The film has less to do with politics, women's or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn't though, and the results are dramatically incoherent.

This watchable 1998 psychothriller deflects its cliches with canted angles, metonymic cropping, and a creeping pace, making it as much a parsing of "Twilight Zone"-brand irony as an example of it.

Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can't quite turn Robert James Waller's cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone.

A tired, generic crime story.

So-so ecological SF thriller from 1974 about superintelligent ants.

Alternates between chunks of opaque exposition delivered by cardboard characters and eruptions of colorful and highly imaginative action.

Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain.

Cokliss's direction strains for a stylishness it doesn't achieve, yet his fundamentally straightforward style brings out the abstract design of the plot. Is this the first cubist thriller?

Self-congratulatory feature, which artificially exalts the character--a classic saint with clay feet--by casting a grande dame and by reducing her motives to facile psychodrama

Though Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) was slated to direct at one point, the assignment ultimately went to Rodrigo Garcia, who's known for his female ensemble dramas (Nine Lives, Mother and Child) but demonstrates no particular affinity for this material.

It never conjures up any coherent drama of its own, focusing instead on the historical destiny of Bernal's beefcake messiah.

The gangster-movie plot, themes, and allusions aren't nearly as intriguing as the earnestly kitschy black-and-white wide-screen images or the mesmerizing, minimalist sound effects.

By the time the high-octane ending arrived I didn't even care what happened to the kid.

He's a fascinating character (even in the person of Gerard Butler), but his conversion from drug-crazed bruiser to psalm-singing family man is so swift and unconvincing that the movie is hobbled from the start. It becomes more engrossing once Childers finds his mission in Africa.

Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities.

The deft physical comedy is a pleasure, though the leering chauvinism becomes more embarrassing as the movie progresses. Mel Brooks never had it this good.

Has an adolescent energy and a tempered sexuality.

Director Robert Zemeckis displays such dazzling cinematic know-how that it's genuinely depressing when this film falls off into the usual self-ridicule.

Elmo's obsessive reaction is never examined, compromising the ability of this rambling minor spectacle to put across its obvious lesson about sharing.

Working with a shapeless script, directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood) can't figure out what they're making. They lunge in several directions, but fail to get around the central problem: most of their actors have little flair for comedy.

Unfortunately, Frank Perry's unbelievably ham-handed direction obscures most of what is craftsmanly and pleasant in Isaacs's work, pushing the material toward a smug, sloppy, heavily early-70s satire on the horrors of suburban life. A very mixed bag, but those who've missed a storytelling sense in American movies might want to have a look.

Disposable teen romance.

Combining the undead and the Third Reich seems like a novel idea--the peanut butter and jelly of trash culture--but in fact Spanish exploitation legend Jesus Franco already got to it back in 1981 with "Oasis of the Zombies."

Paul Newman in his first ascendancy, as the favorite antihero of the Kennedy era. Martin Ritt directed, putting a little too much dust in the dust bowl for my taste.

The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy "Fred Claus" (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.

I'm far from being a fan of the sport, but the boxing sequences held me and the overall atmosphere appears reasonably authentic.

For the most part this reminded me of a hysterical passenger pushing random buttons in the cockpit of a plunging airplane.

Out of five directors—John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, and Val Guest—only McGrath manages to connect with this brontosaurian James Bond parody.

Once the special effects take over, Berg has little room to assert his personality (or tell a story, for that matter), and the movie feels like a chore.

Spencer Tracy does his cuddly curmudgeon turn as Clarence Darrow; it's a lazy, vague performance, but its wit provides the only crack of light in the film's somber, gray overcast.

Apart from some psychedelic flashback sequences, this 1967 spaghetti western is highly familiar stuff, unlikely to interest anyone beyond fans of the genre.

There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen.

The "Big Fat Wedding" formula dictates a certain amount of ugly-duckling fantasy along with the ethnic scenery chewing.

Zwick, intent on correcting the perception of Jews as passive victims, lets the action set pieces overwhelm the more intimate scenes, several of which are already diminished by stilted dialogue.

It seems more like an illustration of his (Kaufman) script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.

Mac was a magnetic performer with a long history of redeeming mediocre movies; unfortunately this is another one.

The end, a drawn-out death scene, is manipulative and, contrary to the movie's feel-good marketing, likely to upset youngsters.

It’s a story that seems made for stage magic–which means that without a stage it’s clearly out of its element.

An odd stylistic mash-up, the movie never quite coheres, in part because the characters are so thin that the style doesn't have much to cohere to.

Sandler adapts his sweet-natured doofus shtick to this remarkably faithful remake of Frank Capra's 1936 rube-in-the-big-city comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town--which suggests that Capra may have invented dumb movies before their time.

Directed with confidence, but it's extremely pretentious--the boy-meets-girl equivalent of Lars von Trier's “The Element of Crime”.

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.

