Even if Zhao and her co-screenwriters were more adept at establishing the family-style togetherness of the Eternals, the emotional continuity is shattered by the incessant time tripping and globe hopping. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings in South Dakota, you suddenly find yourself in Mesopotamia.

In its final half-hour, all the stops are pulled. The movie is still wildly implausible but at least it's hurtling forward. The only thing missing from the proceedings is a windmill for John to tilt at.

The message of the film is that life isn't neat and predictable like a well-arranged business trip; yet everything in the picture is so calculated that there's no life to it. [23 Dec 1988, A& L, p.19]

Well acted and ably directed, if not very probing about its subject of underclass youth.

Alexandre Aja directs in full glop mode and the cast includes a few performers, including Ted Levine (from "Monk"), Robert Joy, and Kathleen Quinlan, who probably wish they were elsewhere.

There's something relentlessly superficial about the movie, and in one area that cries out for sensitivity - the treatment of racial differences among the characters - it falls down badly. [22 Aug 1990, Arts, p.11]

Electric Dreams tries to be as up to the minute as the latest rock video. But it looks more like a tired holdover from the ''psychedelic'' 1960s, another time when frantic visual effects were all the rage, and people rarely stopped to wonder what the point was.

The story is as simple as the average football cheer, but the dialogue has amusing echoes of "Clueless," and Dunst and Bradford make a mighty cute couple.

Rarely has a dance movie done so many cinematic pirouettes with such a graceful sense of audience-pleasing fun.

The problem with Possession isn't that it's filmed in a lackluster way, but that it shouldn't have been filmed at all. Byatt's novel is an adventure in language, telling its story through a kaleidoscopic array of Victorian-style poetry and prose, alongside gripping accounts of the characters' activities and escapades.

Konchalovsky keeps the action reasonably quick, but sentimental storytelling eventually swamps the picture.

This exceedingly romantic comedy begins with flair but lapses into clichés long before the sentimental (and predictable) finale.

It's campy fun, but if you've seen the previous sequels, the plot grows tiresome and lacks shock value.

The screenplay by Kevin Williamson ("Scream") keeps the lighting low and the tension high, though a bit more wit would have helped.

The end product is so clunky, scattered, and all-around soggy that sometimes you can't help laughing. At least Connelly and Reilly give their all, and Tim Roth is terrific as a weird lawyer.

The result can be viewed as an uproarious satire of science fiction in the "Independence Day" mold, or as a rehash of "Gremlins" without the novelty of the original.

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

It’s unfortunate, if predictable, that Hollywood found it necessary to almost entirely eliminate deep think in favor of deep action. As for Johansson, I have no big problem with cross-racial casting, but she’s so glum and seemingly uncomfortable here that you wonder if maybe she didn’t harbor the same misgivings as her detractors.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

Goes on much too long, stretching a modest story into a marathon that outlasts its welcome by about 30 minutes.

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

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.

Paul Verhoeven's movie takes more action than ideas from Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel, which is just as well, considering the book's goofy suggestion that military veterans should control society from top to bottom.

By peeling back the layers of the characters on both sides of the issue, the movie offers a potent reminder that, often, policy debates become mired in talking points. The danger is that we’ll miss the human stories at the heart of such matters.

Ultimately more ambitious than enlightening.

Smart and entertaining almost every step of the way.

No doubt Be Kind Rewind will soon make its way to – um – DVD.

Fallen will sell tickets on the strength of its appealing cast and high-impact camera work, but will probably fade from the scene more quickly than its demonic villain does in the story.