The prospect that this role would officially shift Bettany to a bigger stage, taking him from the character roles that have become his specialty to leading man status, dies a sort of Darwinian death from bad plotting.

It's difficult to get into its "What would I do?" vibe, though, through so thick and transparent a barrier of contrivances.

It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.

Instead of invitations, they should be sending out apologies for Our Family Wedding, a cake-and-kisses comedy that has disaster written all over it and not for the right reasons.

There's a key organ missing from the movie itself: a brain. In its place is a memory bank of other, better movies.

Try as they might, Nicole and Milo, as they are called in the movie, don't steam. Wispy vapors is about as good as it gets.

It's not a bad idea, and it has the right cast and the right look. But, sad to say, it lacks the pace and energy to make it come alive and therefore remains more of a literary conceit than a movie.

Director Michael Bay's filmmaking style is so frantic and frenetic that it's often impossible to figure out exactly what is happening.

After keeping its balance over much treacherous terrain, greedily overreaches and stumbles badly at the close.

It is a slack and preachy business that never comes to grips with its underlying theme of homophobia.

A handsome, intelligent film of rigorous austerity; unfortunately, for all its seriousness of purpose and fine performances, it's also a boring film about boring people.

There's more than a little Oedipal melodrama tossed into the mix. But the movie rarely gets as sappy or as contrived as one keeps expecting.

Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.

The only way the film could have had a prayer of working--and thereby tapping its stars' considerable strengths--is by taking a much harder edge and going for dark, even bleak humor.

There probably isn't another actress anywhere who could make that corny self-advertisement work. And there definitely isn't another actress who could make such an overbearing heroine worth watching for an hour and a half.

The assumption among many when the movie was postponed was that Paramount Classics felt New Yorkers weren't emotionally equipped for something bright or frothy or vivacious. They needn't have been concerned.

Overlong, overwritten.

It delivers the stars in unguarded moments that should give fans--if not everyone--some kicks.

A bland romantic comedy that comes up short on both laughs and love.

(Lipnicki) is pressed into the service of mugging and shtick that would test the mettle of Roberto Benigni.

Documents accurately the capacity of pop culture to make mongrels of its consumers. But it doesn't quite know (or want to know) what to make of it.

Cinematographer Thom Best never captures the glory of the Canadian Rockies, and the uncredited editing is jarring and unconvincing in key action sequences.

It's a pastiche of pulpy elements culled from all the "Dirty Harry" movies you can think of.

Relentlessly smarmy and contrived, and its pitch for the cause of prisoner rehabilitation preachy and heavy-handed.

The specificity of Glory's setting and the ethnicity of its characters enrich the story without moving it one iota away from a mainstream frame of reference.

The result is an exquisite yawn that provokes consideration of how accomplished Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Mira Sorvino and others are as actors -- but how in this instance the characters they play so intensely never come alive.

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

The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.

Deeply felt but flat and unimaginative.

A stunner marred by its central figure, a colt named Lucky, having been voiced (by Lukas Haas). Piovani's score is lyrical and emotionally charged, and it goes a long way toward negating the effects of the voice-over narration we're asked to accept.

It contains, perhaps, one pinkie-toe bone of surprise in its skeleton of cliche.

Overly preachy and maudlin but is saved by its obvious sincerity and forthright sense of purpose, and further enhanced by its rich color cinematography.

Style is content in action movies, but when all the style originates elsewhere, it's just plain lazy.

The route to the film's dramatic and poignant climax is so hard to follow that the pleasure, the potential for which is considerable, has been substantially diminished.

As impressive as Jackson is and as thought-provoking as director Kasi Lemmons' movie is, it's ultimately satisfying neither as a genre piece nor as an art film.

The droll cast--especially Ferrer, who's exquisite as a tough-talking dunce--deserved something more fully realized than this.

While Macy is persuasive, much of Focus is not.

The filmmakers cannot sustain enough momentum to keep their film from seeming contrived and preachy.

