Suggests a raunchier, cruder version of a Coen brothers comedy, but it's also a kind of honky-tonk "Rashomon."

Koepp, an often ingenious writer, should have followed King's example and covered his tracks better. If he had, Secret Window might have been as good as "Stir of Echoes," and not simply a mini "Misery" and a not-quite "Shining."

The movie is full of dead ends, logical gaps and bizarre inconsistencies. Yet Donaldson is deft enough, both in his composition of shots and his direction of actors, to create a scene-by-scene sense of competence and control that carries the picture across some very rough spots.

The songs take some of the sting out of the numerous scenes involving alligators, snakes, attack dogs and bullies. Yet in their lazy way, they're one more reminder that kids are better off with a book than a middling movie adaptation of a book.

Settles for being simple, familiar and ineffective, though I suspect it'll warm a few hearts.

The surprise, if there is a surprise here, is that the film has found a slyly humorous tone for much of the running time.

Ultimately, what's revealed in the new biopic of young Salinger, written and directed by Danny Strong, poses some interesting questions, but doesn't live up to the power of the mystery around the man itself.

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

As directed by a button-pushing Herbert Ross, "Undercover Blues" operates under the credo of "Grin, and the world grins with you." The ever-chipper Turner and Quaid try their damndest throughout, with Quaid often resembling a Cheshire cat whose face froze that way. throughout, with Quaid often resembling a Cheshire cat whose face froze that way. But all the pep in the world couldn't save this nonsensical mixture of low-rent espionage, low-ball slapstick and low-reaching cuddly family moments, like the baby's first steps captured in what looks like a Polaroid ad.

It would be a lie to suggest that there aren't some crudely effective moments in Ghost and the Darkness. After all, this is a movie where two man-eating lions pop up every 10 minutes or so, growl and drag off another fresh corpse or two. But crude effectiveness is all the movie has to offer -- and even that is a mark it doesn't always hit.

An angry, violent and despairing film, without much of a point other than that existence can be angry and despairing and memory is a prison. As a piece of art, entertainment or cultural ephemera, it is indeed bold, but it is significant not for what it says about Capone, but rather what it says about Trank, and the ongoing saga of his career.

It stars Tom Hanks in his first genuinely dull screen performance.

It's more of a pastiche, a montage of brutality, a slow descent into Dante's Inferno until we reach the subbasement of a boy's soul. [21 Apr 1995]

Under normal circumstances, too many comics spoil the show.

The costumes are giving Halloween, the sets and props are giving Xena: Warrior Princess and the story and performances aren’t giving anything at all. Mortal Kombat II seems destined to go the way of the ‘90s sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation — directly into obscurity.

Opulence almost interferes with the movie, weighing it down when it should seem lighter than air, surrounding the inarguably brilliant Carrey with too much frosting and frou-frou.

There are no surprises in this movie -- not even in the Bollywood parodies, when the hero and heroine finally, subversively kiss. There is talent, though.

Just a vehicle for Carrey to do his hyperactive shtick. He has some entertaining bits, such as his rain-drenched meltdown in which he victimizes some stunned innocents, but he’s working so strenuously that at times he’s hard to watch.

Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

Wan's tense, grisly cinematic morsel won't go down easy. But once it hits bottom, Saw is oddly satisfying, though the gag reflex never entirely goes away.

Against "Whale Rider's" well-acted, intimate story, Gordon's film feels like an endless spiral of sub-par soap-opera acting, mired in trite, predictable dialogue.

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

So who’s up for a strange, disarming musical? As much as I hated the first one, this one works for me.

The River is nothing more than a conventional, albeit pretty, melodrama. [11 Jan 1985, p.4N]

Beerfest is one sloppy comedy, but the lads of the comedy troupe Broken Lizard don't know when to say when in their pursuit of the idiotic laugh, and persistence certainly counts for something.

It's Aniston's return to the emotional authenticity that surfaced too briefly in "Friends With Money" and made "The Good Girl" such a revelation.

Sweet-tempered but superficial.

Knight and Day may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

It's hard to get riled up one way or the other by a film about an exorcist who is forced, cruelly and relentlessly, to introduce one flashback after another.

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

IF reminds us how certain key ingredients — charm, wit, clarity, emotional tact and resonance — cannot be willed into narrative existence, or fixed in post.

It’s a movie about a movie star taking out the trash, leaving behind a lower body count than usual, but executing his duties faithfully, and with a predictable dash — the right kind of predictable — of world-weary charisma.

The movie A Good Man in Africa contains the book's funniest, saltiest scenes, but it's less controlled and assured. [09 Sep 1994, p.C]

The movie does command our attention because Hines and Baryshnikov, through their dancing, manage to create very real and living and hurting characters. [22 Nov 1985]

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal. When a character is introduced as "Pizza the Hut," and then shown as a melting mass of mozzarella and tomato sauce, the result is to turn a fairly clever pun into something thuddingly obvious and vaguely nauseating. [24 Jun 1987, p.3]

Lo's writing is generally solid, and he creates some genuinely funny and touching moments with his use of dream sequences and flashbacks. He may not have gotten his proportions perfect in this first try, but Catfish in Black Bean Sauce shows that Lo has sharp cinematic instincts.

Like too many movies these days, takes a clever little idea and all but pounds it into the ground.

Snappy but sappy romantic comedy.

Jetsons: The Movie is a throwaway; with a little effort, it might have been something else. [6 July 1990, p.C]

Despite its rather arrogant title for a first film, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, a series could lurk inside this drawnout, but often spectacular and funny adventure film.

