A turbocharged and pungently enjoyable take on the sport so many observers see - Stone, of course, included - as a reflection of the darker side of American life.

A gloriously tacky horror movie with an inclination toward the occult, The Mother of Tears hails from the Italian schlockmeister Dario Argento, who photographs his Euro movie star daughter, Asia Argento, with something more than paternal pride.

There is so little emotionally or intellectually at stake in most popular entertainment that Goya's Ghosts, Milos Forman's challenging, compelling and wildly uneven film, shoots like a cannonball into the solar plexus. I can't remember when I've been so physically and mentally shattered.

Heartfelt and artfully shot, the movie - with little Rodrigo Noya, wearing big eyeglasses, in the title role - is too sweet for its own good, even as some of its characters do things that aren't terribly sweet at all.

A wholesome little drama aimed at the pre- and early-teen crowd.

Fascinating and strangely involving piece.

For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Steamy and sexy with a smack of sadism, the movie is a throwback to old-school Hollywood action/romance.

This ninth installment in the Marvel mutant superhero franchise is rife with urgent and (dare we say?) apocalyptic comings and goings, with characters and confrontations that seem at once familiar and befuddling.

Alas, it's a throwback that's thrown its back out - limping along, trailed by battalions of stereotypes and ammo rounds of cliche.

Where "Run Lola Run" was like a perpetual-motion machine, The International seems to forever be stopping in its own tracks. Tykwer takes coffee breaks to explain the convoluted and dicey plot.

Black's caped "luchador" grows on you. Like a fun guy.

Most parties concerned maintain their grim countenances, their characters struggling to find the sweet spot between honor and greed, between doing the right thing and doing the absolute worst.

The real problem is that there's nothing to George but the movie's props.

Somnambulistic pacing, kerplunkingly unfunny jokes, and mugging thespians making fools of themselves. Truly torturous spectacle.

Movie and book both are delightful, but very, very different.

Easy to like, and easy to forget.

The Frighteners approaches the mysteries of near-death and out-of-body experiences with a script that is - even by this summer's prevailing standard of dumbness - out of its mind. [19 July 1996, p.03]

Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.

A likable if not exactly groundbreaking comedy.

It is a yarn. But it's so full of passion, poetry, and humor that it becomes, for the time, quite real.

Crazy funny.

RoboCop is a solid near-future action pic that poses moral questions about artificial intelligence and remote-control combat systems without getting too preachy or ponderous about it.

Dreamy and impressionistic, full of debauchery, drugs, disco, and dazzling couture, Saint Laurent is a biopic that picks its moments, leaving backstory behind.

Beautiful Creatures tries terribly hard to establish its own mythology of magic and witchcraft and Southern-fried adolescent angst. This isn't Hogwarts, though, and it's not even Forks High from Twilight, but boy, you know Warner Bros., the studio behind Beautiful Creatures, wants it to be!

However refreshing it is to see a movie about the secretary rather than the lawyer -- there is a long wait for the light at the end of the Haiku Tunnel.

There'd be a lot less strife and starvation, disease and dread, if Nancy Meyers ruled the world.

The Getaway isn't going to bore anybody, but it's not going to do anything else either. [11 Feb 1994, p.03]

Dangerous Beauty, by any name, embodies no such thing. [27 Feb 1998, p.12]

Sadly, director Lee Toland Krieger's offering, a weak wanna-be Jean Cocteau-esque fable with magical realist pretensions, does great disservice to Lively and her remarkably accomplished costars.

If Weitz's Golden Compass feels, at times, too crammed with exposition and big set pieces, the film nonetheless works far more successfully than the first Potter pic - the leaden "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" - did translating its source material.

Tunney, brimming with coltish, neurotic energy, holds the screen like a true star. She brings the role, and the movie, to life.

While I don't always have the stomach for Woo's viscera or the heart for his pure, angelic heroes and impure, diabolical villains, I found myself responding to the context and subtext of Windtalkers while closing my eyes through what one might call its text. It's two-thirds of a great film.

Portrayed by a mesmerizing Elle Fanning (Maleficent, Trumbo) in a magnificent, heart-stopping star turn.

A big comedown from "The Fighter," Contraband finds Wahlberg in default mode: With his Popeye biceps and broody stares, the actor can do a character like Chris without even thinking about it - and that's what he does here.

If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.

All manner of subplots weave their way through the film, which teems with "colorful" characters and saccharine cliches. But, like the first film, it's next to impossible not to find diversion in the company of such stalwarts as Dench and Nighy and Smith. And George Thorogood is, happily, never heard from again.

As a meditation on the vicissitudes of love, on the need for people to connect, and the struggles that come by both making and missing those connections, the movie is wading-pool deep.

Has an empty, soulless feel.

I winced more than laughed at this movie, which has almost as many broken bones as punch lines.

The execution may not be there, but at least it has good intentions. Then again, you know what they say about the road to hell.

The performances in Girl, Interrupted resonate, but the movie does not.

Despite Angela's skills - and Bullock's charms - director Irwin Winkler's film is so pedestrian that his movie has all the thrills of a school crossing.

No great shakes, The Baxter nonetheless has a quiet loopiness going for it. And it has the absence of a laugh track going for it, too.

