There’s nothing offensive in the relentlessly upbeat Tio Papi. It’s just all so polite and saccharine. Life lessons are learned every few minutes, and the ending is telegraphed from the beginning.

This is actually a pretty good thriller, based more on character and plot than on action for its own sake. The need to construct killings that look like accidents adds to the interest.

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. It's harmless, simple-minded.

Flashes of inspiration illuminate stretches of routine sitcom material; it's the kind of movie where the audience laughs loudly and then falls silent for the next five minutes.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.

But when you think of the "Babe" pictures, and indeed even an animated cartoon like "Home on the Range," you realize Stripes is on autopilot with all of the usual elements: a heroine missing one parent, an animal missing both, an underdog (or underzebra), cute animals, the big race.

The word preposterous is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness.

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.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.

They say an elephant never forgets, which means that I have an enormous advantage over Tai, who plays Vera, because I plan to forget this movie as soon as convenient.

OK, OK. They're good dancers, and well-choreographed. You can see the movie for that and be charitable about the moronic plot.

Poker Face has a lean, cool look, and there are some effective dramatic moments, mostly due to the weight-of-the-old weariness in Crowe’s powerful performance. Unfortunately, Paul Tassone’s over-the-top theatrics as the main villain border on the cartoonish, as the psychological gamesmanship gives way to standard action movie stuff, and the cards and the chips have long been forgotten.

From start to finish, Hunter Killer is all wet.

[An] unabashedly derivative but nonetheless entertaining, pitch-black Norwegian crime comedy.

"Star Trek V" is pretty much of a mess - a movie that betrays all the signs of having gone into production at a point where the script doctoring should have begun in earnest. There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends. Of all of the "Star Trek" movies, this is the worst.

Ewan McGregor is a versatile and durable actor who has spent a lot of time on film sets, and someday he might become an accomplished filmmaker, but his feature directorial debut is one of the most unfortunate literary adaptations in recent memory.

What is it about Indiana that inspires movies about small-town dreamers who come from behind to win?

She (Taymor) doesn't capture Shakespeare's tone (or his meaning, I believe), but she certainly has boldness in her reinvention.

A faithful remake of the 1976 film, and that's a relief; it depends on characters and situations and doesn't go berserk with visuals.

Dad is a case of a movie with too much enthusiasm for its own good. If the filmmakers had only been willing to dial down a little, they would have had the materials for an emotionally moving story, instead of one that generates incredulity.

Gandolfini comes in from left field and provides a character with dimensions and surprises, bringing out the best in Roberts. Their dialogue scenes are the best reason to see the movie.

Liv Tyler is a very particular talent who has sometimes been misused by directors more in love with her beauty than with her appropriateness for their story. Here she is perfectly cast.

This is an uneven film with a couple of glaring inconsistencies, but director Slattery has a fine sense of framing and pacing, and the top-notch cast handles the clever dialogue with aplomb.

The story is so interesting, and Bacon and the other actors are so capable, that if this movie had been two hours out of their lives, I would have found it compelling. What we get, though, is 35 minutes of their lives and a lot of recycled visual cliches.

A brainless feature-length sitcom with too much sit and no com.

As an idea, the film is fascinating, but as an experience it grows tedious; the concerts lack closeups, the sex lacks context, and Antarctica could use a few penguins.

It's pleasant enough as a date movie, but that's all.

Given the revolutionary nature of Marley’s music and the often-chaotic state of his life, it’s reasonable that some might find this to be a disappointingly formulaic handling of the material, with only a few stylistic flourishes that take place mostly in the flashback sequences. Still, this is strong work, showcasing the indelible legacy of an artist who was gone far too soon.