A high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it’s an established brand not protected by copyright.

The movie has great moments and a lot of life, sensational special effects and costumes, and Ross, Jackson, and Russell. Why doesn't it involve us as deeply as The Wizard of Oz? Maybe because it hedges its bets by wanting to be sophisticated and universal, childlike and knowing, appealing to both a mass audience and to media insiders. The Wizard of Oz went flat-out for the heart of its story; there are times whenThe Wiz has just a touch too much calculation.

The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke.

The bottom line is, all these people chase the same money around with the success of doggie tail-biting, and it's a lot of fun, and it's not often in these con films that everybody is conning everybody, and they're all scared to death, and nobody knows which cup the pea is under.

Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

A somewhat convoluted and occasionally formulaic but disturbingly effective legal political procedural.

The characters deserve a better movie, but they get a pretty good one.

Watching the film, I enjoyed a lot of it, especially Keaton's permutations on the theme of himself. But I wondered why the possibilities weren't taken to greater comic extremes.

Logan's Run is a vast, silly extravaganza that delivers a certain amount of fun, once it stops taking itself seriously.

Despite a couple of large, genie-blue stumbles along the way, Guy Ritchie’s live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin is on balance a colorful and lively adventure suitable for all ages and a touching romance featuring two attractive leads — and has enough creative musical energy to introduce this story to A. Whole. New. World.

Killing Gunther is filled with explosive action. As a director, Killam displays a veteran’s knack for shooting the shootouts and fisticuffs, nearly all of it carried out in slapstick, nearly “Three Stooges”-level comedic fashion.

It's a bludgeon movie with little respect for the audience's intelligence, and simply pounds us over the head with violence whenever there threatens to be a lull. Anyone can make a movie like this.

Coscarelli knows how to exploit horror/sci-fi tropes and adeptly meld a practical effect with a well-timed gag. Many could depict a man's disembodied moustache with the right degree of farcicality, but few can imbue it with such an oddball credibility.

Thanks to the stylish directing by Everardo Valerio Gout, a tight screenplay from series creator James DeMonaco and a terrific ensemble cast that elevates the material, The Forever Purge is a fast-paced jam that would play well on a drive-in movie screen. Take the whole thing with a big tub of popcorn and many grains of salt.

Despite the undeniable importance of this story and the obvious passion of those involved in telling it, Emancipation is more than anything a relatively standard-issue, period-piece action film — and that’s a shame, because we see glimpses of how it could have been something much more than that.

This empty parody of "coming of age in the 'hood" movies is short on storyline, originality and legitimate laughs. [15 Jan 1996, p.30]

This is a movie for those who sometimes, in the stillness of the sleepless night, are so filled with hope and longing that they feel like -- well, like uttering wild goat cries to the moon. You know who you are.

The movie seemed the stuff of anecdote, not drama, and as the alleged protagonist, Luca/Franco is too young much of the time to play more than a bystander's role.

A musical and a biography, and brings to both of those genres a worldly sophistication that is rare in the movies.

The peculiar quality of Vanity Fair, which sets it aside from the Austen adaptations such as "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," is that it's not about very nice people. That makes them much more interesting.

Parables are stories about other people that help us live our own lives. The problem with the French film Ricky is that the lesson of the parable is far from clear, and nobody is likely to encounter this situation in his own life.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

We know we’re being manipulated from time to time, but the messaging is so earnest and the performances are so heartfelt, we’re willing to go with it. Call it a Comfort Movie.

If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own.

The cast is wonderful, the laughs are frequent, and the ending is truly touching.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

This is dicey material for a screwball comedy, even one with dark undertones, and despite the best efforts of the ensemble, She Came to Me drifts further and further away from anything approaching reality or relatability. Nearly every major character in this film is exhausting to be around and/or thinly drawn.

Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

I found the idea of the plot more interesting than the plot itself, and am finding the movie more fun to write about than to see.

In Flag Day, Sean Penn directs himself for the first time and has cast Dylan Penn, his daughter with Robin Wright, as the lead — and the two are absolutely mesmerizing together, beautifully capturing the enormously complicated dynamic between a con man of a father who rolls out of bed with a fresh set of lies ready to go every morning, and an emotionally broken and bruised daughter who knows her dad is a walking bundle of disappointment but wants to believe that this time — this one time — he really has changed.

It's a strong, intelligent performance [by Gibson], filled with life, and it makes this into a surprisingly robust Hamlet.

