There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

If you're wondering how Steve Anderson managed to make a 93-minute documentary about the ultimate four-letter word, which uses the epithet over 800 times, you're underestimating his capacity to entertain and educate in roughly equal doses.

Rob Brown (Stop-Loss) gives a graceful, understated performance as Ernie Davis.

As werewolf Jake, Taylor Lautner does his best to salvage things by showing his bare chest through almost the entire movie, and the rest of the cast struggles gamely, but the script sucks the life out of them. This is definitely the worst installment of the franchise to date.

Elliott Gould as a conscience-stricken graduate student in a radical chic exercise that seemed hilariously dated even at the moment it came out (1970).

This dark comedy by screenwriters Jonathan Parker and Catherine DiNapoli frequently uses a .44 Magnum when a pea shooter would suffice.

Boyd brings no new insights to this drama of men in a confined space, a situation that's been the basis for many powerful war films.

Though it suggests intriguing ideas about the nature of performance, humor, ambition, and the consumption of spectacle, the movie only superficially explores them.

Flat and unconvincing.

Despite his advancing years, Chan delivers some fleet slapstick; like his hero Buster Keaton he works intuitively with levers, pulleys, ladders, and umbrellas.

Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.

The comedy sci-fi franchise returns after a ten-year hiatus, with the same formula of respectably funny wisecracks and obsessively detailed space monsters.

The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

I'm no boxing fan, but there's something admirable about fighter Johar Abu Lashin's love of his sport, chronicled in Duki Dror's tautly constructed 2002 documentary.

With a mug like hers Cervera must have realized this was her big chance to star in a musical, and she gives a dazzling performance.

Bier's film succeeded on the merits of its actors, and this one offers fine performances by Portman and Gyllenhaal, but Maguire doesn't cut the mustard as the anguished military man.

In a lumbering way, this depressing feel-good drama about the impact of cancer on two children, their divorced parents, and the father's girlfriend offers some useful insights into how feelings of jealousy and betrayal can limit the potential of family relationships.

Quietly unsettling in its vision of modern-day isolation.

Nobody knows how to speak, but they sure know how to apply makeup. [17 June 2010, p.63]

Though the director is Walter Hill, the dominant personality is John Milius, who wrote the story and collaborated on the script with Larry Gross, and despite some narrative stodginess in spots, Milius’s sense of warrior nobility and his talent for writing juicy parts for actors serve the picture well.

The real revelation here is Streep, who spends every moment comically negotiating her conflicted impulses.

High-octane nonsense but gives both the actors and the audience all that's needed to make this diverting--car chases, wisecracks, narrow escapes, explosions.

A painstakingly crafted nonrealist story, which doesn't seem to imply anything beyond what it depicts.

The script, which infantilizes one of the older siblings as much as the father does, undermines its own admonitions against parents and adult children meddling in one another's lives.

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

Butler deftly intercuts real footage with CGI, heightening the drama, and the film becomes especially compelling once the robots are launched into space.

To Towne's credit, he's a thoughtful and conscientious romantic. He skillfully makes the two main characters a hot, volatile couple, deftly staging their courtship as if it were an erotic grudge match.