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

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

This sexually explicit South Korean drama aims more to jolt than to illuminate, but it illustrates an aspect of Asian cinema that globally minded moviegoers should know about as films from that region take on more international prominence.

A perfectly funny idea -- call it "Ms. Ditz Goes to Washington" -- that's never allowed to take on real comic life. I laughed exactly once.

Effective action, solid suspense, excellent Ribisi, plus enough clichés to equal the grains of Gobi sand that fill the screen.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

The film has so many moodswings that watching it induces whiplash, and just about everybody in it, from Winslet on down to Judy Davis, playing the dressmaker’s crotchety mother, flagrantly overdoes it.

Director John Byrum's idea of evoking the past is to usher a parade of overblown cliches across the screen. [15 Nov 1984, p.47]

Bids for originality by focusing on an offbeat profession. Every other aspect is pretty stale, though, from the smart-alecky characters to the romantic-triangle plot.

Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.

The trouble lies in its stereotypical style, its schmaltzy emotionalism.

Worth viewing by anyone concerned about world events.

Spacey is endearing, bringing his shy character to life despite glaring psychological gaps in the screenplay.

Plunges energetically into the 16th-century religious rebel's activities and philosophies. It dodges some significant issues in Luther's life, however, reducing its value as an educational film.

Falls flat, with more "sound design" than delicious music, more slick film editing than graceful ballroom gliding.

What keeps the film watchable, aside from the vibrant musical numbers in the nightclub, is Garcia's obvious love for the Cuba of his ancestors, of his dreams. A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch.

The violent story is long on nastiness, short on credibility.

All this amounts to a badly wasted opportunity, since global warming is a serious issue that deserves thoughtful treatment. So stay home and read a scientific journal instead. This is a disaster movie that lives up to its label.

The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked one, made me long to re-watch "Zorro the Gay Blade," the great spoof starring George Hamilton. In that film, the Spanish accents were meant to sound deliberately fake.

The romantic comedy 27 Dresses will work best for people who have never seen a romantic comedy. If you have, you might find it amusing to tally up the steals – I mean, homages.

Arnold Schwarzenegger fights an outer-space monster in a third-world jungle. The monster never has a chance. Neither does the jungle. Neither does the audience. [19 June 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

For most of its two-hour running time it simply flings a barrage of horrors at the audience, enhanced with the most imaginative science-fiction atmospherics this side of "Dark City," which incidentally was a far more original picture.

Lively acting, eye-catching cinematography, and funny dialogue lift this fantasy a notch above the average until love-story cliches and horror-movie shocks bog it down.

The story is a mess, as usual with Toback's movies, but intricacies of contemporary urban culture are vividly illuminated by his insistence on blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Quite appealing, thanks to good-humored acting and to Martha Coolidge's quiet directing style. She lets romance and comedy bubble up from the characters instead of imposing gimmicky twists on the story.

The first hour is sharply directed, character-driven drama that ranks with Scott's best work. Then he lapses into his usual mode - more a bombardier than an entertainer, filling the screen with sadistic violence and arbitrary plot twists. In all, a wasted opportunity.

Leaving aside Huston's bland acting and a few other flaws, Sayles's politically charged drama raises a rousing number of issues and ideas, inviting us to ponder them and draw our own conclusions.

Utterly predictable, but pleasant enough for its young target audience.

The trouble with pet projects is that too often they are unduly do-goody, and so it is here.

This is standard plot material in most respects, and Kasdan has done little to make it seem new. Fans of time-tested formulas may applaud his fidelity to the genre, but others will wish he'd come up with a few original notions to energize this very long picture.

Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.

Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.

What remains discomforting is their sheer failure to be funny.

By the time it ended, I'd stopped caring. I suspect most moviegoers will do the same. Here's hoping Shelton scurries back to the athletic world in a hurry.

The plot pants so hard -- that it makes less sense than the average pet-food commercial.

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

In short, it's dull, derivative, and as lifelike as a heap of historical figurines. Few will remember this Alamo for long.

Like its precursor, U.S. Marshals has lots of action and the Jones groupies are likeable. Though the overall picture isn't as fine-tuned or character driven, it still delivers what moviegoers want to see - a fast-paced and entertaining chase.

The plot isn't scary, but the low level of filmmaking will have you shivering in your seat. [13 Jul 1988, p.19]

It's so slavishly similar to its predecessor - right down to the symbolic lettering on Marion's license plates - that there's little to spark fresh discussion except the acting.

None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

An ingeniously scripted psychological thriller.

It probably won't matter to its core audience that The A-Team doesn't make a lick of sense.

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.

