-edged comedy could have been written around these characters, but Trust The Man isn't it.

But by the end, you're only watching to see how far Wilmot's pustules will spread, or whether his various diseases will really make his nose fall off.

If only La Mujer de mi Hermano had a dollop of humor and at least one character worth rooting for.

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.

An overly gimmicky and fatally repetitive terrorist thriller that quickly wears out its welcome.

But even those who succumb to his primitive, survivalist vision may resent the way he presents every kind of atrocity at least twice without illuminating any of the exotic details once.

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

If you expect anything more substantive from a movie - characters of more than one dimension, storylines that at the least play new riffs on old themes, plot developments that flow from the narrative - you'd best look elsewhere.

Swing Kids really doesn't go anywhere. [05 Mar 1993]

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

Newcomers to the Mike Myers experience will leave this love train early.

The Wicker Man is too loony to be a drama, too earnest to be a comedy, too predictable to be a horror film.

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film.

Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking.

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.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

For the most part, it's uninspired, not much to look at and laugh-free.

The mystery is, how the filmmakers still managed to come up with a movie that will satisfy almost no one.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

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.

Despite these flaws, people sick of gross-out films and teen-sex comedy may be so hungry for farce that they laugh.

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.

Without Duvall, this movie would be as wet as Waterworld.

Blessed with some outstanding performances, among them Ribisi's.