Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

The Sentinel moves quickly and never becomes a bore. It does become something of a cartoon, though, which proves a major letdown for a movie that aims for something far more intelligent.

As a documentary, the film is woefully underdeveloped.

Cache is the feel-guilty movie of the new millennium.

It's absolutely the classiest big-screen version of chick lit we're ever likely to see. But it still has all the lasting flavor of a Chiclet.

The film ultimately is a letdown, leaving too many questions unanswered and ending in a gesture that doesn't really solve anything.

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

They put the material on lifts - and end up tripping into TV dramedy land.

Other than portraying Mary as an overwhelmed teenager, mystified that God has chosen her to be the mother of his child, it doesn't offer anything that hasn't been playing out in grade-school pageants for decades.

All this might be forgivable if Just My Luck had a little more substance, but it never moves beyond the single joke of its premise.

Notes on a Scandal isn't humorous or witty enough to sustain black comedy, and it isn't insightful or deep enough to suggest a contemporary tragedy. All it does is put an eloquent veneer on petty meanness.

It's like a breeze so slight it doesn't leave a tickle.

You never get the sense that the director, Peter Segal, knows where the funny is, whether in his star or in the story.

Unfortunately, the waste of artistic possibilities dwarfs the human wreckage - and the human salvage - in Freedomland.

It lacks even Tarantino-esque vitality. It moves more like a busted concertina.

The pleasures of Ocean's Thirteen are so slight as to be eminently forgettable. Most of the "twists" in the plot are of the ho-hum variety; it's not that one sees them coming, but that they don't amount to much when they show up.

A low-level hoot.

From the moment he enters the picture, Baldwin looks good and sick of the whole scene. Unless you're in the mood for dysfunctional-family vaudeville, it won't take long for you to catch up with him.

Director Martin Campbell and a quartet of screenwriters dump in everything from the rise of the Confederacy to the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. What escapes them is the cool, clear line of action that would enable Banderas and Zeta-Jones to flaunt their amorous charms without huffing and puffing and stretch their swashbuckling muscles with dash, not balderdash.

The movie comes together like a nihilistic jigsaw puzzle - with a few pieces removed for that special, indefinable dash of pseudo-density.

The sad truth is that the film squanders almost all of its inspiration in the first 20 minutes or so.

The whole movie is too predictable, its conflicts either forced or simplistic.

With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

Memoirs of a Geisha was never primed to be a film that burns down the house.

There's a funny premise at the core of Are We Done Yet? Too bad the movie doesn't do much with it.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.

Hartley is grasping at, and only fitfully achieving, an overall tone of mordancy - formally called "black humor" - rather than believability. [25 Oct 1990]