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.