Fans of anime probably will find Vampire Hunter D plenty thrilling. Non-fans, or those not familiar with the genre, will enjoy the film's gothic atmosphere, but may wonder what all the fuss is about.

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.

Good intentions are no substitute for good filmmaking, and Spy Kids 3D is nothing more than a retread in flashier clothing.

Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.

Fluke tries hard to snuggle its way into the audience's heart but lacks the warmth and spirit to pull off the feat. [02 Jun 1995]

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

Costner succumbs to terminal self-seriousness when he makes a movie of his own either as the director or, in this case, a producer.

Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.

Doesn't display a single deep thought, or even a middlingly profound one.

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.

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.

Will keep kids happy and parents mildly entertained.

The cast doesn't impress, the story doesn't compel and the characters are too bland to make people remember them.

The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.

A modest comedy that does indeed stir a few chuckles out of its knuckleheaded trio of bad boys, it grows almost shockingly disturbing when it portrays armed robbery as amusing and the implicit death threat of the firearm as a joke. In this respect, it's the ugliest movie of the year. Or, no: It's merely the stupidest. [02 Dec 1994]

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

Knowing offers mumbo jumbo on an apocalyptic scale.

The movie could use less romantic boo-hoo-hoo and more Bunuel: It's engaging whenever Bunuel acts as ringleader or troublemaker, even when he's blustery and piggish.

In a boxing soap-opera way, Eastwood is trying to do for himself as a performer what Sergio Leone did for him in a spaghetti-western way: douse his rough-hewn banality with reflected emotional coloration.

Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.

The most grievous flaw in Richard Linklater's remake of Michael Ritchie's 1976 misfit juvenile baseball comedy The Bad News Bears is that it over-relies on Thornton's willingness to play an irredeemable degenerate.

Fitfully thrilling.

Painfully boring.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a just-better-than-routine horror sequel that watches in chilly admiration as some sort of apparition steps out of mirrors and performs atrocities on the unwary. [17 Mar 1995]

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 Missing is so dour it makes you wonder why they didn't all just pack up and go back East.

The whole cast is good. It's too bad all that good work isn't in service to a better, or certainly more original, script.

Paycheck is one of those movies in which all the ingenuity went into the original idea and none into its execution.