It's frustrating and still oddly likable.

A movie that drags.

Doesn't add much to the oft-told story of a boy and his dog, and it never establishes the rules of the dogs-in-space myth it creates, but it is perked up by the gentle intelligence of writer/director John Hoffman.

In the hands of a less-skilled director, this Hollywood-mandated need to impose order could have ended in disaster.

Grim, post-apocalyptic, special-effects extravaganza.

In a film marketplace where even the best superhero movies tend to do a lot of the same stuff, I really admire Will Smith and bad-boy director Peter Berg for trying something different.

There’s a lot of hate in this film. But a lot of talent, too. It borders on despicable, but you can’t ignore it.

There are two halves to La Rafle. The successful one involves the personal tribulations of the families and other souls who were jammed into a Paris velodrome for days under intolerable conditions.

It's not a disaster: Branagh is an actor's director, and there are biting moments throughout and solid performances from Caine and Law.

You never really end up rooting for their happiness, as a couple or individually, so emotionally there's not much at stake.

The clothes are worth it; nothing else is.

Much of Words and Pictures is second-rate. A subplot involving a sexual harassment case is clumsily handled and a talented supporting cast, particularly Bruce Davison and Amy Brenneman, is underused.

As it progresses it becomes a sloppy mix of modern and antique, and the limits of its lead actors and its script become evident.

Texasville is replete with events and complications, but the same three or four seem to recycle themselves every 15 minutes for two hours. The film is already written off as a bomb, a sunbaked soap opera. Its often sly humor does not offset the sense of slow repetition. [12 Nov 1990, p.C07]

Chris Rock probably has a solid writer/director effort in him. This isn't it.

It's the film, though, that remains handcuffed. The early part of the story -- with Riddick stranded on an unfriendly planet -- is taut enough, but hampered by flagrantly unreal effects and Diesel's punch-drunk narration.

For all its bells and whistles, only when it lingers on Jones' dry wit and pained, rheumy eyes does this film about aliens ever seem alive, let alone human.

Dumb, enjoyable kids fare; Jackie Chan's fanny-kicking world tour is a textbook example of how a movie can be "fun" without, strictly speaking, being "good."

The Black Dahlia has sparks of brilliance, swaths of dark intensity, unpredictable crackles of wit, some solid acting. But it's chiefly flat and ambling and dull, insufficient in musculature and overripe with melodrama.

Creaks and groans with pat emotionalism and rickety storytelling.

Beyond the lipstick-lesbian twist, this is a formula flick, but the acting is excellent. It also has genuine laughs.

An old-fashioned story of courage and self-sacrifice in the face of war and deprivation. It's also sappy, boring and obvious.

That strong presence in the center almost makes Lola Versus watchable even as it starts to get formulaic, preachy and tiresome.

While they've managed to make a funny movie, they haven't made a great comedy.

Before dismissing Zhou Yu's Train as the over-conceived, over-edited, under-written perfume ad that it is, the following must be said: It's great to see Gong Li onscreen again.

The movie looks great, with soft-focus shots of perfectly tailored outfits masking the ugliness within.

Eventually, the inconsistency wears, and the film provokes mostly indifference and restlessness.

It's a brisk, though laugh-imbalanced, B-comedy with a hard R.

Just pass on K-PAX.

The trouble is that it's so lead-footed and delighted with itself even as bit after bit sinks like a lead weight.

But with a potentially fascinating study of ethics, of how cheating rich boys become cheating rich men while humble souls do more good in the world, The Emperor's Club doesn't take the audience anywhere smart.

Balancing homage with creativity, the picture is tight, stylishly filmed, clever and, importantly, scary.

It's a terrible picture: ugly and illogical and clumsily staged and peppered with crude, witless humor.

Improves on the original in at least one key way: Its lead characters appear to have souls.

One of the funniest things in Scary Movie 3 is Pamela Anderson. She makes us laugh. And not just at her (though she's game to poke fun at her image) but with her.

The actors are mostly charming; Bettany in particular is broody and cool.

