Fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air. It has rich material and isn't clear what it thinks about it. It has two performances of Oscar caliber, but do they connect?

It’s no secret that Jason Statham demonstrates remarkable flair when it comes to bone-crunching action-movie mayhem, but he deserves special props for making some of the more outrageous flights of macho fantasy in Wild Card seem credible.

Though directed with great precision by Branagh, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is saddled with a boilerplate script.

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

Has a good heart and some fine performances, but is too muddled at the story level to involve us emotionally.

At times Thor: The Dark World does fire on all cylinders, with fine work from the returning cast, a handful of hilarious sight gags and some cool action sequences. But it’s also more than a little bit silly and quite ponderous and overly reliant on special effects that are more confusing than exhilarating.

The edge is missing from Guest's usual style. Maybe it's because his targets are, after all, so harmless.

Does it by the numbers, so efficiently this feels more like a Hollywood wannabe than a French film. Where's the quirkiness, the nuance, the deeper levels?

It has all the necessary girls, gimmicks, subterranean control rooms, uniformed goons and magic wristwatches it can hold, but it doesn't have the wit and it doesn't have the style of the best Bond movies.

Has moments of great imagination.

Elles has a surprisingly deep performance in a disappointingly shallow movie. The performance, acute and brave, is by Juliette Binoche.

The nice thing about Shaft is that it savors the private-eye genre, and takes special delight in wringing new twists out of the traditional relationship between the private eye and the boys down at homicide.

While the animation is quite good and the filmmakers have brought together an excellent group of actors to provide the voice talent, the storyline leaves us with a tale more reminiscent of Saturday morning kids’ programming.

The setup in The Client is done so well, it deserves a better payoff.

Theater of the absurd, masquerading as an action thriller.

The Omen takes all of this terribly seriously, as befits the genre that gave us Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. What Jesus was to the 1950s movie epic, the devil is to the 1970s, and so all of this material is approached with the greatest solemnity, not only in the performances but also in the photography, the music and the very looks on people's faces.

There’s simply too much going on here — too many subplots, too many symbols, too many expendable characters — and certain interesting threads aren’t able to develop fully.

There is much to admire about “Conclave,” but in the end, all of its lofty aspirations come tumbling down due to that poorly constructed Jenga tower of a plot.

The footage on the Paris Island obstacle course is powerful. But Full Metal Jacket is uncertain where to go, and the movie's climax, which Kubrick obviously intends to be a mighty moral revelation, seems phoned in from earlier war pictures.

Venom: The Last Dance is dopey and silly and filled with familiar stock characters and well-worn tropes, but it’s almost never ponderous.

I suspect its audience, which takes these films very seriously indeed, will drink deeply of its blood. The sensational closing sequence cannot be accused of leaving a single loophole, not even some those we didn't know were there.

A film that is beautiful to look at but lacks clear vision.

This is a sumptuous film - extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good. There are times when it is not quite clear if we are looking at characters in a story or players on a stage. Productions can sometimes upstage a story, but when the story is as considerable as Anna Karenina, that can be a miscalculation.

The first hour of Protocol is so much fun, and the Goldie Hawn character is such an engaging original, that at first I couldn't believe they were going to throw away all that work by going for a standard Hollywood ending. But they did.

The positive messages involving characters searching for love and purpose in life are well thought out, but presented in a way that is just too genial and even-handed. No one ever gets really angry or passionate, and the result is a film that sometimes feels stilted.

Within Clay Pigeons is a smaller story that might have involved us more, but it's buried by overkill.

It Ends with Us handles the issue of domestic violence with admirable sensitivity and noble intentions, but with a far too long running time of 130 minutes and a plot that depends on not one, not two, but three major coincidences, it isn’t as impactful or resonant as it could have been.

The good news is there still are scenes to peel back the eyelids, beginning with a nighttime stalking and ending with some slambang mano a mano encounters in a warehouse for Mardi Gras floats - the kind of restricted setting of which Woo is a master. But the adrenaline lift, not to mention the deeper dimensions, of such films of his as "The Killer" are missing in action. [20 Aug 1993, p.46]