As visually stunning as it is, "DR9" is also more than two hours and contains, at best, 10 lines of dialogue, an ear-piercing Bjork score and no discernible plot.

Robert De Niro's characterization is too jokey, a knockoff of his Rupert Pupkin ("The King of Comedy"), and Irwin Winkler's direction is earnest but lethargic. Jessica Lange does better as a barmaid who wants her own saloon. [23 Oct 1992, p.CN]

This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.

There’s an important lesson at the center of Song Sung Blue, about abandoning self-consciousness in a relentless pursuit of a dream. Despite the obstacles, their age, the setbacks, there is a pot of gold, not at the end of the rainbow but within it, in their shared dream.

The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.

It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.

[Cameron's] anti-colonialist, pro-Indigenous cri de coeur is inspiring, if a bit on the nose, but we can forgive that, because the visual spectacle is just so breathtakingly beautiful, the emotional stakes palpable, and the intention is so earnest. It’s good to be back on Pandora.

All the young actors, especially Joshua Hartnett as the misunderstood drug dealer, deliver fine performances in their diverse group, which forms a kind of horror film equivalent of "The Breakfast Club." [25 Dec 1998]

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

This faithful resurrection of the original "Willard," a twisted gem in its own right, also is funny.

There's so much emotion and so many ideas in this film that it's both angering and exhilarating. The acting is fine, the writing superb, the production crisp.

Broken Arrow is much better than the average big-time action movie because Woo has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. [9 Feb 1996, p.C]

Reign works better much better than "Upside" because of the cast and because Sandler and Cheadle together keep it lighter. It's an easy film to watch, but less easy to be moved by.

Wyler's return to the western form (where he specialized in the silent era) is a vast range-war saga full of majestic vistas and full-blooded characters brawling and firing away. [07 Jan 2011, p.C5]

Maybe if I liked the first "Anchorman" a little less, I'd like Anchorman 2 a little more. Still, I laughed.

The movie has no sense of temptation and no real taste for revolt-it's a good little film that knows its place. Van Peebles' direction has a by-the-numbers competence but no discernible personality.

The clever and nicely gory Sputnik comes from Russia with love, slime, and an impressive lesson in efficient, low-cost pulp filmmaking.

Loosely entwining a half-dozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen.

Playing a deranged, possibly homicidal babysitter going bonkers in a hotel, Monroe steals the show in this efficient, vaguely creepy little thriller--despite the presence of both Richard Widmark (as her airline pilot target) and Anne Bancroft (as the hotel's pert lounge singer). [09 Dec 2005, p.C6]

It's the kind of copycat movie that becomes original through its cast and treatment.

The world of his films may be violent, but Hill's vision is a delicate, subtle one-of individuals packing away the tiny bit of meaning and emotion life has granted them, and fighting to protect it at all costs. It's not a sentiment that can survive in cartoons; that it emerges at all in Red Heat is a tribute to Hill's still great talent. [17 Jun 1988, p.A]

Cassavetes, who wrote the script, proves her skill with actors in this woozy push-and-pull of slurred compliments and shaky hopes for whatever lies beyond the next day.

The director and co-writer David Lowery has made nothing but interesting features, six so far, and while his latest (co-written by Toby Halbrooks) turns into a bit of a Lost Boy here and there in its brooding investigation of why Captain Hook, played by a happily camp-averse Jude Law, got that way, it’s a stirring adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy.

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

The whole film, in fact, seems too fast for its own good. It plays like a synopsis, jumping from scene to scene, grief to grief, and it doesn't let us relax into the various worlds it's creating.

This movie is a model of technique, beautifully crafted, often brilliantly acted by Cage and the others, but it's a bit hollow at the center.

Vincent Sherman's tangy 1950 gangster crime-romance. [19 Jun 2005, p.C3]

Uber-raunchy but pretty interesting as sex comedies go.

Director and co-writer Eytan Fox is going for a sexually democratic, politically aware variation on story themes familiar to "Sex and the City" viewers. (At one point Lulu is referred to as "Miss Israeli Carrie Bradshaw.") Surprisingly, it works, and the entire cast is excellent.

