The latest installment in the venerable sci-fi action franchise turns out to be a straight-up war film, grim and muscular and thundering and joyless. It's the color of cement, and it weighs as much, too.

Seems to be going through a series of motions so obviously virtual that it makes you wish that the filmmakers had stayed away from the computer keyboards entirely and stuck with the rotting tape look.

All in all, the movie’s a muddled and overlong experience, one that every so often drifts into dull, unintentional camp.

It makes you wonder if the series' animators, who took time out for "Rio" just before this, aren't so secretly yearning to sail different creative waters.

When the action shifts inside the ropes, which happens often, "Gladiator" pulses with energy, and Marshall shines. Boxing purists may wince at the freewheeling fisticuffs - there is enough kicking, eye-gouging and head-butting going on to make viewers wonder why anyone bothered with a referee - but the electricity in these scenes is undeniable. [6 March 1992, p.31]

Once the vulgar comedy dissipates, we're left with poorly photographed, bullet-riddled summer-action mayhem. The only thing drunker than Hancock is the editing and camerawork.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

The film misses an opportunity to portray the complexity of one’s 30s — and 70s. Still, Mack & Rita is a quirky movie that reminds the audience to live life to the fullest, whatever age they are.

In sum, a big, honking tutti-frutti sundae of a movie that nonetheless is shot through with authentic feeling.

Like a nightmare you recall during waking hours, and then only in its vast outlines, Antichrist has the power to haunt beyond words. For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema.

A big, sorrowful, dramatically trite period epic about a bleak chapter in the history of modern France.

Pitt’s presence makes a borderline-odious piece of work watchable.

A faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.

The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.

It’s been seven years since the writer-director David O. Russell’s last movie. At its frequent best, “Amsterdam” makes it worth the wait.

If you like your revenge slow and cliched, you may like Ricochet. The plot, which by now may be too stock even for TV police dramas, is about an escaped convict bent on torturing the cop who put him behind bars. [05 Oct 1991, p.10]

"Mars" needs Mom more than the filmmakers seem to realize.

Lewis delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the child-woman who wears tube tops and polyester and matter-of-factly tells the other woman that Early doesn't really whip her. [03 Sep 1993]

When the best thing about a movie is the title, that’s never a good sign. It’s all downhill from there? Exactly, and that’s the case with Downhill.

What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.

A powerful portrait of modern journalism and the nobility -- and futility -- of chronicling modern war.

The important thing is that Hurley looks smashing in her succession of red outfits.

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.