Despite strong performances by Gerard Butler and Wes Bentley as the leaders of the two factions and crisply directed soccer action, the movie lacks a powerful central presence to carry the drama.

The self-serious POV visual style has none of Brian DePalma's cheeky, unnerving and self-implicating virtuosity — it just reinforces how sick and dumb this whole feel-bad exercise in misogyny and dimestore pathology is.

Shaped more for message than for convincing narrative impact, The Dry Land ends up feeling like a PSA to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.

A middling, so-so thriller about a murder investigation on an Army base, it falls to Earth somewhere between failure and success, inconclusive to the end.

The film over-relies on blunt messaging, one-note villains (bullies, bosses, administrators, worst mall cop ever) and several stacked-deck situations to align us with David and Po, even if we’re inherently on their side from the start.

At every turn, the Chinese globe-trotting heist flick The Adventurers, with Andy Lau as international master thief Zhang and Jean Reno as his Javert, calls to mind better, craftier precursors.

What the movie could use is a little more faith — in the power of its message and the art of filmmaking. Instead, Heaven is sincere to a fault, and the closer it gets to heaven, the more it wavers.

Elephants aside, the plot of this Ong Bak is rudimentary at best.

Impressive but uninviting, Wyatt Earp is easier to admire from a distance than pull up a chair and enjoy close-up. A self-conscious attempt at epic filmmaking that feels orchestrated as much as directed, it has noticeable virtues but chooses not to wear them lightly. And at three hours plus, it finally encourages audiences to feel as trail weary and exhausted as any of its characters. [24 Jun 1994, p.1]

Ultimately suffers from a late-inning collapse into thematic obviousness and multiple endings.

Even when Alice doesn’t work, it remains gripping. Ver Linden underdevelops her “what if” scenario, but thanks in large part to Palmer the film is a fascinating character study.

The sun can't set too soon on this "Empire." [23 Oct 1995, Pg.F9]

Dosed works best as a purely anecdotal, personal chronicle of a friend’s struggle with addiction therapies. It is not recommended as a substitute for scientific conclusions.

Wingard’s movie, for all its abundant mischief, doesn’t trust the power of its own illusion. You can see these woods a lot more clearly now, and what you see is that you’ve been here before.

Tightly plotted and suspenseful enough to keep you guessing until the satisfying, unexpected end, which is worth suspending disbelief for. After all, as they point out in the movie, "It doesn't work if you don't believe it."

There are some crowd-pleasers - but Hotel Transylvania never becomes the great monster mash that seemed in the offing.

Blessed with unstoppable energy, an undeniably bawdy sense of fun and Tom Cruise in backless leather pants, it takes songs you may never have loved and turns them into a musical that's easy to enjoy.

A flimsy episodic feature.

It’s more of an action gallery, not a blood-pumping story accelerated by its flights of fury.

Even at its stride, "The X-Files" was a load of malarkey. But it was thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable. One could say the same about the first two-thirds of The X-Files: I Want to Believe before it spins out of control and into a delirious plane of awfulness.

The result is a more-clever-than-most window into modern urban yuppie mating rituals, tracking just how tough it is to keep a grip on love and the corporate ladder at the same time.

Sure-fire heart-warmer: lively, funny yet emotion-charged and uplifting.

No one comes out of Hollywood Homicide looking good, but the film fades fast.

Go see it. But you'll feel cheap in the morning.

Irritating, childish and more frantic than funny, Cats & Dogs does manage some few pleasant moments, but they are not worth waiting for.

A pleasant diversion, a lightly amusing criminal comedy with a plot so complicated even the people in it can't quite believe what's happening.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

German director Robert Siodmak gives this juicy 1943 entry terrific gothic style. [06 Jun 2004, p.E13]

Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.

Harrelson and Maura Tierney, who plays Monix's love interest, seem to be inhabiting a different, more interesting, movie, one that follows the familiar path of a has-been athlete seeking redemption at what looks like his last stop. The strange thing is that the subplot is so tangential to the rest of the movie that the scenes could be omitted with no one the wiser.

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.

Proves a fast-paced and enjoyable if violent diversion that revels in its quirky characters, committed performances and involving twists.

My Stepmother Is an Alien is solid, wide-appeal holiday fare. It makes the best use of Aykroyd’s warmth and proven talents in quite some time, and it does even more for Basinger, showing that she can be as funny and smart as she is sexy.

Jackson modulates Abel's internal turmoil and heated exchanges with enough shades of loneliness, steely generosity and wicked playfulness to give the actor firm control of our fascination and growing unease.

