Depardieu gives the story a firm center of gravity, aided by Joffé's eye for colorful settings and period detail.

Bravo works too hard at extolling Castro -- The film's historical footage is compelling, though, and provides plenty to think about.

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

This semiexpressionist fantasia is a botch.

Too often Churchill feels more like an exposé than a deep-dish psychological exploration

The action is dynamically filmed and Willis is at his best. Suspense is soon hijacked by outright gore and grisliness, though.

Funny dialogue, crisp black-and-white cinematography, and a well-chosen cast of mostly stage-trained actors raise this eccentric fantasy a notch above the ordinary.

the strongest emotion it whips up is an overwhelming desire to stop your ears against the stupid dialogue, bombastic sound effects, and atrocious music that assaults you every second - courtesy of Dynamic Digital Sound, a diabolical new development in technological overkill. Surely no good movie would feel the need to be so loud. [25 Jun 1993]

Kitano's first major comedy is loose and likable.

The best reason to see It Runs in the Family is the sight of unquenchable Kirk.

The pace of this Bolivia/US coproduction is slower than that of a snail, but it gathers some interest as the themes of the vignettes dovetail near the end.

Because most movies about Holocaust saviors feature Jews as victims rather than as rescuers, Walking With the Enemy, by contrast, has a special cachet. But the film is as dramatically inert as its origins are inspirational.

The acting is endearing and the story has great charm before predictability and sentimentality eventually take over.

I'd like Head of State better if it had less cartoonish violence, and if its gags weren't so predictable. Rock is in fine comic form, though, and his directing debut shows real promise.

Much of the movie exploits its subject for low-grade laughs, but in the end it takes a foursquare stand against the sleazy business it portrays, exposing its capacity for decadence and degradation.

The blue humor in We’re the Millers is just bland. And yes, Aniston performs a (modified) striptease. That’s pretty bland, too.

It's as if the filmmakers were hungover from the first film and wanted to make a violent action movie instead.

Weak acting, even by Hoffman. Aniston is so far above this material she should never, ever have signed on.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

Watts is wonderful, and the story's forsaken-child theme still has plenty of horrific power.

More psychological realism and less showy cinema would have made this offbeat melodrama more memorable.

Henderson steals the show as an elderly African-American man befriended by one of the main characters.

This visually inventive fantasy paints the wide screen with colorful effects, but its psychological and spiritual ideas rarely rise above "new age" fuzziness.

Shyamalan remains a stilted screenwriter, but Roger Deakins's cinematography is spooky, creepy, eerie all the way.

The movie catches occasional fire when Bridget suddenly says what's really on her mind. The rest is silliness.

The movie paints a vivid portrait of a time and place, but falls back on familiar formulas that diminish its value as both emotional drama and slice-of-life realism.

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

Directed by Martin Sheen, the picture works hard to be socially and psychologically penetrating but doesn't quite make the grade. [15 Mar 1991, p.12]

As the depraved John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, Johnny Depp adds yet another sly sleazoid to his burgeoning portrait gallery.

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

Falls flat on screen, weighed down by far-fetched plot twists.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

De Niro, in what amounts to an extended cameo, is radically miscast. That's still no excuse for his nonperformance, which is beyond lackluster.

Good acting and an effectively claustrophobic mood compensate for a story that doesn't add up to much in the long run.

The comedy is often crass and crude, but it makes telling points about how much of "race" is more about the words and gestures we use than the actual colors of our skins.

Harrelson hits just the right sardonic note in this self-mocking crime drama, but look out for grisly touches along the way.

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.

The fact remains that some Treks are better than others, and ''The Final Frontier'' doesn't have the surprising warmth of the very best. It's diverting, but forgettable. [19 June 1989, p.15]

The CGI effects in this film, directed by Brad Peyton, are quite remarkable and help take one’s mind off the cornball disaster-brings-families-together underpinnings.

The film is a dutiful attempt to convey some of the vehemence of the novel – of the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s especially – but McGregor, making his directorial debut, lacks the temperament to do this era justice. He’s an innocent bystander in the melee.

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

This is one of those movies that profits from very low expectations. If you go in expecting something dreadful, be assured: It's only near dreadful.

Has amusing bits of social satire, but they're crowded out of the stable by lots of bathroom and barnyard humor.

Lively acting and stylish directing make this an engaging comedy-drama, although its attitude toward guns and violence is disconcertingly romantic.

Uninspired thriller-comedy.

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]

Likable performances, but the story's brash and hyper, though sweet, delivery grows wearing, especially the sexual innuendo.

It's always hard to predict what Winterbottom will try next, but this experiment isn't worth repeating, the lively concert scenes notwithstanding. Be forewarned that the sexual scenes aren't simulated.

The story is irresponsible and the filmmaking is awful.

It delivers all the raunch and ribaldry its designated audience could hope for, but others may find it more deliberately disgusting than effervescently outrageous.

The story is less original than its setting - it knocks off everything from "Lord of the Flies" to "The Blair Witch Project" -and its unromantic moods may make DiCaprio's countless "Titanic" fans want to swim in the opposite direction.

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.

The suspense sequences are straight from the standard Hollywood blueprint, and the movie as a whole is so sloppily assembled that it's almost incoherent at times.

This romantic adventure is corny fun, and it's amusing to hear Sean Connery's elegant Scottish accent jangle against Lorraine Bracco's feisty Bronx twang. The movie is more picturesque than memorable, though. [13 Feb 1992, p.13]

Braff plays Aidan with easygoing exasperation and Hudson is better than I’ve seen her since “Almost Famous.” As a director, Braff touches on lots of Big Themes: mortality, marriage, fatherhood, the disillusion of dreams. Nothing quite comes to full boil, though.

