We don't experience the drama from the inside out because everything is on the surface. Redford is the only one who supplies internal life to Spy Game.

Despite the cunning mixture of live-action footage and animatronic effects in Two Brothers, there's more imagination and wonder in a good old Sabu picture like "The Jungle Book" (1942). Two Brothers is more like a tacky jungle comic book.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

The result is a film that plays like a creaking melodrama, with good guys and bad guys and precious little in between.

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.

A first-rate sail into Adventureland.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon makes Bicke suffer the greatest indignity: it turns him into a relentless bore.

Drags on and on and could frighten little kids. But Kenneth Branaugh is one bright light in Chamber of Secrets.

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

The violence is muted and discreet, never appalling, and the sexual tension between Streep and Bacon has been dialed way down. What they want is what they get: a nice, tidy, polite thriller. [30 Sep 1994]

It's an unusual and engaging romantic comedy because it's mostly about how these women ready each other for real love.

Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.

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.

The year's most unsettling movie experience - and in this case, that's a very good thing.

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.

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

Short on details and long on extreme, unflattering close-ups.

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

As the threesome's movie games push them into an incestuous menage a trois, the movie loses its grip.

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.

This Christmas is the rare movie about a cozy household at holiday time that's as funny and dramatic and poignant as any seasonal family get-together should be.

The script is clever and would be brilliant if it worked.

The movie contains few surprises but has plenty of heart.

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

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.

Unlike so many movies directed at teens, ATL is not interested in exploiting its audience.

An only fitfully engaging L.A. soap opera.