The movie ends up being just sharp enough at its peaks to be frustrating in its valleys. But the laughs are there.

The funniest bit in the crude but diverting Soul Men really makes you miss Bernie Mac, who died in August, a few months after completing the picture.

That conscious absurdity is at the core of The Quick and the Dead. It's a rousingly grotesque, often wildly entertaining western horror-comedy, with co-producer and star Sharon Stone as a sexy lady gunslinger taking on all comers in the gunfight tournament from hell. [10 Feb 1995, p.C]

It’s a surprise and a small wonder, then, when The Best of Enemies starts getting good and pretty much stays that way to the end. This may be an apples/oranges comparison, but: For a true-ish story of racial animus, bone-deep prejudice and the American South in the civil rights era, it’s a better, more nuanced and more interesting feel-good movie than a certain, recent, less interesting Best Picture Academy Award winner we could mention.

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

The images are lustrous, the cutting is brisk and the acting of the two leads is right on the money.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

There's barely a scene in this movie that taps his (Murphy) special brilliance.

The film does a fine job of displaying the contrasts between these tense, formalized Chinese students and the faux populist American academics.

Plays like an amateur debut effort written over a weekend during which its writer wasn't entirely sober.

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

His latest film, Gold, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is his most extreme character work yet, with him playing a balding, paunchy, cigarette chomping gold prospector in the 1980s, and yet McConaughey is so good he makes it work.

An honorable, evenhanded but curiously flat interpretation of events.

If Blind Date is soft and simple at its core, it is certainly the sharpest, funniest film Edwards has made since Victor/Victoria. After the sogginess of his last few features, all of his dazzling craft seems to have come back to him.

Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

Rio 2 offers roughly the same approach to story and to story clutter as did the first movie.

The movie is slick, good-looking, nicely edited and empty. [09 Sep 1994, p.F]

The damper here is Affleck, who appears to have been too concerned with placing himself just so, and then posing, so that nothing drew attention away from cinematographer Robert Richardson's pretty light.

Plot doesn't matter much here, as Scary Movie 3 exists solely to reference and lampoon other movies, in this case "The Ring," "Signs " and "8 Mile."

The revenge in Oldboy is neither sweet nor sour; it's just drab.

Not much of Class Act makes any sense, which is all right, but not much of it is funny either. [05 Jun 1992, p.B]

Ephron delivered an incredibly flimsy script based on her novel about her former husband's repeated infidelity during their marriage and her pregnancies. Nicholson isn't given a character to play. He just lumbers onto the screen and cheats off-camera.

The third and easily the worst in the series of hapless adventures of the Griswold family of suburban Chicago. [1 Dec 1989, p.A]

A fine ensemble, some gorgeous Italian Riviera locales, intermittent flashes of magic amid a more manufactured air of whimsy.

A rather wan version of "Jurassic Park" - a series of setups featuring humans being picked off by bigger, faster and stronger carnivores.

A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.

Think about the worst movie ideas you've had in your life, the ones so embarrassing they make you wince. Now imagine this: a modernized version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" titled Scotland, Pa.