You don't go to this film for Sorkinesque repartee; you go for the world's longest chainsaw, or equal-opportunity genital mutilations, or very, very long bludgeonings. And here they are, in buckets.

Although the production establishes the requisite lived-in, small town feel, it has also chosen to take its dramatic cue from the seemingly sedated gaze of its lugubrious, aliens-obsessed protagonist, whom Le Gros portrays with a remarkable economy of expended energy.

The material gets away from him (Stuart) quickly, leaving emotionally forced, clunky filmmaking that feels simultaneously rushed and dawdling, like a chopped-down TV miniseries. (It even has natural commercial breaks.)

Though plenty of road-tested war truths about sacrifice, honor, grit and intimacy get trotted out, "Stalingrad" is deep down a spectacle campaign forged in operatic violence and a siege of the senses, and on those terms it has its moments.

The Good Night has flashes of bookish wit but never quite recovers from the metronomic monotony of its first half, which ticktocks between scenes of Paltrow braying and Cruz voguing.

It's unfortunate that Brown and company were unable to bring stronger narrative and filmmaking skills to this vital subject.

If you can get past the Eurocentric focus, there are worse ways to pass the time than to see The Children of Huang Shi, if only because the glimpse into the time and place are captivating and the images are gorgeous.

Dude, what made you refuse to screen your film for critics before it opened Friday? I'm betting you would have received an earful of praise for your writing and directing.

Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.

An uneven effort overall that when it is working has a strange, engaging energy that is often overturned by an uncertain staidness.

An amusing if slight excursion into nature with a group of animals who turn the tables on their collective nemeses, the hunters.

Here that soul-baring, soul-searching is the centerpiece of the film. Unfortunately, not much else about Lola Versus matches that standard.

With seemingly all the right pieces, it's a disappointment that The Promise lacks the energy and originality needed to sustain itself. It might be fresh material, but the approach is decidedly stale.

An elegant, poetic fable of endurance.

As the Farrellys have proved, tastelessness can be made palatable, but they've misfired with Me, Myself & Irene.

Seems at once overwhelmingly romantic and elliptical, yet all the while it has been building to a conclusion that is surprisingly affecting in the jolt of recognition it elicits.

Gondry captures the leafy radiance of the countryside, and he makes judicious use of special-effects whimsies. But this memory piece will have far more resonance for the Gondry family than for anyone else.

As horror movies go, this one's not especially tense or scary. Instead, it's eerie, provocative and at times ridiculously violent. The ending feels like a cop-out after so much creative mayhem.

Writer-director Daniel Y-Li Grove impresses with his sleek, inventive style and effective pacing but falls short on depth and substance.

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

The script from director Scott Smith and co-writer Kevin Guilfoile thinks the rivalry between the two collectors is enough to sustain the narrative, but it doesn’t devote much of its energies to developing the relationship between Alan and Paul.

Even given the character's extreme introspection and withdrawal, Tautou's performance is too often opaque.

Under the pretext of offering fun for the whole family, the movie winds up doing almost precisely the opposite; its attempts at grown-up sophistication and cheeky, knowing humor are clueless and hectoring enough to leave any adult in the audience wishing they’d been straight-up ignored.

Running Scared's razor-crisp editing (by James Mitchell) shows that you can combine mayhem and laughs. But the action becomes huge, cartoony, out of scale, crushing the warmth Crystal and Hines have built up. And the movie is too long by about 15 minutes, a deadly thought for a comedy.

It’s too facile to connect deeply. Everything in Natalie’s life is depicted on a surface level: motherhood, work, romance, friendship and even her passion for drawing. The differences between her two selves never seem too wide because both are barely rooted in reality.

Well-behaved and genteel from the get-go, it has its pleasures, but being wild and crazy is not one of them.

Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not. So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

Heavy on swordplay and spectacle, it's so intent on reviving the costume epics of the past it doesn't realize it's trying to be too many things to too many people until it collapses under its own weight.

Aside from a few missing transitional beats and one too many coincidental encounters, the picture's fluid, zigzagging sexuality and emotional high-diving prove largely credible and diverting.

Boasting a higher body count than its IQ, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is violent, idiotic fun.

It’s not the promised spectacle that cements Venom: Let There Be Carnage as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

This movie remains subtle throughout, emphasizing the tenuousness of reality and the unmooring isolation of the bush.

