It's a pleasure to see Jill Clayburgh on the big screen in a story about middle-aged love and sexuality, but she can't rescue this alternately trite and implausible comedy.

The plot is more convenient than intriguing, the characters more cartoonish than iconic--especially the heroine, who grapples with feminism in a way that should have been fascinating.

If the combination of Christian bromides and golf tips strikes you as a recipe for boredom, stay away.

The more pathetic the role, the more evident Robin Williams's conscientiousness--but his professionalism doesn't make this fantasy worthwhile.

Time and space are condensed by means both elegant and crafty, and rarely are any of the characters made to be more--or less--than allegorical.

Little remains in this true-life story of a nuclear worker's mysterious death other than some prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric - soft-pedaled, thankfully, but still strong enough to testify to the basic smugness of the project.

As Adam Sandler vehicles go, this isn't quite as dire as "Eight Crazy Nights," but any movie that has to fall back on Rob Schneider rubbing his nipples has some serious script issues.

A fair amount of visual panache, but the fight scenes are routine, the humor juvenile, and the Toronto locales rendered drab through muddy cinematography.

Unfortunately, the dialogue here is littered with cliches, and Ruben Blades as the dying father is the only character that registers with any degree of authenticity.

This forced spoof seems to be targeted at lesbian couples and hetero men with severe schoolgirl fetishes; that may be a legitimate market, but I'd hate to be sitting between them.

Holding all this together would be enough of a chore even without the hollow black-pride message.

Thematically, this has a lot to do with the sexiness of class difference and the hypocrisy of marriage and double standards, although, as often happens in porn, the “dream sequences” by the end make it hard to know what's actually happening in terms of plot. But customers looking for photogenic flesh and passion, with a passing plug for safe sex thrown in, won't have much cause for complaint.

Three decades of skyrocketing income inequality have soured the comedy of Arthur's astronomically expensive self-indulgences.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

A watchable thriller.

Rosen goes out of his way to avoid Disney's stylized movements and character touches, but ends by making his characters all look, sound, and act alike—conditions hardly hospitable to dramatic involvement. The animation may be naturalistic, but the fallacy is as pathetic as ever.

Worst of all, the movie's conventional showbiz finale, brimming with false uplift, implies that the traumas of other mutilated and disillusioned Vietnam veterans can easily be overcome if they write books and turn themselves into celebrities.

More mannered than stylish, more would-be tragic than comic, the film is all surface and comes up fatally short on warmth, humor, and insight.

Though it's not unlikable, John Singleton's second feature ("Boyz N the Hood" was his first) is an unholy mess in almost every respect.

Oscillating back and forth between insulting its two central characters (Muriel and her dad) and showing they have hidden depths, this movie only shows true tact and understanding when it comes to flattering the audience; everyone on screen is strictly up for grabs.

All the movie's free-form horror phenomena might have been more interesting if the plot didn't keep insisting on a systematic explanation for them.

The performers all move a lot better than they talk, which is bad news for the insipid melodrama but good news whenever the characters hit the floor in furious competitions between rival crews.

Somewhat depressive anecdote drawn out to feature length.

There's a gothic backstory to all this, which makes no sense but looks pretty cool.

It almost goes without saying that Harlin is the wrong man to direct a docudrama about the Russia-Georgian conflict of 2008, which displaced tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of others dead. Lacking political insight or sympathy for real people (as opposed to action-movie types), Harlin can offer little more than tasteless spectacle.

Classy and lifeless - a prettily photographed, heavily directed antiwar film.

The film looks austere and serious, rather as if it had been shot inside a Frigidaire, and the oppressiveness of the images tends to strangle laughter, even at the most absurd excesses of Alvin Sargent's script.

Thankyoubutnomoreplease.

Likable but negligible.

Judge races through some of his most provocative ideas in the opening minutes and ignores his story's many logical inconsistencies; the movie is bracing for its bile but ultimately more frustrating than funny.

Tierney and Hackman contribute most to keeping this life-size and funny.

I never thought that a thoughtful director like Gillian Armstrong would get trapped in such Euro-nonsense, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

Steven Spielberg's mechanical thriller is guaranteed to make you scream on schedule (John Williams's score even has the audience reactions programmed into the melodies), particularly if your tolerance for weak motivation and other minor inconsistencies is high.

Howard, as usual, seems bent on mixing genres to make several movies at once--monster movie, crime movie, coming-of-age movie, and action-adventure movie (among others)--yielding an overall narrative that's not boring but not especially suspenseful or focused either.

Overwhelmingly grisly.

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.

It isn't good, but it's certainly mythic.

The result is a problem drama with more problem than drama.

Just follows the numbers, plodding from one unimaginative set piece to the next. Even the tony cast of villains—Christopher Walken, Patrick Bauchau, and Grace Jones—can't add any flavor to the grindingly predictable proceedings.

With the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy completed and the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie two years away, fantasy aficionados needing a Yuletide fix may have to settle for this dull sword-and-sorcery epic.

Drove violence to the point of redundancy.

The scenes set on earth--messy, predictable satire about the commercial exploitation of fevered genius. The unconscious/underworld scenes may be boring because neosurrealism is a cliche.

The film heaves and sputters from one indifferently rendered number to the next.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own. It's a film that expresses a great deal of disgust toward homosexuals, while placing a sympathetic homosexual relationship at its core.

Carnahan stays true to the source material by delivering carnage without consequence (the machine gun-toting bad guys still can't hit a barn from the inside), his convoluted plot and multiple villains may challenge the attention span of the target demographic.

The draggy narrative of this 1997 comedy is tough to sit through--there are even several overproduced musical numbers--but it does have an intriguing subversive element that I don't want to give away.

Kaplan's decision to violate documentary principles by using songs to "narrate" some sections is simply irritating.

