The drama is torpid, the astronomy lessons pedantic, and the spear-and-sandal production values flat-out cheesy. The whole thing is also historically ludicrous.

While no Hawks movie can be considered a total loss, this reductive replay of Rio Bravo and El Dorado is too peevish to qualify as tragic, and only occasionally funny.

Sam Wood, the El Supremo of Hollywood hackdom, squired this one to glory.

A philosophical comedy about man's place in a universe colonized by Targets and Wal-Marts.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

It's Joan Cusack as her doting single mom who holds the film together--her sensitive turn as a flawed feminist hints at what she could do with a meatier role.

Hitchcock was incapable of making an uninteresting film, even when burdened with unsympathetic stars like Julie Andrews and Paul Newman, and Torn Curtain has its moments.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

It is a shock and a pleasure to see an American film that doesn't wallow in complacency, but instead suggests—however fleetingly—that disappointment is also a part of life. Curtis is particularly impressive in the strength and maturity she brings to a role written as pure fantasy.

This inspirational vehicle, based on a true story, is as hokey as it sounds, and it sometimes cuts too fast to allow us to see the dancing properly. But as in "Saturday Night Fever," the sense of reality giving way to fantasy on a dance floor is potent, and writer Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander are so sincere that they make much of it work.

If you can tolerate the overbearing music (think John Williams at his most manipulative), this is relatively painless, thanks to a lighthearted tone and some energetic lead performances.

A flat, stagy, artificially cheerful affair that falls far short of the memorably creepy Laurel and Hardy version of 1934.

This exudes trendiness at regular intervals, and otherwise manages to be reasonably charming about Manhattan's melting pot culture, but my general response was still "Wake me when it's over."

As usual, the three instrumentalists (Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Robby Krieger) take a backseat to their gorgeous front man, though their nimble, idiosyncratic playing has aged much better than his pretentious poetry.

John G. Avildsen directs Stallone's primitive script with the corn it calls for, hoping to distract from the simplicity with a few fancy montages, and does a fairly good job with the climactic slugfest; but the dramatic moves are so obvious and shopworn that not even.

The characters quickly succumb to stereotype.

The movie's strength is in its comedy; a tragic subplot feels merely manipulative.

While the actors show some sensitivity and Scott works up a modicum of suspense and involvement, the real interest of this picture is the radiance of the images—a mastery of lighting and decor second only to Scott's Blade Runner, with atmospheric textures so dense you can almost taste them. Unfortunately, this mastery bears only the most glancing relationship to the story at hand, and Scott becomes guilty of the sort of formalism that used to be charged (less justly) against Josef von Sternberg. But even though the movie doesn't leave much of a residue, it looks terrific while you're watching it: Manhattan has seldom appeared as glitzy or as glamorous.

At least the special effects and outer space vistas are more handsome than usual.

Nothing special, but it's a decent example of a vanished genre—the small character comedy.

Riegert and his cowriter, Gerald Shapiro, breathe some fresh air into the material with their credible characters.

The real standout is Kevin Kline as secretary of war Edwin Stanton.

Main drawback is a relative dearth of clips showing Hicks in his ferocious prime, so if you come away from this wondering what all the fuss is about.

Like the recent Japanese import "Steamboy," this is worth seeing for the artwork alone, but it's so furiously overimagined it may leave you feeling dulled.

A piece of mythmaking stupidity.

Sitting in the theater, you're liable to buy all this simply for the pleasure of watching Caine work. Like Eastwood and other actors of his vintage, Caine brings to the project not only his own formidable skills but more than half a century of movie history.

The landscapes--which come close to outshining the worthy actors in the opening and closing stretches--are beautiful, and the plot, which is basically a grim coming-of-age story, holds one's interest throughout.

This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.

Soggy and predictable screenplay.

Though Ahola's acting is unschooled, to say the least, Herzog shrewdly uses his blunt sincerity to counterpoint Roth's spectacularly icy performance.

Where other King stories and hundreds of other movies simplistically exploit the archetype, this tale intricately relates the actions of its young evildoer to the more abstract forces bearing down on the adults.

Ritchie may be skilled at generating controlled chaos, but his surprise-a-minute strategy ultimately holds no surprises; Snatch is even more frenetically boring than his 1999 "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

I still can't decide whether it's a masterpiece of sexual provocation or just a really classy stroke film.

