This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

Goes to such great lengths to show the greatness of its Navy diver hero that it neglects to add much depth to his character - or the story.

It's so routine and predictable it grows quickly wearisome, its inventions are thin and its wit is witless. You feel the clumsy manipulations coming hours in advance, and when they come, they seem to take forever to finish. [20 Dec 1996]

Bottle Shock wastes that intriguing bit of history and some seductive Napa Valley settings on a bland script that's part period piece, part underdog fable.

This whole movie has zero chemistry. Broderick and Hunt are a match made in hell; Firth and Hunt are a match made in limbo.

Offers jaw-dropping visuals, but its troubling images of violence may cause this revolutionary effort to miss the evolutionary boat.

By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.

The movie never seems to force its connections or its revelations upon us, but merely discovers them in their provocative places; in short, it doesn't seem to be working very hard, but the apparent simplicity is deceiving: There's a grand, clever and ultimately satisfying plan under all the running around and bumping into each other. [27 Sept 1996]

Will pop your eyes without tickling your funny bone.

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.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

The result is suitably upsetting and intriguing, despite a simultaneously tacky and too-neat climax.

Unpretentious and brashly exploitative.

Spielberg believes, admirably, that art can grow from love, and vice-versa. But in The Terminal he makes the mistake of insisting on it, repeatedly.

Schwartzberg sees the homegrown innovativeness and grit still standing beneath the glossy media version of the American personality.

Becoming Jane isn't just a soap opera - it's a soft-soap opera.

A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

Any chance to generate atmosphere or sustained comedy and melodrama goes down the tubes, often literally.

It's impossible not to be exhilarated by the energy and determination that infuses every frame.

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

In a society where athletic competitions are too often likened to war, the recognition that everyone's equal once they're off the playing field is a welcome reminder of that little thing called perspective, not to mention sportsmanship.

The Craft casts a spell with a cast of four kicky young actresses, atmospheric California settings, cool special effects and the attitude of a music video. [03 May 1996]

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

It rarely strikes the right tone and ultimately falls short of what one would expect from a collaboration between director Wim Wenders and writer Sam Shepard.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.