It's amazing how boring endless talk about more and better orgasms can become.

Whether you care if they find them (terrorists) or not may depend on how much you've been able to withstand Bad Company's sensory overload of firefights, vehicular mayhem, techno-cool swagger and enough bumptious contrivances to fill several seasons of daffy prime-time soaps.

Not enough to save ivansxtc from, of all things, dullness.

More entrails, more bare bosoms, more R-rated sex, more flatulence, more mayhem, more brutality and more violence. But it adds up to less and less.

What use is journeyman acting, quality set design and a kicky, eclectic score in a movie that's so ineptly scripted?

It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

It's hard to imagine anyone enjoying it except for those seeking to see people up there on the screen unhappier than themselves.

Despite strong portrayals by Guttenberg and his co-star, Lombardo Boyar, and sequences that attempt to open the play up, it remains too much a filmed play, and worse, one that has not been effectively paced. As a result, it doesn't come alive until it's drawing to a close that's unexpectedly touching, if more than a little sentimental, but too late to redeem the preceding tedium.

The merely depressing ultimately gives way to the contrived in Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's King of the Jungle.

Takes us down a familiar path without discovering anything new along the way.

Looks good but overstays its welcome.

Evokes the fear, anger and conflict that swept over the country at the time, but it doesn't offer sufficient fresh insights to justify doing so.

Screenwriter Dan Schneider and director Shawn Levy substitute volume and primary colors for humor and bite. Granted, it's a kids' flick, but kids today have enough savvy about the movie industry to report for Variety.

The film does have a certain flair and pace and is lively enough to be mildly diverting.

Certainly sexy, entertaining and provocative -- in several senses of the word -- but it's also tiresome as only a French film can be when everyone in it has only sex and amour on his or her mind and is deadly serious about both.

Its twisty film noir world of down-on-their-luck men and unfathomable women is vintage B-picture material, but, in the grand B tradition, the games it plays are more ambitious than successful.

Sluggishly paced and shot in the sort of grubby digital video that renders even the dewiest skin tone liverwurst gray, the film comes across as little more than a series of acting workshop exercises wrapped in a tissue of cliché.

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.

(Lawrence) has every right to be proud of carrying this rickety film on his stooped shoulders.

The film's political philosophy, as much as it has one, is of the "a plague on both your houses" variety, painting the rebels and the CIA as equally fixated on killing innocent civilians for their own nefarious ideological ends. We've seen it all before, and we'll likely see it all again.

Charlotte Gray, for all Blanchett's radiance and intelligence in the title role, is a bore.

When a set of pre-shooting guidelines a director came up with for his actors turns out to be cleverer, better written and of considerable more interest than the finished film, that's a bad sign. A very bad sign.

Another traditional Japanese production, weakly plotted, woodenly acted and indifferently dubbed.

Unfortunately, director Michael Lehmann's point of view is swivel-mounted: He doesn't have the courage of his cynicism. [31 Mar 1989]

Has its moments here and there, but not nearly enough of them to add up to a satisfying movie.

It's exasperating -- a near-parody of bad French comedy.

A fantasy, a fairy tale, but its characters and the emotions they elicit become painfully real.

"You've got a sense of humor, I like that," Lester Long proclaims at one point. Well, we all like that, but would it be asking too much to have a little coherence to go along with it?

Like Malkovich's out of control Russian accent, Rounders ends up reaching a place too hard to understand and even harder to believe in.

Both too unfocused and overly familiar. It has enough comic energy to generate some chuckles, but even when we laugh we're always wondering why the jokes aren't funnier. [5 Mar 1999]

The four actors are very good, and it's a shame they aren't working from a more focused and original concept. Written by Fusco and Michael Garrity, there's nothing awful about Stealing Time except that it mixes familiar ingredients with pretty bland results.

Does for industrialists, politicians, pro-football owners and lawyers what Christopher Guest's "Best in Show' did for dog owners -- but without the skewer.

