Diaz gets her own voice-over monologue, as does Patric - the different points of view functioning like stanza refrains, born in shared familial anguish.

While Ferrell and Reilly are great together, hatching harebrained schemes that have no basis in reality, part of the unexpected treat of Step Brothers is watching Jenkins and Steenburgen sink to such blithely immature levels of rude and crude comedy.

An airless, bilious, endless pageant of pseudohistory.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

Worse yet, Romeo Is Bleeding - which is extremely bloody - just isn't all that fun. [4 Feb 1994, p.12]

Shot on the cheap, with cheesy animated credits and comic-panel "Bams!" and "Pows!" splashed across the screen, Super has a jokey, low-rent quality (or lack of quality) that could be endearing, if Wilson's performance weren't so nihilistically dull, and if there were somebody in the picture who had a soul.

The film's grand concept is betrayed by Anthony Jaswinski's clumsy, mediocre script and by Anderson's inability to manage the talents of a great cast.

Stevenson is big and swarthy and not altogether without credibility, but he's got as much charisma as a potato.

As a character study, City by the Sea is engaging. As a police thriller, it's not all there.

It succeeds as a vivid video album of the metropolis at the millennium, a lilting musical album of the varied carols Americans play and an all-too-rare depiction of what the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

Road Hard, partly funded through crowd-sourcing, is an enjoyable picture. It's sure to appeal to Man Show fans, though it withers when compared to another recent film about a has-been comic directed by its star, Chris Rock's remarkable Top Five.

Although it's set on the same frozen continent, Happy Feet Two is worlds away from its predecessor.

Like its own hero - and so many recent films - The Shadow suffers from a split personality. At some moments, this can have a poetic impact. More often, though, it seems the result of sloppiness. [01 Jul 1994, p.05]

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Director Steven Quale is economical: He ditches plot altogether, delivering instead nothing but set pieces. He does come up with a few genuinely creepy moments of Hitchcockian edge-of-your-seat suspense and a few very inventive deaths.

Kutcher and Portman have terrific screen physics, using their 12-inch height difference to considerable slapstick effect.

Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.

Director John Crowley trots his crew around London, working up a suitable amount of suspense. And paranoia.

At its best, Shange's work is a lyric journey through the storm to the rainbow. At its worst, Perry's movie is a relentless dance between the victimizer and his victim. Shange's poetic flow gets choked by Perry's stilted prose.

At times, Spare Parts sails perilously close to the saccharine. But the film is a fine example of a message movie that does justice both to its important subject matter and to its characters' inner lives.

While it's always gratifying to see girls in the kind of piece that has long been male- dominated, Now and Then merely makes ground that better films have explored more memorably seem like a rut. [20 Oct 1995, p.03]

Hit & Run is a pleasant enough diversion - but more of the PPV persuasion.

It lacks the resonances of Gilbert's book.

Offers a primal vision of the primate order turned topsy-turvy. It is provocative. It is frightening. It is a mess.

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Although it would be understatement to call their characters unsympathetic, Van Der Beek and Sossamon play their parts with such doomed passion that they have some affecting moments.

Flipping his cigarette lighter and snapping deadpan retorts, Reeves plays the demon-hunting detective with Keanu-esque panache.

Little White Lies wants to capture something momentous and meaningful in these people's lives. But ultimately it's hard to care.

Alas, not even Eckhart and Breslin can get Zeta-Jones to simmer.

Featuring an awe-inspiring, stellar performance by Parks and Recreation's (and Wilmington's) Aubrey Plaza as Beth, the film opens with the high school girl's short-lived death.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

Dedication works anyway, thanks to Theroux's jumping visuals and Crudup's jumpy performance.

A feeling man's buddy story that's user-friendly to men and women alike.

A goofy sports inspirational.

Hoffman's turn as the drag queen has its endearing and comically catty moments, but Flawless' utter phoniness subsumes all efforts at honest acting.

Duplex's tenant-from-hell scenario is as predictable as it is tedious -- a tinny, unsatisfying throwaway farce.

It says in the beginning of the film that Two for the Money is "inspired by a true story." Problem is, it's just not that inspired.

Aniston and Zahn are sweet together - their respective characters have built up psychic armor to keep the outside world at bay, and each breaks down the other's in revealing ways.

This unassuming and unexpectedly moving picture set in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood is a sugarplum-and-sofrito affair centering on the Rodriguez household.

When Bullock is on screen, Murder by Numbers is as far away as a sleepwalker's gaze. But when Schroeder focuses on the teenagers, the film is wide awake, eye-to-eye with adolescent angst and anomie.

Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long (2 hours, 48 minutes) that into the third hour I found myself yawning, "Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum."

A stylish, painterly picture that evokes classic horror films from the 1930s.

If the only measure of Fur's achievement was in how well it conjures the fairy-tale mood of Arbus' most memorable photos, then it is a modest success. But as a chronicle of the turning point in an artist's creative life, it falls flat on its viewfinder.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

Although Solondz's view is omniscient, as a filmmaker here he condescends to his characters' innocence, ignorance and bigotry, making him guilty of the same narrative crimes.

It's also a case of art imitates life imitates art. If that makes it a tribute to a tribute to a classic, then it is no less enjoyable for that.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

Like Kevin's lucky fortune cookie, Lottery Ticket is a sweet treat with a substantive message.

Gretchen Mol stars as a 35-year-old virgin deflowered in lusty romance-novel fashion on a trip to Mexico. Her hunky lover-boy's name? Jesus Christ (played by Justin Theroux). The segment? "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain."