Energetic acting helps compensate for a contrived script and directing that's sometimes as heavy as its cheerfully rotund characters.

Although it's slavishly similar to the original Home Alone, which was a colossal hit, this sequel has lots of color and Christmas warmth to recommend it.

The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.

Romantic comedy about a bridegroom-to-be who gets sidetracked on the way to his wedding, especially by an unexpected traveling companion who's both free-spirited and beautiful.

The story is spotty, but the acting is fine, especially when Walken is around.

This one doesn't have enough zesty ideas to revive the breed.

The script by Allan Loeb careens all over the place without ever coming to rest on anything interesting.

Movies don’t become great by association, and Wonder Wheel is a far cry from “Streetcar.” There are ample flaws in this film, but they certainly don’t rise to the level of tragic.

An interesting cast is wasted in this misanthropic thriller.

The animals are cute and Murphy gives a lively performance, but as with his remake of "The Nutty Professor," the original is still the best.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

Hal Hartley's innovative comedy-drama is more ambitious than successful, but it deserves credit for trying something genuinely unusual.

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

Awash in spurious sentimentality and sniping.

There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.

Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel helped open society's eyes to the evils of pedophilia in the 1950s, and this pensive adaptation renews the warning for a later generation.

Daldry and his screenwriter Eric Roth make the mistake of showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers – it's a mistake because its graphic power seems more exploitative than cathartic – but they otherwise thankfully refrain from pulling out all the stops.

The costumes and design are gorgeous enough to distract us from the wildly erratic tone – some of the time.

One of the season's most watchable treats.

Spacey is almost as swinging as Darin was, but his filmmaking leans toward tried-and-true formulas.

Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?

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

I don't mean to imply that this film is any good or that it contains an ounce of genuine insight. But as a template for the big-baby genre, it's invaluable.

Barely engaging spy thriller.

The combination of caveman dialogue, overcooked action, and anything-for-an-effect performances is maddeningly crude even by cop-movie standards. [22 May 1987, p.23]

The subject is intriguing even if the dialogue is stilted and the acting is uneven.

Best when it's morphing into seriousness. Too often the comic bits seem like sops to the audience.

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

Light, slow, funny one-liners.

Desplechin wants to film an adventure of the human spirit in the manner of a Hitchcockian drama, but he doesn't have a solid enough grasp of English culture to equal the complexity of his French productions like "The Sentinel" and "The Life of the Dead."

All so fast and frenetic.

Depp gives a smart, subtle performance, and Turturro is terrific as a foe who's both exactly what he seems and exactly the opposite. Koepp's makes his (literally) corny tricks seemfresh and surprising.

What begins as healthy skepticism in Mr. Pyne's screenplay is subjected to so many twists that it grows into sour cynicism, spread thinly over so many characters and events that it los es its impact...This isn't the first time that shallow notions of entertainment value have taken over what could have been a thought-provoking thriller. It's too bad the strengths of "White Sands" aren't parlayed into a more meaningful experience.

Movie stars have tamed sassy kids in movies from "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Stand and Deliver," but it's hard to remember an example more patronizing or sentimentalized than this one.

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.

Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.

Both as a writer and as a man, Salinger was nothing if not unconventional. Rebel in the Rye is so tasteful that it practically slides off the screen.

The Da Vinci Code is so transparently pitched as pulp entertainment that, in the end, it's about as subversive as "Starsky and Hutch."

The results are more sleazy than insightful.

Carrey is excellent, making the most of his comic gifts even in a cumbersome Grinch outfit, and the eye-spinning color scheme is dazzling to behold.

Quite a time capsule, sampling various mid-century entertainment forms.

The screenplay doesn't ultimately make much sense. Carrey is a unique comic talent, though, and Freeman and Aniston back him up with such sensitive supporting performances that the film almost works if you can suspend enough disbelief to swallow its fantastic premise.

The movie is Allen's most successful in years, even if you don't see it as a self-made commentary on his own career. Credit goes less to the comic dialogue than to the razor-sharp performances of an excellent cast.

Bataille was a serious philosopher as well as a sensation-seeking writer, but you'd never guess his provocative ideas from this updated version.

Horror fans will find plenty to shriek about. Everyone else should keep their distance.

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

What makes the picture special is its muted atmosphere, its way of concentrating on the human dimensions of the plot without slipping into pathos, sensationalism, or even melodrama. [18 Nov 1982, p.19]

There's nothing wrong with it, exactly. But there's nothing to recommend it, either, except its generally good nature, which gets rathers strained during an overlong climax full of speeding cars and exploding motorboats. [10 Sep 1981, p.19]

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

The River doesn't live up to its ambitions. [03 Jan 1985, p.27]