Filmmaker Dana Brown's major error is that he doesn't just shut up and get out of the way.

Davis and Garcia are both fine, and Hoffman gives an entertaining performance that still smells a little much of acting. But it's in the supporting roles that Frears makes his taste and talent felt, guiding such performers as Kevin J. O'Connor, Tom Arnold and Cady Huffman to quick, quietly efficient characterizations. [02 Oct 1992, p.B]

A pleasing but overlong version of the Rocky story told through the character of a put-upon young high school student who learns karate from an old Japanese master to vanquish the local school bullies. There is no reason this simple story should run 2 hours and 10 minutes. Such a running time strains the good will generated by a cast full of likable performances. [22 June 1984, p.12]

Typically, movies about dogs are unrelenting tear-jerkers, but Tatum and Reid resist sentimentality, resulting in a film that’s refreshingly frank and surprising when the emotional moments do hit (and do they ever).

Although Star Maps has some merit as a mood piece, Arteta's treatment of the audience has parallels to Pepe's treatment of Carlos, as he hammers home a message of no hope. [8 Aug 1997, p.K]

Patronizing and predictable where E.B. White's episodic 1945 book...is odd and open-ended.

Bravo!

This is one not to be missed.

A rarity -- an intelligent and moving drama of ideas that becomes increasingly thrilling as the ideas unfold.

The film seems a mad mix of staid PBS bio-drama, flamboyant musical comedy and surreal cartoon nightmare.

Daring and beautifully made, Zhang Yang's Quitting plays like a Chinese "Rebel Without a Cause."

Ladron plays like a telenovela without the melodrama. The characters are brightly drawn archetypes, and the humor's very broad. But the tone is nice and brash.

It retains the original's sunny, democratic vibe and refreshing lack of meanness, as well as Soderbergh's interest (if not his precision) in keeping several of the ensemble members in frame, interacting, without a lot of routine close-ups.

The drama is predictable, and the confrontations lack rational dialogue. In other words, this is just of the sort of movie that a 9-year-old would probably enjoy. [1 May 1987, p.A]

This is the story of a complicated and fraught friendship, and I'm not sure Wright and his collaborators figured out how much Hollywood baloney and how much naturalistic grunge to apply to it.

The visual style is typical, ultra crisp computer animation, bright, sharp, somewhat clinical.

John Travolta stars as a Texas construction worker who spends his nights chasing a woman and the cowboy myth in a huge honky-tonk bar. Debra Winger is a standout as the object of Travolta's anger and affections. [11 July 1980, p.8]

What Vice says, and how it says it, will have half its audience nodding in angry, contemptuous agreement, and the other half calling it a liberal smear. In other words it’s like everything else in the culture right now.

It’s smooth, and far from inept. But it isn’t much fun. That’s all you want from a certain kind of heist picture, isn’t it? Fun?

That the film doesn't live up to our anticipation of a rolicking good time is only part of its disappointment. [11 June 1986]

In The Weather Man, Nicolas Cage, a great oddball movie star who sometimes takes enormous risks, has a good, risky part again.

Respect runs into trouble when its own respect toward Aretha Franklin, the woman who gave us the voice of a century, settles for garden-variety adoration. But longtime stage director Liesl Tommy’s debut feature, working from a screenplay by dramatist and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson, offers plenty of compensations amid its biopic conventions.

Hot Shots! is very sharp and very funny, and if it doesn't have the aggressive, anarchic edge of "Airplane!" (attitude seems to be the specialty of David Zucker, who has just released "The Naked Gun 2 1/2 "), it is consistently, almost exhaustingly hilarious.

Addams Family Values is another big opportunistic, pre-marketed studio show, but it has laughs, flair. At its best, it's a valentine of venom, sent with mirth and malice aforethought.

Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.

The first "H&K" caught people off-guard with its canny idiocy and zigzagging, picaresque treasure hunt premise. By now, there's no catching anyone off-guard with these two, except by way of the most off-color and off-putting means possible.