The tendency that often sinks Angelina Jolie's performances - overemphasizing certain naturalistic behaviors at the expense of well-rounded characterization - more or less sinks her first film as writer-director.

Despite the rich associations, the film finally makes little more of its central figure, a hideously deformed young man, than an object of pity.

Brooks has an uncanny talent for making us feel insightful.

This male weepie is ridden with cliches (Farina's character tends to a pigeon coop on his roof, for God's sake) and climaxes with a predictable act of self-abnegation.

The filmmakers realize that playing baseball isn't nearly enough to fix what's wrong in these kids' lives, which might have made a more provocative ending than what follows.

On its own modest terms, this romp delivers.

Combines absurd male fantasy and grating chick-flick cliche.

A pleasant but tepid comedy.

If spelling out stereotypes were inherently funny the movie would be a hoot.

The childish humor and sensationalistic effects undercut the movie's philosophical agenda.

The Focker franchise has become such a swell payday (Meet the Parents grossed $166 million; Meet the Fockers, $279 million) that now everyone wants in on the act.

The movie's idea of funny is giving the two lovers identical moles bordering their upper lips.

May be a good showcase for James Franco, who's in every scene, but it's a disappointing choice for director Justin Lin.

Writer-director Wil Shriner tends to sit on almost every shot, killing any comic momentum (sequences with Luke Wilson as a dim-bulb cop are particularly witless), and ominous scenes involving cottonmouths and Rottweilers are glibly resolved.

Leaking platitudes and cutesy ambience, this comedy folds a smarmy, social-issue subplot into a Saturday-morning-kids'-show sensibility; it's full of geeky gadgetry, and must've been a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

Manages to transplant the action to Chicago without completely ruining it, though the emotional impact is largely deflated by the change in cultures.

The lovers' seduction in the sand borders on laughable soft porn; later in the film, an act of genital mutilation (part of a prenuptial ritual) injects an unexpected note of terror that reverberates to the end.

A romantic comedy with precious little romance and even less comedy.

Haven't we seen this already?

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

The problem with all the time-travel high jinks, involving multiple versions of the major characters (a gimmick that Robert Heinlein handled much better in stories like “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies—”), is that in order to make the plot even semiintelligible, writer Bob Gale and director-cowriter Robert Zemeckis have to turn all these characters into strident geeks and make the frenetic action strictly formulaic.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

There's one nifty and original sequence--an assassination attempt during a state funeral where the pipe organs in the church all go haywire--but otherwise, this is crushingly generic.

Sometimes come together exquisitely.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

A Sears catalog of rock 'n' roll cliches.

Reynolds turns the emphasis from the action scenes to the depressed emotional state of his strangely disengaged protagonist, and the result is a film haunted by an unstated, largely undramatized sense of melancholy, very personal but almost completely inarticulate.

Dylan Moran has a few funny moments as Pegg's shiftless pal, and Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen puts in an all-too-brief appearance.

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

The special effects are impressive, but they don’t add up to a movie.

The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic.

The film gets campier by the minute.

One of the queasier Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

While the film includes several exciting, creatively shot action scenes, the drama is otherwise so shopworn that the violent climax is a relief.

Terminally boring.

The film in fact consists of a series of dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically.

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

This terminally sappy romance delivers heartache, sacrifice, a make-out scene in the pouring rain, and not one but two autistic characters.

Well-meaning but thick with cliches.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

Not even the soundtrack can save Under the Cherry Moon .

Nobody ever shuts up in this schmaltzy, mannered drama.

Two obnoxious, swaggering brothers -- whose sexual naivete is supposed to make them endearing as well as pathetic -- find happiness in this more schmaltzy than funny Saturday Night Live spin-off.

Tim Burton's new movie is gorgeous -- shot by shot it may be the most impressive thing he's done.

Once again, violence (more than 30 on-screen deaths) makes a poor substitute for suspense, while sloppy, rear projection work drains most of the excitement from the climax.

Camara and Peña are perfectly cast as the bewildered couple, and early on Berger gets some laughs from the one-note premise. But the material grows increasingly stale as the film drags on to its unintentionally creepy finale.

Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act, with its obscure homosexual flirtation, still seems to go on forever.

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

Director Ron Howard makes too much of camera and editing tricks, as if momentarily confusing us about where a character is or which character's point of view the movie is taking will somehow deepen the narrative.

Seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It's a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed.

Moderately watchable but awfully predictable.

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) was brought in to salvage the runaway production (with the cost adjusted for inflation, it may still qualify for the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made); though his name stands alone on the credits, a lot of other hands contributed to the general muddle.

The perfectly acceptable shtick executed by Williams--whose I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself seduction techniques ought to make him a hotter leading man--occasionally justifies the relentlessly light tone of this preachy 1998 comedy-drama.

Failing to provide any insight into his plight as a rich African-American celebrity, he moves on to the hard stuff.

There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.