Oblivion is Moebius-comic gorgeous and it sounds great, especially the loud, nervewracking honks the drones make when they're weighing whether or not to shoot you. I suppose that's a surface appeal. But it's a nice surface.

It gives me no pleasure to report that Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters is fairly excruciating to sit through -- because I'm writing this as a fan of the TV series that spawned the movie.

As a hypothetical, all-access documentary about the kookiest day in draft history, it's oddly satisfying, maybe because watching the actual, bloated spectacle (scheduled this year for May 8) is so often underwhelming.

Although amateurish, often poorly acted and containing dialogue and narration that comes off as pretentious and embarrassing, it's worth watching for the environment it envelops you in.

So sloppily and unabashedly sentimental that it can make you laugh and cry at the same time -- and often at the same things.

Family Business isn't really bad. It is thought-provoking throughout and has many fine moments. Unfortunately, most of those moments are in the first third. [18 Dec 1989, p.C05]

This is one of those comedies where the humor lies in the audacity of tone and character rather than any particular sight gag or one-liner. Same with "The Foot Fist Way," which is absolutely worth your rental dollar.

Never actively unfunny. The cast is far too smart for that. But it never quite pops like it would if it were whittled down to something just a little longer than an "SNL Digital Short."

Somewhere along the way, Stephen Herek's Rock Star decided to become a dippy, cliche-ridden drama and, worse, an odd indictment of metal music. Joy.

If an animated movie isn't competing with Pixar to dazzle the eye, it had darn well better hit the heart or the funny bone. With its wee little stinger, Bee Movie misses both.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

Should satisfy its 8- to 12-year-old target demographic.

This ode to indie legitimacy proves to be too cartoonish to feel real and not outrageous enough to be memorable.

Plot, comedy and characterization? It's absolutely anemic.

Hs a single goal: to prod your tear ducts to open up. It is very, very good at this task. Whether The Notebook is good in any other respect is a bit more complicated.

I'm not sure if parents will be counting out each of Shorts 89 minutes or not, begging for it to end, but I'm guessing 8-year-olds will absolutely love it, because Rodriguez isn't talking down to them or using pop-culture references in place of actual gags; he's making what might be called eye-level children's entertainment.

It gives me no pleasure to report that the Pimentel biopic Music Within plays like a well-intentioned TV movie.

A strangely passive film, dutifully ladling out its bits of filmic wizardry and expanding Lewis Carroll’s fantastical mythos in a promising new direction without any palpable sense of glee or verve.

Had the film been more tempered in its textures, had Cassavetes chosen a surer attitude toward his subjects, it might have been devastating. As it stands, though, it's far more showy than substantial.

One can only hope that the parties responsible for Bandits are brought to justice and someone can stop them before they film again.

Lacks the perfect timing, luster and true vitality of its predecessors.

Filled with too many issues -- along with young motherhood, street gangs, city life, sex, peer pressure, grief and, oh yes, dancing, which is nearly lost in so many poorly written subplots.

A facile, feel-good fable that substitutes cliché for reality at nearly every turn.

The Book Thief renders a dark history in the most bland and inoffensive hues. Most of its success relies on our foreknowledge of history. Its own efforts are hollow, squandering a good cast on lazy writing.

Parents who want smart, harmless movies that don't condescend for their school-age kids -- a rare thing these days -- should be grateful for Nancy Drew.

It's not perfect or "Shining"-level inspired, but it's solid.

Allen's movies, even at their lowest, have usually boasted interesting musical scores, melding jazz, classical, and American standards. Irrational Man, though, uses The Ramsey Lewis Trio's "The 'In' Crowd," an already overexposed riff, so repetitively that I thought I was seeing the film with a temp soundtrack. The real Woody, whatever his flaws, would never have allowed this. I hope he comes back someday.

One of the most important things about Baby Boom, aside from being amusing all the way through, is that Diane Keaton gets her first chance to carry a comedy all by herself. [28 Oct 1987, p.E06]

It more or less plays like a five-episode arc of the series, which is a strength and a weakness.

There's enough realism to keep a soccer buff like me happy, but the film is aimed at the young at heart, and I think they'll love it.

A contrived and sentimental melodrama, the film takes a promising premise and crushes it with mind-numbing repetition, sophomoric conveniences, plastic acting and the worst score, perhaps, ever heard.

Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.

Sobol, directing his second feature, should have been able to prod this story to life, especially considering the cast he was provided. But everything proceeds in such an orderly fashion, right through the ostensibly 'twist' ending, that maintaining interest is a serious challenge.

Despite its familiarity, Tale is well-staged and well-acted. Richardson makes Kate a real person, and her tale is suspenseful to the end. [16 Mar 1990, p.R07]

The delicacy of the film might frustrate some audiences. As if watching a listless young relative do nothing in particular with his or her life, you sometimes want to shake these folks by the shoulders and tell them to get in gear. But then you realize that life has many gears and that moving slowly and somewhat aimlessly is no sin.

There's handmade and then there's amateurish. This, alas, is the latter.

Eraser-dull.

They almost got it really right with Lucky Number Slevin, but they also almost got it horribly wrong.

The film has about five endings, each sillier than the next. Before it's over, the business end of that sniper rifle looks kind of inviting.

There’s quality throughout, but, visual verve aside, the enterprise is dull, heavy-handed and dispiriting.

A thriller that goes from pretty good to absolutely ludicrous in the time it takes one actor to recite about four sentences of dialogue.

Goes on too long and doesn't have much to say.

Imaginary Heroes feels like an endless series of wakes, awkward cocktail conversations and teen house parties, which would be fine if Harris wrote less cartoony dialogue.

Moderately amusing.

It hasn't the flash and style of Fatal Attraction or Jagged Edge, but its contrived finale is better than those contrived finales. [21 Apr 1990, p.C08]

Nair, against all odds, has injected new life into this oft-filmed tale, handily re-creating the grimy look of early 19th-century London streets.

It just drones on and on, so repetitiously that you wonder if some of the reels have been shown twice. [7 Nov 1992]

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

Considering that Margin is a familiar and predictable story, with options severely limited, it's a good, suspenseful adventure. [01 Oct 1990, p.D05]

You should come out of a film like Apres Vous with your heart as light and fluffy as a souffle. But this farce, credited to four chefs, er, writers, is as heavy and leaden as meatloaf.

Amateur is a subversive action movie that uses lurid material for its own puckish purposes. [02 Jun 1995]

Zeffirelli's Hamlet is lively, energetic and suspenseful. [18 Jan 1991]

For a film that shows the folly of failing to take the female orgasm seriously, Hysteria ends up taking a silly angle on a potentially fascinating slice of secret history.

Often as not, the movie works. Here and there, it works kind of beautifully.

ASM 2 makes too many of the same mistakes that have brought other superhero movies low (including Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man 3"). It tries to pack in too many characters and plot lines, for one.

Developing late in the film, the romantic subplot has the effect of retarding the war story, stretching it out and adding unnecessary elements of sentimentality and sensationalism.

There are movies that are made for the big screen, and movies that are made for the small screen; Passionada is the latter type.

Rent isn't nearly as transporting a film as the Oscar-winning adaptation of "Chicago," but its energies and passions compensate for a lot of its deficiencies.

The handful of laughs is overwhelmed by a dull assemblage of chase scenes (one involving a huge dog and an orange tabby), tilted camera angles and dangling plot threads. [23 July 1993, p.AE17]

The movie is gorgeous to look at, the script has a killer twist and the cast is competent.

The Killer Inside Me isn’t for everyone, and even some people who think it’s their sort of thing might be offended. But it’s too well made to dismiss outright for its twisted cruelty. Maybe that’s a compliment, maybe not.

Kids will love this typically well-done Disney film, and there's enough to keep parents entertained as well. [07 Apr 1995, p.26]

Overall, The Pretty One suffers from excessive, unfocused quirk and a predictable sitcom resolution.

It's not a political film, but it's also not a bland recitation of homilies about the honor of serving one's country. It's a jokey road movie, in which three soldiers heading home from Iraq are forced into a cross-country van ride together.

This makes "Eli" sort of wonderfully silly toward the end, as if the Hughes brothers set out to make the first-ever faith-based "Mad Max" movie.

Yes, you can enjoy bits and pieces along the way, more than a few, even. At the end of this journey, though, you feel more exhaustion and relief than catharsis or satisfaction.

Strictly for boys -- grown-up boys -- the more boyish and less grown-up the better.

