Despite the tenderness between them, Rose and her perfect younger man have the sickest mother-son relationship since Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate" - and Mikey seems just as brainwashed.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

About on the level of an After School Special put together by people in a real hurry to get on with their lives, Ed plays pretty dead for all except the very dumb at heart.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is nothing but "The Natural" with Will Smith playing the bat.

The movie's not nearly as cool as the setup.

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]

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]

Think you know where this film is going? You do, and the best thing about Must Love Dogs is that it takes only 88 minutes to get there - short enough to enjoy the film's modest, well-worn pleasures, but not so long that you feel your time could have been put to better use elsewhere.

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.

Eventually becomes cliched, predictable and crude. And that's a real sin.

Lovely to look at and listen to but doesn't reward any closer study.

Analyze That is no surprise, and pleasant is about the most you can say for it.

The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes

At two hours, The Chronicles of Riddick is way too long for ridiculous.

This depressing look at love isn't quite worth enduring.

Imagine a Three Stooges short with a feel-good ending, and you get the idea.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

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

It ain't art. But as a cinematic house of horrors, it more than fills the bill.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

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.

Yet [Smith] can't keep the movie from stopping cold with another hour left to go.

So much of Three to Tango is calculated to push the proper emotional buttons that it's ultimately unsatisfying.

What's hilarious about the build-up is that Secretary proves to be the softest, most middle-of-the-road movie that could have been made about this subject.

A misstep or two aside, you don't have to belong to Mensa to know kids will enjoy it.

Terrific looking in the extreme, The Beach is the movie equivalent of vacation reading: no more demanding -- and no less satisfying -- than a sandy paperback left on a damp towel.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best Star Trek movies are the even-numbered ones. Nemesis may keep that streak alive, but barely.