The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

Even if they're on the side of the angels, 106 minutes is a long time to keep this sermon going.

If you fell in love with the big-hearted sentimentality of Rent when you saw it onstage, the film version will remind you why. If you think Jonathan Larson's musical is ponderous agitprop, the movie won't change your view.

The movie remains quiet and deliberate, a synonym for “boring” in some minds (though not mine). In the end, it becomes an allegory for the times in which we live.

Really should have been made 60 years ago. It would have been timelier, with its tale of life in the remote north of that country during World War II. The juicy overacting, stereotypes and dramatic exaggerations would have been more in keeping with the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The filmmakers have a vision of the way Shakespeare can be made vibrant and vital to modern viewers, with or without the lofty original dialogue.

The summer's most anticipated film, and it gives fans what they want - then more of what they want, and more, and more, until gluttony becomes force-feeding.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

The cheesier it got, the more I liked it.

Easy to like.

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

For the first time since "Chasing Amy," I realized why people like Ben Affleck.

The dialogue includes double entendres that are rather clever, if you're mentally at the age of 11.

Brosnan has toughened up emotionally for his second outing. He's been teamed with Asian action star Michelle Yeoh as Chinese agent Wai Lin, and he's been given a script that provides more fun than the lethargic "GoldenEye." [19 Dec 1997, p.11E]

Only in the last half-hour do the usual Emmerich absurdities pile up: I laughed outright at the character who, past 65 and diagnosed with a massive brain tumor that will kill him within months, cannot be stopped by a ferocious beating, being stabbed in the neck with a sharp implement, then being crushed against a wall by an SUV moving at a minimum of 30 mph.

Nicholson operates in full-bore demonic mode in Anger Management, eclipsing gentle star Adam Sandler and satisfying everybody who's been waiting for Hollywood's Wild Man to cut loose once more.

The big names in the cast add atmosphere in small doses, especially when Haysbert and Glover combine.

The plot's as thin as a debutante's cigarette case.

I knew blues music can make you feel you're not alone when your woman has gone, and rock your soul when you're on top of the world. But until I saw Black Snake Moan, I didn't know it could also cure nymphomania.

What makes Blade 2 marginally better than "Blade," especially if you thought the first was a hollow spectacle? It has a plot.

By the end, an end that has a little too much melodrama to it, we can only shake our heads in wonder.

Bullock and Reeves have an unusual kind of charisma, one that works best when they're apart. Though the filmmakers sometimes put them in the same frame for visual ease, they mostly occupy different times.

Despite the fun dancing, sidestep Center Stage.

Last Holiday floats along on the broad shoulders of one of our most able dramatic comedians. Without her, it would sag like a punctured souffle.

Lloyd finesses a deft script of brisk, quick strokes by Abi Morgan ("Brick Lane," "Shame") into a terrific entertainment.

A mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

An unforced, sweet-natured story about people who find small ways to touch others and rediscover the good in themselves.

A frantic, heartless hodgepodge of pieces from James Bond movies, Indiana Jones adventures, "Star Wars" and half a dozen legends.

These pros lift this button-pushing blob of faux folksiness to a higher plane than it deserves.

Thirty minutes into Be Kind Rewind, you may wonder what you're doing in the theater. Sixty minutes into it, if you have stayed, you will know.

300 is a huge step forward in visually sophisticated storytelling.

(The filmmaker) never does achieve the breakthrough with her father that she and we hoped for.

It's a fable that descends rapidly into nonsense.

Forget the bug-eating, cow-spearing and one-upsmanship of TV's "Survivor." The real results of isolation and deprivation unfold in The King is Alive: madness, suicide and murder.

When we have to spend time with Beast and Angel and Nightcrawler and Cyclops and Psylocke and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, still strong), the movie too often becomes a parade of cameos. Apocalypse has no personality, merely the malevolence of a megalomaniac.

