Has a daft sweep, and if you're in the mood for empty swordplay in baroque settings, purple dialogue delivered with straight faces, and romantic yearnings that never, ever resolve, The Promise may be your cup of oolong.

Arriving with a blockbuster sound and fury that has been dialed up to 11, the movie is a dismayingly safe act of franchise closure. In terms of pure narrative, it’s satisfying. What it very rarely is is inspired.

Dutifully bleak, suitably oppressive, the film delivers Atwood's desolate who-owns-our-bodies? indictment with intelligence and probity. [09 Mar 1990, p.25p]

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.

This is by far the most embarrassing of his seven movies.

Like "Blair Witch," Quarantine uses the conceit of a movie-within-a-movie to give documentary immediacy to its assorted grotesqueries.

Mostly, though, Being Flynn is memorable for the sight of a once-great actor rousing himself to a performance the movie itself isn't prepared to handle.

The most original thing about Lucky Number Slevin is that it lets Lucy Liu play a screwball heroine.

A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.

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.

This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.

If a long, chilly afternoon needs to be filled, The Tigger Movie won't hurt. But neither will it enchant.

Is it one of Oprah's book club meetings?

Doesn't have its heroine's conviction. It'd be better if it had.

It's fun to see Tom Wilkinson, for instance, with a massive bald spot virtually eating scenery with a knife and fork.

Invigorating excellence.

The trouble with Grumpy Old Men is the patronizing attitude -- ageism, really -- that takes a too-broad approach to their geriatric world and renders it plastic. It is too cute and sanitized to allow its performers much in the way of opportunity.

As directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s a steady, compelling accounting of events that intends to leave you infuriated and succeeds.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

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.

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.

The movie is another of those harmless and politely made dark comedies that the English seem incapable of doing without.

The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.

The point of "the official Muslim comedy tour" is that these guys are ordinary Americans just like you and me. Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of the jokes.

Had “Emancipation” shaken off its Oscar-baiting “slave movie” shackles and instead gone full-tilt into a vengeance-laden “freedom movie,” it might have worked.

This time, the over-the-top craziness that Spencer slyly serves up fills more than just a pie plate.

If there is potential in a film that ridicules the John Singleton-styled black-men-are-doomed movies like Poetic Justice, Jungle Fever and Straight Out of Brooklyn, Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood squanders it on a series of repetitive gags and sexist jokes. [13 Jan 1996, p.28]

She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?

Turns out to be thoughtful, creative, and generally worthy of its subject, with sins that are more of ambition and miscalculation than of execution.

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

He (Hui) does not achieve the surreal grandeur of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films, but he has enough imagination and talent to engage his audience on its own level.

What makes Palindromes bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.

At an outrageously over-long 127 minutes, writer-director Christopher Landon’s adaptation of Geoff Manaugh’s novel “Ernest” feels like a different movie every 15 minutes.

Even if I like the film, as I did with “The Little Mermaid,” I still conclude that corporate greed is the sole reason for its existence.

Narrow Margin isn't awful. It's solid and adult, but plodding and dull, rather like a living room filled with the last generation's furniture - not old enough to be considered an interesting antique, yet fundamentally out of touch with the present. It's too reasonable for its own good. [21 Sep 1990, p.44p]

The movie is largely set in a busy Paris restaurant, and, not surprisingly, the food looks terrific. You may come out hungry for poached sea bass and a little starved for drama.

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

It's acceptable Shakespeare - no more arbitrary than most stage productions, especially the willfully anachronistic ones, or the ones with political agendas thrust upon them. [18 Jan 1991]

The problem with Hysteria is that it keeps patting itself and us on the back for knowing better.

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

The Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, has no real struggle or drama. We're dealing with kids for whom everything comes too easily for us to care.

It’s a movie content to stay within the show’s comfort zone, changing things up mainly with flashier, 3-D visuals, a couple of which are dazzlers, and a theme that doesn’t connect in any notable way.

Almost as generic as its title, Fatherhood is made real enough to matter by the strength of its performances and the sincerity of its makers.

The movie seems destined to win a place in the nocturnal-cityscape-hell hall of fame. Its externals are brilliant, but The Hudsucker Proxy is virtually nothing but externals. [25 Mar 1994, p.52]

Humorless, pretentious black-and-white tone poem about a very young Abe Lincoln.

I'm still not convinced we needed a new Spider-Man series, but at least this installment is interestingly mediocre instead of actively bad.

Seems embalmed in its own time, an earnest and handsomely crafted museum piece, not an urgent transposition of Miller's moral outrage to the new century.

A cheery version of a darker, grislier movie, one in which people like Daniel beat up people like Charlie, girls like Vicky end up in far more compromising positions, and women like Celia turn to Scotch and prescription drugs to cope with their pain.

It's too circumscribed and polite for the story it's telling, curiously deficient in the unexpected.

