True, the movie tends toward the treacly at times, and the children's mischievousness seems a bit forced. But Thompson's turn as a glammed-down Mary Poppins with an even more no-nonsense attitude is hard to resist.

The cinematic equivalent of a careless foot fault.

A derivative little tale with enough good intentions to recommend it, but not enough substance to embrace it.

If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

Supple, eloquent and enchanting.

If it worked, The Fast and the Furious would put viewers in the same position as the policeman protagonist, attracted to speed but appalled by crime. Instead it sentences you to an hour and a half in a high-decibel limbo.

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

Anderson sees her subject as little more than a game-show contestant. One suspects the real Evelyn Ryan deserved far better.

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

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.

Caught up in its own macho symbolism, Jarhead fights a losing battle to show the human cost of warfare.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Breaks no new ground in romantic comedy. But it finds ways to make the tried and true scenes -- a hilarious break-up in a restaurant, a nearly disrupted wedding -- new and funny.

While Bresson's insistence on juxtaposing brute force with sublime grace isn't subtle, it is effective.

Thanks to Daniel Craig, the most Byronic of 007s, who, with scarcely any help from the filmmakers, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too.

Looming large over all this is Jackson, who glowers and growls and acts the hero better than any actor out there.

It took guts to bring this story to the screen, but at its core it has the wrong stuff.

Partially financed by the liberal Move On.org, speaks most eloquently when it lets Fox News do the talking.

Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.

Actually moves, whisking the audience on a funny, sad and extraordinary journey through a singularly compelling moment in American pop culture.

The Safety of Objects is just another stilted comic-dramatic essay examining the mold in the white bread.

It's a gimcrack assemblage of gags, action scenes, favorite moments from the first hit and diorama-like views of high and low Victorian culture.

Veggie Tales is one amusing salad.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."