The best acting comes from the enigmatic, always urbane Freeman, who has recently enlivened the likes of "Outbreak" and "Moll Flanders." But so what? Acting with dignity in mediocre pictures turns you into Vincent Price. [2 Aug 1996, p.4E]

The extraordinary canine performances in Shaggy Dog and "Eight Below" lead me to wonder whether Disney could dispense with two-legged creatures altogether, until further notice.

Delivers more of what the original promised, with the crudity index up one notch and the humor index down quite a few.

DiCaprio is up to all but the heaviest emotional lifting; when he enters a maniacal phase, you wish for Martin Sheen, who did the "back to the jungle" thing better in "Apocalypse Now."

I rarely pinpoint the exact moment when a promising action movie turns into a pulpy, asinine mess, but I can do that with Total Recall.

Isn't a bad movie, until John Woo remembers that he's John Woo and we remember that Ben Affleck is Ben Affleck.

The film doesn't lose its way emotionally; it's full of great monologues about loss and responsibility.

This isn't really a narrative: It's a collection of mostly unrelated scenes, about half of which pay off.

It's theoretically possible to make a fascinating film about a thieving, self-indulgent, freebasing, treacherous scumbag who pimps his girlfriend to a gangster and contributes nothing to society. Wonderland isn't that film.

OK, so no plot, really.

By the self-contradictory and ludicrous end, I had the mixed satisfaction of being proved right in my disappointment. (Di Pego wrote the equally silly "Instinct" and "Angel Eyes," so I can't say I was surprised.)

"Man" is like a sour, half-formed version of a TV sitcom full of dislikable, disconnected characters.

As lame as a three-legged mule.

As a movie, it's a mixed bag with a huge amount of heart.

It's a thoughtful, multi-layered film that falls a bit short of its goals on all fronts. Fans of intellectually challenging science fiction and/or Robin Williams will make up most of its market.

Ronan, however, transcends the script. She's innocent yet wise, gentle yet forceful. She's the one thing in this picture that shows how great a movie The Lovely Bones might have been, had the people who made it believed in the book with all their hearts.

The last 40 minutes descend further and further into nonsense, until we're in an underground grotto where Jeremy Irons plays a furry, cannibalistic albino with psychic powers and super-strength.

A holiday fable that's not destined for immortality but goes down more easily than most of the pap Hollywood tries to feed us every Christmas.

For all the story's bland familiarity, it has winning moments. Allen's no actor, but he projects a likeable personality.

Though it begins as a praiseworthy depiction of a unique man, it turns into a formulaic disappointment long before the overly violent end... Comic-book adaptations must remain open to sequels, but this kind of coy cowardice is despicable.

Ron Howard, who’s tied to this franchise like a man trapped in a decaying house by a huge mortgage, tries without success to blow life into David Koepp’s script.

Molly Shannon's peachy-keen attitude and spunky patience win us over to the side of Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Just a great, empty wind machine.

May wrestle with big ideas, but it does so through a succession of small emotional moments.

A Frankenstein's monster of a movie: clumsy, patched together from parts that don't align properly, desperate to be loved, destined to be chased by mobs with pitchforks - those will be the critics - until it stumbles into its grave.

The leads, who were born six weeks apart in 1937, have remarkable hare-and-tortoise chemistry.

However much Underworld recycles elements from other films, it carries us into a well-constructed, convincingly scary world worth visiting.

It's blah. Worse than blah, actually, because it's so stupid.