While it's marvelously refreshing to observe Mother Nature obliterating L.A. and New York along with caricatures of ghastly world leaders, almost everything good is in the trailer, save perhaps brief run-ins with malevolent wolves and Ian Holm.

[The movie's subject] sounds like great movie material, but the film, except in flashes, doesn't do it justice.

Emperor gives off a distinctly musty odor -- not least because Kline's character.

Into the Blue drowns before it even surfaces.

A sharp and pungent distillation of the book. However, as far as the theme of childhood under duress goes, I found "My Life as a Dog" or the stridently Irish "Into the West" to be significantly more fulfilling.

Given the great premise and characters inherited from the first film, it's surprising that this sequel fails to match its predecessor's appeal. The humor is silly, broad, and surprisingly generic.

Eternal promises kink and delivers next to nothing.

The film looks great, but Wargnier is so heavy-handed in his portrayal of postwar Russia that it casts suspicions on the film's reliability as history.

Director Dwight Little, who has made many mediocre films as well as the gleefully gory Robert Englund version of "The Phantom of the Opera," gets at least one thing right -- he really does take time to establish the characters.

The sappy trappings that director Raymond De Felitta piles onto the burgeoning romance story line kills any spark that remains, despite the best efforts of the cast to keep it real.

Damon--as actor, not as co-screenwriter--is the best thing about Good Will Hunting.

The whole thing seems to meander aimlessly, rarely creating a chill.

Bean represents a dismal dumbing-down of a very bright creation. Is nothing sacred?

Even if there were a great movie here, it would have been undermined by two lead actors who are barely even there, asked to deliver lines they can't handle: Bale, playing the Batman with clipped wings, and Katie Holmes as an assistant district attorney who doesn't have the gravitas to pass as an intern. Come back, Alicia Silverstone; all is forgiven.

Comes straight out of the Forrest Gump School of Interpersonal Magic, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

The heist itself is quite nicely filmed herein, but unfortunately, getting to it requires sitting through a bunch of noisy, fussy crap, from the overly busy soundtrack to the irritating narration of stoned guy Leonardo Nam.

The movie's a bust in myriad ways, especially because almost every scene possesses the oily feel of manipulation and condescension.

Imagine a feature-length version of the "Large Marge" sequence from "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and you won't be too far off, only that was scarier.

Aims to be loud, dumb fun, only it takes itself too seriously to offer anything approaching a good time.

It's easy to ignore these knockoff movie versions of retro TV shows, because they're almost always atrociously made. But it can be instructive to watch them because of the template they provide for culture compare-and-contrast between the old show's era and ours.

It's a kiddie comedy that really shouldn't be on the big screen at all; it has all the creative range of an Afterschool Special.

Taylor and Pearce just aren't believable.

Why would the writers bother with narrative when the story is just something that kills time, and brain cells, between feats and fists of fury?

October Sky may be set around coal mines, but ultimately it's Field of Corn, Part II.

Visit Red Planet, and you'll boldly go where everyone has gone before.

It tries to be both camp and action film--send-up and kick-ass. But it delivers so little on both fronts.

The only thing The Missing isn't missing is a handful of climaxes, all of them of the anti- variety that leave you believing, then praying the movie's over a good 30 minutes before its actual and inevitable finale.

It's all a big, boring failure of slapstick and degradation. Of course, that's not to say your kids won't like it.

Fails dramatically as well as ideologically.

Plays like a greatest-hits remix; like "Die Another Day," it's bent on resurrecting a moribund franchise by recalling all the things you used to love about it till you grew into big-boy pants.

A spin-off of a sequel... It doesn't even try to be different, because it assumes the moviegoer wants only the same-ol' and then offers even less.

It's been said that a thriller is only as good as its chief villain, and, in the same way, most noirs are only as good as their suckers. Palmetto has a good sucker but not much else.