Though an admirable shake-up of the typically overbearing, munch-intensive undead yarn, The Returned is still a far cry from the smarts-and-shocks zombie allegories George Romero mastered.

This visually restless and ultimately ludicrous Chinese horror film from director Yip Wai Man (a.k.a. Raymond Yip) is unlikely to either shorten your breath or curl your toes.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

There was bite and outrageousness and a touch of the surreal to the excesses of National Lampoon's Vacation (in which Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis humanized Hughes' cartoonlike material). This was writing whose springboard might have been awful firsthand experience. European Vacation feels as though it were dreamed up to cover the rent on the beach house for the summer.

Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.

They are tremendously appealing, and under Stephens' direction, Anson Scoville as an Amish runaway and Paulo Costanzo as a closeted gay college fraternity man are also memorable.

Kate has its charms.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

You want to see Eddie Murphy surrounded by some Christmas-themed silliness. And on that score, it’s fine enough, but destined for regifting.

It may be a shoddily made Skittles ad masquerading as a superhero riff, but it’s Levi’s performance that sends it into the stratosphere of cringe.

Pink Cadillac has a strong visual design and lots of juicy, self-confident acting. But it doesn’t transcend its star vehicle trappings or chemistry. The construction of the story is so soft, you get the impression that if the driver and navigator were replaced, the movie might turn rattletrap and fall apart.

Unfocused lapses aside, though, the film is intriguing and discomforting in equal measure, using its brief running time to frame thoughtful, boundary-pushing questions.

Increasingly perplexing film, which is more concerned with being clever than satisfying.

Structurally, 44 Inch Chest resembles "Reservoir Dogs"; but, without the added amusement of Tarantino's skewing of narrative time, it feels very much more like a direct adaptation of a stage play (which apparently it's not). The filmmakers do goose things up by playing with reality in the second half, but it all leads to a payoff that, while perfectly legitimate, feels limp.

Frequently fun and generally harmless, The Outcasts doesn’t bring anything new to the teen comedy, but that’s the nice thing about the sub-genre for its viewers.

Stan Winston steps in as director (and co-scenarist) here after many years leading one of Hollywood's top special makeup effects units. Ironically, Winston shows a surer directorial touch with the early, more human scenes (especially those between Henriksen and son) than he does later with the spooks and scares, which are never even faintly frightening. He doesn't win any more points for having his creature followed by artsy mood lighting wherever it goes in the supposedly black night.

There are moments when it is possible, with effort, to forget the plot and its tired premise and enjoy Witherspoon and Ruffalo's chemistry and imagine they are in another movie. But never for long.

Because it's all shot to look like a South Korean noir, with umpteen slo-mo shots and stylistic noodlings to affect a kind of grimy urban anti-hero chic, Christensen effectively leeches the emotion from the central story.

Love Potion 9 isn't truly terrible, like the recent "Frozen Assets." It even provokes some laughs, but it suffers from terminal mildness.

The Mission is less about Mormonism or Finland than it is a poignant and relatable portrait of loneliness.

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

An underwhelming experience. I pity the fool, as TV star Mr. T might say, who mistakes this for genuine entertainment.

In effect, aspects of Gibson's creative makeup -- his career-long interest in martyrdom and the yearning for dramatic conflict that make him an excellent actor, coupled with his belief in the Gospels' literal truth -- have sideswiped this film. What is left is a film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

This is a standard-issue gross Hollywood knockabout comedy in which slapstick antics have been piled up with a steam shovel and driven home with a sledgehammer. Reynolds and Smart are game and even dimensional, but all others are stuck playing tiresome, obnoxious characters.

Twelve years in the making, Phyllis and Harold has extraordinary breadth and depth and has been made with wit, compassion and imagination, and it reflects the complexity of life itself.

At the Devil's Door goes right up to the threshold of being an interesting possession saga but never truly gets inside.

The cause is just. But there's something off-kilter about the mix. Maybe it's because the animation retains its TV flatness while the story's texture is gratuitously bulked up.

Consistently sleek but works best if no more is expected of it than a mild diversion.

Robert Cary's Anything but Love is that rarity, an hommage to the sweeping Technicolor Hollywood love story of the '40s and '50s that works.

The actors can't turn the strained stabs at poetry into the affecting meditation that was clearly intended.

A film rich in atmosphere but emotionally as blunt as its title.

Although graceful and dynamic, Three Dancing Slaves is none too substantial or original, lacking the edge or complexity of Morel's impressive debut film, "Full Speed."

A paint-by-numbers indie that barely uses its most vivid hues.