This sophomoric mix of the supernatural and screwball from Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) is diverting, cheesy fun, with Thurman's G-Girl as a droll combination of Superwoman and Uber Shrew.

Flat and predictable.

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men.

There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters. Now You See Me is not that movie.

The problem with Wide Awake, which was shot by ace cinematographer Adam Holender in rich, autumnal tones, with interiors full of inspirational shafts of light, is that there isn't a genuine moment, or character, in the whole thing. [27 Mar 1998, p.14]

Feels less like an epic drama about power and the power of love than an episode of a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series.

How bad is Prince of Persia? Whether or not director Mike Newell is to blame, the action sequences lack verve and scope.

Their apartments are chic, the architecture is impressive, the restaurants richly appointed. And yet, while the atmosphere and cinematography of director Leon Ichaso's grandly conceived movie evoke The Godfather series (as does its theme of brother vs. brother in a criminal underworld), Barry Michael Cooper's screenplay falls short of any such epic design. [25 Feb 1994, p.03]

Neither fish nor fowl (nor extraterrestrial), and that's a problem. Craig, handsomely craggy, plays it straight, and like Eastwood's Man With No Name, he doesn't have much to say.

Isn't a cheap knock-off but an equally effective, deliciously disturbing movie. It's bound to delight genre fans (and dismay critics, who attacked the first as heavy-handed and sloppy).

Simplistic and jingoistic. But it's also explosively fun.

The good news is that it sees what a jihad looks like from both sides. The bad news is that it's not a very good movie, with three fine performances and two great sequences.

While Grant is sublime, the "Godfather" spoof he's in sleeps with the fishes.

The trouble with Alfie - apart from the film's existence, and the wrongheaded idea of remaking a minor classic - is that not a soul is likable.

Leaves you in no doubt of where the talent is in what would otherwise be a throwaway picture.

If you can accept Dennis Quaid as a post-Arthurian knight and a dragon who looks like Sean Connery as well as talking like him, there is a certain loopy charm to their adventures. But the rest of Dragonheart, with evil kings and distressed damsels, is such a warmed-over borrowing from better fantasies that it undermines the film's modest strength. [31 May 1996, p.05]

In his peculiar, confused and grossly violent debut, Texas writer- director C.M. Talkington doesn't seem to know whether he is dumping on the road-movie genre (felony division) or celebrating it. [09 Jan 1995, p.D02]

One wishes that Chambers had more gracefully integrated the stories of the individual players into this celebration of Rush.

There's not a believable character, nor line of convincing dialogue to be found.

There are two questions to ask about a film such as Chloe: Is it erotic? Yes. Is it good? Yes, until it devolves into third-act pretentiousness and preposterousness.

A comedy as likable as its stars.

A testosterone-fueled road movie that displays the same Apatow-ian obsessions, and raunch, as "Pineapple Express," "Superbad," and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

Happily, Perry's strength as a filmmaker is that he genuinely loves his actors, and they love him back. What his movies lack in exposition they make up for in performances.

For all its flaws, offers an enjoyable look at the machinations of moviedom and fame, and a look into a future where what is real and what isn't becomes scarily blurred.

The film is cannily made.

I watched this movie thinking that it used the idea of taking a chance on cards as a metaphor for taking a chance on love. I was dead wrong.

Tobey Maguire, terribly miscast and squeaky (that voice - it belongs to a kid!).

Ricci makes all this far more palatable than it should be. She is surely helped by the dismal level shared by most allegedly more adult afterlife fantasies. The kids will enjoy the high-spirited antics, but Casper ultimately is another reason to wish Hollywood would declare a moratorium on ghost writing. [26 May 1995, p.03]

This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.

Yet another Hollywood serving of everyman pluck, sports division.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

Though it's rife with unexpected scene-stealers, the movie belongs to Lemmon and Matthau, that perfect complement of treacle and acid. [02 July 1997, p.D01]

Legacy is a two-hour light show with a lot of flash, a little style, and not one byte of narrative originality.

Burns' movie shows a Woody.esque affection for a certain slice of New York and its denizens (with the angst and neuroses quieted down a notch or two).

There's no doubt that the formula for this kind of action film is showing its age.

Is Final Fantasy decent sci-fi? Yes, more than decent.

The best thing about The Thing, the third - and the least interesting - big-screen adaptation of the John W. Campbell Jr. short story "Who Goes There?", is its closing credits.

Surely there is a good comedy to be framed around that strange limbo of powerless celebrity we reserve for our ex-presidents. My Fellow Americans merely proves that it has yet to be made. [20 Dec 1996, p.45]

Richie Rich has some fun with Richie's pampered life, and Culkin seems at ease with the role of a kid who has been isolated from his peers by money and celebrity - perhaps because it surely touches on feelings in his own young life. [21 Dec 1994, p.E01]

In some ways, American Reunion is the Charlize Theron indie "Young Adult" all over again: In both, a small-town high school reunion is the setting for a lot of nostalgia and narcissism and nasty behavior.

Eva Longoria brings a crisp swagger and fluent Spanish to her role.

The film is an omnibus ride through Brighton Beach, Central Park, the West Village, and Tribeca.

For sheer audacity and adrenaline-fueled carnage, Shoot 'Em Up hits its target pretty much dead on.

Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.

Too long (and it sure ain't taut), but it brims with passion.

So many characters to keep track of, so little time!

This furry family comedy about a boy and his border terrier is irresistible, if not exactly in the league of "Babe."