A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

Easily the best 1975 B-movie made in 2005, Four Brothers is a raucously entertaining vigilante film.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

A temptation that can be easily and safely resisted.

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful.

A kind of Tracy/Hepburn rom-com with a "Dead Poets Society" backdrop and dollops of human failing for added drama, Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche - a matchup that makes you want to like Fred Schepisi's film, even when it becomes impossible to do so.

Franco, the hollow-cheeked, pouty-lipped actor best known as Spider-Man's nemesis Harry Osborn, plays Tristan like a biker boy with a broadsword.

A movie that provokes as many rueful sighs as it does bruising laughs.

Her (Angela Ismailos) generic questions about the politics, economics, and aesthetics of film yield predictably generic responses from her subjects.

Purely as an action film, Riddick is passable, if grueling. The problem is tonal.

What could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

It's a stylish package with not much inside.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

Boasts exciting competitive track cycling footage.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

The film's atmosphere is incendiary. It has style to burn. But for the most part, the performances are all wet.

Among contemporary films, fans will recognize extensive borrowings from Terminator and Alien. But Donaldson makes sure we wind up with something more than Alienator: Species shrewdly manipulates some very modern fears of deadly sexual infection and touches a paranoia unimaginable back in the '50s. [07 July 1995, p.03]

Everything about An Unfinished Life's screenplay is cliched and predictable, but the actors manage to elevate the proceedings above and beyond shameless soap.

May not be great cinema, but it nonetheless deserves attention.

Was it just three years ago that Perry made his feature debut with "Diary of a Mad Black Woman?" Then his filmmaking was strictly amateur; now his sweeping pans and portentous closeups approach those of Pedro Almódovar.

At 24 minutes, Lola Versus might be a middling episode of a sitcom like "New Girl." At 87 minutes, it is a gracefully aimed arrow shot in the air. Where it lands, Wein and Lister Jones know not where.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A spectacle where A-list talent strives mightily to elevate a C-plus effort.

Eisenberg (who starred in director Fleischer's far better Zombieland) does his usual Eisenbergian thing, more slacker and less hacker, but still hitting the same notes. And Ansari squawks and yelps, like a parrot with a grudge.

Jackson gets by mostly on bluster, but that doesn't matter because he serves mostly as a foil to Mac's popeyed shake-and-bake antics.

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.

Both consoling and confounding.

Fairy-tale-like musing on true love in cynical times.

Don't blame Kline. This most thoughtful of actors is trapped behind the lectern of a film that spouts contradictory lessons it can't reconcile.

A standard-issue, ineptly executed serving of the genre's staples, from skeptical cops to an all-knowing psychic.

A tired, cobbled-together concoction.

It'd be nice if Jason Statham and Ben Foster, The Mechanic's mentor/protege duo, could crack a smile. Once.

Gold never settles on a coherent point of view. Is the film supposed to be a critique of capitalism or is it a Horatio Alger story about a self-made man preyed upon by wall street?

It's riveting stuff, but unlike Tarantino's work - layered with casual irony, deadpan dialogue and encyclopedic pop-cult references - Killing Zoe is what it is and nothing more: a nihilistic crime film, steeped in carnage and chaos. [14 Sep 1994, p.E02]

It's intriguing enough to suck you in, but confusing, fragmentary, frustrating.

Scary Movie 3 is a veritable time capsule of of-this-moment kitsch, schlock and bad taste. And it's funny, too.

The sheer brutality of Oldboy is stunning, especially a deeply disturbing scene in which Brolin tortures Samuel L. Jackson. But this is an unrelievedly grim and hermetic experience throughout, the cinematic equivalent of blunt trauma.

The "Alien" recipe with a little imagination.

That very curious thing, a Shakespearean happy meal.

It is at once inspiring and troubling.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

What's maddening about Angel-A is that Besson is so brilliant with his visuals - and so in love with his two leads and the city they're parading around - that you desperately want the story, and the characters, to make some kind of emotional sense. This, however, does not happen.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

13 Hours, by its very subject matter, can't help but tap into the confluent veins of politics and patriotism.

Sure, there's a witty reference to another, vastly more momentous legal drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall's film debut). And yes, Farmiga gets to call out Downey, and stay in character, for "that hyper-verbal vocabulary vomit thing that you do." Small pleasures, in a bigger mess.

Though I liked Love's unhurried pace and oddball digressions, its obligatory romantic-comedy resolution seemed too schematic for what had preceded it.

Plunges into a void created by a stale and incredibly derivative plot.

Some numbers: Hawn and Sarandon (both 56) are arguably the first women in American popular culture to be pushing 60 and sexy. Hard to believe, but when Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were comparable ages (59 and 54), they were the frightening gargoyles of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Not a movie, it's a museum catalog of gorgeously rendered portraits and landscapes. What a crashing disappointment.

A conventional, button-pushing but emotionally affecting tale.

