Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.

It's still a film with genuine laugh-out-loud moments, most provided by comedian Dennis Miller. On first glance it would appear Miller is horribly miscast in this predictable fang flick. But Miller's ceaseless verbal machine gun of one-liners salvages the movie. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.

All these segments are well made and engaging, but their lack of interconnectedness reduces The Laundromat to a sketch comedy, and random guest appearances by actors like Sharon Stone (as a Vegas real estate saleswoman) and David Schwimmer (as a small-time lawyer) only add to the scattergun atmosphere.

It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.

A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.

The film comes across as an irksome contrivance. What’s meant to communicate the mysterious, even taboo allure of playing chameleon instead just leaves us scoffing.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

A brisk and reasonably thorough dog trot through a life that was simultaneously invisible and all powerful, and it’s goosed along with slick production techniques that more than once get in the way.

Though perhaps more suited to PBS or classrooms than to movie screens, the documentary is engrossing and just may encourage more people to look less to pharmacology for answers and more within.

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

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.

It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.

The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors.

Lopez is not yet the actor Caviezel is. Still, she fills her performance with conviction, does a couple of her own stunts, and has enough star presence to fill the big screen.

Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.

Humor in 'Jim' is a little too dry.

Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]

Wendy feels like a holding maneuver — a way for a gifted young storyteller to keep one foot in the innocence of childhood while figuring what he’s really going to do next.

Phoebe in Wonderland gradually loses its grip on tone and believability, climaxing with a show-must-go-on moment that's just plain silly. Thankfully, Barnz knows exactly where to end his film: on the face of a girl, and an actress, at the crossroads.

We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

Tight close-ups, jittery hand-held camera — lots and lots of jittery hand-held camera. The idea, presumably, is to impart urgency, immediacy, dynamism. Instead it causes visual exhaustion.