It's all a little ultra-cool for me. Shakespeare was right. Revenge is a dish best served ice-cold, not cool.

With Hands of Stone, Robert De Niro officially enters his Burgess Meredith-in-"Rocky" phase, bringing the ringside grizzle and rumpled gravitas by the pound.

It's gut-grinding, to be sure. But a misjudged degree of cinematic dazzle obscures the outrages at the core of Standard Operating Procedure.

In a rom-com, there's no rom without the com. Hart and Hall give it their all.

The best material in the film is the loosest, capturing the perpetually insecure and overcompensating Pineda in his early concerts, leaping, bouncing, careening around as if every moment in every song were an audition for the next moment in the next song.

As an intentionally campy film, Girls Will Be Girls dips a cinematic toe into shark-infested waters. Not only must it operate on several levels-making us care for deeply flawed characters and laugh at their bitter lashings-it also has to carry a cohesive story arc. On this count, Girls Will Be Girls fizzles a bit.

This is a movie where you can get drunk on the B2], sloshed on the scenery. But perhaps not quite drunk enough. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

Tom Cruise does with bartending pretty much what he did with a pool cue in "The Color of Money." In other words, he shows skill at a con game while being less successful with the woman in his life. [29 Jul 1988, p.A]

There is a thrill in seeing them wooing and pursuing each other through the streets of New York, a city that here again, for a while, becomes a movie isle of joy.

Anne Hathaway basically saves it from itself.

There's a tremendous amount of material here, and the script covers too much of it, often confusingly.

Errol Flynn deifies Gen. George Armstrong Custer in a silly though well-directed biopic. [25 May 2001, p.C1]

There's some undeniable appeal to watching a well-oiled, built-for-speed machine operating with its pedal to the metal -- even if it's destined to wind up in flames before the finish line.

The results are pretty, and sometimes beautiful. They're also a tad stiff, and the dialogue and voice-over narration sometimes has the ring of a scrupulously faithful adaptation.

Relentlessly driven by fashionable revisionism and good intentions, Geronimo: An American Legend-which deals with "days of bravery and cruelty, heroism and deceit"-is so politically correct it often is dramatically inert. [10 Dec 1993, p.C]

It's sort of fun, certainly more so than the "National Treasure" pictures, as well as less manic (a little less) than the recent "Mummy" films.

If you can forget about the movie’s general moral vacuousness, the extremely uneven digital photography and the slavish devotion to designer assault weapons...the screenplay by “Watchmen” scribe Alex Tse keeps the shifting alliances and power plays in clever circulation.

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

Welcome to the world of Ellie Parker, a faux-documentary and big, fat raspberry dedicated to L.A.'s underclass.

Burt Reynolds stars as a Dirty Harry-style detective who chases after a high-powered pimp in Atlanta. When Reynolds stays in character, the film works well as a straight thriller. When he winks at the audience with his dialog, the film falls apart. [25 Dec 1981, p.12]

I cannot say how I'd feel about The Walk if I'd never seen "Man on Wire," because I did see "Man on Wire," and I can't un-see it. I love it. I can only say The Walk struck me as an honorable good try of an also-ran, though with some lovely things to offer.

The best sequences involve Frank's inventive ability to stay within 75 feet of his car, but otherwise, it's the charismatic unruffled dexterity in the face of impossible odds that rivets.

When the story’s twist arrives, you half-expect Twohy to throw in a couple of reels from "Dead Again," plus outtakes from "The Usual Suspects." It’s a lulu; I'm just not sure if it's the sort of lulu that will lead to great word-of-mouth.

We want to watch pets behave exactly as we expect them to, and sometimes in a completely incongruous manner. Like the original, “Pets 2” delivers just that, nothing more.

Mission: Impossible III hasn't the kinks or the oddball Continental chic of the first "Mission: Impossible," but it's less pretentious and obsessively pretty than the second movie.

It`s a shame to have to knock the otherwise beautiful and haunting picture, but when you`re watching a love story and you can`t stand the character who is being loved, that makes for a very frustrating movie-going experience.

Trying to be more antic and cuttingly funny, it misses the premise's shivery tension. The story loses us at precisely the moment it should put us in the vise.

Walter Matthau is absolutely wonderful as the constantly tormented neighbor, Mr. Wilson, in this film adaptation of the popular comic strip and TV show. And although little Mason Gamble may not be another Macauley Culkin, he's fine as innocently troublesome Dennis. But the movie loses track of its energy during a labored, 10-minute sequence with Dennis combatting a thief. What would have been better is more scenes of tenderness between Dennis and Mr. Wilson. [25 June 1993, p.C]