A work of incompleteness, might-have-beens and moral subtleties befitting a filmmaker named Gray.

This film might've worked better as a comedy.

It's a heavy, moody film, mimicking in its form something of the mental state of its central character, which is a nifty trick. But the quality of the craft doesn't draw you in, nor does Gosling's aloof and inward performance.

Toothless, limp and clumsy.

A modest little caper film that satisfies chiefly because of its relative familiarity and lack of ambition.

The relationship between Trishna and Jay never rings as true as it needs to for the downbeat third act to resonate the way it was presumably intended to do.

It doesn't take an awareness of the ethnic and cultural differences between the miniskirted siren and the shy Arab youth to see that she might be more than he can handle.

The crudeness with which Mottola made "Superbad" suited that film; here, a similarly rudimentary technique detracts and distracts.

Ultimately, it is nothing more than a souped-up, intermittently interesting take on some familiar material. [24 Oct 1997, p.22]

It's an often lovely, constantly assured film that now and again burps forth a really remarkable vision. But it's also half-nuts -- maybe three-quarters.

Never quite catches fire. They take a crackerjack premise and a comely, committed leading lady and turn in a merely OK film.

Isn't profound or dazzling or groundbreaking. But it's a pleasant, clever and sincere little romp, proof that you don't need to harbor heroic ambitions to create something satisfying.

Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist," "Coal Miner's Daughter") keeps things low-key and low-tech, which makes some of the cliched Bondisms a bit easier to swallow.

A twisty, darkly comic story of greed, betrayal and murderous misunderstandings.

It's hard to argue with the movie's big heart, solid craftsmanship, likable characters, decent acting, gorgeous scenery or the fact that it's going to leave its audience blubbering and smiling.

Simultaneously modern and yet gorgeously primitive with its budget sets and simple but influential score, this is not just a film re-release but a film event.

Life Partners may be a dispensable sitcom of a movie, but it's charming and cannily made.

Thor meets the elevated expectations for superhero movies today, but doesn't exceed them. There's some sloppy plotting, which always shows a certain disregard for the audience's intelligence.

Doesn't have much new to offer in either style or substance. It's got the same glossy-gritty urban warfare sheen as "Black Hawk Down" and every other Third-World geopolitical action thriller of the last few years.

Beautifully acted and accomplishes exactly what writer/director Alan Ball set out to accomplish.

The movie is well-crafted and finely acted (including by the non-actors László and András Gyémánt as the creepy, affectless twins), but it never comes up with a new way to communicate its sadly familiar themes.

A clever and affecting thriller/comedy about a subject that absolutely cannot be written about in a daily newspaper or website that's for a general audience. The film is a giddy pastiche of styles -- slasher picture, faith film, social satire, teen romp, '50s atom bomb monster movie -- and it makes you laugh and squirm and grin in appreciation.

Space Jam is a high-energy comedy that mixes live action, animation, cornball storytelling and rowdy humor into an energetic, gee-whiz confection that will probably delight just about everybody. [15 Nov 1996, p.20]

A kinda funny, kinda charming movie about finding out what really matters.

In Little Buddha, the Italian director offers an utterly sincere, respectful introduction to a religion that is, for people raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, largely a mystery. [27 May 1994, p.21]

It's fine ensemble work, but you nevertheless grow itchy wishing Roos had focused it a little better.

Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi is just like his Koyaanisqatsi, only different. Its dreamlike mix of forceful imagery and Philip Glass' surging, unique music is the same, but the dream is different, and Reggio uses different techniques to incarnate it. [08 Jul 1988, p.F13]

May not carry great emotional or intellectual weight, but, in a slim and fetching way, it's peachy.

A charming, funny piece of wish-fulfillment for young girls -- and, if you're much older than that, a disturbing critique of modern male sexuality.

Humor and humanity keep The Boys Are Back from being a cloying mess.

Even if her turn in Bright Days Ahead feels overly familiar, especially after Deneuve's recent "On My Way," Ardant is still possessed of the same Gallic poise and presence, and generally a joy to watch.

