Your basic Lasse Hallstrom formula-film, featuring people in dire situations who are redeemed when their basic goodness comes to the fore, elevated a notch by a pair of actors displaying sides we don't often see.

Unapologetically cliched and determinedly upbeat (even when it shouldn't be).

At some point the foul language, lascivious sight gags, references to sex toys, violence against animals and cruelty toward children simply ceases to be funny.

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

Soul Men isn't much of a movie, but it bubbles along and reaches its percolating high point at the very end.

Could have been a contender, but it lacks the courage of its own ambivalence.

The casting in K-PAX is canny, but the picture as a whole is a clunky mix of the canny and the would-be uncanny.

The Emperor's Club is a beautiful fraud -- as gracefully proportioned as a Christopher Wren academy, yet as devoid of content as a prep-school promo film.

What makes the "Dolittle" movies stand out from this menagerie is the superb casting and matching of the animals and their human voices.

Killing Zoe lacks the incisiveness, the tightly controlled irony, and the blank verse power in the profane dialogue that enabled "Reservoir Dogs" to transcend its admittedly horrific violence. [25 Nov 1994]

Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.

A gigantic mess.

Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.

Ragged and frenetic.

Rather than providing flashes of one-of-a-kind humor, Allen has reached the point where his critical and movie-going fans are humoring him.

All in all, Jennifer 8 is about four bricks shy a load and two hours too long.

While it's certainly too derivative to be a great movie, it's too goodhearted and modest in its aspirations to be denied.

Ready to Wear, though it boasts a few small delights, is unready to see.

Like watching a 90-minute game of the video game Asteroids - all bang and no buck.

The Banger Sisters stands as proof that no movie is so bad it can't be redeemed by a single stellar performance. That performance is by Susan Sarandon.

Director Gillian Armstrong drains all the emotional energy out of the people who dot her movie's lovely landscape.

Lively and inspirational, with terrific performances from a big star and a host of supporting players.

Modest, tasty, and it goes down easy, like home cooking.

Isn't a full-bodied comedy, and it isn't a bona fide action movie, either. It just makes a facetious spectacle of itself.

Initially an amiable sci-fi thriller that toys with the paradoxes inherent in time travel, it finally gets drunk on them. It becomes an incomprehensible stew of versions and revisions, until there's no there there and no then then.

It's a real shame the film gets mushy at the end. The result is an all too conventional ending on a film that should have been much better.

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

As a romance, Spanglish is like a wholesome flirt who drags things out and becomes a tiresome tease. As a satire of upper-middle-class Los Angeles, it's a disaster.