Gets a little soapy, but the dismal working-class milieu and the measured performances by Mezzogiorno and Girotti (a venerable Italian actor who died last year ) bolster the sense of solidity.

The heavy-handed delivery may reflect the urgency of the message--that women need to face the past and stand by their children--but it impedes the drama.

Most of the screen time goes to American-Armenian hard rock band System of a Down, whose grating concert footage trivializes Garapedian's message.

Stanley Kramer issues the final warning to Mankind, in a tiresome, talky 1959 film set in the shrunken aftermath of World War III.

Watching her (Blanchett) and Jones work together is the chief pleasure of this polished but self-conscious drama--Howard delivers some terse and coherent suspense sequences, but Ford looms over the story like a rifleman hidden in the red rock.

This singing-along-to-the-radio effect has a dingy charm that honors the blue-collar Italian setting, yet Turturro spoils it by turning the movie into a hip star party, with a cast of indie-acting royalty.

Cruise holds the center of the film with a sharply focused performance, though his bonding with the wise samurai chieftain (Ken Watanabe) is noticeably more ardent than his soggy romance with the stoic wife of a man he killed in combat.

The script favors routine "Odd Couple" gags over the sort of comic contemplation of motherhood a writer like Fey might have brought to the subject.

Director Eli Roth is adept at building a sense of foreboding; unfortunately, once the bloodletting begins, all sense of drama and logic oozes out along with it.

Canned racial uplift and tear-streaked faces abound, though they're offset somewhat by a nicely funky blaxploitation vibe.

It's no masterpiece, but compared to the toothless comedies of its era, its attack on American mythology seems almost worthy of Preston Sturges.

Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story, Silver Streak) just puts his apolitical head down and digs into the mess without worrying about style or sense.

This 2003 drama suffers from a heavy narrative hand, as a series of ironic coincidences creates a tiny, hermetically sealed New York City, but the contrivances are overwhelmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the human encounters.

A treat for balletomanes, this 2001 feature may be too precious for others.

The characters are so full-bodied and the feelings so raw and complex that I'd call this the best thing he's (Singleton) done to date.

As the WWF-style villain, Stiller misfires again and again, but Vaughn is reliably funny and Rip Torn has a great part as the underdogs' crotchety old coach.

At a relaxed pace, accompanied by restrained pop music.

Writer-director Derrick Borte brings a heavy hand to the comedy and an even heavier one to the drama.

The torture is strictly for kicks, which spoiled this for me, but less skittish viewers may enjoy this as a stylish and tightly wound genre piece.

All in all, an entertaining (if ideologically incoherent) response to the valorization of greed in our midst, with lots of Rambo-esque violence thrown in, as well as an unusually protracted slugfest between ex-wrestler Roddy Piper and costar Keith David.

Director Bryan Barber (known for his music videos) and his cast display so much gusto that it's hard to keep up your resistance--I wound up finding this more enjoyable than the Oscar-bestrewn "Chicago."

Not a movie that needs to exist, but it passes the time, and at least Hopkins manages to look like Picasso at odd moments.

This thin premise can't sustain a feature, and the racial and gay jokes are jarring, but the child actors are cute, especially Andrew.

It's the submarine barn and Richard Kiel's steel-toothed Jaws you remember from this one; the ostensible hero is just a fleshy blur.

A hokey but highly entertaining tale of corporate greed that should be especially satisfying if you're pissed off at big business.

Starts out silly, gets sillier by the minute, and frequently had me and most of the people around me in stitches.

If you've never seen the lovely Wenders film, maybe you'll be charmed by this low-grade variation, all of whose best qualities--such as the airy crane shots poised over city vistas and freeways--can be traced back to the original; otherwise you might run screaming from the theater.

When a respected actor moves into the director's chair, he can usually draw a pretty good cast, which is certainly the case here... But Sherwood Kiraly's slight script only makes this embarrassment of riches seem more embarrassing.

Clooney and Bridges model an assortment of wigs and facial hair as they labor to put across their outsize characters; at its best the movie recalls a subpar episode of M*A*S*H.

Aiming at a microcosm of American life comparable in some ways to Do the Right Thing, Singleton can't quite justify or explicate his parting message ("unlearn"), but his passion is exemplary.