Mighty Joe Young is a movie only an 8-year-old could love. How cheesy is it? Well, it leaves the ooze of Velveeta in its wake. [25 Dec 1998, p.4]

Peter Jackson devotees may not like to hear this, but Jack the Giant Slayer is far more accomplished, visually speaking, than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Snooze, I mean, Journey.

Verdict? Mixed. Loved the slapstick, winced at the toilet humor, and mourned that the female performers were given so little to do. Funeral is funnier the second time around.

Acts more like a primer for newbies unfamiliar with the show's history, giving no real insight into Lorne Michaels' long-running creation.

Alternately tedious, cliched and unintentionally funny.

Although it often feels like a company-bankrolled promo film, A Lego Brickumentary answers all the questions both Lego novices and Lego nerds would want to know.

Quickly devolves into a violent thriller that resolves itself in sadomasochistic romance.

In this episodic film with a soupcon of "Sex and the City" (just as the Merchant Ivory Slaves of New York presaged the HBO hit), cross-cultural misunderstanding, not character, is the point.

By turns entertaining and excruciating.

Story and collaborators succeed in making a courtship comedy that will entertain women and amuse men.

Directed by veteran stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, Snitch is shot with a mix of nervous close-ups and weirdly vertiginous angles.

The script, which needs not just doctoring and could benefit from a spell in the critical-care ward, is full of dress-up and put-downs, and comes alive only when Prinze or Cook are on-screen. In short, She's All That aspires to be Clueless. It succeeds in being clueless.

It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

Succeeds as a do-it-yourself handbook of guerrilla filmmaking

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

While it descends too often into the melodramatic, it's a solid, smart picture and a welcome addition to the genre.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

An exceptional film -- unpacks long-buried suitcases, both figuratively and literally.

His routine about the differences between cat lovers and dog lovers demonstrates how perceptive and just flat-out funny he can be when he's not trying so hard to shock us.

Dumb, dumb, dumb - borrowing scare tactics from Hitchcock and other suspense masters, but forgetting basic story.telling essentials such as character development and logical exposition.

Tonally, Casino Jack is all over the place: exaggerated comedy, cartoonish high jinks, then heavy-handed melodrama (a third-act face-off between Abramoff and his wife, played with no center of gravity by Kelly Preston, comes out of nowhere).

Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi is going for a quiet, thoughtful character study: a modern woman, sure of herself, but still trying to come to terms with her place in the world.

Finding Amanda isn't bad, and there is some smart, jagged humor.

Intermittent moments of mild amusement ensue.

One caveat: The film has more blood-splatter than a dozen zombie movies. If you can handle that, Doomsday's drunken mash-up of futuristic and feudal is surprisingly satisfying.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

It's totally down-to-earth, as real as a trip to the supermarket.

Jon Amiel's moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

Shameless in every way imaginable, Me Before You milks the pathos for all it's worth, but milks the comedy, too.

Has to be one of the nuttiest, sappiest (literally), most unintentionally hilarious spectacles to come down the time-travel turnpike in eons.

Frisky, raunchy and frequently riotous.

On the whole, it's a mess of action clichés built on top of a shaky premise that's so out-of-this-world that it'll either enrage you - or make you laugh. I chose the latter. I'm not ashamed to admit that I had a lot of fun at this movie.

Araki's films have never been known for their subtlety. Think Douglas-Sirk-meets-Johnny-Rotten. He tries to rein in his tendency for the baroque in White Bird in a Blizzard, but he pushes the story too far in the direction of the grotesque.

A preposterous, if admittedly fun, exercise in sci-fi/horror mayhem.

At its best, the movie is a catalog of doggy stunts.

Michael Elliot, the Philadelphia native who wrote Just Wright as a vehicle for Latifah - and who was on set for most of the shoot - says that Common's earnestness, and eagerness, and his sense of responsibility in carrying the movie, were palpable.

An OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

An undemanding and reassuring amiability that made it a crowd-pleaser at Sundance.

A thoroughly satisfying mix of mayhem and mindless fun.

A wonderfully crafted, smartly acted study of a complex old coot.

There's lots of zero-g action in Ender's Game - even old Han Solo takes a whirl.

It's like a bath of stale testosterone as these Hollywood tough guys from the '80s swap references to their most famous movie lines. Their individual entrances are the primary pleasure of The Expendables 2.

Unfortunately, the plot runs out of dilithium crystals, and drifts to a sluggish and predictable conclusion

Birth makes its oddball supernaturalism seem completely, compellingly real.

At its best, Worlds Away is a parade of mostly attractive acrobats performing physically improbable feats. At its worst, it has the humorlessness of Ridley Scott plumbing the deeper meanings of an Esther Williams water ballet.

The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

The movie avoids most of the romantic comedy cliches, and its leads are appealing. That's almost enough for me. But not quite.

It wants to be "Wedding Crashers," but it's not nearly as memorable, smart, or sweet.

Clunky and unsurprising.

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.

Unlike the first film, which was broader and more episodic, this one has a narrative throughline.

The fundamental problem with The Night Listener is the manner in which the boy, Pete, is depicted. Rory Culkin gets the tricky job of bringing the role to life, and he does it well, but it's still a trick. Or is it?

Never again let it be said that an action movie is just like a video game. Hardcore Henry, a frenetic, dizzying, and ultraviolent actioner from Russian rocker-turned-director Ilya Naishuller is one - a first-person shooter writ large for the big screen.

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.