As for Bale, he seems to have lost his compass. His accent strays, his famous intensity wasted on clunky dialogue.

Fails as drama but succeeds as a "When bad things happen to good firemen" procedural. It's sensitivity training for civilians.

The film drifts along on a stream of humiliation jokes - physical, emotional, sexual, hairpiece-ial.

Every time Problem Child gets an interesting edge, it loses it.

Though imaginatively directed by Harald Zwart, Mortal Instruments, which is adapted from Cassandra Clare's YA novels, is marred by significant flaws.

Contrived and schematic, Peter Chelsom's film is a mechanical bird that never takes wing.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.

In returning to what is basically the same premise, Carpenter gives us an update as well as a sequel. [09 Aug 1996, p.5]

Unlike the filmmaker's previous stabs at presidential biopic-ing and conspiracy theorizing - "JFK" and "Nixon" - this one doesn't have the luxury of historical perspective.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

Travolta, a bit portly (or is it starboardly?), phones in his performance from his place in Maine; Vaughn is ice-cool but not especially convincing; the kid is OK, and Polo is a blank.

In Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith wears his heart on his sleeve - and on his pants, socks, boxers and backward-facing baseball cap.

Anderson, who's turned Brit in a number of TV series and films, including "Bleak House" and "The Last King of Scotland," is compelling in her white lab coat and surgical scrubs, and she brings some real tenderness to her tete-a-tetes with Mulder.

A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

The new Ben-Hur isn't much of an improvement. Dominated by CGI effects, it's a soap opera better fit for basic cable.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

A messy fish-out-of-water gangland romp.

The stiff banalities and trite dialogue of the genre hardly suit his flamboyant comic style. And whatever life Murphy manages to bring to the few moments between crashes and explosions are done in by the lifeless, if beautiful, presence of Ejogo and the completely wasted talent of Michael Rapaport as his partner. Ejogo's London accent is gratingly out of place on the streets of San Francisco. So, too, is Murphy. [17 Jan 1997, p.03]

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

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.

A tad more character development would have been nice.

A by-the-numbers extravanganza that journeys from London to Venice to Siberia to Cambodia without ever really going anywhere.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

Lame and misguided homage, which reduces satire to vulgar silliness for kids.

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.

Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.

Designed as the ideal confection to attract a young girl or teen, What a Girl Wants will more likely hook their mothers.