The performances are spot on, and I especially like the spunky Gyllenhaal, who with this film and the underrated "Secretary" (2002), has built up a nice sideline in sexual exploration.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

This is a rip-snorting adventure fantasy for families, especially the younger members who are not insistent on continuity. Director Michael Apted may be too good for this material, but he attacks with gusto.

Based on the novel of the same name by M.T. Anderson, the third effort from the talented Finley (“Thoroughbreds,” “Bad Education”) features some impressively staged sequences and terrific performances, but awkwardly straddles the fence between biting social commentary and dark humor, never quite finding its footing and ending on a curiously flat note.

From the opening frame right up to the whirlwind finale, you will be treated to non-stop action, clever dialogue and quite a bit of zany energy. If I’d fault anything about this fun romp, it’s that the filmmakers tried to jam-pack too much into one movie.

She's the One plays like an overhaul of “The Brothers McMullen” with a larger budget, and it's time for him to move on.

It’s nice to see Hart in a role where the comedy is relatively low-key and dialogue-driven (though there are a few hilarious physical bits of humor).

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

If the stream-of-consciousness, imagery-trumps-everything films of Terrence Malick tend to try your patience, this beautifully, beatifically boring imitation by a Malick protégé might be more than the better angels of your nature can endure.

Director Marc Webb and his forces come up with some gorgeous special effects, and Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have terrific chemistry, but as is the case with far too many superhero movies, the plot is a bit of an overstuffed mess.

It's remarkable, a war story told as a chess game where the loser not only dies, but goes by necessity to an unmarked grave.

Doesn't reach for reality; it's a deliberate attempt to look and feel like a 1940s social problems picture, right down to the texture of the color photography.

Passionada assembles the elements for a soap opera, and turns them into a bubble bath.

One of the most entertainingly ludicrous movies of the year.

An uneven but touching comedy with a cheery score that sounds too much like whistling on the way past the graveyard.

Finding Steve McQueen is a combo platter of crazy-but-true history mixed with creative fiction. The result is an entertaining if sometimes overly self-conscious 1970s period piece, bursting with pop culture references.

The film retains a certain power and is ripe for rediscovery. Its theatrical morbidity and poetic earnestness could make it a favorite of moony teenage depressives everywhere, especially as Grazia -- like Romeo and Juliet -- appears to prefer Death to a compromised life. [25 Dec 1998, p.12]

On film, Rent is the sound of one hand clapping.

This one holds its flavor better than most.

With Cage delivering the goods in a juicy supporting role, and Hoult and Awkwafina developing a nice buddy-cop type chemistry, Renfield is an uneven but entertaining enough vampire comedy that gets as many laughs from creative slicing and dicing than it does from the dialogue.

Suspect is a well-made thriller, but it was spoiled for me by an extraordinary closing scene where Cher, as the defense attorney, solves the case with all of the logic of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

This is no history lesson, but it’s mainstream Hollywood entertainment that respects the history and seems to invite discussion and debate.

Sharp Stick is a rather sour and troublesome film—a strange hybrid that sometimes plays like a Fractured Fairy Tale and is populated by razor-thin characters who behave in an inconsistent manner and exist in a world that alternates between gritty reality and some kind of bizarro alternative world where things just don’t add up.

The movie stars Jim Carrey, who is in his pleasant mode. It would have helped if he were in his manic mode, although it's hard to get a rise out of a penguin.

The reader of a pulp crime thriller might be satisfied simply with the prurient descriptions, and certainly this film visualizes those and has as its victims Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who embody paperback covers, but the dominant presence in the film is Lou Ford, and there just doesn’t seem to be anybody at home.

The Tender Bar is unabashedly sentimental — it’s one of those movies about writers told from the point of view of the writer that romanticizes everything about writing — but Clooney’s sure-handed direction and pitch-perfect attention to the 1970s and 1980s period-piece material, combined with the warm and relatable performances, make for classic comfort-movie formula.

Maybe Muppets from Space is just not very good, and they'll make a comeback. I hope so. Because I just don't seem to care much anymore. Sorry, Miss Piggy. Really sorry.

Dog Eat Dog occasionally positions itself as social commentary, but it’s mainly a bloody, trippy, bare-fanged pulp thriller featuring terrifically entertaining performances from old dogs Cage and Dafoe.

I realized the human potential movement has gotten completely out of hand when I heard Goofy telling Max they needed to spend more "quality time" together.

It’s essentially a stand-alone film, though it doesn’t really stand so much as it wobbles and careens all over the place before exploding in an overwrought orgy of grotesque images, religious psychobabble and second-rate CGI nonsense.