The result calls to mind “Lord of the Flies” and “Children of Men,” even if the film’s second half is much less compelling than its first.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

The ensemble can't bring enough, though, to overcome the unoriginal setup and predictable story arc.

Decent performances aside, the only interesting bits involve Geoffrey Rush as a chemistry professor who enables their self-abuse.

In a movie that strives to offend with every spat profanity and cruel insult, the most shocking thing about Bad Words is that it expects us to care about its main character at all.

As a picturesque mood piece, Flesh and Bone is haunting and effective. As a movie, though, it doesn't quite get to where it wants to go. [05 Nov 1993, p.AE17]

There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.

Minkoff lets the fight scenes go on for a while, which is nice, and all the best bits are in the middle, when Jackie and Jet spend a lot of time playing off each other.

The chief attraction of Albert Nobbs is the acting.

Goes overboard in its presentation of supposed reality.

A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.

The last time Jane Fonda acted in a French-language film, it was Jean-Luc Godard's radical 1972 effort "Tout Va Bien." It's fitting, then, that she fluently plays Jeanne, one of five aging leftists in this slight, but never frivolous, tale.

Bees is a movie in which a bunch of powerful African American women get their lives upended and in some cases destroyed so a little white girl can feel better about herself.

The parts of "Run Ronnie Run" that advance the minimal plot can be painful to sit through, but the jokes scattered along the side of the story often are hilarious. [19 Sep 2003]

Be warned that this is a movie literally awash in blood and graphic violence.

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

A bit of exotic neo-noir, clunky in parts and long, but often engaging and artfully atmospheric as well.

It's gory, really gory, gratuitously and often inelegantly.

What is deeply stirring is Code 46's sound, light and texture. It's probably bad critical form to recommend a movie based largely on abstractions like "vibe," but Winterbottom does such a glorious job building his world that a certain breed of filmgoer can get punch-drunk lost in the pure cinema of it all.

Director Wes Ball doesn't have much experience with actors, but for once that's a plus; his background is in animation and art direction, and the design of the maze (brutal slabs of concrete and steel) and the attacks by the spiders ("Predator"-like clicks, then stabbing violence) make the movie gruesomely watchable.

Only a shadow -- if an agreeable and harmless one -- of its predecessor film.

You're looking for the mammoth home run, and the film is merely a bloop single.

But if it's going to be diet Pixar, at least it's action-packed diet Pixar -- with overwhelming, detail-choked production design that occasionally had my jaw lowering like a forklift.

It's inoffensive and shiny and competent and kids will dig it, and I can already barely remember a single thing that happened.

The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.

While it's an effective memoriam for the well-meaning Germans whose lives were ruined by Hitler's mad dream, the refusal of Generation War to focus on any other sort of German makes it both dramatically and historically suspect.

A sometimes very funny movie made by very funny people.

Despite the film's claim to be an anatomy of a pop culture craze, it's deeply parochial and has an opportunistic feel at its core.

The romance is unexpectedly chaste, and the violence muted. [07 Jul 1995, p.23]

It's the sort of sophomoric exercise that will be appreciated chiefly by viewers already convinced they love it even before they've bought their tickets.

The Killer Elite is possibly Bloody Sam's worst film, and the martial-arts-themed actioner is must-see material only for the director's completists, despite a cast that includes James Caan and Robert Duvall. [17 Jun 2005, p.43]

If you've a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of Snow White and the Huntsman.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

Binoche is her usual dependable self, bringing passion and fury to a familiar, but still compelling, character.

Overall, there's a patchwork quality to the movie, as if a batch of half-finished short stories were filmed before their time.

Neeson used his newfound box-office clout to get A Walk Among the Tombstones made, and he's the best reason to see it.

Rather like a four-hour episode of "Today": painless enough, leavening superficiality with substance, allowing you to watch and still do the laundry without missing anything vital.

