It’s cute and clever to a point -- especially if you don’t know much about the film’s premise going in -- but then the cleverness runs on like the one-note punch line of an interminable “Saturday Night Live’’ sketch, sponsored by Audi.

It’s all a fair attempt, but Aselton isn’t going to make anyone forget Kathryn Bigelow.

As much as the director andco-writer, Paolo Virzi, might try, he can't bring any of these people into focus. The movie is shapeless, too.

A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]

The people who've made White Oleander appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about the audience. They should have told the story and let us take care of ourselves.

This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.

There is no continuity in narrative or character and it’s all shot in an elliptical, heavily stylized, gaudily lit (much of it looks like it’s shot through an algae-filmed aquarium) collage.

You’d think the 3-D effects would bring the action closer, but the kooky optics often have the opposite effect, turning the athletes into GI Joe and Boba Fett action figures zipping around a dollhouse set.

The best thing about Saint John of Las Vegas is that it makes you really appreciate guys like David Lynch and Joel and Ethan Coen.

I enjoyed the first three adventures of the Dragon Warrior, but the best thing he can do now is to give this series a much needed skadoosh, sending it to rest in the cinematic spirit realm.

A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.

When Boston Strangler focuses on the two journalists who wrote about this case, it is quite involving.

With its overly solemn, by-the-numbers approach, “Cyrano’' doesn’t make a strong enough case for another go at the story.

Somewhere in this movie, amid the ponderous exchanges and unfortunate O. Henry-style coincidences, there's American tragedy.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

What follows is no “Citizen Kane,” or even “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Todd Haynes’s arty tale of a reporter trying to track down a missing glam rock star, in which Collette also starred, playing the missing man’s alcoholic wife.

It's not that What a Girl Wants is dreadful; it's merely slapdash, wildly inconsistent in tone and style, and mind-numbingly predictable in character and plot.

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

While the film grabs us on cue with its sudden strikes that end with blood dripping from the monster's dragon fangs as it zips back into the dark, it's also true that predictability robs the thrust and counterthrust of the purely visceral impact it once had. The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered despite its diversionary moves. [22 May 1992, p.29]

The script is a little too clunky to serve Ricki Lake well, and Richard Benjamin's direction is a bit too sluggish to disguise her limited range as he crams this romantic fairy tale a little too forcefully into its predetermined mold. [19 Apr 1996, p.53]

For all its propulsion (when it isn't slogging through would-be love scenes), Metro is unable to avoid seeming like yet another of the vanity movies that got Murphy into the career trouble from which he just extricated himself. Murphy vulnerable is more appealing than Murphy as supercop. [17 Jan 1997, p.D6]

It’s a shame: Odenkirk begins the movie with a rep as a smart and slippery performer, but by the end of Nobody, he could be anybody.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.