Between the tart dialogue, the compelling lead performances, the vivid violence and the stunning cinematography, it's complete and satisfying all on its own.

Has two other notable things going for it: the brilliant Christopher Walken and a soundtrack packed with songs by the drippy power ballad band Bad Company.

The weirdly earnest literalism of Besson's story is a weak point. His desire to make Angela satisfy both sides of the Madonna-whore complex is too blatant.

The humor tends toward the mildly crass -- bare buttocks and inappropriate scratching are Schwimmer's go-to comedy staples -- and the story is ridiculous. But Pegg, who co-wrote the script, plays to his strengths. You can't help but root for the loser.

The film is a pleasure that doesn't rank with Allen's best but satisfies far more than most American comedies.

Thornton restrains himself (especially compared to Downey and Duvall) until his cross-examination of Duvall, when he throws off that "Fargo" menacing restraint and throws it down. You go, Billy Bob!

The great physical production of the film may engage some viewers who don't care that the apocalyptic foreground of the novel serves as part of an interesting backdrop for a melodrama. Those who enjoyed the novel should find the film's last five minutes positively nauseating. [9 Nov 1987, p.B09]

A Lot Like Love is, well, a lot like many other movies. It's also a lot like having your eyeballs seared by a propane flame -- in a bad way.

An impressive array of themes, stories and sequences.

A flimsy film that's too clean and corn pone to be anything near rock 'n' roll.

An old-fashioned romantic adventure film strongly acted, ably directed and written with stolid sobriety, the film feels, save for a few moments of verbal or physical intensity, as if it could have been made 60 years ago with Ingrid Bergman in the lead.

You may strain to recall just what happened an hour after you see it, but there are so many worse things to have to remember in life. It's a relief to focus on something so attractively amusing.

The sequel has all the merits and demerits of its predecessor, only with a less-snarly antagonist, a more thoughtful final showdown and broader Holmes/Watson relationship jokes.

Barkin's brilliance can't offset misdirected script for Switch. [11 May 1991, p.C08]

But despite its audacious sexuality, Tokyo Decadence isn't really honest about its pornography -- or its politics. The sex scenes are more about the twisted uses of power than they are about erotica. And like a movie that purports to be anti-violent but racks up a dougle-digit body count to make its point, the film relies too much on sexual excess to make a persuasive argument against it. Its pretensions fail to conceal the emptiness at the heart of Murakami's vision. [30 July 1993, p.AE23]

Timecop speeds along briskly: It's a well-oiled, smooth-running action movie with a science-fiction twist tossed in for good measure. [16 Sep 1994, p.14]

Intelligent teens will hate this film, and adults will just be embarrassed.

Maybe it's too early to say MacFarlane can't make a movie. He's still young, he's compulsively creative. He'll keep getting more chances. He could figure it out, but I don't think I want to watch him try.

While Burger, Daughtery and Taylor skimp on the characters’ interior lives, they do make some surprising improvements on the book.

Could have had charm if the characters had been more recognizable as human beings.

Fuqua has made three films before his newest, Tears of the Sun, and they've all begun well enough but then collapsed under the weight of his heavy-handed visual technique and his indifference to plot, character and logic.

As two-dimensional animation, Sinbad is passably attractive, reaching a visual height when it arrives in the surreal, shifting Tartarus.

A sweet but weightless and witless romantic comedy, Sandler is not only deeply unfunny, he's deliberately unfunny.

Creepy, purposefully frustrating, nonlinear horror exercise from Japan that quietly burrows right into your skull.

The Counselor is nothing but a dumb, gory, grab-bag of clichés and the biggest waste of talent since "Savages." It makes Oliver Stone look subtle.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

Gross, sophomoric, offensive, nasty, cheap and mean -- and so funny again and again that you plumb near forget all that's reprehensible about it.

This film is uplifting, well-meant, and morally impeccable, but it has the incoherent storytelling, abysmal production values and absolute contempt for its audience one ordinarily finds only in hard-core pornography. [18 Aug 1995, p.25]

This sequel, thankfully, is faster paced, and has more action.

