Forgoes that split-level wit to concentrate on mere rock 'em sock 'em mayhem.

Big, noisy, harmless, and a little clumsy -- yep, that's Clifford, the Big Red Dog. And it's Clifford's Really Big Movie, too.

Though Trolls Band Together mercilessly beats its familiar, tired message about the importance of family into the ground, it’s still surprisingly watchable with plenty of voice and singing talent.

The film was technically astonishing and yet brazenly simple.

Intelligent and earnest, The Fault in Our Stars works well enough to keep a doubter from feeling mugged by sentiment.

All movies are phony. What, you think beautiful people doing ugly things on a screen is real? Some movies are phonier than others. Widows is one of those. The always thin line between a twisty plot and a silly one gets crossed about an hour in.

This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.

It's more like a cartoon with a body count.

Writer-director Zach Clark doesn’t rise much above that level of subtlety in his lampoon of the phony goodwill and soulless commercialism of the Yuletide season. Luckily, he has a cast that elevates the puerility into genuine pathos and absurdity.

Through it all, Fleck seems at a loss for words, stumbling through small talk and staring feebly as a Ugandan musician weeps during a song about his dead father.

Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.

The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.

It’s a sequel that sticks to more routine territory of action, angst, and dystopian gloom — mostly a sound approach, thanks to the consistent strength of franchise lead Shailene Woodley and a mix of intended and inadvertent surprises.

Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.

A faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.

Notwithstanding its irresistible rhinestone array of mid-’60s popular culture, Last Night in Soho is an exercise in nostalgia only in passing. What it is is a horror movie, released just in time for Halloween.

There's nothing seriously wrong with Man in the Moon. It's sincere, heartfelt and handsomely crafted - but within limits, and ultimately it's the limits you feel most strongly. [04 Oct 1991, p.43]

Uplifting? Not bloody likely. Mesmerizing? Very, thanks to Greg Kinnear's eerie performance as Crane and director Paul Schrader's lucid depiction of the character's happy-go-lucky descent into hell.

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

It’s an easy film to watch and become engrossed in, and it’s just as easy to forget, despite a true-life twist that darkens the final minutes without making much of an impact on the whole. Expertly shot, excitingly edited, smartly acted, The Connection never quite connects.

At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.

The movie is only so-so, borrowing a little from the VH-1 school of popumentary but lacking the snazzy production values.

From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.

The movie’s a watchable affair for most of the running time, not so much subverting cliches of the serial-killer genre as keeping the audience in suspense as to how, if, and when those cliches will be observed.

The romantic stuff is tepid. Luckily, his onscreen buddy, Hall, never strays far. Coming to America is at its best when they're playing off each other, and not just as the prince and his buddy. [29 Jun 1988, p.69]

Cadillac Man isn't perfect, but it's got enough peppy lowlife turmoil under its hood to pass most of what's on the road these days. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

The movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: "The 40 Year Old Virgin" with a shoe phone.

James has the forward drive of a trash-compacted Ralph Kramden with some of Ed Norton's random gentility and, here at least, he has a knack for fine-tuned physical comedy that gets you laughing even when the script's not there.

July may have lost all faith in the strategies of the parents' generation but holds out hope for the future. I think this may be her idea of a family film.

A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.

Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.

It's a small film, and a far from perfect one, but it allows her (Theron) to extend her range as no previous role has done.

Writer-director Burr Steers delivers a screen mash-up that’s generally done in the right, warped spirit. It lampoons Austen cleverly enough at points, without winking any harder than needed.

Enola doesn’t just break the fourth wall. She tickles it, winks at it, and tugs at its sleeve. With another actress, this would be annoying. With Brown, it’s charming.

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

It's just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and where ''Human Nature'' should be ingratiating, it's just grating.

A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.

If you want state of the art anime that comes within spitting distance of escaping the limits of its genre, this might be your cup of bootleg sake.

If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.

It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.

It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.

For a movie predicated on slapstick forward momentum, we spend an awful lot of time driving backward.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a sturdily crafted but only mildly amusing goof on Kevin Costner's 1991 Sherwood Forest outing. It further confirms that Mel Brooks has lost something off his fastball since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. [28 July 1993, p.22]

This 19th Bond installment is passable, but only just.

Remains a frustratingly opaque study. There's something missing, namely Kaufman.

Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.

Despite its ambitious depiction of post-Soviet economic woes, Tycoon is an uneven political thriller that suffers mostly from a highly convoluted story line.

