Essentially a one-trick pony.

Lacks the raw power of the original but offers its own brand of exploitative fun.

But as a neo-Dickensian Disney exercise in old-fashioned sentiment this has a certain charm and a sense of human decency that tended to win me over.

The film never outshines its influences, but as back-to-basics action filmmaking, it's often superb.

The performances of both Schwarzenegger and O'Brien are labored, the pacing uneven, and maybe only half the gags work, but there's a certain amount of creative energy and audacity mixed in with all the confusion.

It's also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism.

An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

This buddy movie grows on you.

Sluggish comedy drama.

The first two are total stinkers, but things pick up with Joe Dante's creepy, claustrophobic, and very funny study of a brattish kid who lives in a cartoon universe, and come slamming home with George Miller's final sketch about a paranoid airline passenger.

Few movies on the subject of peer pressure offer so wide a cultural critique, even pointing a finger at underwear billboards, and Bellott's roving eye makes him a filmmaker to watch.

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

Writer-director Robert Shallcross believes in it so passionately that he came close to convincing me too.

The movie is humorless and monotonous, but watching the talented Sheen (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) give his all to such throwaway material is weirdly diverting.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

This may conjure up unpleasant memories of Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" movies, but Ritchie could learn a lot from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta); this is multiplex fare to be sure, but McTeigue manages to popularize 19th-century literature without completely vulgarizing it.

The video has a funky, loose-limbed feel, but Van Peebles has been celebrated so much already you have to wonder how many victory laps a man needs.

But Girl 6 isn't what we'd expect from Spike Lee: after exhorting his fans to wake up in his early efforts, he now tempts them to hang up.

It's still fun to watch, but the first one was better.

Almost every note in this insipid comedy is strident or false, from the child's prodigious talent for deception to the jock's chaperoning her and her classmates at a Corolle doll boutique.

Hampered by the kind of overacting that the cast seems to enjoy more than the audience.

Too bad the overreaching script has to go after effects recalling "Alien," but as a stylistic exercise this still has its chills.

Kruger's elaborations on the original mystery are superfluous, but Watts gives this everything she's got.

Kasi Lemmons directed this tepid thriller, whose only genuinely creepy aspect is its cavalier and uninformed use of mental illness and classical music to heighten the meager suspense.

Affecting and offbeat.

An effects vehicle disguised as a metaphysical meditation (or a metaphysical meditation disguised as an effects vehicle?), this strikingly unimaginative 1998 movie contains visuals that can barely assert their niftiness amid the vacuous themes.

Director Jacques-Remy Girerd often divides the frame into three vertical bands, each with a different color signature; this dynamic technique makes the eventual introduction of explosive action sequences seem like overkill.

With very little modification, this archly innocuous children's musical could have been marketed as a sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Feeble exercise in brain-teaser noir.

Full of high spirits and good vibes.

Every eerily tranquil shot, weirdly elliptical scene, and peculiar line reading contributes to a mood of detachment rather than creeping dread.

Carefully re-creates the first movie's lightweight romance and mildly cheeky gender comedy.

Of some interest for promoting rapprochement between India and China, this is still awfully silly.

It's not your usual story line, but Widen makes it sufficiently plausible; unfortunately, the film's fireworks ending isn't as subtle or spooky as the rest of the movie.

At its best this 2005 feature wickedly satirizes the politics of pity--how healthy people buy off the dying with gifts and imminent death becomes a kind of stardom. But the sap begins to flow.

As the imperious actress (and whore) Elizabeth Barry, the unlikely object of Wilmot's affection, Samantha Morton finds the soul in a woman who's hard as nails, and Tom Hollander and Rosamund Pike also provide excellent support. The haunting score is by Michael Nyman.

As the bad guy, Jason Patric gets the funniest lines, but there are plenty to go around; though rigidly formulaic the movie is undeniably good-humored, if you don't count all those minor characters getting shot in the face.

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

The great cinematographer Tak Fujimoto has the time of his life on this low-budget horror feature, playing with dolly shots, abrupt zooms, and negative space inside the widescreen frame, and the fun is infectious.

Given the audacity, it would be a pleasure to report that the results are hilarious, but most of it isn't even funny, and the sense of "anything goes" hangs heavy over the film as it develops.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

Overwritten by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan, overdirected by Joe Roth, overplayed by most of the cast, yet typically undernourished.

Pure punishment, this rote action flick from Australia.

This terrible live-action comedy based on Jay Ward cartoons has its moments and its near misses.

A dearth of game footage and a wealth of inspirational platitudes contribute to the sense of a powerful tale having already faded into yellowed newspaper clippings.

Has the enthusiasm and naivete of a first feature.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

Because so many female characters spend so much time trying to seduce Harrelson (usually successfully), the notion that multiplicity enhances intrigue is pretty worn out by the time any duplicity is revealed.

