The opening stretch, when the visitor arrives on earth and blithely dresses down mankind, is great fun. But screenwriter David Scarpi has drained away much of the sentiment.

I didn't feel I was wasting my time but I started looking at my watch long before it was over.

A multifaceted misfire from writer-director Steven Zaillian.

There's plenty of disquieting material here, but I wish the film were less antagonistic in its own right.

Oscillating between a furrowed brow and her trademark horsey smile, Roberts battles the repressed harpies on the faculty and strives to shake her students out of their conformist mind-sets. Dispensing with character development, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal's lifeless script shunts its caricatures from one predictable plot point to the next.

Almost an hour of self-indulgent psychedelics, it's nearly impossible to watch.

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.

With minimalist and universal fantasies as their points of departure, the superheroic deeds evolve only incrementally beyond the realistic -- a deeply satisfying process.

Despite the exotic locale and the photogenic moppets, that's not enough for a satisfying movie.

I was never bored but only occasionally interested.

The twist of making Bronson a genuine working man adds interest to the action-revenge formula, but not enough to lift this out of the programmer category.

Assorted ladies, a few quick lines, and one good chase, making for a mediocre entry in the series.

Writer-director Desmond Nakano paints some of the characters in broad strokes, but his feature is undeniably heartfelt.

About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be--a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like "Speed," and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste.

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

The film never quite achieves the sharp edge satire demands, largely because director Andrew Niccol, who was so good at managing tone in "Gattaca," can't decide whether to go with nasty or hilariously farcical.

An ungainly blend of Monty Python, The Goldbergs, and My Favorite Spy.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro grounds the ghostly encounters in grainy imagery, his unobtrusive handheld camera and deeply saturated colors best appreciated in a nightclub sequence that looks like something from Hieronymous Bosch.

The nonsensationalistic results are also somewhat ho-hum--and oddly less convincing than Friedkin's lurid mess, let alone the elegant satanism sagas of Tourneur and Polanski.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

Argentinean writer-director Daniel Burman uses a shaky handheld camera and voice-over narration to take us inside Ariel's head, which gets a bit exhausting, even in the more emotionally satisfying second half.

This 1945 picture is much more felicitous than Christmas Holiday, the bizarre film noir that followed, though not nearly as memorable.

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]

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

For what it is, it ain't bad, though it serves mainly as an illustration of the ancient quandary of revisionist moviemakers: if all you do is systematically invert cliches, you simply end up creating new ones.

Based on the novel by T.D. Jakes, this is a queasy mix of comedy, melodrama, and self-help spirituality; it's meant to be uplifting, but its profamily message is undercut by its virulently misogynistic treatment of the realtor and her mother (Jenifer Lewis), both too shrewish and controlling to be believed.

It often seems precious and overconceived, its accumulating crosses and double-crosses as devoid of consequence as a child's backyard game.