More a grab-bag of loosely connected scenes and lives than a film with a firm sense of direction.

The spike-heeled, postfeminist pajama-party sisterhood that is Charlie's Angels is back, and it's serious dress-up time.

Virtually every set-up and set-piece in this extravagantly tedious adventure is misleading, or worse, irrelevant.

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.

Although the story has more than a little Lion King deja vu-doo going for it, Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is likable as both a man, and then a bear.

Part of Glee's charm has always been its innocent amateurishness, its just-folks aura. The live show clings to that conceit - with some pyrotechnics thrown in.

The question for moviegoers: Would you rather get your dose of existenz-philosophie from Dostoyevsky or a slasher flick?

A TV-movie-ish love story laden with heavy-handed metaphor... The Theory of Flight is feeble stuff.

Just call this movie "The Hangover: AARP Strikes Back."

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

An uneasy mix of hand-painted characters and digitally rendered photorealistic backgrounds, the film never fully reconciles its two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds.

I don't think 50 First Dates is a great movie, or a particularly funny one, but I admired its romanticism and its gentle plea for the acceptance of difference. Of how many romantic comedies can you say they are sweet and disturbing?

McCarthy's screenplay, a tangle of doublecrosses and dead men, has just been published. Those who really want to know what's going on would be advised to buy a copy.

Song One burns with genuine sentiment, charismatic actors, and good music. One wishes it were held together by something more than a series of moods.

When the slimy creatures pop out of the ground in Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, one of the hapless humans in their path advises that the most strategic weapon to try is "anything that destroys their eyes and frees their tortured souls." Anyone exposed to this nauseating piece of brain-dead nonsense may want the same treatment. [13 Jan 1995, p.16]

This is the slightest and slimmest of sex comedies.

Its grossness knows no bounds, and you'd have to be dead not to laugh.

If there's going to be a "Rush Hour 3," the filmmakers need more of the Ziyi/Sanchez women warriors to punch up the sagging cross-cultural buddy humor of the Chan-Tucker partnership.

There's no rhythm or rhyme to it. The subplots don't organically connect to the main narrative. It's a series of brightly lit tableaux in which we see the end result of an action but never the action itself. [18 Aug 1995, p.03]

The animation in Planes: Fire & Rescue is considerably better, the landscapes grander, and the 3-D flight and firefighting scenes more exciting.

Chicken Little is entirely lacking in anything "Disneyesque."

21 makes for some slick escapist fantasy. Even if, and because, the fantasy has its roots in something real.

Has the disjointed feel of a bunch of strung-together TV episodes.

In the end, you just feel good about these people, and that's a nice sensation these days.

The Core is unabashed Hollywood spectacle, but with a cast of up-from-indie actors that makes the cataclysmic kitsch all the more fun to behold.

The movie is hipper than its L.A. establishment credentials would suggest.

The thing about stoner comedy is that, well, it helps to be stoned.

Individual moments in Hit and Runway are quite funny, but as a send-up of action-movie mindlessness, the movie is sometimes as dumb as its targets.

Israeli director Noam Murro does an excellent job of managing and expanding the franchise established so vividly by Zach Snyder.

Lockout is genre all the way. The film wears its colors proudly, but it also, alas, wears out its welcome.

Sly can still fill a too-tight polo shirt at 66 - in the same way Jack LaLanne did in his later years. But no amount of movie magic can make him pass for a lethal and nimble juggernaut.

Just Cause is an entertaining if overwrought death-row thriller built on the pros and cons of the capital punishment debate, and it owes most of its appeal to the presence of Sean Connery. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

It's an awkward mix, and Simon Wincer, a director with considerable experience in animal movies, can't make the ingredients work consistently. [28 Jul 1995, p.14]

The characters' high-minded, if unsophisticated, patter clashes with the film's ironic-chic style, and it never manages to move beyond the late-night palaver of earnest, if naive, college freshmen.

A meditation on a life lived in the public eye, I'm Still Here is strange, riveting, and occasionally appalling stuff, any way you look at it.

With its female heroines and its uncertain, constantly shifting view of reality, The Girl on the Train is a bit like a cubist, feminist episode of "Law & Order." But not much more.

Comes across as gratifying, not grating: the same way the familiarity of a well-crafted whodunit is part of the book's pleasures.

Suffers from "Bridget Jones" Syndrome but without that movie's charms.

A far sight nimbler than its plodding predecessor, where the Holy Grail turns out to be a Holy Girl. The sequel is a little like CSI: Vatican City.

What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.

A campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy.

As in "An Education," Scherfig's settings are unshowy, imparting period flavor without overwhelming what is, ultimately, an underwhelming film.

The real reason to see this slight but interesting documentary is to watch and listen to the radiant Aury.

In this G-rated movie the effects are gee-whiz, with live giraffes amid the stuffed animals and bouncy balls so manic that they could use some Ritalin.