Dumb but harmless live-action comedy for kids.

Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of 70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor.

At long last, the Dead series may be ready for that final bullet between the eyes.

Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

An exceptionally feeble entry whose ideas, visual and otherwise, consist of hand-me-downs from 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Superman III, and whose special effects, despite the hefty budget, look strictly bargain basement.

Tends toward the generic, and Jim Caviezel is hopelessly bland in the lead. Among the bright spots are Mary McCormack as the hero's wife and Bruce Dern as the wise old motorboat guru.

As his wisecracking roomie, Smith keeps this contrived chick flick afloat, managing to steer past the kind of egregious product placement that would have capsized a less agile performer.

For a filmmaker like Julie Taymor, Shakespeare's language isn't nearly as enticing as Prospero's violent manipulation of the elements, and this screen adaptation of the play-like her egregious Beatles movie "Across the Universe" (2007)-is primarily an exercise in eccentric (and, I would argue, empty) spectacle.

This new version is an almost scene-for-scene remake, which is good news in the first half and bad news in the torpid second.

Mild gross-out comedy integrates a non sequitur -- a running joke made by a sidekick -- into the plot, providing some payoff.

A seemingly mad dog periodically turns into a well-trained pet.

Combines absurd male fantasy and grating chick-flick cliche.

The premise of this neither dark nor funny movie--which wants to be both--is that it's somehow ironic when wealthy characters are motivated by greed.

Interminable...Writer-director Richard Lowenstein seems as bored with the proceedings as most spectators are likely to be; consequently there's probably more gratuitous camera movement per square inch here than in any other film of 1986.

The mechanical possibilities are worked out with precision and relish, but [the director] is careful not to allow the comedy to linger too long in the realm of real feelings. A platitudinous ending restores a safe and sane emotional order.”

For a movie that consists almost entirely of real sex and real rock 'n' roll, 9 Songs feels remarkably conventional.

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.

Samberg can't carry this, though director Akiva Schaffer supplies some hilarious, "Jackass"-style wipeouts and there are nice supporting turns from Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) as Rod's love interest and Bill Hader as one of his goofball friends.

"Sorry, viewers" is more like it.

For a kids' picture this is relatively funny.

The passionate and carnivalesque sense of politics reminded me at times of "Dog Day Afternoon," but despite the absence of cynicism this is a 90s story in every sense of the word

The simple premise of one scene of table-turning voyeurism is brilliant.

A narrative that tries to juggle thriller elements, tons of pop culture imagery, and way too much philosophical baggage.

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

The full-length feature film uses groundbreaking digital 3D techniques to provide an unprecedented all-access pass to the X Games.

Tyler Perry grounds this sequel to "Why Did I Get Married?" (2007) in his trademark blend of comedy, soap opera, and down-home southern sentiment, though he lets up a little on the moral proselytizing, which aids the digestion considerably.

If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]

Engrossing if standard-issue prison drama.

It's a bitter story played for humor, in which a callous character is never quite allowed to see herself as such.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

Bullock, Rowlands, Whitman, and others in the cast -- most notably Harry Connick Jr. -- acquit themselves as admirably as the pedestrian script allows.

At least it has Bill Murray.

This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.

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

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

Time-travel cliches, female characters who exert authority only so we'll laugh at the pussy-whipped males, dialogue that's neither self-mocking nor serious, and an ostentatious though not particularly exciting production design keep the movie from taking off.

With its hypnotic pacing, blatantly nonsynchronous sound, clunky robot costumes, and graphic but unconvincing violence, the movie falls flatly between camp and art-house pretension.

Rick Rosenthal's action comedy is positively dripping with good intentions, and although it has its moments of charm, this hands-across-the-waters gesture rarely gets beyond formula Disney material (how far can you get with humanism when the humans are made out of cardboard?).

An unexpectedly troubling crime thriller.

If you've seen any of these, you know that the hero is always killed for her trouble, a final stroke of mordant wit.

This corny and manipulative movie taxes your ability to suspend disbelief and predictably punishes characters for their hubris--earmarks of a great disaster flick, if the tone is just right.

The insipid gags fail to exploit Murphy's gift for physical humor, Elizabeth Banks and Gabrielle Union are merely decorative, and Ed Helms (The Office), playing a character called #2, looks appropriately constipated.

This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.

A businessman is visited by an otherworldly presence who has the nerve to fall in love with his daughter in this savory, extralong feature, whose obvious plotlines unfold with an almost painful slowness that somehow makes them deeper.

This takes place in the same sort of pathologically sports-obsessed hamlet as "Friday Night Lights," though in contrast to that movie's grim honesty there's enough heartland schmaltz here to embarrass John Mellencamp. Remarkably, the movie rights itself once the actual season begins, focusing on game strategy more than the usual heart-stopping pep talks.

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.

For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.

This bleak little drama started as a play, and I'd bet that even onstage it felt contrived.