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

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

How do you make a boring movie about this guy? Beats me, but director Ben Lewin has managed to pull it off. Based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography of the same title, The Catcher Was a Spy is a decorous, dutiful dogtrot that tells Berg’s story with excellent production values and a conspicuous lack of energy. In its tastefully dull fashion it wastes not only a fascinating subject but the mercurial actor playing him.

The reconstituted Vanishing is a pretty banal proposition. [05 Feb 1993, p.27]

It’s silly-sweet rather than silly-stupid, the script has enough snap to count, and – really, now – it allows us to spend time with Issa Rae.

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.

A second-rate novel and a second-rate movie, in which some interestingly faceted acting can do only so much. [28 Sep 1990, p.46p]

Like the earlier film version, this one often exchanges the dark poetry of Golding's writing for action and connect-the-dots social anthropology, but it's crisp, taut and involving nonetheless. [16 Mar 1990, p.39]

There isn’t a single original idea to be found here, nor a twist you can’t predict immediately. This film has what Siskel and Ebert used to call “the Idiot Plot.” That is, a plot that doesn’t contain a single credible moment, and would be over if everyone involved wasn’t an idiot.

Simple without being simple-minded, warm without worrying too much about being cool. It's agreeably silly fare for the very small set and not so noisy that parents can't either follow along or take a quick nap.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

Wilson has some fun lampooning ’80s action tropes, but he’s also just doing Dwight Schrute with a twang at times. McBrayer and Garcia barely get to play one-note characters, let alone ones that you’ll remember.

Although it's the first time Hank Ketcham's mischievous kid has been brought to the big screen after a few TV versions, the film has the air of a weak, warmed-over sequel. [25 June 1993, p.51]

Less elliptical and more down-and-dirty than Lang's interesting debut film, ''The Well,'' this one tumbles through Sydney's academic and alternative poetry circles and is built around a lesbian private eye.

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

Although Species benefits from a new generation of computer-generated visuals, it can't hold a tentacle to Alien. Alien was more old dark-house thriller than sci-fi. Species turns into just another day in the LA pest-control biz. [07 July 1995, p.28]

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

How to Make a Killing should be a lot more fun than it is. The murders are poorly staged and unfunny, and Powell’s performance is so one-note and smug that you can’t root for him even if you think his killing spree is justified.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

It’s a brutal bit of screen poetry that’s matched too infrequently by the aching human stories director Fedor Bondarchuk is so anxious to tell.

What ought to be the pinnacle of the story - the orphans' odds-defying 500-mile march over snow-covered mountains toward the relative safety of the Mongolian desert - is shunted toward the end of the film and compressed to a near-footnote.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

As cartoon rip-offs go, Open Season can be surprisingly entertaining, in a made-for-6-year-olds kind of way.

A well-intentioned indie that tries to be a "real" version of a Hollywood romantic comedy and ends up feeling more ersatz than ever.

Too glossy to truly immerse audiences in the horrors it depicts.

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

CB4 succeeds on joke overkill, made possible by a story framework that begs for heavy-handed puns and sophomoric sight gags. It is a cotton-candy comedy, far wispier than its prototype, but equally insightful into the rap world as This Is Spinal Tap was to rock. [12 Mar 1993, p.30]

The film looks great, boasting all the elegant period details that are expected in tasteful French adaptations of treasured national literature, with beautifully photographed Bordeaux landscapes and luxurious interiors. As for the human element, however, the mood is more apathetic than tragic.

The laughs here are more about the colorfully zany action than the ho-hum material the cast gets.

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.

The crime is appallingly petty. But occasionally the friction between two actors' idiocy will produce a comic spark.

Andy Serkis directed. Serkis, who’s given so many memorable acting performances (Gollum! Caesar the chimpanzee!), doesn’t elicit any here. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the movie, which makes its lack of visual texture all the more dispiriting.

There are two reasons to put up with Soul Men, and that's the soul men themselves. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac appear to be having a good time, and for most of this raunchy, poorly orchestrated buddy comedy, that's enough.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

The Quick and the Dead is a sly, savvy Hollywood sendup of Sergio Leone Westerns with Sharon Stone playing the Clint Eastwood righteous avenger role and Gene Hackman the heavy. You'd call it a spaghetti Western, but the budget is too high. Maybe we'd better think of it as Hollywood's first angel-hair-pasta Western. [10 Feb 1995, p.47]

The final act of Dark Matter is grim but unconvincing, and the shortfall leaves an ugly, exploitive taste in your mouth.

Reminds us that the human dynamic can do a lot that explosions can't, even when the film flirts with formula.

It's warmer and fuzzier than the first film, though every bit as tedious.

That uncertainty -- in the professor, in the audience -- is what drives Emperor's Club to a surprisingly thought-provoking, even disturbing conclusion.

