The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

It's turned Stone's Catherine Tramell from a warning sign for the dangers of wanton sex into the last thing you'd figure - a bore.

Everyone from the ensemble appears to be acting in a different picture. Zaillian strands them all.

If Pride had concentrated on a gifted coach's teaching and training techniques, it might have been a contender. Instead, all the overheated melodrama evaporates our rooting interest.

This is a strange and indeed foolish film. [29 Apr 1994]

As an action comedy, it's just a bad trip.

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

I managed to get through the biker extravaganza Hell Ride, a narcissistic piece of soft-core porn and macho camp, by mashing it together in my mind with the equally woeful, family-friendly biker comedy "Wild Hogs." After all, both are full of hellions gone to seed.

In the movie, the unconverted will hold their ears as the banal tunes blare out in multichannel sound. And they'll wince as the camera closes in on every heart-tugging moment.

Looking for comedy in Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy In the Muslim World is a fool's errand. There's hardly any there.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

A sword-and-sorcery saga that desperately wants to be another "Lord of the Rings," Eragon succeeds in being only the palest of imitations.

Like a party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

This movie doesn't have a mean bone in its body; the problem is, it doesn't have any bone in its body.

Wild Hogs puts the "ick" into City Slickers.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

The best thing that can be said about this Yours, Mine and Ours is that it's inoffensive.

Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

Now we get a lazy Eddie in Norbit, a lackluster attempt to make a gross-out romantic comedy. When I say lazy Eddie, I mean imaginatively lazy.

Fans of horror-comedy probably will enjoy this movie, even though chuckles outnumber scares.

It aims for outlandish and athletic love lyrics and instead achieves all the potency of a makeshift nonsense song banged out on a toy lyre.