Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.

The movie gives people a piece of the AIDS nightmare - a view of HIV-infected men struggling to retain romance - but the piece is sharp and brittle, with little humor truly working. And despite the somewhat serene ending, it is really shot through more with the characters' rage than anything. [14 Aug 1992, p.42]

More times than not, The Benefactor takes the less interesting fork in the road.

What am I looking for in a thriller? I think maybe a movie where people get into a situation, instead of one where an artificial and manipulative situation is imposed on people. "Fatal Attraction" convinced me it was about people who were in a believable situation. I cared about them. White Sands is all arbitrary melodrama, and so the considerable skills that went into it are essentially wasted. [24 Apr 1992, p.38]

Pfeiffer looks, acts and sounds wonderful throughout all of this, and George Clooney is perfectly serviceable as a romantic lead, sort of a Mel Gibson lite. I liked them. I wanted them to get together. I wanted them to live happily ever after. The sooner the better.

But in the absence of prime-time thrills, and more than a snip or two of the TV series' cutting wit, 95 minutes is a long time to stretch this simple-minded stuff. [13 Jan 1995, p.33]

First Kid wouldn't be my first movie choice this weekend, but my 9-year-old consultant thoroughly enjoyed Sinbad's antics, personality and style. [30 Aug 1996, p.32]

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

Davis (who was an executive producer on the film) gives a strong performance, as if she were acting in one of those many prestige projects lighting up her resume. It’s a noble try, but this dreck is beyond saving.

Frantically overcooked, bursting with headache-inducing, rapid-cut action sequences and only half as clever as it fancies itself, Bloodshot is an ambitious and intermittently entertaining minor-league superhero film.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything.

Entertaining if you understand exactly what it is: if you see it as a film made by friends out of the materials presented by their lives and with the freedom to not push too hard.

Despite the fine performance by Witherspoon and a number of the supporting players, Devil’s Knot comes across as a cinematic, slightly dramatized Cliffs Notes edition of a story that’s been told often, and almost always more effectively, in other formats.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, makes the mistake of thinking we care more about the gold than about the city slickers. Like too many sequels, it has forgotten what the first film was really about. Slickers II is about the MacGuffin instead of the characters.

To its credit, Street Fighter does have a sense of humor about itself. [26 Dec 1994, p.25]

It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.

This movie doesn't contain "offensive language." The offensive language contains the movie.

Brannigan isn't great, but it's a wellcrafted action movie and, besides, it's got John Wayne in it.

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.

Any Which Way You Can is not a very good movie, but it's hard not to feel a grudging affection for it. Where else, in the space of 115 minutes, can you find a country & western road picture with two fights, a bald motorcycle gang, the Mafia, a love story, a pickup truck, a tow truck, Fats Domino, a foul-mouthed octogenarian, an oversexed orangutan and a contest for the bare knuckle championship of the world?

There is a place for whimsy and magic realism, and that place may not be on a cow farm in New Zealand.

A confusing and not very exciting private eye caper.

Burlesque shows Cher and Christina Aguilera being all that they can be, and that's more than enough.

Oh, God! Book II qualifies as a sequel only because of its title and the irreplaceable presence of George Burns in the title role. Otherwise, it seems to have lost faith in the film it's based on.

The shame is that more accessible Iranian directors are being neglected in the overpraise of Kiarostami.

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.

When bodies are buried in cellars and cats are thrown into lighted ovens, the film reveals itself as unworthy of its subject matter.

The movie contains violence and death, but not really very much. For most of its languorous running time, it listens to conversations between Bella and Edward, Bella and David, Edward and David, and Edward and Bella and David. This would play better if any of them were clever conversationalists, but their ideas are limited to simplistic renderings of their desires.