Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.

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

For all its pretensions and intermittent power, is essentially high-grade claptrap.

Smith, it should be noted, has compared Neville in interviews to Job. Tone down the highfalutin references. In the end, this is a sci-fi zombie movie, folks.

Washington doesn’t look as if he’s having much fun, and who can blame him? Perhaps he agrees with me: Apocalypse movies, like apocalypse heroes, need some laughs, too.

May be accurate around the edges, but at its heart it's a fairy tale.

The whole thing is piffle, but it moves fast enough to stay entertaining.

Cruise is better than he’s been in a while because he damps down his usual all-intensity-all-the-time MO. He’s best here when his character seems the most scared. And Emily Blunt as a commando legend is indomitable, a credit to her exoskeleton.

There’s something borderline dishonest about the way Rosi intercuts the oblivious, life-goes-on Lampedusans with the harrowing, too-brief footage of Africans inside the immigration center and aboard the rescue ships. His stylistics keep these two groups cruelly apart, but who knows if this is the way things actually play out?

Rush isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s like a standard-issue male action programmer that somehow crept in from an earlier era.

Aside from these two actors (Downey/Rourke), Iron Man 2 isn’t much of a whoop-de-do.

Driver’s low-key charisma in the role rescues it from terminal dullness, and there are a few fine sidelights.

It's not only light, it's thin. It's self-deprecating to a fault. Reynolds is required to practically wink at the audience, as if to say,"I know this looks silly."

It's not "The Odd Couple," despite the nostalgic casting of the male leads, but it has a few laughs, and Matthau carries rubber-faced comedy into a new dimension. [7 Jan 1994]

Hartley is very adept with actors, though – or at least some of them. Posey, for her part, displays a pert quizzical quality that's very charming and very funny. And Goldblum is tailor-made for Hartley's minimalist patter.

Director Francis Lawrence stages the action sequences, both aboveground and underground, with a modicum of flair, and Julianne Moore as rebel leader Coin gives off some sparks – she’s a reformer with a totalitarian streak – but for the most part there is nothing divertingly new or different about this franchise fade-out.

What we're left with is outrage in a vacuum. It's impossible to separate out the stop-loss tactic from the misadventures of the war itself, and that's what this film, to its discredit, accomplishes.

It boasts appealing performances, and it takes a reasonably tasteful approach to its subject, aside from a string of four-letter words that sound strangely out of place in this romantic comedy.

The film itself vaporizes before your eyes, but it’s likable. Given its unstable mishmash of thuggery and whimsy, that’s something of an achievement.

Melvin Van Peebles gets the idolatrous treatment in this documentary by first-time director Joe Angio that traces his subject's career as San Francisco cable-car conductor, rap pioneer, filmmaker, Broadway producer, stockbroker, and all-around womanizer.

Setsuko’s pathetic attempt to claim a new life for herself is touching. The film never makes fun of her.

At times, “Homecoming” resembles a very good after-school special embedded in a cacophonous franchise flick. That’s probably not the demographic the filmmakers were most hoping to please.

It's all rather sweet but instantly evanescent.

Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in "Little Miss Sunshine."

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

Gene Hackman is solid as the hero, and Dennis Hopper does his best screen work ever. [6 Mar 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

The action is fast and involving until the three-quarter mark, when the David Himmelstein screenplay loses its focus and everything muddies up. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?