Hypnotic is an uneven, at times mesmerizing and dazzling mind-bender of a psychological thriller that plays like a drive-in movie version of a Christopher Nolan film.

Sweet and high-spirited and with three dancers who are so good they deserve a better screenplay. This is really two movies: A stiff and awkward story, interrupted by dance sequences of astonishing grace and power.

American Underdog is a fitting family album for the Warners and solid, safe entertainment for the viewer.

The disappointingly flat and decidedly un-erotic non-thriller Deep Water is the kind of movie that has you thinking about other movies as you tap your toes impatiently, waiting for this great-looking but dumb and bloody mess to swirl around the drain and disappear.

Like so many cautionary tales we’ve seen come out of Hollywood since there was a Hollywood, “You Don’t Know Me” is one long reminder to be careful what you wish for—because dreams that come true often arrive with tentacles attached.

This formula is fraught with pitfalls, but the characters and the actors redeem it with a surprising emotional impact.

The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

It is exuberantly old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment.

A nice little gem of escapist entertainment that keeps us guessing until the very end, which is corny as all get-out and maybe I even got something in my eye.

Plunges far beneath Todd Solondz's territory and enters the suburbs of John Waters' universe in its fascination for people who live without benefit of education, taste, standards, hygiene and shame. I

A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.

It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and gives Reno a chirpy young co-star who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank.

Hartnett shows here a breezy command of his charming, likable character. It is a reminder of his talent and versatility.

A wise and touching film with a lot of love in it. I may have given the wrong impression: It's not entirely about drinking, it's just entirely about a drinker.

Now this is a terrific premise for a thriller, and director George Romero (The Night of the Living Dead) sets it up with skill and style. Unfortunately, the film's biggest disappointment is that it doesn't develop its preternatural opening theme.

The beauty of the "Shop" movies is that they provide a stage for lively characters.

The saving grace for this film is the group of young actors.

Big Game never once feels credible, and that’s why it’s so entertaining. Almost nothing that takes place in this movie could occur in the real world, and there’s something comforting about that.

Levinson’s dense and richly layered, albeit sometimes overly theatrical, script affords Washington and Zendaya multiple opportunities to showcase their considerable talents and for the discourse to expand beyond the fraying relationship.

The movie contains less of its interesting story and more action and battle scenes than I would have preferred.

Heartbreak Ridge has as much energy and color as any action picture this year, and it contains truly amazing dialogue.

I enjoyed the movie for the sheer physical exuberance of its adventure. It is magnificently mounted and photographed.

There are a lot of movies about escaping from the middle class, but Metroland is one of the few about escaping into it.

If I didn't feel the same degree of involvement with Point of No Return that I did with "La Femme Nikita," it may be because the two movies are so similar in plot, look and feel. I had deja vu all through the movie.

The things that make Overboard special, however, are the genuine charm, wit and warm energy generated by the entire cast and director Garry Marshall. Hawn and Russell work well together, never overplaying scenes that easily could have self-destructed.

Stick It uses the story of a gymnast's comeback attempt as a backdrop for overwrought visual effects, music videos, sitcom dialogue and general pandering. The movie seems to fear that if it pauses long enough to actually be about gymnastics, the audience will grow restless.

Has laughs, thrills, wit and scary monsters, and is one of those goofy movies like "Critters" that kids itself and gets away with it.

Never quite attains takeoff velocity.

The film is a soapy melodrama set from about 1936 to 1946 and done with style.

I can imagine it as a sex comedy, as a romance, as a bittersweet exploration of lonely people. Schleppi has a little of all three elements at work here, but it's Tim Blake Nelson's character who keeps the plot from spinning out of control.

The Awakening looks great but never develops a plot with enough clarity to engage us, and the solution to the mystery is I am afraid disappointingly standard.

We walk into the theater expecting absolutely nothing of substance, and that's exactly what we get, served up with high style.

As the body count piles up and the action gets bigger and bigger, even the great John Luther comes perilously close to being overwhelmed by the spectacle in an increasingly ludicrous storyline that favors admittedly stunning and often gruesome visuals in favor of anything approaching plausibility.

When Marley is not on the screen, Wilson and Aniston demonstrate why they are gifted comic actors. They have a relationship that's not too sitcomish, not too sentimental, mostly smart and realistic.

The first 30 minutes of the movie gave me lots of room for hope. It was fast-moving, it was visually spectacular, it was exotic and lighthearted and filled with a spirit of adventure. But then, gradually, the movie began to recycle itself. It began to feel as if I was seeing the same thing more than once.