The overriding impression is one of utter nihilism, as reflected in a world divided into bored, crassly materialistic teenagers on one side and doltish, unfeeling adults on the other.

Glitz with no mind and lots of fancy visuals, edited with a pounding beat.

As on their TV collaboration, "That '70s Show," the time period never extends much farther than hairdos, costume design, and soundtrack hits.

Despite the off-rhythm styling and suggestions of primeval menace, there's really not much going on here.

Ulliel, the meek missing soldier in "A Very Long Engagement," makes such a tedious Lecter that this quickly becomes a chore, though Dominic West ("The Wire") is good as a French detective on the madman's trail.

The intentionally broad Greek-American milieu is oddly colorless; having all of the cousins named Nick or Nikki is an OK gag, but once you're past it there's little to hold your attention.

Schizoid romantic comedy -- The first half of the movie is full of broad but capable comedy, but the original film's sexual and class politics are clumsily handled, and the mood turns serious with all the subtlety of a falling guillotine blade.

Bogdanovich, a cold director drawn to sentimental material, doesn’t have the warmth to bring it off, and his wobbly control of tone keeps leading the physical comedy into pain and humiliation, the romance into prurience, and the wit into the realm of the sour and shrill.

Ingmar Bergman at his most painful, pretentious, and empty.

This low-budget sci-fi item was produced by some of the Brits who made "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," including their writer and director, Edgar Wright, but it hardly compares, despite Nick Frost's brief appearance as a mangy pot dealer.

Watching John Leguizamo labor to keep this leaky vessel afloat, I was reminded of all those Hell's Kitchen melodramas James Cagney rescued in the early 30s.

The acting--especially Dreyfuss's ability to roll with the mood swings--is impressive if not redemptive.

Most of the time it plays like the movie adaptation of a Land's End catalogue, making monogamy seem essential by associating it with high-end interior design.

Andrews is still a treasure, but the series's currency is plummeting.

Unfortunately writer-director Paul Feig has a weakness for artiness in general and hokey art movies in particular, and the overall sluggishness of this 2003 adaptation starring Ben Tibber makes such devices as slow-motion seem like mannered rhetoric.

This long-awaited monster mash should satisfy fans of the "Friday the 13th/A Nightmare on Elm Street" franchises.

Your enjoyment of this picaresque tearjerker may depend on how much you can tolerate its shameless contrivances and didactic social realism, whereby the story exists only to illustrate the plight of illegal aliens. I was ultimately more moved than appalled, but it was a close contest.

A rather tedious kidnapping movie by writer-director Lisa Krueger, despite the novelty of the kidnappers (Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino) being sisters, one of whom is pregnant, and the kidnapped person being a nurse (Mary Kay Place) needed to assist with the childbirth.

For all his good intentions, screenwriter Paul Laverty (best known for his work with Ken Loach) is didactic and crudely manipulative.

An ounce of self-awareness about its almost gleeful use of cliches would have improved this dance soap opera.

While the results are both cheerful and occasionally inventive, they can't hold a candle to his previous features; too many jokey asides and cameos - not to mention an overdose of plot - keep getting in the way.

You can't set the comedy bar much lower than spoofing the old Rock Hudson-Doris Day romances.

Geek-triumphs-after-all comedies can be charming, but in this one the triumphing begins so early it's hard to feel for the geek.

The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination.

This earnest yet cynical drama makes the gang-infiltration genre seem exhausted.

Yet another unironic war movie.

In some ways this 1978 Cheech and Chong effort, their first feature, is the perfect doper movie—no one's straight enough to remember the punch lines. Director Lou Adler (the record producer) finds a few chuckles, but mostly it's amateur night.

The rest of these animated sequences...depend on gimmickry, cuteness, or facile ideology, and don't come close to demonstrating the complex relationship between sound and image found in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

A charming, albeit slightly overextended (even at 81 minutes) multiracial sex comedy.

The idea of transposing the story to the macho, greedy world of big-time sports is promising, but director Jesse Vaughan delivers only flat dialogue and predictable situations.

A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.

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.

Shakur’s performance get increasingly intriguing as his character becomes disenchanted with his partner’s tactics, but Belushi is in way over his head.

Sicko horror flick.

This operates at the intellectual level of the old "Star Trek" in its limp last season, and the professed humanism is belied by the extreme violence and Nazi-chic production design (not to mention a voice-over that traces the outlawing of emotion to "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime").

It's so played out at this point that not even the enjoyably no-nonsense Statham can pump any life into it.

The clunky plot is set in Santa Fe, and includes a foil character who might as well wear a sign on his forehead.

Everything comes easy here, especially the right to narcissist complacency, but Hughes/Deutch are too busy playing Mr. Goodvibes to worry about the contradictions at the heart of their shallow moral vision.

This Hamlet elevates plot to a height that retains the play's atmosphere but squanders its thematic richness in a welter of "Mommy, how could you?" melodrama.

Some of the gags here are funny, but they aren't executed effectively enough to score.

It's hard to believe that anything this academic and artificial was once considered great filmmaking, but you can look it up.

Pesci proves he can act his way through anything.

The most striking thing here is a performance by Robert Forster, as one of the older men on the boat, that's so terrific everything else in the picture pales beside it.

Pearce pads out his plot with lots of borrowed bits (notably from The 39 Steps, with Gere and Basinger as manacled fugitives), but the borrowings don't have any resonance of their own: they simply hang on the story like empty thematic husks.

A general lack of charm make this pretty tough to sit through.

What this autopopathism means in terms of American culture is a subject I neither understand nor wish to.

Buffeted by the usual car crashes and explosions, Wilson and Murphy never develop any comic chemistry.

There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.

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

There's nothing but sheer manipulativeness holding this picture together.