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.

A reminder of the difference between exhilaration and exhaustion, between tension and hysteria, between eroticism and exhibitionism. The line may be fine, but it is real enough to separate the great thrillers from the also-rans. And Basic Instinct is not a great thriller.

Suffers from being neither here nor there. In its rush to modernize its story and attract a young audience with stars like Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, the film ends up problematic both in relation to the original and on its own terms.

Half-baked.

Does go on too long, leading to inevitable dead spots.

A vaguely amusing formulaic comedy with a premise that turns out to be more discomforting than endearing.

Just another lurid, contrived, xenophobic tale about Americans trapped in hideous foreign prisons.

It is deeply unpleasant to see women abducted, tortured and eviscerated by a methodical and meticulous butcher.

It's a copy all the way, a disheartening attempt to capitalize on the success of the original.

Reitman's attempt to show he can re-create the success of his biggest comedy ever. What he proves instead is that, given time and money, a comedy director can devolve into a lower life form.

Mildly entertaining, offering generous swaths of Mahler performed by the Bratislava Philharmonic, but it's also inescapably ponderous.

The misguided, delirious result offers the perverse guilty pleasure of watching a roster of distinguished actors earnestly swimming against a tidal wave of silliness.

Carpenter's heart doesn't seem to be in this lackluster space adventure set in 2176. What's more, his stars -- Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube -- don't exactly energize the proceedings.

A deadly earnest drama tripped up by clumsy plotting and unintentional bursts of humor.

There's not enough sustained musical momentum to simulate the energy of an actual rave; the characters are likable but unremarkable.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

Main lure is what feels like a very authentic visual sense of the nontourist side of Kingston, where the ambience of zinc-walled shacks wallpapered with old newspapers is captured by cinematographer Richard Lannaman.

It only serves to remind one of better movies, at a time when one needs no reminders.

Wasabi dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding.

(Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

Long-winded and ultimately uninvolving.

In all his athletic scenes, leaping through doors, leaping between uptown and downtown trains, leaping on an assortment of villains, Swayze is just fine. It's the movie's big cosmic questions that throw him; for these he's reduced to a look of total stupefaction--not the movie's finest moments. [13 July 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]