This sensitive, sometimes troubling family drama is one of the rare movies dealing with intelligent adults tackling lifelike problems.

The end result smacks more of Hollywood melodrama than true compassion for the suffering poor.

The movie has a broader range of emotions and visual effects than any "Star Wars" installment since "The Empire Strikes Back," but the writing and acting are as stiff as R2-D2's metal torso.

The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.

Wise, who is noticeably older than the 29-year-old Ruskin was at the time the events occurred in real life, gives a tense, implacable performance, and Fanning is touching. The movie, however, directed by Richard Laxton, could use a lot more oomph.

You might expect "Seabiscuit" meets "Lawrence of Arabia," but overall, it's a big, beautiful bore.

Directed by Joel Schumacher with occasional gestures toward social commentary, and enough spectacle to mask the movie's deep down emptiness.

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

Art School Confidential mostly just makes you feel bad - period. It puts you in a foul mood and leaves you there.

Strutting around for most of the film in her leather rocker duds, Streep’s Ricki Rendazzo is almost as much of a concoction as her witch in Into the Woods. She wears her uniform as a taunt and also as a way of defining herself. She’s a woman out of time – a superannuated hippie.

"Axe Murderer" resembles a dozen other films, yet it has its one charm - Myers himself, who sometimes borders on being adorable but is smart enough never to sink the viewer in gooey sweetness.

If you're not in the mood for "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" meets "Last House on the Left," stay very far away. Horror fans will find what they're looking for, though.

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

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

This is closer to an Allen comeback than anything else he's made recently. Maybe he'll achieve it with his next movie, "Match Point," due this year.

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

Although he gave the plot real momentum on the stage, director Saks has fudged and fuzzed things by translating it so listlessly to the screen. [2 Jan 1987, p.25]

There's good bad taste and then there's just plain bad bad, which is what describes most of Brüno.

It's all a bit like "Girl Interrupted" shattered into a thousand shards, but Page somehow manages to come through with a performance despite the director's distracting technique.

At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?

Deathtrap falls short of the classic potential it would obviously like to have. Still, it's a jaunty entertainment, by and large.

The picture goes for sentimentality rather than substance every chance it gets, and the cast falls right into its syrupy trap.

The movie works well as a straight-out horror yarn, proving that the Hughes Brothers are more versatile than their previous "ghetto pictures" suggest.

Korine confirms his reputation as one of today's most experimentally minded filmmakers, helped by an inventive cast including German director Herzog in a surprisingly strong performance as the father.

The story matters less than the style, full of swooping camera movements, rapid-fire editing, and color-drenched displays of violence the Hong Kong school is famous for.

Although this "Moonstruck" knockoff is diverting to watch, it's basically a low-budget loaf of Italian-American movie clichés.

Feisty, funny, and smart.

It's a sideways view of a national trauma. The large cast includes standout performances from such unlikelies as Demi Moore, playing an alcoholic crooner, and Estevez himself, as her long-suffering husband. Everyone in this film is powerful.

With the exception of a few laughs - including a hysterical footsie scene and another that involves Saran Wrap - this one's a no-brainer.

There are some good laughs and ironic twists in the story, along with a nagging vulgarity. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas make a terrific team, and director Jeff Kanew gives them free rein to amuse us. [3 Oct 1986, p.23]

The plot is ''Pygmalion'' warmed over, but Michael Caine and Julie Walters give sparkling performances, and director Lewis Gilbert keeps the action humming along.

Nicely acted and capably directed, but hardly memorable.

Striking photography, period detail, screen-filling crowd scenes, and veteran composer Morricone's score make this one worth seeing, but the sheer nastiness of the town's people drags it down.

Impressively filmed but not dramatic enough to justify its length.

It's all kind of silly and amorphous, but the scenes between Yi and Cera, whether or not they were scripted, have a babes-in-the-wood loveliness.

Oliver Stone's imaginative style runs rings around John Ridley's idiotic screenplay.

Written and directed by Mark Waters, who strives for David Mamet-style punchiness but doesn't develop the quirky momentum that would carry the deliberately out-of-kilter story past its implausibilities.

Its main value is the prolonged look it gives of the late artist Basquiat.

The story's can-do attitude and moments of soaring music make it a must-see for moviegoers seeking positive visions on the screen.

Take a chance on Gerry. It's only a movie, and you'll get out alive no matter what happens on the screen. You might even find you've had a rare adventure.

The movie, starring Rogen as a mall cop with anger management issues, is essentially a goony romp flecked with disturbing eruptions of violence.

As the boarding school honcho Father Benedictus, Geoffrey Rush chews so much scenery that he looks ready to burst.

The acting is excellent, and the movie has a good-natured spirit to match its ultimate faith in the hero's deep-down goodness.

Best viewed as an oddball career move rather than as a successful movie.

It's all energetically filmed, but I miss the cool, modest clarity of the first version. Bigger isn't always better, even at the movies.

Bland, amiable, innocuous.

This ghastly swatch of pulp horror is compelling at the most basic level, but so little is going on in it that you might as well be watching a sadistic lab experiment performed on mice.