Meant to feel either lived-in or spontaneously passionate, these poorly written relationships don’t project the effervescence of living in the moment nor the fickleness of what’s to come.

The film is at its best as a fast-paced enigma. When Kentis and Lau start explaining what's actually going on, Silent House takes a turn not just for the worse but the ludicrous.

The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.

Bissell has needlessly manipulated the real story, completely missing what makes it significant.

It is easy to see the film as two movies crammed together, neither of them being very good.

Less fascinating and finally unsatisfying is the awfully familiar racism angle, a subplot that, though unusual in a POW movie, turns regrettably earnest and preachy almost immediately.

Its successful moments (and they are only moments) remind us that this is a squandered opportunity.

It's well crafted by director Michael Hoffman, not painful to sit through, and even contains some 21st century plot twists -- But unless you have a predisposition toward this kind of thing, none of that is going to matter much.

A pleasant enough entertainment raised above its station by the quality of its acting.

As stylish as it is grisly, Jeepers Creepers has cult film written all over it, and it's not for nothing that Francis Ford Coppola has been a staunch Victor Salva mentor.

It's weird, wacky territory you enter in The Price of Milk, and we don't just mean New Zealand.

These profiles are frank, absorbing and heartbreaking, if also a bit inconclusive.

Though the issues are heavy, the execution is light, enjoyable, but it keeps Elsa & Fred closer to "Sleepless in Seattle" than Fellini's deliciously deep Roman affair.

Bates and co-writer Mark Bruner seem to be going for a satirical tone that falls somewhere between David Lynch and Seth Rogen, but deliberately cheesy effects and a sluggish pace sink the early potential.

Compelling as Zylka and Keough may be — and we're definitely rooting for their well-etched characters — Bedford too often plies a kind of woeful wooziness here when a more propulsive approach is in order.

Unfortunately, there’s a missed opportunity to develop the suspense within a structure that has built-in tension. The pacing remains steady during the ramp-up to the final pitch, but it lacks competitive drama.

Remains intriguing despite its troublesome issues.

Murphy’s quietly precise performance ultimately can’t overcome the film’s chilly gravity and unsatisfying finale.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

While the “Wait Until Dark”-like suspense of the film’s climax feels a little rote, that’s OK, because the foggy depiction of a troubled marriage is plenty disturbing.

One suspects Inside the Rain is a labor of love. One wishes its makers would have let us in enough to love it as well.

John Sturges directed this overlong but intermittently entertaining action-thriller. [24 Jul 2002, p.2]

Director Peeter Rebane and his co-writer (and star), Tom Prior (they also produced), have created a compelling, tender, tragic, occasionally melodramatic look at forbidden love and desire.

Without its lead, whose full-throttle portrait is at least a burning flame, Gold wouldn’t work on any level.

Schweighöfer does have a memorable screen presence, and this film is well made, as formulaic pictures so often are. But this one never fully justifies its existence, or its expense. It’s a big movie with skimpy ideas.

Although first-time feature writer-director Julius Avery may aspire to become a sort of Aussie Michael Mann — and perhaps lays an apt foundation here to do so — he has a ways to go in developing the kind of characters and world we can solidly invest in.

The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.

Though the movie’s leads are undeniably charming, director Steven K. Tsuchida and screenwriter Eirene Tran Donohue don’t give them much to do that hasn’t been done many times before. What does distinguish their film is its setting

The story is larger than life. Padilha brings a frenetic, authentic style and flair to this depiction and never loses sight of its larger messages and themes.

Despite the strange but winning chemistry between Danner and Lithgow, the script ultimately fails the fascinating characters.

What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.

The contrived third act notwithstanding, expect audiences in movie theaters to engage with The Front Room in audible gasps, one nauseating stunt at a time.

What unfolds on screen over the course of three hours and one minute in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 can only be described as a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.

Not that there aren't sporadic pleasures in store for the star's completists — a seasoned gesture here, a well-timed tear there and the steely beauty of her ageless gaze. But it's not enough to save Souvenir from the sense that without her anchoring presence, this movie would float away.

Wonderfully animated and well-voiced, Rio 2 is nevertheless too much. Too much plot, too many issues, too many characters. But not too much music.

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

Haunter offers a freaky, visceral experience — without a hint of gore.

The movie is handsomely mounted with upscale production values, but it feels sluggish and disjointed.