Traveller does pass the time painlessly, and it isn't aggressively stupid or hateful, like about half the movies Hollywood makes nowadays. But someone must have stolen its engine - this film has no narrative drive. [p May 1997]

For the most part, The Last Kiss engages and pleases with its shaggy earnestness.

For all its handsome decor, tasteful restraint and old-fashioned look-and-feel, is a stiff, lacking tension, sizzle, drama, energy, appeal and, finally, purpose.

Not much in The Man From Elysian Fields resembles life on Earth, but there are a few moments with Jagger that feel desperate and human -- stuff from another movie entirely, in other words.

Basically "Before Sunrise" for middle-aged people, only with less interesting conversations and a more formulaic construction.

The movie is strongest when it stays with Bateman and Spacey, who play greatest-hits remixes of their best-loved performances.

The visual design of Mama is effective, at least in small, quick doses. But those are about all the positives for this example of why a solid audition reel doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to churn out a feature.

As far as the company Redford keeps, I liked it better when he hung out with Paul Newman and Sydney Pollack, but those days are long gone.

A bloodless film that aims for wry but leaves you merely asking "why?"

So what will happen? Sadly, some overacting and a bad "And Justice For All"-style speech at the end.

The first half of the movie is a particular delight, with the bug-eyed, chinless Cuthbertson playing beautifully against grouchy, stoic King, who's barking mad under that stiff upper lip.

No matter how noble, not everyone's life should be made into a movie.

The movie's anchored by a strong lead performance and a steady sense of humor.

Thought-provoking, making this a solid date movie science geeks and philosophy freaks alike.

The story, as so often in bad farce, treats them all as idiots, so it's almost impossible be engaged by anything other than the pretty rooms, gondolas and costumes.

The lunacy to which The Equalizer descends is especially disappointing because the movie starts out with some promise.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit though, gets the international-espionage ingredients almost exactly right.

Despite some arresting visual flourishes and Downey’s inherent likeability, it’s nearly incoherent both as cinema and as story. No, this isn’t your grandfather’s or your father’s Sherlock Holmes, but if theirs featured Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett in the lead, it was better by miles.

For good and ill, there is only one John Waters.

Rosemary Clooney (that's Danny Ocean's aunt) steals the show as one half of a sister act accompanying the boys on their yuletide misadventures. The real highlight, of course, is the Irving Berlin score. [24 Dec 2004, p.39]

Despite the avoidance of fundamental surprise -- there are a few good ones along the way -- Shoot To Kill is still an OK suspense adventure. Director Roger Spottiswoode (Under Fire, The Best of Times) makes the most of the wild, sometimes vertical terrain, and the acting is fine. [15 Feb 1988, p.C04]

A scary performance by James Woods as a racist assassin brought to justice after 30 years and the sheer importance of the true story redeem an awful script. [03 Jan 1997, p.16]

Despite some rough edges, Dogfight is a sweet, enjoyable match. [08 Nov 1991, p.AE15]

Wants to be both a hot-button, ripped-from-the-headlines statement movie and a crowd-pleasing, rip-roaring action thriller. It ends up meeting each goal about halfway.

As is, it's a pleasant but unremarkable retelling of a story as old as the Dead Sea itself.

The writer-director has done a lot of opera, onstage and on film, and he sure is fond of the dramatic gesture. His leading man, Poelvoorde, is not at first glance the type of guy who'd captivate two such stunning women, but this is France, and his desire and anguish is real.

The pleasures of Buffalo Soldiers mainly come early on, before the film becomes a sloppy mixture of tones and story lines. Afterward, you're left mainly puzzled and looking for a way to wash a bitter aftertaste out of your mouth.

Whishaw's oddly charismatic performance makes the despicable Grenouille into an almost sympathetic antihero. The rather astonishing finale will likely have audiences either howling in derision or ardently dissecting afterward. And it must have given the bluenoses at the MPAA fits.

With very little dialogue and through what's essentially a gimmick, we come truly to like these guys.

Hollywood used to make a fair number of films like The Escapist (sigh: remember grown-up dramas?), and it's a satisfying variation on a once-familiar theme.