If you’re worried that the re-teaming of Clooney and Cate Blanchett in a World War II movie signals something like “The Good German,” fear not: She’s better here, playing a French art historian who worries the Americans will “rescue” the art in order to steal it for their own country.

Brooks gives himself the last word, appearing onscreen for the first time amid chorus girls oozing PG-13 pulchritude. "Go home!" he says. "It's over!" Could he be referring to his career?

The two stars of Nacho Libre, Jack Black and Jack Black's hair, take different paths.

Aspires to rise above the conventional drugs-and-action genre and succeeds about half the time.

The acting is solid.

Crash. Kick. Stab. Punch. Talk (briefly). Smash. Chase. Screech. Shoot. Mumble. That's the wearying pattern of Safe House. Had "think" been an action verb, the movie might have risen above the knee-jerk excitement of the second-tier, "Bourne"-style spy thriller. But it never does.

A melodrama that reaches the heart but hardly ever convinces the head.

To call the film “unwatchable” is to unfairly insult Josée Deshaies; his lush cinematography delights the eye when the camera roams around Saint Laurent’s workrooms. But “incomprehensible,” “interminable” and “immaterial” all apply.

Whether or not you think of this as a knockoff, it has a ripeness “Twilight” never did.

Director Marshall Herskovitz and his cast haven't been able to achieve the outsized grandeur that could make us take the story seriously. It's not zany enough to be camp, except in one or two spots, yet it's too small to be epic. [06 Mar 1998, p.9E]

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

The movie's weirdness isn't organic; it's imposed, like barber-pole stripes painted on a prison wall.

Know how to tell if a war movie is mediocre? An outspoken bigot, usually a Southerner, abuses a patient member of an oppressed minority -- the Asian recruit, the African American or, in the case of Windtalkers, a pair of Navajo men from Arizona in his platoon.

A thriller with its share of nail-biting moments.

The film seems almost intentionally bad in most ways, as if Gilliam were expressing a suicide wish for his directing career.

Any of the key relationships would have been grist enough for one movie's mill, but "Feast" crams them all together.

They have turned a brief, appealing, honest autobiography by Susanna Kaysen into a long, appealing, rather dishonest film.

Writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris must figure the blinking lights on Angela's screen will cloud our brains. They ask us to ignore plotholes the size of craters... Nor does director Irwin Winkler shoot scenes suspensefully. [28 July 1995, p.9F]

Mighty Joe Young is based on the 1949 film of the same name, and it's nominally more aware of '90s concerns: destruction of the gorillas' habitats, illegal hunting, trade in animal body parts. On the other hand, it's no more enlightened about the intrinsic value of these clever, emotionally complex creatures. [25 Dec 1998, p.13E]

The movie runs out of steam before its finish, but she (Kidman) doesn't.

Is this just silly filmmaking, or have Ivory and Jhabvala succumbed to the Francophobia that gave us "freedom fries" in the congressional cafeteria?

The chorus backs the soloists powerfully, and they are as fresh as the rest of the film: fat and fit, homely and handsome, young gods and old codgers – in short, people you might really see in Greece. Reality in a musical? That alone makes it worth your open-eared attention.

The movie fails the credibility test right here. As those of us who were social rejects in high school know, the two qualities that would defeat any prom candidate are extra weight and a blotchy complexion. Laney has porcelain skin and a sveltely curvaceous figure, so she's a candidate for prom royalty. [29 Jan 1999, p.6E]

The film robs mermaids of everything exotic and remarkable about them in mythology.

About halfway through Irreversible comes the longest sustained act of violence I've seen onscreen.

Tthe kind of movie the clergy can recommend to anxious parishioners.

A loosely woven crazy quilt of other, better movies.

A picture sufficiently shallow that you'll discover everything that lies beneath it well before the end.

Part of the film's failure to arouse real horror is the languid direction; not enough seems to be at stake emotionally.

