The movie is a straightforward nuts-and-bolts affair of no particular consequence, except for Neeson’s performance, which rightly does not resolve the question: Was Felt acting nobly or vengefully?

Spielberg has filmed Empire of the Sun with great care, paying keen attention to every detail of its time and place. If the film ultimately seems flat and superficial, it's because Spielberg just isn't the right filmmaker for this kind of tough historical subject. [9 Dec 1987, p.21]

This is fire-breathing melodrama masquerading as social commentary.

War Dogs ends up being no better than its protagonists at delivering the goods.

The derby sequences are just OK, and the conflict between Bliss and her uncomprehending parents, played by Marcia Gay Harden and (a fine) Daniel Stern, is so predictable that you wish someone had rolled onto the set to whip it into shape.

Too much of The Names of Love is a joke book posing as a movie.

Director Wladyslaw Pasikowski has made the mistake of going about his business as if he were fashioning a horror film.

The picture has moments of raw emotional power, but these are overshadowed by lapses into needless vulgarity and sadistic violence, especially in a repulsive scene that lingers on the vicious brutalization of a helpless woman. [04 Mar 1994, p.1]

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

Chen Shi-Zheng, well regarded as an opera and theater director, makes his feature film debut.

Watching actors tap out code as big buzzing screens of digital data flash on the screen just doesn’t cut it.

For all the glam and swank, the film is essentially a bright, shiny, empty puzzle. The puzzlemaking by writer-director Tony Gilroy is clever but most frequently an end in itself.

The film has a creepy allure but, as movies featuring full-bore sexual gamesmanship often do, it wears thin.

Departures is sappy and wacky – not the best combination.

The chemistry may be good, the movie isn’t.

It’s all third-rate “Pink Panther” stuff, and Brosnan, eager to play down his 007 bona fides, overcorrects.

Who can really differentiate between these films anyway? In the end, they all devolve (evolve?) into clashing, clanging bots.

Crossing Over is not a success but make no mistake: There is great drama to be found in these streets.

Most of the music is by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, and it’s heartfelt without ever really touching the heart.

The presentation has verve. But the story is confusingly told - everything is NOT illuminated - and, as the seeker, Elijah Wood is a big blank.

Most of the time, however, we are watching pathology without benefit of insight.

When we last see a much older Moses en route to Canaan, we can at least be grateful that this film, unlike so many other movies these days, does not seem primed for a sequel.

If only there was less mush and more meat in this stew.

The movie becomes, perhaps inadvertently, a celebration of selling out.

For an ostensibly soul-deep movie like this to work, we need more than smirks and scowls.

A promising premise and some very good actors are smothered in goo in The Answer Man.

Adam Sandler plays a dual role in Jack and Jill, and he's a lot better as Jill than as Jack.

I suppose the relationship is Oedipal or primal or something or other, but mostly it’s just an excuse for Dolan to stage a series of gaudy shout-fests.

Blunt and Friend strike a few flinty sparks, and Julian Fellowes’s script has its share of dry-as-dust witticisms. Most of the time, though, it’s a stiff pageant.

By the end, 10 Items Or Less has the obnoxiousness of a vanity project. Freeman is having a better time than we are.

By turning the loner Louis into a nutcase – if he blinked at all during the movie, I missed it – the movie becomes a species of horror film.

A little of this movie's preppy, whiny expostulation goes a long way.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

Sex, drugs, delirious camera work, and a great deal of noise are the foundations of this aggressively bizarre Australian production. [9 Oct 1987, p.21]

As generic as its title.

What Looking For Eric demonstrates is that drama, not comedy, is how Loach makes sense of things. On the other hand, I often find his dramas unremittingly bleak. I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not a big fan of Ken Loach.

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

Has some vitality, but it sinks into cliché just the same.

Like O'Connor's other novel, The Violent Bear It Away, and some of her best short stories, Wise blood has a fierce momentum and a savage wit that stand alone in contemporary literature. The movie makes a good try at capturing these elusive elements. But ultimately it loses its balance, and many viewers may wonder whether its rewards are worth all its perversities. [07 Mar 1980, p.19]

The directors, George Miller and George Ogilvie, borrow from every source they can find; movie buffs can pass the time spotting the Lynch shot, the Leone shot, the Jodorowski shot, and all kinds of others.

The director, Bruce Beresford, is so eager to crowd the screen with eccentric details of behavior and setting that the verbal subtleties and rhythms get twisted out of shape. Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton give all-out performances that occasionally jell into true ensemble work. [12 Dec 1986, p.35]

Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.

Shriner's direction has an Afterschool Special blandness, but those mechanical owls are quite realistic. While the film was in production Hiaasen said that he had "nightmare visions of the gopher in 'Caddyshack.' " He needn't have worried.

It’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a PhD. Or maybe an MA.

The movie will disappoint people expecting a genuine superhero epic or an over-the-top spoof. But those in the mood for an offbeat satire with a gifted cast will have a surprisingly good time.

The acting is amiable but the story isn't much deeper than the callow main characters.

Many will welcome the movie's interest in spirituality, but some may wonder why it's couched in a celebration of sensual pleasures ranging from sex to cigarette smoking.

Gilliam's visual style has never been more energetic or inventive, and nobody could be attracted to dope after this portrait of drug abuse as a hallucinatory quagmire.

The Normandy locations are evocative, but director Sophie Barthes compresses Emma’s multiyear rise and fall into what seems like a month or so.

Coppola's satirical debut movie is too ambitious for its own good. The cast is good, though, and ambition isn't the worst fault a fledgling filmmaker can have.

