The character and Qualley’s performance is so beguiling that it would be a delight to watch Honey O’Donahue solve any manner of mysteries of the week, “Columbo”-style. It’s a shame, then, that the particular mystery at hand in Honey Don’t! is so convoluted and nonsensical.

A thriller of passive virtues, the steely intensity of Jodie Foster notwithstanding. It's not too violent. It's not assaultive. Even James Horner's music plays it cool.

It's not as if Stone is above this sort of pulp. But as rejiggered for the movies, Savages has trouble making us care what happens to the beautiful people - the untouchables - at the center of the sun-baked fairy tale.

The shadow of Gena Rowlands looms over this picture like a cinematic eclipse. [25 January 1999, Tempo, p.5]

Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.

Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.

This debut picture never makes up its mind about what sort of comedy it wants to be. But at least it has one--a mind, that is.

Figgis (Stormy Monday), here making his American debut, doesn't possess the tight control necessary to really charge up the material. The result is a stylish but oddly slack film, which still features a couple of fine performances (from Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalf) and a few effectively perverse moments.

Without a strong narrative engine, Upside Down ends up exactly where it shouldn't go: sideways.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

But writer-director Alan Shapiroisn't content to focus on aquatic mammalian high jinks. Instead, he must pack in virtually every family movie cliche of the '90s. [17 May 1996, p.C]

Lasseter's sequel smooshes the vehicular ensemble of the first "Cars" into a nefarious James Bond universe, heavy on the missiles and ray guns and Gatling guns and electrocutions. Sound peculiar? It is peculiar.

But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.

Juvenile viewers may well benefit from the movie. But, for the adult, it’s ultimately a film that arrives too early for the season in its title and too late in terms of style and impact.

The sense that the movie serves mostly to showcase a slew of purchasable cartoon figures loses nothing in the translation.

There’s no question about the talent on display. Coel is one of our most hypnotic screen performers, and had Hathaway decided to put her prodigious talents toward pop stardom instead of an Oscar-winning acting career, she’d be one of our top icons. Her Mother Mary performances are so fantastic it leaves you wanting more — of her, but not necessarily this plodding movie.

Like Ice Cube's "Friday," How High probably will survive as an underground classic, until it's pushed further underground and forgotten by the next disposable "cult classic" to hit video.

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

Ruthlessly skilled as Atkinson is, the Bean persona of generic, maniacally grinning ineptitude owes most of its appeal to seeing just how far an actor can pull a face without pulling a muscle.

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

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.

Has to explain itself through so much of the film that there's just not much film left.

The plot, though of the made-for-TV ilk, makes for good discussion fodder if you're trying to impress life's lessons on children or others you love. That said, be prepared to be hit over the head by the message, edifying as it is.

There's still enough hardcore Williams-when he's sitting by himself in his studio-to make Good Morning, Vietnam worthwhile, but the alarm bells are sounding. Heres another comic who wants to play Hamlet.

We're snowed by a great deal of intersecting and crisscrossing information in The Fifth Estate, and Singer's script lacks organizational skills. I can relate. But that doesn't make parsing this busy film, or — crucially — its true, contradictory feelings about Assange any easier.

Any serious message has been sacrificed on the altar of excess, making us realize why the stylish story probably worked better as a graphic comic book than as a film.

An insubstantial addition to the cycle. It looks cheap and feels slapped together.

Jeong and Schaal are quite funny in the limited time they're given, but one can't help but think the story would have worked so much better as a drama, or some kind of "Man on Fire" actioner, with Coleman's chops and Bautista's brooding presence. Hopefully a director can figure out what best to do with him as a leading man, and soon.