This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

What keeps the Fantastic Four franchise alive is the Human Torch's emotional fire and the Silver Surfer's melancholy ice.

Terrence Howard has stolen 50 Cent's thunder - and his lightning, and his storm clouds, too - twice in one year.

It's the wrestling match between the banker and the bad guy that fuels the audience's adrenaline.

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

Unlike Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," Lopez seems a little too comfortable in her new duds, which prevents the audience from rooting for her with passion, rather than just appreciation.

Life as a House mounts a brutally insensitive attack on its audience's sensitivities.

It's not meant to be scary. It's meant to be Disney -- a fun and warm children's fantasy.

What's wrong with Latter Days is that its banter is pedestrian and its lessons forced.

Two of the most insistently unlikable movie creations to afflict audiences in some time, a pair of self-obsessed anti-romanticists who spend some two decades doing stupid things at each other's behest. They also whine a lot.

Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.

It's for those of us for whom killing people with high-powered guns in the movies is not only as good as sex but maybe better -- a sacrament for our age... [A] poorly written, badly directed film.

The emotions seem genuine enough, even if Sandler is not a talented-enough actor to always pull them all off.

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile.

It's last in laughs, last in drama but first in Murphy ego, as he gives a performance that everybody has seen before, only louder. [04 Dec 1992]

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

The opening half-hour may prove to be a disreputable classic of pedal-to-the-metal filmmaking.

The result is a charmer that boldly marches where lesser movies - at least since the heyday of John Hughes - fear to tread.

Like an over-packed three-scoop cone -- it melts into a mess while we're still slurping away.

Cameron Crowe crams at least three movies' worth of plotlines into Elizabethtown, and gives short shrift to all of them.

This slap-- sequel is primarily for the cognoscenti -- that is, for other teen-age mutant ninja turtles, or very small children. The rest of us it happily ignores.

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

In this film, Soderbergh appears to judge the actors by how well they spew or swallow bile.

Novocaine is neither funny enough to be a comedy, nor dark enough to be a true film noir. Like the drug of the title, it just kind of leaves you numb and anxious to taste the good stuff once again.

Most of the humor is both determinedly puerile and unfunny, performed by a generic cast.