The real star is the splendid computer-generated Hulk, though his King Kong-like story is compromised by the need to keep him around for the inevitable sequel.

For much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste. Though far from a worthy successor to the original the film clearly could have been much worse.

Unfortunately, Volcano is also faithful to Hollywood's legendary lack of originality.

The sentimentality is held in check by Caine, who rises to the occasion with a bleak, angry performance.

Luc Besson--and Andrew Birkin wrote the pandering, adolescent screenplay for this pseudosubversive hagiography, and nearly every scene screams out its sensationalist intent, though few actually achieve the status of spectacle.

At once self-conscious and generic, this smart monster movie about smart monsters -- supersharks cleverer than the scientist who created them -- repeatedly lulls you into thinking it's paint by numbers.

According to common usage, the French word stupide comes closer to silly than to dumb, which is how I might rationalize my affection for this harebrained, obvious, but euphoric tale.

The ghoulish tone and Mikkelsen's glassy performance smother any laughs.

Eddie Murphy strikes the right balance between silliness and pathos in this screwball family comedy.

This lacks the heft of "The Insider" (1999) or the snap of "Erin Brockovich" (2000), but it's a thoughtful entry in the growing subgenre of whistle-blower dramas.

It reminded me of "Pump Up the Volume" in many ways.

Though a bunch of the jokes are milked too thin, there are some absurdly goofy sight gags--like a hacky sack game enlisting a family pet--and a lineup of fun, silly cameos by guests from Chris Rock to Mariah Carey.

The action plot is lousy with cliched suspense scenes of back-road executions halted at the last possible instant.

The directors exercise their stylistic flourishes mainly in the imaginative sequences depicting the young daughter's trancelike state while she conjures up the correct orthography in the spelling bees her father's determined she must win, and while the film observes the same heartbreaking obsessiveness as the popular "Spellbound," it has none of that documentary's cuteness.

Even if you find Franken hard to bear, as I do, the movie's take on how he functions in the world is both authoritative and compelling, and the movie steadily grows in stature.

At one point screenwriter James C. Strouse name-checks the brilliant Richard Yates, whose fiction similiarly perches between grim humor and utter despair, but the movie's hip detachment is a far cry from the unruly passions of Yates's chronic losers.

But despite a compelling opening, as a movie it loses focus and purpose as it proceeds.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.

If misery were inherently interesting, this adaptation starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle as a couple plagued by alcoholism and child mortality might be too.

Ordinarily I don't care for this kind of thing at all, but something must be said for Jackson's endless reserves of giddy energy; perhaps because this is so clearly meant to be silly, he generally avoids the calculated mean-spiritedness of more prestigious directors like Spielberg and Renny Harlin.

Though the look aspires as usual to be both otherworldly and familiar, there's nothing that doesn't reek of southern California (as opposed to Hollywood) plastic, and this is as true of the characters as the decor.

Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.

Absorbing docudrama.

Eventually the action leads to an uncharted island, where the film devolves into an explicit but unoriginal gorefest. [28 May 2009, p.30]

It's the romantic sparring with Catherine Zeta-Jones as another glamorous thief -- not the unsuspenseful heists -- that makes this silly thriller lightly bearable.

The first positive portrayal of homosexuality in Russian cinema, a distinction that carries it only so far.

Action comedy hurriedly cobbled together as a fund-raiser for the Hong Kong Directors' Guild.

This big-budget western bears a striking resemblance to the recent Tom Cruise vehicle "The Last Samurai," though it's more fun and less pretentious.

Director Joel Schumacher submits to the Wagnerian bombast with an overly busy surface, and the script by Lee and Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman basically runs through the formula as if it's a checklist.

The international Asian stars gamely tackle their English-language roles, aided by superior costumes, makeup, and set design. But despite all the hothouse intrigue, the film lacks passion.

The exotic plant and animal life is enhanced by the 3D process--which makes the two-dimensional screenplay all the more disappointing. With its weighty dialogue the movie becomes depressing well before the final violent showdown.

Ralph Bakshi gathered retired animators from all over the world to work on his 1972 film, misleadingly billed as the first feature-length cartoon for adults. The results, inevitably, were disappointing; Bakshi just didn't have the money to make it right.