Virtually everything about the film is derivative--even the design for the eerie setting for the climactic struggle recalls the interiors of the more exotic old movie palaces--but its makers can't be accused of cutting corners. No doubt about it, those who ask only for pure action will be getting their money's worth.

[Aselton's] disregard for her male characters causes Black Rock to spiral into dudette "Deliverance."

If Perfect didn't have a germ of an idea tucked away in all its posturing silliness, it wouldn't be quite so infuriating. But it has: Superficially it's about sliding-scale morality in journalism today, a not uninteresting subject. [7 June 1985, p.C1]

Whatever was unforced and funny in the first film has become exaggerated here, whatever was slightly sentimental has been laid on with a trowel. The result, with some exceptions, plays like an over-elaborate parody of the first film, reminding us why we enjoyed it without being able to duplicate its appeal.

Suffers from the tired POV gimmickry, the weak characterizations, the numbing sameness of stuck-in-the-woods-with-dolts narratives.

Turns out to be an extremely likable vehicle with a genuine sense of fun.

Gentlemen, it's a male chick flick - "The Dirty Secrets of the Ya-Ya Brotherhood."

The twists and reversals that pile up, stirred by greed, friendship and betrayal, fail to register any meaning, simply accumulating -- so that ultimately Autumn is as dry and lifeless as the leaves that fall to the ground in its opening images.

Newsies becomes a string of set-pieces, some of which work, some of which don't, all barreling full-speed ahead toward its Teddy Roosevelt deus ex machina. [10 Apr 1992]

What The Dilemma ultimately does best is create a platform for Vaughn to drag that iconic character of his into full-blown adulthood.

Because of its look, some fine period music including the Mills Brothers version of "Coney Island Washboard," and actors giving it their best effort, Wonder Wheel is not as completely forgettable as it would otherwise be.

Ambitious and impressive, both in its provocative themes and superb production design using striking sets and locations in Korea, Russia and Thailand, this handsome epic amply rewards audiences willing to go the distance.

This new romantic comedy from the U.K. lands on an emotional gold mine only to spin it into synthetic straw.

Figgis remains a compelling storyteller, holding you with the intensity of his vision and his mastery of nuance.

A complete waste of time and potential.

Has the makings of that rarest of ventures, an adaptation that is true to the spirit of the original as well as its own time and place. But as Payback wends its way toward its conclusion, its promise dissipates and its pleasures wane.

With its stylized story-line and almost styleless direction, it sometimes resembles a juggling act with sledgehammers. [13 Jul 1988, p.1]

What makes Choose Connor so special and unsettling is the consistent adroitness and perfect timing with which Eberl makes his revelations.

Alternately silly and provocative, strained and funny.

Thanks to its star's all-in commitment, the overtly maudlin film works better than it should, particularly sequences in which octogenarian Reynolds is dropped into "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Deliverance" and converses philosophically with his younger self.

The fantasy of a punk icon for a friend is one thing, but the filmmakers undercut the modest liveliness of their enterprise with a save-the-day storyline that seems far removed from the roiling, anti-authoritative ethos of punk.

The cast is rounded out with likable comedians, but this fable can’t decide if it’s going to be deliciously bad or morally upstanding.

We don’t learn much about how the government or politics work in Afghanistan; and there’s very little in the way of historical background. But by giving a voice both to Ghafari and — in a few scattered scenes — her fierce opposition, In Her Hands does capture with direct immediacy how hard it can be to loosen up a culture with a tradition of rigidity.

Despite the handsome Craig Wrobleski cinematography, and despite a typically fine performance by Patrick Wilson as the lost kid’s dad — slowly going mad in the bush — “In the Tall Grass” runs too long and repeats itself too much to be as gripping as its source material.

A romantic drama with some good qualities -- among them earnestness and strong performances -- but not enough to completely overcome the strain of its clichés.

For the most part, this is the kind of immersive fanboy experience that doesn't suffer wandering attention spans.

The film aims for a light social satire but mainly falls flat. It feels more like a long-lost pilot for some never-aired 1970s sitcom or a misguided sequel to a Billy Joel song.

Flowers abounds with well-worn movie archetypes and slathers on schmaltz.

In the highly suspenseful 1976 Two-Minute Warning, directed with terrific energy and control by Larry Peerce, a football game takes on a subtly symbolic aspect as the cops pursue a mad sniper on the loose in a packed football stadium. [05 Jun 1988, p.2]

There's a beguiling throwaway quality to Flirt that has the effect of making it stick with you.

It’s an overload of overkill, yet as tedious and empty as the last day of a 72-hour trip to Vegas when the novelty has worn off and you just want to go home and sleep.