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.