The story has charming and uplifting moments as well as strong performances by an impressive cast.

What diminishes the film's impact is Mary Agnes Donoghue's schematic screenplay, which follows Astrid from home to home as unswervingly as a faithful pet.

Try to imagine "In the Company of Men" with a feminist twist and you'll have the gist of this fervently acted, ultimately unconvincing drama.

The action of this South Korean melodrama is fast and furious, but its emotions and ideas don't manage to keep up.

Expertly made, thanks largely to Jim Caviezel's fervent portrayal of Jesus and Caleb Deschanel's skillful camera work. But the film contains little to learn from, unless one is unfamiliar with basic Christian history.

A romantic comedy that's pleasant, if not exactly spellbinding.

Steven Spielberg's historical drama is more stilted and didactic than its fascinating subject deserves, gathering great emotional force only in a harrowing scene depicting the Holocaust-like suffering of slave-ship captives.

The drama is as obsessive as its heroine. Crossword mavens may enjoy it, but it's too monomaniacal for comfort.

While it's a splendidly acted film, A Beautiful Mind is also a wasted opportunity.

Quaid and Church are funny, but too much of this film is not half as smart as it thinks it is.

Only the acting of City Hall is strong enough to deserve a vote of confidence. Pacino does a solid imitation of Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, bringing dark-toned fervor to his intimate scenes and delivering speeches with enough pizazz to remind us that politics and show business have an awful lot in common. [20 Feb 1996, p.13]

Bird's keen visual imagination keeps the action grimly watchable.

This sequel to Jia's excellent 1997 drama "Xiao Wu" is less original and absorbing than its predecessor, and less visually impressive than "Platform," his 2000 look at Chinese sociopolitical change.

Despite his sorcerer bona fides and voluminous cape, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange isn’t strange enough, and trying to parse the convolutions of the Marvel multiverse is more exhausting than engaging.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

The subject is likable and the story has possibilities, but why does every single performance sink into a self-indulgent mess of hammy overacting?

Like most movies aimed at the younger set, Racing Stripes has easily absorbable lessons to teach: Be yourself, never stop trying if your goal is worthwhile, and so forth.

This is a quintessential Allen comedy: squirmy relationships, dark Jewish humor, an assumption that everybody in Manhattan has money and a touch of glamour, and -- as with most of Allen's movies since the first few years of his career -- not nearly as many laughs as it gamely tries for.

Soft, sentimental, and as unlike real family life as you can get.

The Emily of this movie seems to survive primarily to take everyone in her orbit to task. Davies is holding her up as the indomitable spirit of genius – a woman who suffers fools not at all.

Nobody in it seems to possess a nervous system.

Eddie Murphy has impressive energy, but he needs mountains of makeup and special effects to accomplish what Jerry Lewis did with sheer talent in the original 1963 version of the comedy.

From a psychological standpoint, this is murky territory but Jacobs presents it as the height of enlightenment – a confluence of two damaged souls. At least "Good Will Hunting," another movie that played this game, wasn't blah.

Viard's energetic acting is the French production's most memorable asset.

Good acting and understated filmmaking turn off-putting material into a mildly engrossing drama, if not a particularly compelling one.

Too bad the clever bits are swamped by no-brainer gunfights, rescues, and chases galore.

The delayed release of this 1975 drama provides an interesting view of her (Breillat) early development as a world-class filmmaker.

Days of Thunder wants to be an action drama, but it's really just a star vehicle of the most rudimentary sort, with nothing to offer Cruise except a chance to look pretty and chant time-tested punchlines. Ditto for the rest of the cast, which may be talented but gets little chance to show it here. [3 Jul 1990, p.13]

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

The story's celebration of honesty is commendable, even if the treatment of homophobia is no deeper than the hero's swimming pool.

The screenplay isn't remotely as funny as it tries to be, and the visual style is equally unexciting.

Taylor Hackford's thriller makes a mischievous assault on today's legal system, but its points would be more telling if the story didn't veer so often into needless sensationalism and eye-catching effects.

The visuals are spectacular at times, but the screenplay is trite, intermittently vulgar, and just not funny.

Mighty monotonous after a while.

The result is yet another remake that should send viewers scurrying to video stores for the original.

Too chilly and distanced to build the emotional impact it would like to have.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

The first half packs some clever surprises, but eventually you'll wish you'd signed up with another movie.

The thriller's best and worst features all stem from a highly unusual plot structure that builds to a genuinely startling conclusion.

Impressively filmed but not dramatic enough to justify its length.

The picture often rambles as aimlessly as its characters, but its vivid depiction of alienation and self-destructiveness among suburban youth has much cautionary value.

The overall effect is imaginative but overambitious, though Troche unquestionably has cinematic talent.

A change from summer fare, but it doesn't make the picture compelling to watch. You won't find the detail of the "Godfather" films or the psychological complexities of Martin Scorsese's gangster movies. The plot holes are big enough to hide Al Capone's illicit millions in.

It's surprising that so much material, so many moods, and such an interesting cast end up making such a small, unmemorable splash.

The story is rarely as touching or funny as it wants to be, but children may enjoy the fantasy elements. [24 Dec 1998]

The picture is equally long on eye-dazzling camera work and New Age sentimentality.

Some of his theories seem cockamamie compared with current intellectual norms, though, so it's too bad the filmmakers don't give him time to make a coherent case.

Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, this Indian production is not filmed very interestingly, but reveals much about conflicts between traditional and modern attitudes in Indian society.