The acting is capable and the suspense is effective at times, but the gore is grisly and the climax is surprisingly hokey.

Would have benefited from more flamboyant film clips and fewer folksy conversations with the garrulous old-timers it focuses on.

Pacino's performance in People I Know is the best thing he's done in ages.

Rowlands is superb, as usual, and Garner partners her with the grace of a dancer. Cassavetes's directing style is slow and stilted, though, indicating yet again that his notion of moviemaking is the opposite of everything his father, the great John Cassavetes, stood for.

Riveting and revealing whatever views you have on the partisan issues involved.

But the drama's attack on racism would be more persuasive if it rejected vigilante justice and recognized that hatred and violence of all kinds must be condemned if evils like bigotry are ever to be eradicated.

Stranger than fiction, indeed.

The movie is a decidedly mixed bag, in part, because of the equally pronounced disparities between Burton and Carroll – and between Burton and Disney, for that matter.

What follows is a phantasmagoria that is more cheesy than transporting.

Even though none of these guys is ready to kick the bucket, The Big Year has an unmistakable affinity with "The Bucket List."

McDonald and Montgomery are fun to watch in this mildly amusing Irish romantic comedy.

The plot is predictable, and the humor is uncreative and often crude. The heroine, however, is endearing in her quirkiness.

Some scenes in a Manhattan hotel have the amiable ring of old-fashioned farce to them, but most of the going is noisy and obvious. [10 Jun 1988, p.21]

Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

Unnecessary profanity for PG, a little slow for grown-ups, but good for laughs and promoting sibling peace.

It’s respectable, safe, intelligent – and a bit dull.

Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.

The story is an odd mixture of preachiness and paranoia, but the stars provide sizzling performances and the action moves at a lively clip.

Knight of Cups isn’t quite as fancy-flimsy as “To the Wonder,” which, as I remember it, consisted mostly of Ben Affleck gazing dazedly at wave formations, but it’s close enough.

Allen isn’t doing anything terribly deep-dish here, just gussying up the standard crime-movie tropes. To what end? His point, I think, is to demonstrate that human beings, no matter how educated, are capable of justifying the most awful acts.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

Davison gives one of his many bravura performances in this 1977 adaptation of Miguel Pinero's hard-hitting play.

Harold Pinter's screenplay adds needless touches of melodrama to Margaret Atwood's original novel, but the performances have a lot of conviction, and the story deals with important issues. [16 Mar 1990, p.10]

Dark, eccentric, silly.

It would have better if Brooks had invested more time trying to discover what makes AMERICANS laugh.

Dano is still doing his ethereal, creepy underacting routine, but, compared with De Niro's scenery chewing, he seems almost dignified. The film, written and directed by Paul Weitz, has many touching moments and many more hokey ones.

Hartnett has been stuck in the young-adult heartthrob mode for some time now, but this comic thriller may launch him into meatier fare.

The acting is solid, but the story builds less drama and suspense than its high-stakes subject might lead you to expect.

I much prefer Mel Brooks’s “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” to all this doomy somberness. Why take the legend so seriously?

Manages to seem fresh, funny, and original from start to finish.

The movie teeters on a slippery dividing line between realism and fiction. It gains power from the mercurial nature of its improvised acting and split-screen camera work, though.

Would have more heft if the filmmakers had been supplied with talented stars, original ideas, and a barely adequate budget.

David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject.

It's not "The Odd Couple," despite the nostalgic casting of the male leads, but it has a few laughs, and Matthau carries rubber-faced comedy into a new dimension. [7 Jan 1994]

It’s not simply that it’s “too soon” for such movies. That’s highly debatable. More to the point is that the stark reality of these explosive events as we live through them – in the news, in real time, on TV and through investigative documentaries – potentially outflanks any attempt to dramatize them using embellished scenarios and famous actors.

Superbly acted.

It's not easy to sit through the movie spawned by this notion, though, proving once again that a picture can be simultaneously high in concept and low in entertainment value. [18 July 1996]

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

The movie is remarkably touching and engrossing, with Kline's spot-on acting and realistically second-rate singing balancing Judd's one-note performance as his wife.

What's missing from this Vanity Fair is the sense of plucky, anything-goes adventurousness that abounds in Thackeray's novel.

The story is too self-conscious about its offbeat qualities, becoming so cool that it practically freezes on the screen.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

Like all this adventurous filmmaker's work, it's truly one of a kind.

A diverting dramatic comedy.

The film actually deserves four stars for its imaginative style and astonishing suspense, zero stars for its shameless exploitation of violent shocks and loveless sensuality.

Maybe the movie does so much dawdling and meandering so we'll have more time to bask in their presence; in any case, the otherwise pleasant picture uses up its ideas long before it uses up its running time.

The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.

Even the humor is played too broadly – another notch and we'd be in "Monty Python" territory, though not half as witty.

It's a powerful subject, but director McG and screenwriter Jamie Linden haul out every cliché in the playbook.

Michael Apted's direction veers into listlessness, but there is, at times, a pleasing elegance to the production, too. It doesn't assault you. Small favors are better than none.