Although Scream 3 is often clever in the way it interweaves the worlds of "Scream," "Stab" and life outside the theater, it's not exactly groundbreaking.

The movie isn't quite spry, warm or hip enough to carry out its very ambitious serio-comic agenda. Even for an ace like Levinson, Belfast is a long way from Baltimore.

They never quite got the script right, but director Kormakur toggles well enough. And Woodley sees it through.

The gall of Peter and Bobby Farrelly. To think that a romantic comedy might work absent a sleazy wager or maddening miscommunication takes a lot of chutzpah.

If her movie cannot fully resolve the demands of the love story with the horrifying particulars of the context, she's smart and honest enough as a first-time filmmaker to make "Blood and Honey" off-limits for those who prefer easy viewing. Even with a subject such as this.

It's just OK. Not great. Not awful. Not particularly memorable. Not entirely forgettable. Just OK.

I kind of hate the movie’s mixture of bro comedy, sadistic practical jokes (don’t call it slapstick) and last-ditch pull for the heartstrings.

But while Downey is up to the material, and then some, the material is not up to him. The film plods along with the sort of creaky literalism that blunts its attempts at other-worldliness. It says something that Elisabeth Shue, in a bit part as Downey's frustrated girlfriend, has more presence than anyone else in the movie. Her sphere of real time and space is credible; the fantasy world the film attempts to create is not. [13 Aug 1993, p.C]

It is a family-friendly, seasonal, nondenominational holiday movie option, but it’s more fun to pick out what makes this a Mike White project, and his influence gives it a slight edge over the rest, making Migration a worthwhile journey.

If you're a Beatles fan who's not offended by people taking serious liberties with the arrangements of your favorite songs, the unrepentantly exuberant and seriously tuneful Across the Universe is pretty much a sure thing.

Harsh Times, is almost a good, salty urban thriller.

The Belly of an Architect is less a movie than a filmed script--it lacks the sense of surprise and discovery of a world freshly unfolding before the camera that makes the cinema come alive--but it remains an intelligent, provocative effort. [14 May 1987, p.7N]

It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.

There's much to love about this "Rocky" on horseback, and those laughable blemishes just fold into jokes that Helgeland likely intends audiences to laugh at.

Tries for both civilized wit and primitive joy -- and mostly misses both.

John Waters is back with this awfully bawdy, never sexy, rarely funny, actually boring, one-note sex comedy.

Jack Nicholson's impressive, convoluted and moody sequel to Chinatown. [10 Aug 1990]

Falling Down is an intellectually sloppy, rebellious working-man adventure film that is little more than a set piece for Michael Douglas playing out a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy. [26 Feb 1993, p.C]

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

Stands a triumph of stunts over plot, of style over substance--of the wool we pull over our own eyes. It's brainless, high-speed, popcorn fun.

McCarthy is following well-established story grooves here, but scene to scene, he allows the dialogue to breathe and reveal bits of character along with the more expedient bits of plot advancement.

A gentle, honest and shrewdly realized film such as Tiger Eyes, based on the 1981 Judy Blume novel, shouldn't have to fight for a moviegoer's attention or an exhibitor's screens. But it's worth seeking out.

It's a fairly entertaining bash, with a travelogue vibe established by director Larry Charles ("Borat"). It’s also smug as all hell.

The film works because the screenwriters, Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, have a knack for juggling a dozen-plus major characters without succumbing to the obvious class-warfare gags every 90 seconds.

Ironweed is more than a chance to watch two multimillion-dollar actors play bums. Each character has a particular story; each is given a dignity that seems honest in the context of a worldwide Depression in the late '30s, and at no time are we certain what the future holds in store for either character. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

Parker is pretty much a disaster here, shrill and phony and, worst of all, spineless. She reminded me of Tea Leoni in "Spanglish," her performance working against the movie, serving only as a cumbersome, opaque obstacle.

You watch the movie, and you wonder: What was this life like, really? That’s a sign of a movie not quite answering the question.

Neat and tidy and well-mannered and dull, and not even Colin Firth and Jude Law and Laura Linney and Nicole Kidman and some very sharp fedoras can enliven it.

I greatly prefer this cleverly sustained and efficiently relentless remake to the '73 edition. It is lean and simple.

Directed by the Finnish-born Renny Harlin, it's a deft, fluid piece that rushes from one surrealist epiphany to the next, and along the way displays a craft and imagination far above the norms for the genre.