It is a contrived, bombastic, well-intended failure.

It's pedestrian.

The result is rather a mess, but it’s an honorable one, and very much worth wrestling with.

Sarah Jo is a slippery protagonist, an oddball, and an enigma. But perhaps tucked within her pure, dovelike disposition is a message about the ways women’s desire can be flattened or overlooked.

This is a flavorless adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's 73-year-old children's book.

A Good Woman is pretty to look at and fakes witty elegance passably, so consider it a diversion -- a movie that might have been in the Oscar race if the elements had jelled but has instead been properly hung out to dry in February.

The film is crisply shot, expertly paced, solidly acted, and it gets a goose when Bill Pullman shows up in the late innings as a good-old-boy lawyer. (By contrast, it’s never convincingly explained what stake the union official played by Elias Koteas has in the drama.) All that’s missing is a reason.

A grubby little redemption comedy that in every way feels like a consignment-shop Jack Black vehicle.

As tiresome as the relentless, indulgent inscrutability and lack of story momentum can be, it says something for the movie’s visceral power that there isn’t an urge to quit on it.

It’s amiable and unpretentious, if also slack and diffuse.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

The fundamental value put forth in Brown’s “Sunday” sequel is not fearlessness but “family.”

It has its own bizarre charms and a breezy confidence that renders it the very definition of a simple pleasure.

This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.

Unfortunately, director Aidan Zamiri and his co-writer Bertie Brandes are equally bad at mockumentaries and generating suspense.

For a stylish thriller to work, it needs to be at least a little bit stylish and offer an occasional thrill. Deep Water does neither.

High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.

As close as a movie about three Iraq war soldiers should come to mediocre TV comedy.

The Book of Eli is “The Road’’ with twice the plot, four times the ammunition, and half the brains; it’ll probably make 10 times the money.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.

Luhrmann is working a tricky game: He's trying to come to terms with modern Australia's racist legacy while telling a ripping yarn while also making fun of ripping yarns - but not too much.

The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.

The film's biggest problem, however, is its naive inability to understand that sex comedies, to amuse, must be about more than sex.

Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.

Too many cliches and not enough energy have come along for the ride.

You'll see worse, but The Dark Half could have been darker. [23 Apr 1993, p.45]

The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect.

Formulaic but extremely good-natured comedy.

Green and his cast deliver a wonderful surprise. Echo himself, a generically precious alien, is the least of it. The funny, moving, authentic bond among the kids in the movie is the unadvertised draw.

Few comedians talk so much to get a laugh, and sometimes the strain shows... And the directors don’t do him any favors by the annoyingly frequent close-ups of audience members in convulsions of laughter.

But, oh, the action. Tommila and Jackson have a couple of escape sequences that are exhilaratingly choreographed, never mind that one employs a meat freezer as its key prop. Kids should dig these bits. After all, off-kilter as Helander’s sensibility continues to be, he’s got a passion for popcorn-movie energy that can be contagious — especially when he’s not trashing Santa.

Unfortunately, the material flounders from the broadly farcical to the bombastically melodramatic. Race and ethnicity aren’t so much the problem as gender is. Despite Gainsbourg’s efforts, her character becomes a caricature.

Writer-director Nic Bettauer can't decide whether to play Duck for tears or laughs.

It’s not hard to see the script’s appeal for the actors, John David Washington and Zendaya. Playing the only characters in the movie, they get a very serious workout and give seriously good performances.

Astro Boy alternately soars and sputters through a story line that’s not quite sure who it’s aimed at.

At its best, Year of the Fish makes a virtue of naivete - its heroine's, its director's, and the fragile fairy-tale belief that everyone deserves a happy ending.

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

Bale and Watson make most of the film more interesting and watchable than it might otherwise be, finding flesh and blood in a script that isn't always equal to their talents. [23 Apr 1999]

The big difference between Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" and this big, slick remake is that this new film has less visual edge and is more sentimental. It's more upfront with the idea that Maggie, as she's called here, has feelings. Still, Fonda's at her most compelling in the early scenes. [19 March 1993, p.50]

Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.

The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.

Peregrym is like a secondhand Hilary Swank. She has a looser presence and might be a better actor, but since we already have Swank, finding out is not a priority.

Doesn't try to be anything it's not. It's happy being a funny, shoot-'em-up, run-for-your-life, green-guts monster movie. And as green-guts monster movies go, it's a beaut.

The first half of The Heart of Me is just that sort of hoot. You know where it's all headed, and you can't wait for it to get there, as the cheap, cruel ironies pile up almost farcically.

What saves it is that it's lighter than mousse and is animated by a handful of engaging performers.

This is one beautifully drawn, frequently lifelike piece of anime.

Soft girl era is something the socialmedialites are desperately in search of, and so am I. “You, Me & Tuscany,” takes us there.