Even with its drawbacks, I found “The Watchers” worth watching, even with its odd (and perhaps too faithful to the book) final 15 minutes. The director works well with cinematographer Eli Arenson to envelop the chamber-sized ensemble in various shades of dread, or comfort.

An okay kids' picture about a bunch of misfit hockey players who are brought together to play in the Big Game by a cynical, Yuppie coach (Emilio Estevez) doing community service. [02 Oct 1992, p.C]

Good cast, nearly hopeless script.

Turns out to be nothing special. Well, the music is. The storytelling is not.

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

What a disappointment Weird Science is! A wonderful writer-director has taken a cute idea about two teenage Dr. Frankensteins creating a perfect woman by computer and turned it into a vulgar, mindless, special-effects-cluttered wasteland.

A classic play has been reduced a decent movie. It's a shame it couldn't be as good as the play; it's a small pleasure that it's as entertaining as it is. [20 Dec 1985]

The dialogue they deliver is crisp, witty and occasionally biting. Levin's script has the style and rhythms of the kind of romantic comedies of the '40s and '50s when actors like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn used verbal banter like boxing gloves.

There is a great, even revolutionary movie to be made about pharmaceutical companies in America. Side Effects is definitely not it.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

Isn't without charm, or laughs. Director Shawn Levy's film features some of the best child actor casting since "The Little Rascals."

Offers two or three worthwhile laughs.

Wildly uneven but nonetheless intriguing and funny.

Far too self-absorbed a picture.

Unambitious and transparent, but that doesn't mean it won't warm the hearts of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

As it turns out, "Liberty," a likable, light-as-air road comedy, is a much better movie than its sour-pun title.

The movie’s not as slapstick-dependent as advertised. It’s a less coarse and more heartfelt project than McCarthy’s disappointing headliner gigs, such as “Tammy” and “The Boss.” (The Paul Feig-directed comedies “Bridesmaids,” “The Heat” and “Spy” are far better.) The new movie renders matters of directorial finesse and comic technique essentially irrelevant.

Kline took on Douglas Fairbanks in Richard Attenborough's "Chaplin" and Cole Porter in Irwin Winkler's "De-Lovely"; he's the go-to biopic ace for roles requiring some fizz, a certain droll elevation and hair parted and slicked-back just so.

It's a cute romantic comedy, just as Shakespeare intended.

The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.

Though The burbs is hardly an actor's film, Hanks continues to demonstrate the ease and maturity that has been his since Big, while Dern, Ducommun and Feldman lend broad but effective support.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

A dismal kids' comedy in which all creativity stopped after casting lookalikes for the old rascals was completed.

It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique, stupid and unnecessary. Other than that….

Black or White may not be racist, exactly, but it patronizes its African-American characters up, down and sideways, and audiences of every ethnicity, background, hue and predilection can find something to dislike.

The film works best once Hanks gets to the island along with love interest Meg Ryan. But it takes too long to get there. A fresh but needlessly drawn-out story. [9 March 1990, p.C2]

Although Banderas occasionally shows flashes of style, individual elements too often go together like grits in a puff pastry.

Despite intelligent, sympathetic direction by Gordon, a brilliant lead performance by Robert Downey Jr. and an adapted script written by Potter himself before his 1991 death, this "Detective" pales next to its predecessor.

Two gifted co-stars, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and the highly imaginative thriller specialist Phillip Noyce lend some luster and credibility to another borderline-absurd scenario.

Just withers compared with many older, better movies about teen alienation and nihilism, from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "River's Edge."

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

The upside is that they're likable and play well together...The downside is that they're all still communicating roughly the same message, which lies somewhere between a wink and a nudge.

If you're looking for purple romance with a social conscience, it doesn't get much more purple than God's Sandbox.

Despite the actors hired to deliver the story, the superassassin of American Assassin isn’t quite human. He’s just revenge in a henley T.

The film, like the book, is clear-eyed without being clinical, reflective but never maudlin.

Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.

It's lively but chaotic and evasive. The period re-creation switches on and off. We get a sense of what the silver-walled Factory was like, but not the rest of swinging Manhattan in the '60s.

Not funny because it's not true.

Still Life is a very different story, small and quiet and, unfortunately, airless.

The cast is not the limitation here. The limitation, and I found it to be a drag on this aggressively audience-pleasing indie, relates directly to its premise.

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.

A childish and visually repetitive movie, ham-fisted, proselytizing and overtly simplified.

Hoodwinked treats "Red Riding Hood" as a detective story we've never really understood until now, with nuttier motivations, more complex characters and a screwier climax.

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved.

Mad props to Peter Zuccarini, who headed the team of ocean-bound photographers and captured some remarkably vivid footage, and also to the actors, who spend plenty of time looking cool, calm and collected swimming with the predatory fishes.

The movie delivers on its own terms. It may emerge a bit bruised and tattered around the edges, but its ever-beating heart provides the ultimate Proof of Life.

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

This is a movie whose title promises to show teenage viewers how to cope with the messed-up, grown-up world they are entering, not how to make it perfect -- or even how to make sense of it.

Despite the deftness with which Bigelow handles the transitions, the modern story never attains the intrigue and tension of the period tale.

While some pedestrian camerawork and spotty acting from supporting players deflate Love Object, it has enough juice - and a surprising twist - to keep fans of the slow-burn horror genre enthralled.

Sheffer`s calm serves as an effective counterpoint to Estevez`s coiled energy, and Morgan Freeman is outstanding as Charlie, an older bar owner who mediates between the two boys as they clash over the importance of women and the rapidly changing nature of their lives.

Boomerang, a sleek, confident and very funny urban comedy that may not entirely overcome Murphy's more discomfiting tendencies, but at least manages to put them to good use. [01 Jul 1992]