It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.

Hammer plays the Lone Ranger as a clueless, stolid square, and the resulting contrast with Depp’s cartoonishness isn’t odd-couple funny, just blah.

Another Stakeout boasts a fine cast, but the writing is so uneven and the plot so poorly developed that the film's few amusing moments get lost. The talents of Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez seem wasted on this lumbering farce.

A fumbling comedy directed by Dennis Dugan that could have benefitted from surgical reconstruction. How about some liposuction to siphon off all those lame jokes?

Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.

Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.

I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.

The only saving grace is that this time around, the script (yes, there is one, and it was concocted by Ehren Kruger) has occasional wisps of lucidity, and Bay delivers – overdelivers – on the mayhem.

Soppy, schematic weepie.

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

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

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]

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.

Not a sterling example of how to make a high-toned weepie, let alone a serious examination of trauma.

Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.

Unearths not only those thirty-three miners but also several thousand tons of clichés.

Sorrentino’s magic is all smoke and mirrors. People calling this movie a visual feast must be awfully famished.

Practically every gag in this movie, and there are scores of them, is milked dry. When the gags aren’t very good to begin to with, this is a prescription for disaster.

The only surprise to me about this movie is that there no jokes about kilts – a serious omission in an otherwise entirely predictable farce.

It’s a clunky, over-the-hill gang escapade enlivened only by the presence of the three Oscar winners, all of whom are so far beyond the movie’s meager demands that to say the actors are overqualified would be the grossest of understatements.

Both Jolie Pitt and Pitt have demonstrated their chops in far better movies. I suspect the problem here is that there was no one around to tell them, “Please don’t. Please. Don’t.”

The film also seems to end at least four times, which is three times too many. Better yet, it never should have started.

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.

Seven Pounds, coming after "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "I Am Legend," seems like the third in a trilogy of inspirational bummers.

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.

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

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

What begins as a pretty good comedy devolves rapidly into a high-flown example of Hollywood messagemongering.