The Beanie Bubble eventually runs out of steam. The snappy pace and colorful style — so attractive at first — later become alienating, keeping nearly all the characters locked into one dimension.

It is consistently entertaining and frequently hilarious, the violence of the slapstick so cartoonish that it does not spoil the fun.

Oldboy suggests a filmmaker doing almost as much soul-searching as the main character. There is a brashness in the risks taken, the very imperfections revealing an artist finding new inspiration. For Lee, this weird, brutal film seems to have freed him.

It’s not a bad film. Brightly designed, slickly paced, it has its cargo of youth elements: laughs, sexual tease, action and music. But, halfway through, you can almost feel everyone relaxing, waiting for the next bit of spiritless slapstick or car-chase to carry them through to the end.

You can fret at Heartburn's flimsiness, may even find it insufferably smug in its portrait of our set, but you probably won't be bored by it. And it is peopled with adults, these days enough to make you whimper in gratitude. If only these talents were in the service of something.

Chevy Chase has not been on a roll lately, and to say that in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation he's funnier than in his last six movies combined may sound like high praise, until you remember those six movies. "Caddyshack II" alone almost throws them into the "minus" laugh range. But here, he does what he does best: flat-out slapstick and subversive tear-downs of his own smooth image. This sweet, goofball, manic middle-class daddy brings out his sharpest reflexes and he gets good support from D'Angelo, the bulging-eyed slob-in-excelsis Quaid, and from Questel and Hickey as his dottiest relations.

With no unifying sensibility, the magic thuds more often than it soars.

It's no use expecting Return to Never Land to match, much less exceed, Disney's 1953 version of "Peter Pan," which by itself isn't quite in the uppermost tier of the studio's full-length cartoons.

It's easy to accuse Morrissette of condescending to a bunch of yokels, but hardly anybody would hold that against him if the result had been hilarious instead of deadly dull.

The music is sensational, the energy level high, and Down and Out With the Dolls is a wise and funny treat.

Most important is the film's consistent unexpectedness. Rosenstrasse captures well not only the varying states of mind and levels of awareness in Germany during World War II but also the era's lingering effect upon its survivors.

As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."

A routine sci-fi/horror action-adventure, takes us where we've been countless times before.

Spending more observational time with her smart, resilient and stirringly positive subjects -- even seeing less-edited footage of their business plan speeches -- might have helped sell her inspirational story.

It's a letdown that the film itself, written by Patrick Tobin and directed by Daniel Barnz, doesn't take half the chances its leading lady does and is content to paddle around the shallows rather than plunge into the deep end.

There are laughs and clever bits of business in “The Instigators,” but there’s never a reason to care.

In essence, you get "It's a Wonderful Life" meets "Wings of Desire," swapping out the substance for self-help platitudes. If you can get past that, you can enjoy it as a 90-minute look at a lovely postcard.

Snarkiness and sentiment are in constant battle for supremacy throughout Run, Fat Boy, Run with no chance of a comfortable draw.

The rapport between Allen and Johansson (pretending to be father and daughter) is lively, and the variations on the same old jokes are plentiful.

The Exorcist III doesn't completely work but offers much more than countless, less ambitious films. [20 Aug 1990, p.F6]

This action facility, however, is not enough to make "13 Hours" more than sporadically successful, in part because, at 2 hours and 24 minutes, the film is too long for its own good and risks feelings of repetition and exhaustion.

However unwieldy the final result, Dobkin and company deserve credit for helping Duvall and Downey create vibrant, dramatic characters that involve the performers in rousing, stem-winder ways.

Gung Ho goes after that ever-so-elusive Capra-esque spirit of communal triumph over adversity, but both sides too often verge on stereotypes for this to pay off as richly as it should.

Director Anthony DiBlasi, working off an efficient script by Bruce Wood and Scott Poiley, skillfully tightens the screws on a story that leads to much collateral damage and an effective final showdown.

The startling spike in anti-Semitism over the last two decades is certainly a vast and vital topic for documentary exploration, but director Laura Fairrie’s Spiral proves a largely underwhelming look at an overwhelming problem.

A killer concept falls frustratingly short of the finish line in Empathy, Inc., a dark morality tale that ambitiously casts contemporary technology in a throwback visual setting.

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

Pablo Fendrik's Ardor is a densely atmospheric, Sergio Leone-steeped western that ultimately proves too reverential for its own good.