Redundant to the point of being absolutely pointless, a sequel that's almost a note-for-note, beat-for-beat redo of its predecessor, only with all the entertaining stuff left out.

As the movie enters its final chapter, you will come to the sad, sickening realization that the filmmakers have played you for a chump. What seemed so smart, so well crafted and finely tuned, falls apart into a flaming heap of c---, and all goodwill is dashed.

You'll get that $8 nap you've been craving.

It all feels disorienting and truncated, as if the script, by Ted Tally, who also adapted "Silence of the Lambs," was a harried summary of the book.

Before things have even begun we know how they will end; this is pure Hollywood product, slicker than the insides of an oilcan.

A little too loud, and a lot too boring.

Although the movie doesn't go in for quick fixes, it's not particularly revelatory or insightful. It's a textbook paradigm of grief, loss, and regrouping laid out in three acts.

This is fun for a while, but the ending is so ridiculous, and obvious, as to sully all the small joys that come before it.

Certainly it exists solely to sell a soundtrack; the movie, like most made for teens, is well beside the point.

It's a plot more worn out than the tinsel boxed up in the attic. In the end, they've given us a Christmas gift barely worth returning.

Undermines itself with tabloid-style narration, overly emphatic graphics, and a sensationalistic tone.

What this Reagan movie really needed was . . . more Reagan. None of his admirers have his charisma, and none of the footage here is surprising. Fox News could easily produce a better film.

Along with his tedious array of tricks and twists, Parkhill stuffs the film with enough dizzying flashbacks, camera jitters and rock-and-roll editing techniques to drive a 14-year-old MTV addict nuts.

The title pretty much says it all: syrupy romantic comedy dripping with unearned sentiment.

Sadly, though, the movie as a whole feels blatantly dedicated to fleecin' da kidz.

Don't expect to be wowed by a vast spectrum of delicacies, as the buffet here is composed of entirely obvious ingredients.

This film about sex is so joyless, so astonishingly unsexy, it's like watching porn with your grandfather going tsk-tsk-tsk over your shoulder for two hours.

In the end, The Apostle feels like a con, a movie that embraces its contradictions only because it's not smart enough to reconcile them; everything feels complex, but, in fact, it's far too simple.

A romantic adventure-movie slapstick that's too screwy for the action crowd and too old-fashioned for the Home Alone contingent.

All the new plot stuff is way old hat, as though straight from a textbook chapter called "Conflict Drives Your Narrative!" And at times the motivations are either unclear or senseless.

More than just a disappointment. It is also a spoiler, possibly weakening the impact of "Silence" for its fans.

What makes the claptrap in Starship Troopers so flabbergasting is that it's monumentally scaled.

It's sweet and well intentioned, with occasional amusing moments.

A comic-book movie unashamed of its roots, meaning it's unabashed about being silly, overwrought nonsense, which works to its benefit--so much so that you're almost rooting for it by the end.

The movie comes off as willfully eccentric when it should have been charmingly touching.

Has its heart in the right place, but its head seems to be lost in a swirling maelstrom of teen movies that have come before.

It may have been the perfect storm, but this is the imperfect movie.

Peet is still adorable, and a couple of twists enliven the plot, but the jokes are lame, the timing is off, the physical pratfalls are too broad, and there's still no chemistry between Perry and Henstridge.

John Grisham's The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie!

An hour of dour stagnation is a lot to take, even with good acting. So when the action finally does shift, toward the end of the film, it is a welcome relief.

It's just a familiar bore, offering chills and thrills only to those who have never seen a movie before.

Aside from a single jazzy image of Hunt taking a nosedive off a Shanghai skyscraper, Abrams' movie is too oppressive, too enamored of its brutality to deliver anything like real thrills; its deeply unpleasant tone nearly makes you long even for Woo's cartoon absurdities.

Surviving Picasso falters in its careless structure.

A mostly well-constructed action flick with a number of flashy, well-choreographed fight and chase scenes.

