Quirky acting combines with Ferrara's dark, brooding style to give the throwaway story a noteworthy measure of dramatic and cinematic interest.

You won't find a load of laughs in 13 Going on 30, but there's plenty of whimsy, which is a close cousin of genuine humor.

The movie is mostly a megadose of good-old-days nostalgia.

We’re still essentially in the Land of Retread: An outer space voyage turns grisly-ghastly as gloppy, befanged creatures invade the crew’s innards and pop out – gotcha! – right on cue.

The dialogue swings between platitudes and clichés, but the acting is lively and the music will set even lazy toes tapping.

The movie takes no particular stance on the controversies surrounding its heroine, seen by some as a self-serving egomaniac and others as a tireless champion of the poor. Nor can much insight be gleaned from Madonna's energetic but oddly impersonal performance.

The story has too many trite moments, but strong acting and a goodhearted attitude keep it afloat.

Starts cleverly but becomes more preposterous as it goes along.

In the end there's more nasty behavior than constructive insight.

Three brief comedies filmed in English for a German television series. The most thoughtful is Seidelman's contribution, The Dutch Master."

It’s all terribly cliché-ridden and predictable, and the best I can say for it is that Shannon and Gugino do their best to convince us otherwise.

The movie seems sincere in wanting to explore rather than exploit its subject, but any potential insights are cut off by too-obvious characterizations and plot twists. [04 Apr 1986, p.23]

Audiences may howl at the hackneyed plot and dialogue, but you won't hear them over the Dolby sound effects assaulting your eardrums at a gazillion decibels.

Admirers of their MTV series will find a few laughs in this animated odyssey. Others will find it as repetitious as it is vulgar.

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.

As a movie, it's mediocre.

As it is, “Mockingjay,” a big bore, suffers from being the transitional event before the big showdown.

The more moralistic 21 gets, the less enjoyable it is.

There are multiple murders and two gory scenes, but if you love getting scared, then you'll enjoy this thrill ride.

The story is so sentimental that even soap-opera buffs may feel it outwears its welcome.

The movie is just plain muddled - showing the Hoffa forces performing a heinous crime one minute, then glamorizing and sentimentalizing them as if the other stuff had never happened.

The bloom is decidedly off the pinkish rose. Martin has a few inspired moments but in order to get to them you have to wade through a mosh pit of unfunny gags.

The story grows sillier as it goes along, culminating in a final switcheroo that's about as deep as the comic-book ideas that inspired the plot.

The results are more sleazy than insightful.

This pitch-black comedy is less lurid than its title, but director Danny Boyle ultimately fritters away his psychologically rich story in a horror-flick finale.

Much of the historical horrorfest is more frenetic than fascinating. Look out for bursts of over-the-top violence.

Goony, so-so comedy.

Don't race to see it unless a female "Full Monty" is just what you've been waiting for.

The title characters are wittily crafted by Messrs. Stiller and Wilson, and Snoop Dogg is a riot as Huggy Bear.

Excali-BORE, Gere as Lancelot lost-a-lot; inaccurate.

A very well-meaning movie, and it will stand in future years as an eloquent memorial to the World Trade Center tragedy.

Mildly entertaining for a while; think "Stand by Me" meets "Alien," with a soupçon of "Starship Troopers" tossed in.

The screenplay aims high in terms of humanity and complexity, but director Hoge drains it of energy with listless meanderings that provide more yawns than insights.

The only performances worth discussing are delivered by the always excellent Michael Shannon, the Texas detective who tries to set things right, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the scurviest of the marauders.

Ultimately more ambitious than enlightening.

In its cinematic approach, though, the film is as slick as any Hollywood thriller, directed by Fernando Meirelles with visual flourishes - jazzy editing, lurid colors, crackling sound effects - that dilute the impact of what might have been an indelible cautionary tale.

This is the ultimate Woo movie, but while his fans will enjoy every minute, others will find it too long, repetitive, and violent.

The movie has magical moments, but it's too contrived to gather much comic or dramatic power.

Described in the film's production notes as a "classic French comedy" – although I've never heard of it – and perhaps this is the core problem. French farce doesn't mix well with English gooniness.

Val Kilmer is fun as the mercurial hero, and Elisabeth Shue would be great as the physicist if she didn't waste so much time making googoo-eyes at her handsome new boyfriend.

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

Much of the acting is energetically good. Moviegoers familiar with "Fargo" and "Red Rock West" will find this adventure eerily familiar.

The result is hardly a subtle film, but it has a stronger sense of combat's real costs and consequences than more sensationalistic pictures like "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers" provide.

There's not enough substance to support the sentiment of this longish comedy-drama.

Just a few years ago, the generally felt aspiration of ethnic groups was to blend in with the majority culture. Today it's to flourish in modern society while actively remembering old-country values...Bend It Like Beckham could cement the trend.

Bad movies invariably stem from bad ideas, and the worst of the several rancid ideas packed inside of Dan in Real Life is that Steve Carell could be the new Alan Alda.

An inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy. Coppola has made some of the greatest films ever made in traditional narrative mode, but whenever he goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.

