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]