There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.

Slow and ultimately distressing.

All this manic invention is great fun for a while, until Tai Chi Zero falls apart on the rocks of the eternal verities: story, acting, direction.

Melding history, science, and up-to-the-minute urgency, A Fierce Green Fire is a clarion call that’s passionate and provocative.

The movie usefully, carefully, and cogently argues that Bieber is more than his hair. He is his hoodies. He is his pop-hooks. He is his many handlers.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

Fallen is a more than usually ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to merge a supernatural thriller and cop-chase movie. [16 Jan 1998, p.D6]

It's a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness.

Hook touches neither fantasy nor soulfulness nor yearning. Mostly, it's benign spectacle in which the actors keep yielding the camera to some expensive playground or other. Hook is neither wistful nor primal. It's film's most expensive wind-up toy. [11 Dec. 1991. p.53]

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

Far too long, but its rambunctiousness is engaging, propelled by Stone's virtuosic quick-cutting.

Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.

An overstuffed turkey that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons.

Runs out of helium and lands pretty heavily after its airy beginning.

Sinks under the weight of its ever more inescapably apparent contrivance, and its forced parallels to ''Lear.''

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.

Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.

The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.

Point is, the property is running on bald tires, and, for all its ear-splitting racket and lavish effects, “Apocalypse” is the barest of retreads.

It’s cheap pandering to fans, but I really couldn’t stay mad at a movie that uses Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” as a point of contention and has two shout-outs to one of the best movies of 1985, “Real Genius.”

It’s a great story, and much of it’s true. This should work like a pip. Instead, The Monuments Men is a tonal mishmash: Half “Hogan’s Post-Doctoral Heroes,” half “Saving Private Rembrandt,” and half “Ingres’s 11.” That’s three halves, so you can see the problem.

I can promise you a fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats (the car chase in "The French Connection," the single-take battle sequence in "Children of Men") and from which the movie never really recovers.

Alda's work as a writer on M*A*S*H didn't go to waste. His script delivers a lot of laughs - patently related to TV sitcom, but laughs all the same. Betsy's Wedding is fun, and LaPaglia is a find. [22 Jun 1990, p.43p]

Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

There’s a reason the movie has been pushed off the back of the truck into late February. It’s damaged goods.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

Shirley Valentine only intermittently captures the wistfulness and tough-minded humor Collins is so good at dispensing. The rest of the time, it's far from bracing. [22 Sept 1989, p.31]

The reason to sit through its uninspired, formulaic moves, however, is its half-dozen spectacular fight sequences.

A strong ending might have obscured the mediocrity in the writing, or at least diverted us, but the ending is sentimental where it needed to be hard-edged and comically merciless. For a film about people hurtling forward, Rat Race is pretty pedestrian.

A pleasant puff-pastry throwback to Sandra Dee movies, ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' and other pre-Beatles effluvia.

Everything about this curio is claustrophobic.

Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.

You come away enchanted less by the character than by the woman playing her.

It's technically sophisticated and intermittently engaging, and its showdown is more than up to genre standards. But fresh it isn't. [19 July 1996, p.G4]

I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.

The actors also acquit themselves well singing the film's numerous tunes. Breslin's voice is pleasantly melodic, while Nivola sounds like someone who's been grinding it out on tour for years.

Despite the derivativeness, Chism shows talent and shrewd instincts in the timing and direction of the comedy — she handles the requisite dinner table disaster scene with aplomb.

The movie’s a somber affair, but if you see it in the right frame of mind, it’s the guilty-pleasure hoot of the season.

David Frankel’s film reduces an extraordinary life to a predictable template of bullying, resolve, success, disappointment, and platitudes — a pattern repeated two or three times until the genuinely moving finale.

The filmmakers have made this for the purposes of near-term celebration rather than long-term understanding, and they’re probably judging their audience well.

So this is the little movie that caused the big fuss. And little it is, a dopey bro-com that piddles along delivering mild laughs until it turns overly, unamusingly bloody in the climactic scenes.

The film doesn't embarrass itself or dishonor its predecessor, which is something.

Bonello takes on the point of view of Saint Laurent himself, exposing a visionary world seen from within that is as strange and wonderful as that of a magnificently stitched garment turned inside out.

Lively, if overlong, documentary.

It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.

They're a far cry from the Coen brothers, or even the Polish brothers, but Josh and Jacob Kornbluth emerge intact from their first filmmaking venture and score more hits than misses in this comedy.

Endearing, if not an A-list classic. [25 Sep 2005]

The Intern is bizarrely retrograde, implying that every working woman only needs a cuddly Yoda daddy to make it in the world of business. It’s soft in the heart — and soft in the head.

Director Roger Donaldson seems a bit too obviously caught up in the slick technology of zapping us with mayhem and death to allow Thompson's gritty viciousness to take root. [11 Feb 1994, p.41]

Dangerous Beauty is a costume drama that hasn't quite decided whether it wants to exist on the level of serious historical drama or trashy entertainment. [20 Feb 1998, p.C6]

It’s refreshing that Lemmons focuses on the highs rather than the lows, even if it feels like buffing off the edges of her complex protagonist. But that won’t matter to Houston fans: They’ll get so emotional, baby.

