As a viewer, we intuit that it is more, or less, than it seems: That in some sense, the whole project is a scam.

The twist on top of the twist was so amateurish, so hacky, so insulting to the viewer, I’m already thinking about apologizing to you guys for just the one-star demerit.

Even a warmed-over, behind-the-times Woody Allen script is going to contain some choice one-liners, and this is a superb cast that knows how to put the right spin on clever dialogue — even when they’re playing thinly drawn characters in a dated and unnecessary story.

The first-time director is Mateo Gil, known for the screenplays of "Open Your Eyes," "The Sea Inside" and "Agora." Ironic, that the film's weakness is its screenplay.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

Because the real world scenes are in 2-D and the dream and fantasy scenes are in 3-D, we get an idea of what the movie would have looked like without the unnecessary dimension. Signs flash on the screen to tell us when to put on and take off our polarizing glasses, and I felt regret every time I had to shut out those colorful images and return to the dim and dreary 3-D world. On DVD, this is going to be a great-looking movie.

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

Nothing incendiary to see here, folks. Just a mostly forgettable, slow-season splatter movie.

Winner should have told us a lot more about his lawman, or a lot less.

Force of Nature is more of a nasty little rainstorm than a Category 5 anything.

Even when John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are slumming it, they’re good fun. Not enough to save the movie, but enough to keep you interested when you click across this thing sometime in your future.

The film itself remains pure fantasy. Sure, it's nice to think you could outrun half a dozen hand-picked African warriors simply because you'd been to college and read Thoreau, but the truth is they'd nail you before you got across the river and into the trees.

The movie tells us nothing we haven't heard before.

Moonfall is the kind of film that doesn’t take itself seriously and yet really doesn’t have a sense of humor about the ludicrous nature of its very existence.

But the later Rocky movies have been low on inspiration and eager to repeat the same formula, in which everything leads up to a climactic fight scene and a triumphant fadeout. Stallone is smart enough that he could have made this series into a meditation on sports celebrity in America, but that theme has always been at the edge of the stories; the formula takes center ring. If Rocky seems to be running on autopilot, that's also the case for the other characters. [16 Nov 1990, p.49]

Love may or may not be endless, but there’s no limit to what can be contrived in a movie like this.

Its characters are bloodless, their speech monotone. If there are people like this, I hope David Cronenberg's film is as close as I ever get to them. You couldn't pay me to see it again.

The idea of taking a mid-1980s screenplay by the Coens’ and marrying it to a very different story, penned by Clooney and Heslov, does not work. We might have had two quite good, independent features, if those scripts had been produced into two different movies. Instead, we are presented with quite the sad mishmash of ideas here.

He seems fueled more by anger and ego than spirituality and essentially abandons his family to play with his guns. It's intriguing, however, how well Butler enlists our sympathy for the character.

Lost for Words is directed with little originality by Stanley J. Orzel.

The characters are all over the map, there are too many unclear story threads, our sympathies are confused, and there's an unconvincing showdown in which the story's lovingly developed ambiguities are lost.

You can enjoy U-571 as a big, dumb war movie without a brain in its head.

Ty Cobb was by many accounts a mean-tempered, vicious, drunken, wife- beating, racist SOB who was impossible to spend any length of time with, and the movie Cobb faithfully represents those qualities, especially the last one.

There is a certain lackluster feeling to the way the key characters debate the issues, and perhaps that reflects the suspicion of the filmmakers that they have hitched their wagon to the wrong cause.

All this is presented in an expensive, good-looking film that is well-made by Scott Derrickson, but to no avail.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

The special effects are all there, nicely in place, and the production values are sound, but the movie is dead in the water. It tells an amazing and preposterous story, and it seems bored by it.

The Rover does have a central nervous system that crackles and pops with suspense, but in the end it’s not enough to jump-start the lack of narrative. Too much story is missing, and that is simply distracting.