Just amusing enough to provoke a few chuckles and just short enough to keep you from glancing at your watch.

A measured, magnificently understated and intense performance by Academy Award nominee Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash) as Ellis gives Pride its fire and heart.

This is a nearly universal theme and might provide the spine for a funny comedy. [29 July 1983, p.C1]

Midler has emerged as the best funny woman on the screen. As Sandy, she makes abrasiveness appealing. But her work here can't compare with what she did in Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People. Neither can Outrageous Fortune. [30 Jan 1987, p.D1]

The clownish humor is imbued with a great, genuine pain. Unfortunately, the twist proves too much for the filmmakers to handle. The second half of The D Train collapses into a series of plot curlicues and narrative dead-ends. The picture loses its nerve and opts for a pat, wan resolution.

So impressive you welcome each and every one for the film's 48 minute duration.

Raunchy, provocative and often very funny.

In Dodgeball, Vaughn is stuck playing the straight man to a collection of stooges, and he looks utterly bored doing it.

Plot? There is no plot. You want plot, go read "War and Peace."

Though it's entertaining when the tone is light, The Joneses can't quite keep up with this sort of complexity.

At his wittiest, Carpenter is very funny indeed, and the undisguised commentary of They Live is as entertaining as it is pointed. But at his clunkiest, Carpenter directs with all the deftness of a hod-carrier, and his set pieces drop like bricks -- wham!, plop! [9 Nov 1988, p.D6]

A mess, but an energetic, convivial mess.

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a failure that should have at least been a magnificent mistake, a risky endeavor that showed a daring intent even if its brash vision didn’t quite succeed. Instead, the movie leaves you cold and weary and vaguely disgusted.

Hackman, with the force of his inelegant personality and his gift for dramatic understatement, makes it go. He has saved a lot of movies, and this is one. [25 Aug 1989, p.G5]

The Bank, despite its faulty finale, is a fun and thrilling ride.

If you're going to be offensive, by all means be offensive. Be tasteless! Be "There's Something About Mary." But at least stick to your guns, and don't wuss out when it counts.

Much of The Men Who Stare at Goats is indeed amusing, although mostly in a mild, setting-the-stage kind of way, and your smiles eventually turn to yawns.

What Passion ultimately lacks most, ironically, is passion, the artistic fervor that distinguished all his best pictures. This one feels like a throwaway by a gifted filmmaker who has run out of ideas.

Once the premise has been established, the film goes absolutely nowhere.

The main problem with The Hulk, really, is that there isn't enough Hulk in it.

This is a silly movie, yes. But since it works as a humorous homage for students of Hitchcock and his B-movie masterpiece, and since it works as a high-grade slasher film for the rest of the audience, there's no hating it. In fact, this is the most likable gore film in years. [04 June 1983, p.D4]

To Rome with Love is so inviting, and most of its gaggle of characters so diverse and likable, it's doubly disappointing that Allen, who wrote and directed the movie, can't think of what to do with them.

You don't need a Ouija board to suss out where all this is heading, but Is Anybody There? counteracts its deficiencies -- predictability, sentimentality -- with a healthy dose of dark humor.

The film also plays to the strengths of the found-footage format, proving that sometimes the scariest things are the ones you can barely see. For horror hounds, this is required viewing.

May be the grandest looking film ever made on the subject, but it lacks the most essential element of all: passion.

It's fitting. Valentin and Jane may be awakening from life's slumber, but mostly they're just putting us to sleep.

Shirley MacLaine pops up as Walter’s ever-forgiving mother, and Wigg kills in an elevating sequence in which she sings David Bowie’s Space Oddity at a karaoke bar. Penn only gets one scene, but it’s a great one, and it reminds you how funny of an actor he can be.

Essentially, You Don't Mess With the Zohan isn't all that different in tone and sensibility from Sandler's previous films, but he's really trying in this one, and the effort pays off.