Funny, dumb, cruel and sick, Girls Will Be Girls is a relentlessly mean picture that will tickle those tired of sweet comedies whether in drag or plainclothes. In short, "Tootsie" it ain't.

It's not particularly logical and it's not particularly fun. As deliberately amateur as the herky-jerky photography is, the rest of the film isn't much more professional.

In addition to the slick but generic computer animation, it's also got an A-list voice cast: Nicolas Cage as Dr. Tenma, the grieving inventor, and Donald Sutherland as a scheming politician.

Stunningly photographed, acted with occasional bravura and structured with exacting precision, it fails to sing more than once or twice, and then only briefly. [2 Feb 1996]

Sufficiently resembles the first film that the heartiest fans should be content.

Badham, a journeyman director prone to coughing up hairballs such as ``The Hard Way'' and ``Bird on a Wire,'' does unexpectedly well with the supporting cast. He actually wrests a good performance out of Anne Bancroft, as a veteran operative who trains Maggie in feminine wiles and etiquette. Improving on Jeanne Moreau in the original, Bancroft is a fierce combination of society hostess and drill sergeant. [23 March 1993, p.D06]

Other than flubbing the dismount, Stick It is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.

The people behind Eight Legged Freaks were absolutely correct not to make it too loopy or too dark. But they ought to have made it too something. Real fun is never this tame.

By a certain point The Heart of Me becomes pointlessly depressing and unlikable without offering insight.

Well-crafted as it is, though, The Artist and the Model suffers from the familiarity of its plot, and especially in comparison with "La belle noiseuse," which ran over twice as long as this film but contained ten times as much insight into human nature.

The Guardian doesn't offer too many surprises. Except for one: it's genuinely well-made and, at least when it comes to the character Ben Randall, kind of moving.

To my thinking, the grand simplicity of the metaphor is a big part of In Time's oddly retro sci-fi charm. Niccol is practicing the old-school craft of making a barn-broad alternate-reality that forces you to think about the way we all consensually agree to participate in systems -- even when those systems are hopelessly screwed up.

Isn't sexy, funny, smart or fun.

A big, loud, sometimes clever, often dumb behemoth of a movie.

As a manipulator of images and emotions, De Palma has few equals, and this is his most gripping film in at least a decade. Viewed simply as cinema and not as political rhetoric, it's often a kick in the guts -- even when it makes you roll your eyes.

Would somebody please pull the plug on James Bond? It's not that Tomorrow Never Dies is inconceivably bad. What with dashing Pierce Brosnan cavorting as 007, nifty Michelle Yeoh playing chop-socky on bad guys' heads, and a nearly-sentient BMW in Bond's bag of tricks, it's got at least as much going for it as, oh, a good Steven Seagal film. [19 Dec 1997, p.19]

It's probably not a good idea to examine the political content of a film in which the leader of the free world proves that the pen is mightier than the sword by stabbing someone in the neck with one.

Other than its overwrought Herod-Antipas scenes, The Nativity Story sticks so closely to the text that it's a total snooze.

Needing the gristle of its title, the film should have been angrier.

The Protector is the nuttiest movie I've seen all year, and I've seen the last 20 minutes of "The Wicker Man."

it's so much fun because, like Haynes' film, it's made by people with a genuine love for the entertainment they're bringing back to life. You'd have to be a real prude not to go for it.

This one is for Woody fans, and maybe Woody fans only.

Despite this familiarity-wallow, The Holiday is likable. Really likable, in fact.

A gorgeous, life-affirming movie. On paper, it sounds lurid bordering on ridiculous.

The camera tricks, the pacing, and the superbly choreographed set pieces are all there, in the right order, primed and timed like a string of fireworks. But what's holding Blackhat together is a dopey, ham-fisted script that plays like it's plucked from the bottom of the James Bond slush pile.

The dialogue has its moments of perception, and Long and Rossum deliver it with conviction and spark.

All that talent behind and in front of the camera is mostly wasted due to a rare substandard screenplay.

Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.

Despite moments of atmospheric tension and a core of compelling mystery, the film feels remote, cold and, oddly, obvious.

Citizen Koch doesn't have a narrator, and that's fine, but it tosses out a lot of information and doesn't pull it into a compelling movie.

As it stands, this is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.