Director Len Wiseman is good on action, and Patrick Tatopoulus's dystopic production design is within hailing distance of "Blade Runner," his chief influence. But essentially this is a big-screen video game.

Although overlong, the picture has a fair measure of jolts and surprises.

Woo's customary action-film pyrotechnics gather more substance than usual from the implausible but inventive plot, drawn from a Philip K. Dick story.

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.

Woody Harrelson, Randy Quaid, and Bill Murray give riotous performances, but be warned that the comedy is overloaded with gross-out humor from beginning to end.

Disney's Hocus Pocus, if frequently saccharine, at least has the power to engage the viewer.

The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything.

Halfway through the movie, I decided a better title for this weepie contraption would be “The Hurt Letter.”

The filmmakers can't decide what sort of picture they're trying to cook up, so they keep oscillating among shallow psychological drama, high-tech action sequences, and comedy scenes that are themselves an uneasy mixture of sitcom-style dialogue and self-mocking campiness.

Clumsy filmmaking and a hoked-up screenplay make this a strong contender for worst picture of the year. [13 Nov 1987, p.21]

Morgan is a wonderful writer when he's working from the headlines, but his "personal" movies, like "Hereafter" and this one, release a bleary, pseudo-profound aspect of his talent that's best left in the dark.

If Freedomland reminds you of Spike Lee's "Clockers," that's not by accident. Like that film, it's adapted by Richard Price from his novel and is set in the neighboring Northern New Jersey communities of Dempsy, predominantly poor and African-American, and the largely white blue-collar suburb of Gannon.

There's nothing fresh or off-beat in Final Destination 3, no talent that is struggling to get out. The only thing struggling to get out was me from the theater.

The dialogue is utterly inane, but the high-tech effects deliver the sort of thrills that disaster-film connoisseurs expect.

Eddie Murphy is one of the most alarmingly gifted comic actors America has ever produced but he persists in making comedies that are beneath him.

Brest deserves credit for letting the story unfold at a thoughtful pace, but the drama falls apart in the last half-hour, gushing with exaggerated emotions and abandoning its fairy-tale premises for an unconvincing feel-good finale.

This sentimental drama is wildly uneven as it switches between ballpark scenes, which are very involving, and romantic episodes, which are badly overplayed.

Whatever novelty this series ever possessed has gone down the proverbial tube. The actors are on autopilot, and Adam Herz's screenplay panders to its immature target audience so cravenly and relentlessly that it verges on incompetence.

Dumont's methods are radical, but there's a fascinating method to his seeming cinematic madness.

Verhoeven's lurid thriller has moments of welcome self-parody, but most of the action manages to be sensationalistic, homophobic, and tedious at the same time. [20 Mar 1992, Arts, p.12]

The murder-mystery plot is told in rough-and-tumble style, full of sound and fury but signifying almost nothing in the end.

Benton builds the yarn carefully, drawing us into a web of suspense with a string of deftly timed surprises. But after a while, you get the feeling you've seen this all before. [02 Dec 1982, p.19]

Director Marc Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller take the easy way out by turning Childers into a Bible-thumping Rambo. Just because the Childers of this movie is not, to put it mildly, introspective, is no reason why the filmmakers had to be equally dense.

Joseph Zito directed this cheap exercise in hate, suspicion, and mayhem. [06 Dec 1984, p.50]

What emerges most strongly, though, is a staggering degree of ignorance among everyday Americans about the basic meanings of democracy, liberty, and national security. [20 Aug 2004, p.15]

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

If a movie that uses the word "relationship" 7,000 times puts your teeth on edge, stay away.

Brooklyn’s Finest does indeed provide a new genre twist. This must be the only cop movie ever made where a character is driven off the deep end by mold.

MESSAGE Nuclear blackmail is a horrible crime but can be defeated by vigilant and courageous authorities.

The drama is likably low-key but builds little excitement, and Bowie's star billing says more about the power of his agent than the number of scenes he appears in.

Youngsters may enjoy it. But the humor is generally of the genre heard in the boys' locker room at the high school gym.

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

As the murderer, Stanley Tucci is intensely creepy but, like almost everybody else in this movie, he’s more gothic figment than flesh and blood.

If you want a movie time trip, the 1960 version is a far smoother ride.

Wilson is the main reason to see The Big Bounce, where he's perfect as a reasonably smart guy who often seems to have no idea what he's getting into. The other reasons are a solid supporting cast.

It's technically impressive, but most of the better aspects of Sanctum would be almost – maybe exactly – as effective viewed the old-fashioned way.

Raising Cain will delight cinephiles with keen eyes and strong stomachs, but general audiences may find it more bothersome than brilliant. [10 Aug 1992, p.11]

Home of the Brave is a milestone of sorts. But it's a formulaic, overacted piece of work that rarely delves deep.

Hollywood has never been the best arena to hash out policy debates. But social-issue movies can have real societal impact. That's why Won't Back Down, which presses a lot of hot buttons, deserves to be taken seriously, and criticized seriously, on its own terms.

Brody has offbeat charisma, but it's no match for the corny dialogue he's given here, not to mention the "Wild at Heart" snakeskin jacket he wears.

Endearingly silly, but nowhere near as original or amusing as Pee-wee's Big Adventure a couple of years ago. [22 Jul 1988, p.19]

Moderately entertaining, periodically draggy, Transcendence is not as wacky-visionary as “The Matrix,” or nearly as lyrical as “Her.”

There’s a potentially good comedy to be made about old-school guys trying to make a go of it in a youth-dominated digital marketplace, but director Shawn Levy and screenwriter Jared Stern overdose on moronic excursions.