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.