Fun to watch it may be, but it's shallow fun. Like the drugs and booze the characters keep using -- and even the sex -- it's a passing pleasure.

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

I wish more had been made of the power of books versus the power of a studio's special-effects department.

Wayne's World 2 may not be much of a movie, but at least it's funny. And, hey, what else does it have to be? What do you want from a movie? Blood? Rock on, Wayne. Party hearty, Garth. [10 Dec 1993, p.A]

It's just another case of mourning over what might have been.

Last Chance Harvey is what it is: a pleasant put-up job, held up by world-class pros.

A marvel of shadows and fog -- literal and psychic. [12 Mar 2010, p.C9]

A cranky failure with brilliant moments.

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

The results in this, Coppola’s third feature, are roughly half-good, half-less. The good comes when the director, working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, focuses on evocative silent footage serving as interludes and visual grace notes capturing Shelly, primarily, in moments of reflection. The dialogue and the dramaturgy, in contrast, strain for jokes and over-ladle the pathos.

The movie's title refers to a comment about how people grow at their own rates. Miller's movie has its moments of impressive velocity, but it never quite takes off.

The whole schtick of these movies is the treat-motivated, not-quite-getting-it doggie voice-over, performed by Josh Gad, and it lightens the film. But going dark and emotional makes the film work better than the prior two.

Shandling and Nichols strain to reach a mainstream audience and wind up sounding like they, too, have been trained to tell us what we want to hear. Sorry, guys, but you don't score.

Hyams' script may lack emotional thrust, but it's economical, and it tweaks the genre's traditional heroism, if only faintly. [21 Sep 1990, p.H]

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

The comedy works some of the time; the pathos, more so. There's an undertow of grief in 2 Days in New York relating to the passing of Marion's (and Delpy's) mother, who died in 2009.

The actors put it over, and Watkins is a genre filmmaker who believes in using his actors as more than pieces of plot in human clothing. That, I appreciate, with no reservations whatsoever.

The film is easy to take, though it must be said: It's almost 100 percent blather.

As a series of sights, which movies like these are, Oz the Great and Powerful is more like "Oz the Digital and Relentless." Certainly this is true in its final half-hour, which seemed to me to be all explosions.

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.

This “Last Dance” may be shaggy, silly and even a little bit stupid — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially when it’s winking so hard at its own genre play.

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.

A somewhat bewildering and unsatisfying film that nevertheless contains more inspired moments and brilliant scenes than many movies we call successes.

Crowe's chilliest movie. In part this is by design. Like "Open Your Eyes," to which Crowe is mostly faithful, Vanilla Sky is a head trip that merges thriller, romance and science-fiction elements while playing with our notions of dreams and reality.

A thickly plotted disappointment, yet it has three or four big sequences proving that director Michael Mann, who gave us "Thief," "Heat," "Collateral" and others, has lost none of his instincts for how to choreograph, photograph and edit screen violence.

The most interesting thing about this slick but frustrating picture is the way it puts Crowe’s Hoffman at the center of our mixed feelings.

The problem is that the movie is, in comedy parlance, a "bit fest" -- it tries to generate its humor with a barrage of bits, or external gags, rather than letting it emerge organically from the deepening interaction between its two leads.

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.