It's almost too bad, then, that MacArthur and Jones take a back seat to the far less interesting Gen. Bonner Fellers in the stolid drama Emperor.

When the picture hits high gear, your qualms vanish one by one, and the script, credited to four writers, grows into its own.

21 isn't insultingly stupid. But there's a gap between what we're told about its characters and what we can see for ourselves, a gap that gets larger and more frustrating as the film goes on.

One of the most wearisome "high adrenaline" movies to come along in a while.

With a less popcorn-friendly cast and some cheesy special effects, this is a surprisingly engaging, sometimes foolish but often roughly intelligent film.

Both a prequel and a sequel to the original tale, only with more bloodspilling and slow-motion, and even less wit or truth.

This suspense thriller is scary, all right, but it's also distasteful and manipulative. [17 Feb 1995, p.AE22]

You've never been quite this close to a movie star, and after enduring the experience you'll likely never want to repeat it.

Unafraid of walking the fine line between the repellent and the human, Shallow Hal is wickedly funny but heartfelt.

Perhaps this is what fans want from a movie like this: to sit back as if in a Jacuzzi and get a quick impression of history and Rome and such. If so, Howard, Brown and company likely have another monster hit on their hands.

It's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies.

Director R.W. Goodwin (an "X-Files" vet) makes a fatal mistake: He never takes a clear stance on the material he's spoofing.

One Day, despite its attractiveness, never manages to find a way to bring the conceit fully to life.

Despite the solid performances (Roberta Maxwell as Jude's mother is the exception), the one-note intensity wears you down, until a shocking coda wraps things up. It turns out that being trapped in a bathroom together is nothing compared to being trapped in a marriage, or a nearly two-hour movie, with a crazy person.

Kids will enjoy the experience overall: It's a little messy and undercooked, but still vastly more imaginative and entertaining than junk like "Fred Claus."

Reese Witherspoon, whose production company made Penelope, contributes an inflated cameo that feels forced.

Lily Tomlin gives the movie a boost as Portia's radical feminist mother, who would hate this movie.

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

If you've never seen any anime, set your sights on fun and leave your hard nose for drama and fine dialogue at home.

The film is amped up to insanity in its language (both verbal and cinematic), in its ironic embrace of teen-salvation movie clichés, and in its depiction of a small town as a ghetto hell. But just when you think they've gone too far, the Trost brothers 1) go further and 2) wink.

At the end of Martian Child, we're told the movie is "inspired by actual events." But the movie isn't even fully inspired by David Gerrold's source novel that was inspired by actual events.

A dull, clumsy copy of the original The Blues Brothers, this'll give you the blues, all right. [06 Feb 1998, p.24]

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

Directed as if it were an after-school special, with listless performances and musical numbers (Mary J. Blige shows up as a platinum-wigged congregant), Black Nativity is as simple and condescending as Hughes' work was complex and demanding.

Night at the Museum ends up being a pretty fun all-ages comedy -- if you can survive its first 20 minutes.

The film is flat and false in the exact same way that director Anne Fletcher's last rom-com, "27 Dresses," was flat and false.

The potential for an interesting story is high. Unfortunately, Miller's autobiographical tale, as told in Blue Like Jazz, squanders this potential by failing to take place in a recognizably real world.

It's too ridiculous, too flatly acted, too action-packed, too, well, fun.

So action-packed from start to finish that the final result is grating rather than thrilling.

Blends its seemingly disparate elements into a coherent film that's entertaining, funny, sad and even a bit uplifting and inspirational.

Noisy, garish, cluttered, simplistic and often dark in content, it nevertheless sings and preens and jokes and tugs at you with such persistent verve that, exhausted, you give in.

The result is an exercise in emoting that features one of the worst Southern accents in recent memory and does about as much to establish the actor's range as "Battlefield Earth."

As pointless suspense exercises go, The Strangers at least gets off to a good start.