It would be gratifying to report that there's a lot more to K-Pax than Spacey at the top of his form, but there isn't.

The limp script actually has the characters spout ''Let's get outta here!'' more than once. Or maybe that's just a wise member of the audience talking.

An intermittently arresting, mostly standard action entry that deals death noisily more than cleverly - a lot like the original.

The movie gets credit for showing the struggles he and millions of others with similar disorders live with on a daily basis. They’re not pretty, but — aside from Emma — they’re real.

The movie's an easy, engaging watch, even if it's literally all over the map.

As the romance blossoms, our hero is vindicated when Melody accepts his quirks, even enables his fantasy life. But the touches of magical realism begin to feel gimmicky. By the final frame, this romance never feels real enough.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

Their (Danner/Lithgow) being together feels more like a device — there’d be no movie without their relationship — than it does a romance. There’s a lack of chemistry that makes for a listlessness of narrative.

It’s fun in stretches, but also busily forced.

Affleck the screenwriter seems to have dumped the story onto the kitchen table and pushed it around like dough, hoping for some shape to emerge. It resists.

Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.

Lee’s Oldboy stands on its own. It just stands a bit shorter.

This formula comedy could have been a disaster, but during their short-lived career as a comedy team, Kid 'N Play seemed to have picked up a few pointers. They're not Abbott and Costello, but that's not what's called for here - what's called for is a fresh face on the formula, a young and easygoing team that really believes what it's doing is funny. [05 Jun 1992, p.29]

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

Reliable, standard Disney animated fare, with enough creative energy and wit to entertain all ages.

Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.

The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.

Lots of sex, but little joy.

The B-movie is still very much with us.

If Ten9Eight brings NFTE to the attention of you, your child, or your school administrator, that’s probably all that matters.

Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.

It’s sad when a film wastes the talents of so many fine actors. Sad for us, that is, because I’m sure they were all paid handsomely.

The movie might have been more tolerable had Besson searched harder for a performer and not a specimen. Barbara Stanwyck in her prime might have made more sense.

Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.

Scoop is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker.

A straight-up combat film. Not a very good combat film — it wallows in genre clichés and makes a hash of its action scenes — but one that does get you to empathize with its grunts, the “secret soldiers” of the title.

A slick, ripsnorting character drama whose artistic ambitions are consistently neutralized by its commercial imperatives, puts Downey in a box from which even he can’t escape.

It's too diffuse, too turgid, an intelligent failure, but a failure nonetheless, with no real heat between Garcia and Thurman, riveting as she is as the blind woman literally and figuratively struggling to find a purchase on the world. In the end, it spends so much effort avoiding cheap obviousness that it seems to implode on its own muted restraint. [6 Nov 1992, p.38]

''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.

Ready to Wear has entertaining bits, but for a film about people converging on Paris to increase the hysteria and anxiety levels, Ready to Wear has surprisingly little urgency. [23 Dec 1994, p.48]

The end result is an inert bore. Golda fails as a character study and as an exploration of wartime mechanics. It succeeds only as Oscar bait.

A space shot worth taking.

The Banger Sisters so frequently features Hawn running around in revealing attire, tossing instructions at exhausted people that I'm inclined to think of it as a workout video.

Rarely has a movie that looked so good on paper fallen so flat as the aptly named Charlotte Gray. It's not a bad movie. Bad movies have more flavor.

In the end, it's simple warmth and sincerity that make this ensemble piece so disarming.

The movie's glee is contagious.

Washington and the others score in this predictable but rousing film where the big victory is over attitudes.

It's an enjoyably demented meta-finale, the rivals showing what they could do if they ever bothered to actually do it.

It's thoughtful as well as funny, and you never want to take your eyes off Barkin. [10 May 1991, p.27]

Well, even on automatic pilot, as he is here, Jackson is always good company. Maggie Q’s blend of grace and gravity translates into a quiet authority. Keaton completes the trio. He’s quite droll here. No one’s better at playing a low-key wiseass. The pleasure of such company isn’t enough to compensate for watching a succession of scenes that are like recruitment ads for abattoir work.

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]

To say that Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross go hard on the music would be an understatement. There were times when their beats vibrated through my theater chair, goosing me into thinking “Tron: Ares” is better than it is. Their contribution propels the action and makes you believe in the visual bedlam unfolding before you.

Risks seeming too earnestly therapeutic for its own good. But what makes My First Mister a successful feature directing debut for Lahti is the emotional veracity it summons.

In a refreshing change of pace, this week's anti-Bush documentary, Bush's Brain, is not really about George W. Bush at all. It's about his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

The Muslims Are Coming! is at its best when the comedians talk to real people outside the controlled environment of a stage.