Shot in digital video, Fancydancing feels a bit like a racy after-school special. Performances are amateurishly uneven.

The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.

For a harmless "Indiana Jones" knock-off, Journey to the Center of the Earth has an awful lot riding on it.

The Visitor arrived at the height of a sci-fi and horror film revival, when “serious” directors... embraced genre conventions and made them their own. Paradise stole from them all. But unlike these directors, his ambition was coupled with delusional ineptitude.

Tidily arranges its raw feelings about fathering and manhood into a decent, intelligent melodrama meant to soothe audiences and provoke no one.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

Whenever it stays with Piccoli, though, it's mysterious and moving, struck by the humility of a man who's not up to playing God.

For a holding maneuver, Thor itself turns out to be diverting enough - not close to a sharp-edged romp like "Iron Man" but not the B-movie roadshow some of us were expecting.

Franken's feel-good inanities make you laugh, but the insipid script in which they're embedded lacks the courage of its satiric convictions. [12 Apr 1995, p.90]

Alan Rudolph's beautifully burnished, heartache-filled evocation of Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Tablemates bites off a bit more than it can spew. But a couple of things make it special. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]

Tales, which (as the title suggests) is an "Arabian Nights"-style omnibus, has similarly eye-bending backgrounds but a creatively monochromatic foreground that comes to feel like a limitation.

Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.

By itself, the new "Pelham" is a solid, suspenseful tale all over again, so long as it stays in the subway tunnels and airless offices of the transit department.

What’s good about Rubberneck is also what makes it tough to watch: Karpovsky burrows under the skin of this repressed romantic nebbish until the frame seems ready to burst.

"Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.

While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.

A slight but diverting series of set pieces.

Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.

The biggest problem I had with this visually unappealing cinematic version of “Wicked,” is that it can’t handle the tonal shifts.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.

Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.

Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique. Her thoughtful presence is a very welcome departure from the standard rock-doc formula. She provides the kind of reality check — an under-the-influence Manuel almost got her killed when he totaled her Mustang, with her in the passenger seat — rarely found in such films. In that sense, it isn’t just the Band that was different but “Once Were Brothers” is, too.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.

Glawogger has the good sense mostly to stay out of the way and let the material speak for itself.

What makes it worth sitting through is the chance it offers to catch up on the technical advances since the last installment.

There’s no question that Kasztner has vastly more significance for the historian. Eckstein, a grim footnote to history, has much more for the artist.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

It’s the kind of movie my 2½-star rating was invented for; that is, a movie that’s interesting enough to put me on the ropes for several rounds before dropping its hands and getting knocked out.

The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.

One of the best things about the movie, aside from its screwily positive message, is the blithely freewheeling yet clever way that Rogen and company assemble the story’s puzzle pieces.

If the movie’s all too predictable in its broad outlines, it’s scurrilously funny in the details, and it pushes its two leads and one of its supporting actors in entertainingly fresh directions.

Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.

Not the sanctioned wet T-shirt contest you might be anticipating. The Pacific is the hottest body here. And director John Stockwell handles the frivolous material with an integrity that I have to admit I found disappointing. The movie isn't nearly dumb enough to be much beach fun.

This film has provocations to spare; it just hasn't been made provocatively. It's a mess, actually.

A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.

Sorry, boys. After two decades, the first film still does more with one skyscraper than Live Free or Die Hard does with an entire country.

The movie ends on a plaintive can’t-we-all-get-along note, but at heart it’s a Charles Bronson flick. It mashes the revenge button the real world won’t let us push.

Enjoyable, occasionally grueling, and overstuffed with incident and agenda.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

There's been talk about Van Damme deepening his excursions into acting. Wisely, though, he keeps Timecop on a comic strip level. [16 Sep 1994, p.72]

With Clerks II, the director retreats to home turf, but is Smith playing it safe or is he really interested in seeing how the old nabe has changed? Bit of both, actually.

It's heady in the beginning, chaotic throughout, and numb with the suddenness of the Internet economy's plummet at the end.

Visually, the movie is surprisingly inventive, with takeoffs on everything from manga to Hokusai prints. Sure, a lot of the jokes are dumb — you got a problem with that? — but “Paws” is quite smart.

I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.

French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.

It's no meal, but it'll tide you over.

A confident and promising directorial debut, one that has the feel of an experienced director to it, from the hypnotic unfolding of scenes to the finely observed character details.

The kind of heartwarming, well-intentioned film many audiences claim they want to see at their local theaters.