Hughes succeeds more than he has any right to in Uncle Buck because he's able to override sitcom cliche with generosity. It's a smart idea to let Candy play feelings instead of just fatness and bluster. For a movie that isn't really that good, Uncle Buck is surprisingly likable. [16 Aug 1989, p.77]

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

It consists of a series of episodic encounters, misadventures, and musings redeemed in part by the presence of two scenic wonders, the unspoiled 2,190-mile grandeur of the Appalachian Trail and the spectacular crapulousness of Nick Nolte.

You can go see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or you can save yourself the time and money by chugging a six-pack of Red Bull and running through the dinosaur exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History until you can’t breathe. As experiences go, they’re equally adrenalizing and equally ephemeral.

While it's altogether smaller in its ambitions and achievements than Singleton's terrific "Boyz N the Hood," it at least allows Janet Jackson to emerge as a sympathetic presence, more credible than most pop singers making movie debuts. [23 July 1993]

Less a documentary than a PR package with a chip on its shoulder.

Zizek is a revolutionary playing a comedian playing a revolutionary. Which makes him worth watching, even in this movie.

While most of the scenes in Tony Stone’s peculiar Middle Ages art project look like a homemade educational reenactment, the film is actually more involving than it should be.

Although there's a certain connect-the-dots quality to the storytelling, there's no denying the care and craftsmanship that Gardos has brought to her debut film.

The code talkers and their guardians - Beach and Cage, Willie and Slater - do the best they can with the oddly flat-footed script, but their dynamics don't really have a place in Woo's universe.

The cast is up to the challenges of that arc, but the plot doesn't always keep them afloat.

A treatment of Foster so reverential it verges on camp.

What Greenbaum captures is compelling, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Sports in their purest form are played by children, who are — most of the time — much too young to be tarnished by professional-level jealousy, scandal, sacrifice, and unfair expectations.

Elle Fanning is impeccably cast as Jesse, a quiet, sweet-natured ingénue shuttling between sketchy photo shoots and her clichéd newcomer’s digs in a seedy Pasadena motel.

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.

These successes are inspiring, but deeper and more complex emotions are unexplored. It’s no fault of Foy’s performance; she brings depth, humor, and conviction to her role as the devoted wife. Garfield, on the other hand, labors mightily but can’t overcome the superficiality of the character as scripted by William Nicholson (“Shadowlands”).

An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Plays more like an exercise in nostalgia than a dramatic re-creation of a triumphant fight for civil rights.

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

The most uncomprehending sequel of the last few years. It shows no awareness at all of what made the first film work so surprisingly well. What little emotion it summons is superficial and sentimental. The rest of the time it falls back on dumb farce and embarrassing Brit-bashing, climaxing with a vacuous chase scene. And this in a film that's supposed to be more mature than its predecessor. [21 Nov 1990, p.37]

It's worth noting that the movie's spiritual underpinnings are sometimes fairly subtle and other times veer into "Touched by an Angel" territory. The third act is downright Bible-thumping.

The bodies are athletic, young, and white, and yet this is not the sport sex we usually see in Hollywood movies. It's the sex of adulation. Sometimes the director Robert Benton goes heavy on the hydraulic positioning, but his movie is scarcely mechanical.

Shopworn to the bone.

Mostly it's Paredes' imperious - then surprisingly generous - high-handedness that carries High Heels. [20 Dec 1991]

A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.

Exhausting and seemingly endless.

There's too much control in it and not enough danger.

Doesn't really have a climax that works, making you wonder whether all the nutso plot machinations were worth following. Maybe, maybe not. But there were a number of skewed bits that popped out and put a chuckle into this journey.

A self-consciously arch work of hipsterism that's more styled than funny.

The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.

Karmic influences or not, the new "Mighty Joe Young" works. This is one remake that isn't trying to make us forget the original, but seems rather to embrace it and bring it into the present in solidly crafted, family-friendly fashion. [25 Dec 1998, p.C9]

A giant chef character is an icky bit of inspiration (complete with booger humor to soothe any shell-shocked young’uns in the audience), and the monsters are key to an epic-scale third act. If you thought the tale ended when Jack clambered back down from the skies, then you haven’t given it as much thought as Singer.

The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.

In short, Besson builds a dazzling alterna-universe — a bit of Terry Gilliam, a dash of “Blade Runner,” a smidgen of “Star Wars” (which, to be fair, was probably influenced by the original comic), and a lot of extra-strength Besson-ian whimsy. And then he strands us with the two least interesting people there.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" is a too-literal evocation of the played-out frontier experience. It's imaginatively shot and bravely and even iconically acted by Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickock, but it's numbed and numbing. [04 Mar 1996, p.32]

A classy unintentional hoot.

A wide-ranging new survey of the toy’s global subculture and appeal.

It's notable for some astounding urban wildlife footage and for the way it unintentionally reflects the giddy narcissism of the primate known as homo sapiens.

This bizarre, uneven comedy is notable mostly for the unsettling presence of Nicole Kidman in full, kinky, sex-kitten mode.

Lightweight yet alluring.

This present-day Paris of Le Divorce is smartly shot and costumed, and the whole affair is breezy and uncharacteristically insouciant, given the reserved nature of the folks responsible for it.

The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.