Baseball, Boston and Drew Barrymore. Certainly sounds like a winning combination.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

For most of its meandering running time Harsh Times is just a rough South Central L.A. buddy movie.

The result is as flat as a year-old beer commercial.

A Dirty Shame is certainly dirty, and maybe it's even a shame. But this is the John Waters we've come to know and cherish, and that alone is cause to celebrate.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

The talented and quirky-pretty Sarah Jessica Parker gives an excruciating performance. It's a keenly self-conscious caricature - the bold, showy kind that often wins awards yet sends audiences running from the theater.

It's a rugged, almost chauvinistic celebration of American get-up-and-go that never acknowledges, even implicitly, that our get-up-and-go got up and went. It might be characterized by words begin with G: gusto, guts, gumption, gee whiz and gosharootie, though, er, never G-spot. [14 Jan 1994]

The climax and epilogue are the juiciest, most tough-minded bits in the movie. Too bad Mayer didn't work his way backward from the end.

Cabin Fever may not be a horror classic, but it's definitely an ideal midnight movie.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

The film's storytelling and image-making lack originality and vitality. Nothing sticks to your memory unless you come in with recollections of the book.

Unabashedly sentimental and just as unabashedly cliched.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Feisty and good-humored, and if it doesn't have deep characters, it is chock-full of personality.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed.

There's less here than meets the eye, not to mention the ear, nose, tongue and fingertip.

Needs a story.

Extreme Measures, a new medical thriller with Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman as doctors with differing views on medical ethics, is an episode of "Beauty and the Beast" grafted onto an episode of "ER" as directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

Will remind filmgoers that one of the chief pleasures of going to the movies is a good old-fashioned swoon

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Meandering, forgettable trifle.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

This is a movie for genre fans only; there's not an aspect to it that should appeal to the rest of the world. It's neither original nor inventive, and while its young cast works hard, there's not even a standout performance worth recommending.

Nothing seriously detracts from the film's overall brilliance.

Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.

A cautionary tale, a warning not to gather all of your neurotic friends in one room - or better yet, not to have so many neurotic friends.