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.

If you decide to hit the concessions stand (where you're bound to have lots of company), I'd suggest going out for popcorn during either the first hour or the third, because the second features some pretty good big-screen effects involving planes, ships, and explosions.

McKee's direction of actors is as clumsy as the stabs at rapid editing.

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

A film of ingredients, rather than ideas realized and integrated: it panders on different, disjunctive levels.

I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter's sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it's tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem.

Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.

This 1998 movie is essentially a compilation of things-aren't-what-they-seem games played on the viewer; all its little tricks, including Ricci's snide and smart-alecky voice-overs about movie conventions, are really old--except one. But it's not worth the wait.

Dopey but charming.

Neither good nor terrible.

Oscar baiting is the main point of this unintentionally silly drama.

Stodgy storytelling and a hyperbolic score reduce their experiences to melodrama.

It's gooey fun for the first reel or two despite an abundance of close-ups that render the frantic action nearly unreadable.

Maybe the magic will work for those who loved the book, but I found this film stultifyingly self-important and, despite the regularity with which it cuts to the chase, weirdly static.

A step down from the first Naked Gun cop-thriller spoof, which was a step down from Airplane! and Top Secret!; but if you care about such fine distinctions, this may be marginally better than Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear. Or at least it is when the movie finally arrives at the climactic Academy Awards ceremony; prior to that, it's mainly just one little-boy gag after another.

Some of the illustrious cast members were on their way up (John Travolta), but most of them were on their way down (Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn).

Hokey.

Under his (Fry’s) direction this 2003 British feature becomes a flat, depressing affair.

An intriguing noir whose conceptual sophistication is partly undermined by naive execution.

It's his sense that he is superior to the series (which he certainly is) that introduces a fatal strain of campiness and condescension. And without absolute conviction, no action film can survive: if there's no belief, there's no danger.

Lost me early on with its show-offy shooting and editing, portentous metaphysical conceits about winners and losers, and exaggerated displays of evil, violence, and deceit.