There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.

This is the slightest and slimmest of sex comedies.

Yes, it's stupid. But sometimes it's stupid with a capital S, and it's in those moments of transcendent idiocy that you can't help liking Saving Silverman. At least, a little bit.

Shannon is flawless.

My guess is that The Dreamers will have a certain resonance for those of us who discovered movies and sex at the same time during the '60s. For the rest of you, the film is a curiosity about cinegenic youths baring their bodies while thinking they are baring their souls.

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

Ultimately, it's the romance that feels forced and phony, not the group meetings, the confessions, the anguished moments alone.

Tomorrow Never Dies sticks to the Bond formula without bringing anything new, or particularly inspired, to the proceedings. (Besides a lot of shameless product placement, that is.)

Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

Carpenter, an old hand at this horror stuff, delivers some convincingly creepy effects, but the narrative lacks any sustained dramatic pulse - its gallery of hallucinogenic scenes doesn't add up to much more than, well, a gallery of hallucinogenic scenes. [03 Feb 1995, p.5]

Those who know Austen novels will recognize how much each character resembles a figure in one of them. Those who do not will enjoy the amusing types. Men, this means you.

It is by turns illuminating, exasperating, sloppy, redundant, a head-spinner, and a headache.

There are big, jaunty gusts of music, and there are big, jaunty gusts of acting: the Heath Ledger-esque Alexander Fehling pumps up his Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with brash, boyish verve and stormy emoting.

The producers of the TV series have managed the near-miraculous feat of putting out a well-written and decently animated episode every day that draws you in without insulting your intelligence. So it shouldn't surprise many people that this may be the best Batman story brought to the big screen so far. [28 Apr 1994, p.D07]

Wild Target is the sort of farce where nothing, essentially, is at stake, even as cars crash (including an original Mini Cooper), bullets rip, and knives get hurled with deadly velocity.

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.

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

Funny and not-funny, slapstick and slapdash, Welcome to Collinwood is a seriously uneven caper comedy in which a bunch of really fine character actors get to act really, really silly.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

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

There are the bare bones of a plot, but the true purpose of this animated feature is to highlight Gibran's poetic essays, recited sonorously by Liam Neeson.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

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

It's the classic odd-couple buddy movie setup, only it'll pull at your heartstrings, whether you want it too or not. And you won't want it to, because it's sap.

Judy Moody has some enjoyable ingredients. The cast, for instance, rocks it, especially young Aussie actress Jordana Beatty as the title character, a bottle rocket with unruly red hair.

This based-on-real-life tale of artistic aspirations and international politics is packed with more corn than an Iowa silo.

Apted's movie puts flesh - and a considerable amount of blood - on problems that usually get lost in the winds of empty political rhetoric. [27 Sept 1996, p.03]