A solid meat and potatoes film. Like the land itself, there are no frills, and the cinematography by William Wages is commendable. But, someone should tell the filmmakers that there probably weren't any big mountains outside of St. Paul, even in 1917.

It's just a watery, undeservedly smug update of the low-budget, kids-stranded-in-the-sticks bloodfests of the 1970s and '80s.

Despite the talent involved, and the incredible subject matter, the irritating tendency to over-explain to the audience means there’s very little spark to be found in the enervating Radioactive.

What's the point of telling Jesse Owens' story if you don't get into what made him tick, and drove his success as an athlete?

Call it a successful failure. Some movies worth seeing are like that.

Some of the Indian imagery in the film is arch, but the story, the acting and the tension level are of the highest order. [04 Oct 1991, p.C]

At its best, Nightbitch is many things at once: funny, unruly, bizarre, tender.

It's a better-than-average gay relationship film, largely because neither plot mechanics nor the same old camp intrude much.

The appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth THEY'RE calling gassy.

Shackles its characters with stale dialogue straight out of decades-old Sgt. Rock comic books.

Like all good popular entertainments, the best of it sings.

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

Cher plays a footloose, life-loving mother of two fatherless daughters who sports a bouffant hairdo and, at one crucial point, a Mylar mermaid costume that looks as if it were constructed, on a bet by designer Bob Mackie, entirely out of common household objects. The part isn't much of a stretch for America's reigning queen of wacky non-conformity, though it should please her established fans while scraping the nerves of the unconvinced as lightly as possible.

The look and feel here is classic Hardwicke: gritty and dark, so as to fool you into thinking this film is serious business.

Kids may love the movie, and even kids who love the books may like it. For me, though, an astonishing percentage of the books' appeal has vanished.

Director Tobe Hooper seems to want his homage and his "Saturday Night Live," too. One minute he's reveling in hair-raising terror; in the next, he's dishing up naughty, nasty camp. [9 June 1986, p.5C]

Screen chemistry between two individuals isn't really a pass/fail proposition. There are degrees involved. But let's pretend otherwise and say yes, Smith and Robbie pass, barely, with less than flying colors and in a pretty dull movie.

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

Sylvester Stallone and Billy Dee Williams star in a thriller about New York detectives trying to capture an international terrorist. The story is full of holes but compelling nevertheless because we do grow to hate the terrorist and want him stopped. [19 June 1981, p.8]

It was a very uneasy 80-some minutes. Watching John and Kipper express their fears and weaknesses and desires respresented a peek under covers that might best have been left unmussed.

Sidelined by a script that plays like an imitation of another era’s artifacts. It’s an oxymoron: a mild screwball romance.

Q's adventure is a passionate and creative retelling of a time-honored tale, and one that will appeal to audiences both old and new to the genre. Hughes would approve.

While it's done well enough here - written smartly, staged crisply and acted to the hilt - it doesn't last, except as a brief virtuoso piece for three players.

Pseudo art can be fun, though, even if it doesn't quite awaken all your senses.

As Cruel Intentions progresses, you may come to realize that if a bomb suddenly blew up everyone on screen, you wouldn't particularly miss anyone.

Any Chekhov is better than no Chekhov, but it would be a shame if this was your introduction to one of the greatest plays of the last 100 years.

An epic unhinged, and while its best sections suggest a Loony Tune done by Sam Peckinpah and Emilio Fernandez, "Mexico" needs to be even crazier than it is.

There are some laughs, and director Anne Fletcher — like Kenny Ortega, who did the first one, she’s dance-trained and a veteran choreographer — manages a far smoother amalgam of effects, mood swings, mugging, headless-zombie comic relief and heartstring-yanking that miraculously almost kind of partly works. All in all, it’s twice as good as Hocus Pocus. It’s easier to write that if you didn’t like Hocus Pocus.

It's ridiculous but fun, as it careens from Havana to Berlin and icy, terrorist-ridden Russia played by Iceland, and a spit-ton of medium-grade digital effects. But the second hour gets to be a real drag, and not the racing kind.

But what's the excuse for the film's script? What we get is a reworking of "Flashdance" and "Footlose" into a routine story about a couple of high school kids who want to become regular dancers on a show called "Dance TV," or "DTV" for short. [10 May 1985, p.LN]

It's a particularly great pleasure to encounter Quick Change, a wonderfully loose and graceful character comedy. [13 Jul 990, p.C]

The movie's fun. And now, thanks to our annual Neeson thriller, spring can come soon.