If you want my rock-solid statement on whether The Fountain is a masterpiece or a muddle, check with me in 2026.

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

One of the opening scenes of The Accountant consists of puzzle pieces being dumped on a table, and that’s a fine metaphor for the film.... A few pieces can’t be made to fit, and two of those are big ones. (More on that in a minute.) But the rest of the story has been well-constructed, and the picture it gradually reveals keeps you guessing up to the final scene.

It combines elements of "Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars" and James Bond flicks with generically satisfying results.

Birth, which should never have been conceived, is obscure in every way: visually, philosophically and psychologically.

On their accounts (Williams/Collette), The Night Listener is compelling viewing-but on their accounts only.

Did anybody expect it to be a metaphor for modern America?

Anonymous is fun – if you take the anti-Shakespearean tale as events set in an unreal, alternate universe.

The writer-director waited until he had the clout, budget and prestige to attract a top-flight cast, then turned Colored Girls into a movie with a little less darkness but plenty of heart and guts.

Stuff yourself with popcorn, let the gray matter rest and enjoy what may be the best two hours of nonsense you'll see this year.

And what of Roger Avary, the writer who shared the Academy Award for writing with Tarantino? He continues to plummet toward oblivion with The Rules of Attraction, which ranks with the Great Pyramid of Khufu as a monument to self-indulgence.

There's a potentially good story rattling around somewhere inside this broken, self-contradictory and finally meaningless film.

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

It takes its plot from the 2001 German film about a workaholic chef, dumbing down the original slightly and inserting a couple of phony crises. You're spared not only subtitles but subtlety.

If you wanted to, you could see this movie as an allegory about people who love each other but can never connect. Or maybe it’s a warning to parents who turn a blind eye to children’s failings until the family self-destructs.

Quirkiness is as essential to a small indie film as beef stock to French onion soup. But if you don't have enough of any other ingredient, you end up with a watery, barely edible broth.

A long, slow pity party full of characters who constantly bemoan their fate while telling other people not to pity themselves.

Without Essel, this might have been a run-of-the-mill dark comedy. With the 86-year-old British thespian, it's a wickedly funny and audacious movie in which she puts her capable co-stars in the shade.

There is indeed a murder - two of them, in fact - and the movie proceeds strictly by the numbers laid down long ago in some by-the-book Hollywood writing class.

I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the Pirates of the Caribbean experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts. To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused.

Bay's movie couldn't be more timely; whatever you think about this subject, you might admire his attempt to come to grips with it in a summer blockbuster.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend offers us a heroine with phenomenal bone structure and a story with hardly any at all.

A taut, consistently surprising political thriller with a sting in its tail.

The special effects, with one painful exception, hold up beautifully. But the people have no personalities, the story is unconvincing, and the whole movie is as shallow as the puddle left on a flat roof by a 20-minute shower.

Now You See Me can’t quite claim to be the ideal crime drama – that would be “The Usual Suspects,” which justly won an Oscar for its script – but it’s only one level down.

If you're indifferent to silly revisions of history and bad acting, you may enjoy The Other Boleyn Girl. I'm not, and I didn't.

The filmmakers fall back on melodrama fairly often.... Yet there’s freshness in the storytelling.

On the scale of summer action films, this is to the “Transformers” sequel what an Andy Warhol print is to a first-grader’s refrigerator painting.

A mediocrity at any time, because of its implausible script and bland characters.

Kapur’s contradictory feelings about his material result in a movie that works against itself. As righteous and consistent as his anger may be -- it’s displayed from the opening title cards to the final shot -- it doesn’t blend successfully with the story.

Grant handles the slapstick humor gracefully and speaks his lines with sincerity and warmth.

Flaccid remake of a tough 1966 original.

Maybe this is a case of too many cooks spoiling a simple broth: The movie had four producers, five executive producers, three writers (credited ones, anyhow) and three editors.

Dragonheart is all dragon, no heart. [31 May 1996, p.3E]