Alpha Dog may well go down as the most dispiriting film of 2007.

Poses as the story of a wild, eccentric love match but is really about a match made in limbo.

Ella Enchanted is one cute movie.

Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

Bright semi-adult entertainment.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

With Almodovar, things tend to happen fast, and "Kika" is all speed and no depth.

Sex and the City, as a film, is a testament to bad faith. It wants its characters to eat their wedding cake and have it, too.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

Features lots of cool dialogue but doesn't provide much of a movie in which to showcase it.

The timing couldn't be better for a thriller that focuses on assassination, international war scandals and U.S. agencies of enormous influence and wildly varying competence.

A plot that seems stretched for the big screen.

Whenever I see this film, Pryor's look of what-am-I-doing-here? panic echoes my feelings exactly.

For at least two-thirds of its length, all elements combine for a taut thriller, a Hitchcockian exercise in suspense pitting human frailty - can our minds be trusted? - against human resourcefulness.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

A gritty, profane and profoundly disturbing look at the American drug culture.

But the movie really just sort of peters out rather than reaching a sublime point. In "Groundhog Day," there was an exquisite moment where the wonderfully horrid Bill Murray actually regained contact with his humanity and rejoined his species. No such thing occurs in "Multiplicity"; the movie just staggers toward a point where it's gone on long enough to do everybody the favor of ending it. Send out the writers. [17 July 1996]

The movie is a premise in search of a comedy. Rather than flesh it out, the filmmakers put familiar glad rags on the skull and bones.

This new version may be closer to the Cole Porter biography, but it's hardly any more true to life. There is no life in this movie. It's a brittle contraption of a biopic.

The whole thing is too preciously conceived. [05 Feb 1993]

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

Zeffirelli has managed to make Shakespeare's greatest and most modern play one-dimensional. [13 Jan 1991]

The result is a movie that inspires without pontificating and plays on the heartstrings without pounding on them incessantly.

Sorry, Phantom, but the purple suit has got to go. No amount of buff bod can make an audience take a superhero in bright purple seriously...And while we're at it, that script has got to go, too. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam apparently studied the first two "Indiana Jones" movies so thoroughly -- so that he could write "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" -- that he's carried many of the motifs to "The Phantom." The result is not breathtaking excitement, but rather a stunning lack of originality. [7 June 1996]

By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.

Keeps its eye on the big picture even when focusing on the small scene.

A cautionary tale that's harrowing, heartbreaking and -- especially given the times, when Americans seem all-too-ready to once again judge people as a threat solely by their appearance -- disturbingly resonant.