The middle 40 minutes of Lone Survivor have to be some of the toughest battle scenes in Hollywood history - an epic, close-range firefight that finds the SEALs throwing themselves down rock faces like superheroes. Only they aren't superheroes - they bleed, they break.

Billy Bob Thornton, wearing a succession of toupees, wigs, fake facial hair, and funny hats, and twitching more than a horse's behind, is the best reason to see Bandits.

With its polished mix of traditional and computer-generated cartooning, Treasure Planet doesn't exude the same suspense as the Disney original. You could say it's lighter on its feet -- but then there's less gravity in outer space, anyway.

Kunis, rebounding from the disastrous Jupiter Ascending (an unintentional comedy if ever there was one), demonstrates an easygoing comic flair.

Life of Crime is like an errant golf putt that appears headed for the hole, but just keeps rolling and rolling, all the way off the green. In other words, just missed . . . by a mile.

Writing with her sister, Karen, Jill Sprecher rigs up an elaborate cause-and-effect comedy of errors, with Kinnear's predatory protagonist as both perp and victim. I won't say more than that, but Thin Ice is deeper than it first appears.

Under Michael Apted's direction, Nell is a pleasingly tranquil experience, its epiphanies as understated as Richardson's and Neeson's low-key performances. [25 Dec 1994, p.G01]

It's hard to know whether this is a function of the sympathetic screenplay or of Krieger's sympathetic direction - or both - but Celeste and Jesse are endearing even when they do unsympathetic things.

How do you say "tearjerker" in Spanish?

While it has considerable charms, Hippocrates is just too predictable.

It musters both the merits and the drawbacks of the landmark original.

The problem with The Perfect Storm is that while its roiling collision of weather systems is pulled off with cinematic deftness, the actors who stand there getting lashed and splashed don't have anything terribly interesting to say.

Too cute by half (or maybe three-quarters).

Somehow the star emerges from this mess smelling like pure testosterone. You can't stop the Rock.

Zemeckis, who blazed trails mixing live-action with animation in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," blazes not even a footpath here.

An involving fantasy for beamish boys and girls - and their parents.

However great Murphy is in this film, even greater is Liam Neeson as Father Bernard.

It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.

Never as much fun as (Woo's) old Chow Yun Fat-starring Chinese pics.

Unbroken is a grueling endurance test - for the audience just as much as for its cutout champion.

Because the confrontations between power and powerlessness are so dramatic and because Hirschbiegel's editing is so emphatic, Das Experiment is practically over before you realize that you don't know what its point is, exactly.

Fugard’s classic minimalist drama comes eloquently to film.

The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.

A gripping French-Algerian coproduction that makes Algeria's epic struggle for independence from France look like a gangster movie.

An upbeat-if-shapeless Canadian comedy about two adorable young women, an artist and an aspiring writer, who fall in love at first sight. [26 Jul 1999, p.C06]

Devoting more time to the setup than to the follow-through, Tower Heist doesn't really build suspense so much as it builds impatience - for the thing to be over.

Excellent performances make the movie effective. Yet the flashbacks have a depth and resonance largely absent from the modern scenes.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.