Slight in the extreme, more tasteless than amusing, but at least its young actors manage to make promising impressions, especially Wiehl and Brenner, whose characters have a tad more dimension than the others.

While clunky in pacing -- and in periodic attempts at humor -- Green Card Fever has been well-photographed by Scott Spears and makes some provocative points.

The juxtaposition of grim reality and pure fantasy doesn't work...the entire film seem artificial and contrived.

Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.

A film without a framework, without a skeleton--a Phish philet, if you will.

Uptown Girls is more downer than upper.

A goofball movie, in the way "Malkovich" was, but it tries too hard.

LaBute can't avoid a fatal mistake in the modern era: He's changed the male academic from a lower-class Brit to an American, a choice that upsets the novel's exquisite balance and shreds the fabric of the film, corrupting all of LaBute's good work and robbing it of the impact it would otherwise have.

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

All the ingredients of a success--a stellar cast, a promising premise, a strong production team--but nothing comes together in satisfying fashion.

The movie is over the top and garish. Its transitions often are sloppy and crude. But it brandishes its excesses like a loud, retro suit.

As has happened before in less extreme circumstances, filmmakers with purportedly serious intentions punish their viewers for watching their envelope-pushing depiction of sex on the screen by presenting it in the most profoundly negative context imaginable.

Its dark-edged crime-caper plot is so formulaic it seems almost ritualized. Yet Ice Cube and Mike Epps enact their standard odd-couple tango with such ease and brio, you'd think they'd never seen such movies before.

The film has been hailed as something of a literary thriller; it's not. The stultifying pace and Moskowitz's filmmaking laziness are forgivable, but it's exasperating and indicative of our low expectations for the documentary form that a film that taps the likes of Leslie Fiedler could be so devoid of ideas. Reading is fundamental; so is thinking.

That bland, opaque quality is a disadvantage here; whatever else [Depp] is capable of, making audiences feel his pain is not at the top of the list.

This film is sensationalism gone rampant with sex, cruelty, and all the ruddy elements which make for what is known as rough, rugged, brutal appeal. It has to do with soldiering, but it dallies preeminently with sex, and is only in minor degree concerned with war.

Few people will be able to go along with Bolton's point of view regarding relationships between adults and underage youths, but there's no denying the writer-director, in his feature debut, has avoided sensationalism in telling this story.

A movie that desperately wants her (Latifah's) hip, her edge and mostly her blackness but doesn't know what to do with the human being who comes with the package.

Production notes for Mark Hanlon's Buddy Boy describe it as "a dark and twisted exploration of faith, alienation and madness"--and is it ever!

The melodrama of the Maugham original is too simplistic to involve, and the places the film's plot goes are so obvious that even the presence of quality actors can't create sufficient interest.

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

The result is crass but reasonably harmless, although to hear one of the guys hold forth on how much he's learned about family and loyalty in just one week living with the DOGs is enough to make a person gag.

A disappointment. A good-faith attempt has been made to duplicate the original elements, but the mix is wrong, bearings have been lost, the balance is off. It was attitude that made "Men in Black" special, a particular kind of cool insouciance that has proved as impossible to duplicate as it was irresistible to experience.

Sophisticated romantic comedy for people who think "Corky Romano" is trenchant political satire.

It isn't just that there's something unsettling about a film that aestheticizes a crematorium; it's that there's something trivializing about the very effort.

Not as much fun as it should be. Few of its numerous actors make a lasting impression and Burton's heart and soul is not in the humor but (remember the "Batman Returns" backlash) in deadpan postmodern horrors, of which this film has a few.

Outside of a hyper-energetic, irresistibly evil portrayal by Tim Roth as General Thade, the baddest ape in town, the sad truth about Planet of the Apes is that, disappointingly, it's just not very much fun to watch.

It's not objectionable (which is saying something these days) but neither does it have any compelling reason to be seen.