Extreme Measures is a suspense picture that should excite thinking audiences as well as thrill-crazy ones. One possible exception: fans of Michael Palmer's novel, who may wonder why his plot and people disappeared. But after all, in movies as in medicine, extreme measures may be necessary.

It's only a mild disappointment. The talent is still there, the film better than most. It just needs less crime, more love.

Storks is at times cacophonous and overly busy, and the animation tends toward the goofily humorous rather than the spectacular. However, Stoller manages to pull off a third act and emotional resolution that's genuinely moving.

It's a procedural, often absorbing, rarely surprising, about a briefcase bomb and a near-miss. Yet there's no question the film feels dodgy and vague when it comes to the personalities and ideology of the men onscreen.

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

Date Night is a product substantially inferior to the material routinely finessed by Carell and Fey, on their respective hit shows, into comic gold.

Whitman's a wily cross between Janeane Garofalo and Ellen Page and in her scenes with her motivational-speaker single mother (Allison Janney), you sense a better movie lurking in the shadows.

In the end you feel like you've been taken on a pleasing, professionally run tourist trip that let you enjoy the sights without ever really inhabiting the land.

It's a dreary movie about a dreary character, offering little insight into her poetry or the mental illness that ultimately conquered her.

Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

A caveat to viewers: This brand of movie sex, as directed by 30-year-old Lionel Baier, is emphatically not for the puritanical.

Though the new "Sabrina" has been updated to include micro-chips and corporate raiders, French fashion shoots and the Concorde, it doesn't transcend its time the way the old screwball comedies did. It doesn't even illustrate its own time memorably. Instead, the movie leaves us peeking through the trees like Sabrina, while trying to tell us that old movie fairy tales like this one are eternal, as relevant in our day as in their own. It's doubtful the people who made "Sabrina" themselves really believe that -- though they'd obviously like to. [15 Dec 1995, p.C]

A thoughtful, exceedingly well-produced science-fiction drama about a scientist (Charlie Sheen) who becomes convinced that he's received radio signals from alien beings. Trying to locate them, he runs into a lot of official government opposition, and his pursuit of the truth takes him (and us) to unexpected places. Sheen is not the most appealing of actors, particularly wearing a Fu Manchu beard, but director Twohy carries us through the story with high energy nonetheless. [31 May 1996, p.B]

Though overexplicit and underdeveloped, Clive Barker`s Hellraiser is a horror film with enough personality and ambition to rise slightly above the run of the genre.

Forbidden Fruits can’t reconcile all of its influences and just ends up as a collection of references and high style without much staying power — it’s essentially the fast fashion of girly pop horror.

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

The Brave One is "Death Wish" with a guilty conscience, and while it may be a bit of a hypocrite as vigilante thrillers go, the internal contradictions of the thing make for a very interesting picture.

As horror movies go, this is a pretty good one.

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]

I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.

Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of "Memento."

There isn't a sophisticated or "adult" perspective to be found in The Rum Diary.

For the record: Josh Duhamel brings some welcome exuberance to the role of the goofball suitor, Hobart. Like Oh, he's fun to watch. This is something never to be underestimated

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

I won't pretend there aren't moments of sweetness here--there are, aplenty. But the promise of true emotion goes bust with bad acting, cheap writing and false sentiment.

Starts out hilarious and then turns very, very grim.

Director Caton-Jones has given the film a few moments of charm and gentleness, though the movie would be a lot more beguiling if it weren't so sure of itself. Its charm has the practiced, impersonal touch of the professional salesman.

Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap.

Because the movie starts at an 11 and doesn’t let up, the runtime feels overly long. However, the voice performances are excellent, especially Cage, who brings his signature sense of yearning pathos to Grug the Neanderthal.

Insistently grotesque, relentlessly misanthropic and spectacularly tasteless, Death Becomes Her isn't a film designed to win the hearts of the mass moviegoing public. But it is diabolically inventive and very, very funny.

Minimalism be damned; even a postmodern noir needs more than Minus Man gives us. So do the actors.

A lean, mean tension machine, setting up its premise, executing it with smarts, throwing in enough twists to keep things interesting, and wrapping it up before anyone can get fatigued or reflective. It's on the money.

Done with an enticing mixture of lacerating comedy, lush Roger Deakins cinematography, robust acting and juicy lines, the Coens' Ladykillers is often glorious fun to watch. It won't please everyone, of course.

In a league with Hollywood's top historical epics, ancient or otherwise. It's stunningly handsome film, with an equally stunning cast and engrossing story.