The story is shamelessly corny, and grown-ups will groan at its cliches. It's vividly filmed and energetically acted, though, so youngsters new to outdoor-adventure movies should find it tremendously exciting. [14 Jan 1994, p.13]

The movie is reasonably smart and touching when it deals with the plight of a family on the rocks, but it pushes too many emotional buttons when the ex-wife is diagnosed with a fatal illness that proceeds to take over the story.

The movie would be better as a 30-minute short, though, since its shaky camera work and fuzzy images get monotonous after a while, and there's not much room for character development within the very limited plot.

Music buffs may wish there were a lot more Puccini and a little less talking-head chitchat.

The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.

Strains too hard to seem smart and savvy.

The title means "The Swamp," and you may feel you're in one after 103 minutes with such a generally unlikable gang.

AT once an old-fashioned adventure and a postmodern pastiche, The Quick and the Dead walks a slim tightrope with impressive skill and humor. Its main reference point is the work of Sergio Leone, the Italian maestro whose "spaghetti westerns" reinvigorated the genre during its last major phase about 30 years ago. [13 Feb 1995, p.13]

No better than the first – which means it will probably be creamed by critics and make a jillion dollars. But really, standards are standards.

Skillfully acted, idealized, uneven.

For all the special effects – like its predecessor, this is in 3-D – the film coasts on Johnson being charming and Caine being Caine.

Barrymore and Busey walk away with the acting honors, but no aspect of the picture is more than mildly entertaining.

The action is fast, furious, and as wacky as science fantasy gets.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

Zellweger is as charming as ever, and it's good to find LaBute working with a script by writers who don't fully share his crabbed, cramped view of human nature.

Almost every scene is pitched for dewy sympathy. Madsen, a strong actress who might have matched Freeman, is portrayed in varying shades of blandness. Even Freeman, good as his is, is held back here. His rock bottom isn't very rocky, and far from bottomless.

Ultimately, it's more an emotional hodgepodge than a compassionate look at real human problems.

Like many a Hollywood political drama, Lions for Lambs carries a full head of steam that is indistinguishable from a lot of hot air.

Much of the action seems more like warmed-over Quentin Tarantino than first-rate Steven Soderbergh.

If none of this seems particularly fresh, you're right. "T3" is strikingly similar to "T2" and "T," reflecting Hollywood's reluctance to tamper with a hit series.

The drama is long on 1950s atmosphere and complicated feelings, short on emotional depth and real psychological insight.

Joe Eszterhas's screenplay is vastly more thoughtful than his scripts for "Basic Instinct" and its ilk, but the storytelling is too spotty for the movie to become the effective moral tale it might have been.

The story evokes a lot of varied emotions, but none runs more than an inch below skin deep.

The omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange, stringy white-gray hair flowing, and Daniel Brühl is Domscheit-Berg. Condon and his screenwriter Josh Singer don’t quite know what to make of this duo, perhaps because the men didn’t quite know what to make of each other, either.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

Sweetie is imaginatively filmed, but it's sadly mean-spirited, too. For all its cleverness, it left a mighty sour taste in my mouth. [29 Jan 1990, p.11]

The story is slow and corny, but Whitaker gives commendable dignity to his everyday characters, and the acting is emotionally strong as long as the male romantic interest (Connick) isn't around.

The trouble with Chicago is the sense it conveys that nothing is really at stake -- there's no moral or ethical question that can't be turned into toe-tapping fun.

The Young Karl Marx disappointingly resembles for the most part a conventional biopic. It has little depth, either political or psychological.

Wesley Snipes is terrific as the hero.

The comedy as a whole is very slight.

The movie wastes a good opportunity to look at important questions, such as who's responsible for American policy when the president is busy killing terrorists.

An odd amalgam of soap opera and street-level realism, with, alas, the former trumping the latter.

Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.

Campion is an imaginative filmmaker, but here she reduces a fascinating subject to a two-character soap opera that often seems contrived on both spiritual and psychological levels.

Rodin, directed by Jacques Doillon and starring Vincent Lindon as the great Parisian sculptor, does not, to put it charitably, add to the very small roster of Great Artist movies (such as “Lust for Life” and “Vincent & Theo”).

Seems more clever than heartfelt, and whether you enjoy it may depend on how much you like Robert Altman's eccentric western "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," which it uncannily resembles.

The subject is crucially important, but the movie dilutes its impact with by-the-numbers filmmaking, and Cheadle's one-note performance displays few of his acting gifts.

Like its predecessor, it's a hugely ambitious picture...But also like its predecessor, it cares far more about action, adventure, and violence than feelings, relationships, and ideas.

It's a serviceable picture, but hardly a top-notch vehicle for Washington's remarkable gifts.

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

The story meanders, but the subject is timely and important.

Alas, the movie isn't nearly as amusing as its premise, but it's refreshingly different from most run-of-the-mill teenage fare.

The story is so important and compelling that you wish Jewison had treated it more as an urgent wake-up call than a by-the-numbers morality play.

It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.

Nicely acted and capably directed, but hardly memorable.

The acting is solid, but Tony Pierce-Roberts's unimaginative camera work falls short of his highest standard.

As featherweight as its title, but Lyonne gives a winning performance and the mischievous story packs a few good laughs.

The plot is promising and the acting is earnest, but in the end the movie doesn't quite work.

Denis's pungent images create a nightmarish mood but don't bring full artistic coherence to her odd mix of gothic horror and postmodern reverie.