The soundtrack is guaranteed to send chills where they'll be most effective, and the ultimate resolution is a real shocker. While it doesn't explain away everything that's happened, it comes deliciously close.

The whole enterprise suffers from tired blood.

A comedy that doesn't work if you think about it too much. Cut it some slack, however, and you just might have a good time.

It's the ideal capper for a cop comedy with a refreshingly wry, adult and humane attitude.

There are the gadgets and the effects. But Cats and Dogs definitely could have been more fetching.

Thank goodness for Davy Crockett; without him, the Alamo could have proven the blandest heroic siege in movie history.

Semi-Pro is so shabbily staged, shot and edited that it hardly ranks as a movie, much less a sports film, but hilarious people keep turning up in it.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution. Even at its supposedly heartfelt conclusion, it's more ironic than emotional, more of an art thing than a suspense movie.

Sadly, most of the fun and all the magic derive from the location. The most enthralling fantasy of Just Like Heaven is that an unemployed landscape architect and a fledgling doctor can afford a sprawling apartment with a rooftop view in San Francisco.

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

Whenever Just Friends threatens to become a total drag, Faris bops onscreen for some serious comic business - either saving the film, or making things worse by pointing out what could have been.

Too bad it doesn't deserve to fold the bedsheets of Paul Mazursky's L.A. roundelay "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969).

What makes the film work better than its nearly unbearable cuteness suggests is the casting of Christopher Walken as the son; the movie has yet to be invented that Walken can't improve simply by showing up.

Newsies is a live-action musical, but it's only barely alive. Call it "Snoozies." [10 Apr 1992]

His [Director Mike Figgis's] techniques do make the film at least watchable.

It's pretty off-handed, more a theory of a movie than a movie itself. [05 Oct 1996]

It lands the characters in a shambles of farce, melodrama and forced chivalry. For all its promise and accomplishment, the screenplay, like Eva, needs a knight on a white horse.

Reading this book and watching this movie, as with "The Devil Wears Prada" a year earlier, I'm convinced that chick-lit books are formula - and chick-lit movies are baby formula.

Pleasantly meanders around a group of people who pitch projects and pitch woo on the Riviera.

Bullock's character goes through some changes, but she never turns into some unrecognizably serious actress.

The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.

If the movie were as funny as it is well-meaning, this would be one for the ages.

When the film is not focused on Wilson, it's really not focused at all. This is a comedy ever holding itself in check, filled with plot threads and asides that seem as though they should be funny but almost always fall short of the mark.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

Too bad you can see this sort of thing done more amusingly every week on ABC-TV and Comedy Central.

Secret Window leaves you unsatisfied and frustrated. Depp's performance both makes the film and undercuts it. He's a poet caught in a machine.

After a fast, smart start, White Sands implodes like a black hole, sucking all goodwill from the atmosphere of the theater, turning those of us who started to love it into embittered cuckolds.