Stoker is the sort of stylish, cerebral movie that engages your brain instead of your emotions, and yet you’re never less than intrigued by the breathtaking visual artistry of this slow-burn thriller.

Unfortunately even a clogging Timberlake can't stop the movie's march to a conveniently happy ending. Nor can he block the flow of psychobabble. It's enough to make any fan beg: Play ball. Please.

The most extreme English-language studio release I've seen in years.

The film works as contemporary fable, cautionary tale and perversely driven love story all at once. There's a gratifyingly wide streak of humanism running through it. And there's that "chemistry." Malkovich and MacDowell, bubble, bubble. Yes, indeed. [26 Apr 1991, p.G11]

The film isn't much of a character study; too many of its secondary characters are stereotypes, and it never fully engages our emotions the way "Schindler's List" or "The Pianist" did.

Under Siege is never at all convincing -- everything about the battleship (except the exterior shots) seems small and understaffed. There are supposed to be 30 bad guys, but they appear to outnumber the crew, and the interior scenes of the battleship's command stations are barely more ambitious than Star Trek's bridge. [12 Oct 1992, p.C3]

Hits the parallels between love and hip-hop a little too hard when the message is relatively easy to grasp: Don't sell out: not your art, not your heart. If only music business executives were listening.

For this last chapter, the filmmakers play things relatively straight, resulting in the best Shrek movie to date.

So TRON is an adventure story, with the requisite (and understated) love triangle at its heart. But it is also a story of remarkable special effects, and this is the stuff you haven't seen before. [09 July 1982, p.C1]

Psycho III is still a comedie macabre -- as was Hitchcock's -- but Perkins doesn't follow the Psycho path. Where the master trod subtly, the disciple relies on emphasis. [03 July 1986, p.D11]

The movie is unwieldy and overstuffed with subplots - and, at 2 1/2 hours, probably too much misery and sorrow for most viewers.

The latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with "Borat" and then started to milk dry with "Brüno" has finally run out of juice. Time to move on, guys.

The film feels more like an extended epilogue than a stand-alone adventure, which may be because it is the shortest (105 minutes) entry in the series.

This is an affair to forget.

Neither as good nor as bad as you'd hoped it would be: It's just a mediocre exploitation picture with an inspired premise (succinctly spelled out by its title), loads of gratuitous gore, a dash of equally gratuitous nudity and enough inanities to make you wonder if Ed Wood rose from the grave to serve as a creative consultant on the project.

Lean on Me is one of those movies that you know is swollen with hyperbole, but that you want to like anyway. Freeman provides a big reason. [3 March 1989, p.5]

Bogs down in a deep muck of inevitability.

It plunges so deep, in fact, that the film winds up bordering on the unwatchable.

Despite its exciting moments, the film is too long.

Anything but light on its feet. It lumbers instead of dazzles, drags where it should feint and jab.

Much of metal's appeal is the mythology of power -- mighty images of conquest (sexual and otherwise) carried on tidal waves of thunderous music. Spheeris shows us the insecurity, frailty and dim-bulb vacuousness behind the myth, in a film that is sometimes disturbing and always fascinating. [05 Aug 1988, p.C8]

Eclipse, like its two predecessors, is ham-fisted and obvious, a mass-market entertainment with a frustrating lack of imagination.

The movie - which caused walkouts and an uproar at Sundance - rewards your endurance with an utterly insane 30-minute climax of violence, audacious gore and all-around bad behavior (how this picture got an R rating is baffling).

Although (Untitled) makes a spirited effort to mine comedy from its outre characters and the orbits they inhabit, the picture feels thin and wan, like a joke you've heard 100 times too many.

Carrey's amazing transformation in Man on the Moon does justice to Kaufman's undefinable talents and his peculiar outlook on entertainment.

The Safety of Objects doesn't carry the power of Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm," a similarly themed work about WASPS in crisis. Objects is too artificial, clunky with too many preposterous situations.

A hoot.

I'm not big on getting lectures from produce, and the Jonah story is not exactly fresh from the crisper, but Jonah is engaging enough for parents looking to introduce their kids to the veggiest story ever told.