There’s some first-rate camerawork aboard the sub, that strong lead performance from Law and one nifty plot twist. It’s a shame the script gives us one of the most incompetent and ridiculous submarine crews this side of “Down Periscope.”

Despite its attempts to be racy and of-the-moment and to earn that R rating, Red, White & Blue comes across as contrived and, at its foundation, quite formulaic. Not even the cake gives a convincing performance.

The Bounty is a great adventure, a lush romance, and a good movie.

Is this movie for the whole family to attend? No, it is a movie for small children and their parents or adult guardians, who will take them because they love them very much.

[Furie) retains the ability to make a picture move, grow on us and involve us. That’s what happens during The Boys in Company C.

It’s wildly entertaining and it has a sense of humor about itself.

Many of the parts of City Hall are so good that the whole should add up to more, but it doesn't.

Antwone Fisher has a confrontation with his past, and a speech to the mother who abandoned him, and a reunion with his family, that create great, heartbreaking, joyous moments.

The point is, adults can attend this movie with a fair degree of pleasure. That's not always the case with movies for kids, as no parent needs to be reminded. There may even be some moms who insist that the kids need to see this movie. You know who you are.

A series of well-drawn sketches and powerful scenes, in search of an organizing principle.

A step or two down from the first and second, but it has some very funny moments, and maybe that is all we hope for.

As a movie, Veronica Mars looks and feels, well, like a glorified TV movie, with just decent production values, mostly unexceptional performances and ridiculous plot developments no more innovative than you’d see on a dozen network TV detective shows.

The experience of watching The Doors is not always very pleasant.

This is a smart, observant movie about two very particular people, and its casting is pitch-perfect.

The formula is obvious, but the story, curiously, turns out to be based on fact.

A conventional film for an unconventional actor.

This powerful and well-acted story might have been much more effective if told in strictly linear fashion.

Working Girls is not a slick and dramatic movie. There are moments that seem forced and amateurish, and the over-all structure of the story is fairly predictable. What the movie does have, though, is the feeling of real life being observed accurately.

Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.

I suggest a plan: Why not try flushing this movie down the toilet to see if it also grows into something big and fearsome?

This is essentially Renee Zellweger's picture, and she glows in it.

It's sometimes distracting to tell a story in flashbacks and memories; the story line gets sidetracked. The director, Taylor Hackford, is successful, however, in making the present seem to flow into and out of the past.

Marooned isn't very interesting from a stylistic point of view, and the actors tend to get buried beneath the technology, but it does tell an exciting story, And that, I imagine, was all Sturges (whose storytelling includes The Great Escape and Bad Day at Black Rock) was really trying to do.

The result at times approaches screwball comedy. But no, this isn't deliberate comedy. It's essentially realistic. It's simply that the real lives of these figures are funny.

Quaid is just right as the guilty husband who somehow becomes the wounded party.

The target audience for "Rugrats" is, I think, kids under 10. Unlike both insect cartoons, the movie makes little effort to appeal to anyone over that age. There is something admirable about that.

Miles Teller gives the performance of his career as the indefatigable Vinny “The Pazmanian Devil” Pazienza, and writer-director Ben Younger delivers one of the best boxing movies of the decade in Bleed for This.

Parsimonious with its plot, which is revealed on a need-to-know basis. At first, we're not even sure who is who; dialogue is half-heard, references are unclear, the townspeople know things we discover only gradually.