Not good enough to overcome its status as damaged goods, which is almost a shame, since audiences will miss Billy Bob Thornton's best performance, and hairpiece, in years.

A very dull movie.

No matter how hard the filmmakers work their narrator (Geoffrey Rush, as Oscar's great-grandson), he can't make the damn thing explicable, much less bring it to life.

Very sketchily based upon "The Reluctant Debutante" (minus the charm, plot, and characterization).

Smith used to make movies to make fun of movies like Jersey Girl; now he's just another guy working the assembly line, which won't make you a sell-out if no one buys it.

The supposedly funny quips and shrugs that fill Jakob the Liar are tepid at best and embarrassingly shticky at worst. Some are simply in bad taste.

Never quite works, despite the wonderful performances or the decency in the screenplay's margins.

The 3D, effective but not yet totally awesome, masks a world of sins: Ghosts can be an awfully tedious voyage-to-the-bottom-of-the-sea.

Manages to be gruesome and grisly, but not particularly creepy or frightening.

It is unfortunate that von Trotta does not trust her audience enough to think for themselves -- her themes are carved on a sledgehammer en route to our skulls.

Be forewarned: The rural Irish accents may be incomprehensible to viewers who aren't accustomed to them.

You will regret paying money to see something that unfolds rather like something you'd watch on TV when you're ill and bedridden and confronted with nothing else but daytime soaps.

It's dank, moody and sorrowful (all pros for this critic), but also tediously vague, thematically plodding and often eye-rollingly absurd in its grimness. Some may swoon; I yawned a lot.

The droll has been made dull, a most inexplicable and unfortunate turn of events for so adored a genius, goofball work as this.

Here, jokes are just as likely to end not in punch lines, but in uncomfortable silence, impenetrable irony or stomach flips.

Ryan never quite convinces us she's seen the inside of a fight gym, much less that she's worthy to be Rocky in a miniskirt. On the other hand, her director here was not Campion but actor Charles S. Dutton, whose behind-the-camera skills, developed via cable TV, tend toward the cartoonish.

If Alfred Hitchcock were retarded, lobotomized, and freshly dug up, he might possibly c--- out a movie like this one.

The fact that Romance was written and directed by a woman doesn't make the film any better; it simply makes it objectionable on other grounds.

If you were ever in marching band, you'll love this; if not, stay far away.

It's not really a kids' film, nor it is particularly funny, by either design or execution. It is, rather, Columbus' latest attempt at a comically tinged tearjerker.

No one is more blameworthy than Witherspoon...With her newfound clout and charm, she could make better films; instead, she strolls up to the audience standing in line at the ATM and demands we fork it over or else.

The film is often unintentionally silly, and it might have been better if it tried to be.

It's the solipsistic, obvious, misogynistic, and occasionally redeeming tale.

One can only assume all the, ah, good stuff landed on the cutting-room floor, because it sure as hell didn't make it to Mars.

Once the terror ends and the credits roll, we finally get to the best part: a merciful escape.

If you really want to live life to the fullest, step one is to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your life in a theater showing Last Holiday.

Some of this stuff should give you some good laughs. Unfortunately, the film's not a comedy, and once the conservative-bashing wears off, the alleged thriller elements kick in. Too bad that for you, the viewer, there's still another hour to go.

This sort of thing is the problem with making stuff up as you go along.

It's barely a movie at all, more like a thousand car commercials spliced together in an hour.

Pretentious yet devoid of poetry, left-of-center yet artless, this well-intentioned trudge does not exist to be enjoyed or appreciated so much as to be coddled and patronized as one would a retarded child.

Director Marcus Raboy hasn't made a bad movie, exactly -- just one that seems to have forgotten its own jokes, much as those who watch it will forget everything about it a week later, stoned or not.

There are enough good scenes within the 94 minutes of The Guru to make an entertaining coming-attractions trailer.