Even at a mere 82 minutes, the movie is guilty of killing time. It's not a complete Kaputschnik, but it's sure no Bellini.

Chan is so good, so much fun to watch, that he often transcends his vehicles. And that's the case with Rumble in the Bronx, his big bid to crack the American market. [23 Feb 1996, p.C]

Laurel Canyon itself feels musical: languid, rich in color and light, and deliciously sensual.

If you can simply get lost in the crushing splendor of the waves themselves, the script might not leave you so seasick.

At its best, this uneven work represents Moore at the peak of his argumentative skills.

Secretariat isn't bad but it's precisely what you'd expect.

The late Mr. Cassavetes directed a film called A Woman Under the Influence. This is a powerful variation on that theme -- a woman tossed every which-way, physically and emotionally. [29 Aug 1997, p.A]

The movie could reasonably be rated S for slow because director Alan Parker seems more concerned with style and with hiding the film's big mystery than with pacing. We develop no empathy for the Rourke character, and so watching the movie, as attractive as it is physically, is like riding on a slow conveyor belt. [06 Mar 1987, p.A]

Vol. II turns into a battle (like most von Trier films) between the filmmaker's baser instincts and his searching ones.

Hitch's most plausible, least suspenseful spy thriller, based on Leon Uris' reality-inspired novel of intrigue in Cuba and France. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

There isn't enough heft to the story to pull everything together. Watching it is like trying to assemble a puzzle that's missing pieces.

A sleekly fashioned true-crime story without much on its mind.

Actually, if "Fast 6" shows any new ambitions, it's by enthusiastically embracing its inner-Telemundo, its heated, knotty "Game of Thrones" melodrama.

Part of the problem here is one of proportion: The movie throws a misjudged majority of the material to the villains and lets the unfashionably sincere and sweet-natured Muppets fend for themselves.

Does it work? It’s one busy movie, though without much variety in its rhythm or much breathing room in its perils.

Creating a mood that suggests an unholy mix of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, American pulp fictionist Jim Thompson and French heist moviemaker Jean-Pierre Melville, Babluani's story is about the perils of get-rich-quick schemes.

The funniest American comedy of the summer.

It can be a rare occurrence to find a kid-friendly animated film these days that actually surprises and delights. Dreamworks' Abominable, written and co-directed by Jill Culton, does indeed surprise and delight, all while following a familiar hero's journey tale that borrows from favorite friendly creature films.

Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.

The song remains the same, but it’s all in the way you play it. Karia, Ahmed and Lesslie prove that "Hamlet" still hits after all these years.

While not autobiographical, The Kite Runner feels authentic in its ethnic tensions, even when the narrative itself, with its handily reappearing and easily avenged villain, undermines that authenticity.

Criminal is an exercise where viewers are likely to ponder not "How did the characters do it?" but "Who cares?"

On many levels, it hits its marks -- but it still misses the impact of some shorter, less-ambitious movies that play with our emotions more deftly or deeply, walk their miles, deadly or not, with a lighter, faster, more confident tread.

Overall, The Jane Austen Book Club is an admirable mix of heady and fluffy, the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that needn’t make filmgoers ashamed of what they wished for.

Bullying is not easy to watch on screen, even--or perhaps especially--if the viewer had the fortune to avoid either side of the bully/bullied equation.

Pale Rider may be a risk simply because westerns are not in vogue right now at the box office, but fresh and challenging westerns with Clint Eastwood always will be in vogue.

Until the last 20 minutes, which stumble around in an attempt to set up a sequel, The Incredible Hulk keeps slamming everything forward, satisfyingly.

While the plot suffers from a few sit-comish aspects and some dumbly juvenile joking around between Lester and his buddies, the film gains strength from small, nutty scenes, dead-on reactions and off-the-wall lines that almost seem improvised.

While the subject matter makes Nuremberg worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon), and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late, in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance.

Leonard Nimoy, in unTrekked territory as director of his first comedy, displays a sure sense of pace. His free-wheeling prologue and epilogue set a spontaneous, stylish tone that carries over into the body of this helium-filled entertainment.