I'm all for hearty theological debate. But this is intellectual suicide. Even worse, it's boring intellectual suicide.

Here's a hint to tracking down an intelligent, discriminating significant other: stand outside the entrance to a theater showing Must Love Dogs. Once the film begins, look for the first person to walk out.

There's a madcap romp in here somewhere, but Beresford doesn't locate it, despite a fine cast. The script doesn't help. [09 Sep 1994, p.19]

It's still trite and a little too cutesy for its own good. Gay or straight, the cliches remain, but not to a stultifying degree.

Lopez can't decide if she's playing Lavoe's victim or enabler -- the movie sort of half blames her -- and neither of her characters is likable. The music's lovely, though.

Of all the roles where the star has played a character transformed from ordinary to goofy ("The Mask," "Me, Myself & Irene," "Liar Liar"), this is the one where he seems the most human, achieving that elusive quality in a Carrey film: tolerability.

The results are not endearing. Eddie comes off not as a beleaguered Everyman but a heedless, dishonest knob trying to undo a deal that gave him exactly what he deserved. The real surprise is Carlos Mencia, playing an exuberant clerk at the resort hotel. But when Carlos Mencia is the funniest thing in your movie, you've got serious problems.

Jas some nice moments, a great soundtrack and some wonderful works by the dark-even-while-light Ricci.

Takes a look at the bumpy path to self-discovery.

The period details are unconvincing, the cinematography is flat, and the performances are surprisingly one note considering the talent involved.

A charming Rob Reiner film that more or less works as intended.

Bay seems to have been gunning for something along the lines of "Blood Simple" or "A Simple Plan," but Pain & Gain is just plain simple.

It's well-acted and works as a cautionary tale for young dope dealers but beats any hint of subtlety into a bloody pulp.

Banderas' direction is a bit of everything and a lot of not much.

In a way, the film is a kind of experiment: Can you lop off the bulk of a classic work and still have something worth seeing? On this evidence, the answer is, despite the best intentions and some fine work, sadly no.

The movie's atmosphere is moody and intense, bubbling like a caldron. Unfortunately, the broth turns out to be stone soup.

Still, if it doesn't go down in film history as a key moment in Roberts' career, it might very well be remembered as a breakthrough for one of its trio of rising stars.

The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite.

Factory Girl lives fast and dies young, but the corpse it leaves isn't really all that good-looking.

There is such a thoroughgoing nastiness to the plot and dialogue that the film almost achieves a level of buoyancy.

At one and the same time it feels like a decent-but-not-great film of his '70s period and a perky and tart entry in his modestly successful revival in the last half-decade. Neat trick.

It's horrible. It's wretched. It's Limburger pickled in castor oil.

It's a refreshingly human-scale saga.

As satire, it doesn't add up -- but it's an admirable, if dull, experiment.

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

The two stories never come close to meshing the way the filmmaker intended. The result is a well-acted movie that simply doesn't gel.

The new footage adds almost nothing and feels like a lame, double-dipping cash-grab.

It is thoughtful and well enough acted throughout. [03 Jul 1992]

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are adequate leads, but no great actor will be more squandered this year than Jeffrey Wright, who does nothing but speak in vast paragraph blocks of exposition while looking haggard and bored.

No doubt this is a sincere film. But its wobbly technique prevents it from ever reaching a point.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, is . . . well . . . not terrible. In fact, "Rise of the Silver Surfer" is roughly 300 percent less cringe-inducing than its predecessor.

Marcus, like the real-life Jackson, survives being shot nine times. But this film is dead on arrival.

Firewall does more to destroy my desire to see a new Indiana Jones movie than anything the aging process could conjure.

The movie's not good, strictly speaking, but it is kind of fun.

A picture that could have bordered on classy screwball if written wittier, acted sexier and filmed shinier.

Fortunately, Winkler has a good cast.

The movie falters when it gets mean.

There's something in the obsessiveness of these characters that pushes the film just beyond the level of believability, even for a romantic fable such as this.

Competently done and harmless enough to entertain the tots. It's just that the movie's kind of . . . sparse.

Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.

Surprisingly dull.

All this star power goes for naught in Traeger's film, which tries to blend bucolic sweetness with juvenile let's-make-a-porno jokes.

It's beautifully photographed, but pretentious, overlong and trite.

While Daniels' work disappoints, his film is saved from disaster by uniformly terrific performances.

An unsteady mishmash of snot-nosed humor and treacly Hollywood sentimentality.

Visually nervy, beautifully acted, intense and philosophically compelling, it struggles to connect emotionally as it wrestles with the challenging source material.

It says a lot about this movie that the most arresting character in it is Mary, whom Morton unsurprisingly endows with a fanatical combination of narcissism and rage.

A movie full of actors improvising their idea of how cops in a Scorsese flick would talk. It's a special sort of cartoonishness, a hard-to-pin-down brand of emotionally grandstanding fakeness you sometimes see in movies trying way too hard to be "gritty."

Too sugary to be funny or offensive or even offensively funny, though any kind of funny would be welcome here.

The bad news is that Jefferson is inept and inert. [21 Apr 1995]

Blood Ties not only convincingly recreates its era, it seems like it could have been made then.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. The animation ranges from crude approximations of Terry Gilliam's cutout style to borderline puerility, and the entire enterprise strives far too desperately for the sort of irreverence that Chapman could conjure with a cock of his pipe-clenching head.

It starts off well enough, and Solanas has a marvelous sense of space and style. But he doesn't develop its story and doesn't truly draw out its characters.

The movie's excessive and logistically goofy in a way "Taken" wasn't.

Murphy shows an easy versatility, going for guffaws one minute and pulling off a grinner the next. [04 Dec 1992]

While the whole film is well-made, it has surprisingly few surprises. There are some small ones, but the plot and many details are predictable down to small details. [7 Oct 1988, p.F13]

As idiot car-crash movies go, "Tokyo Drift" is pretty fun, and certainly a more-than-decent entry in this franchise.

14-year-old girls will dig its amiable energy.

The film nicely maintains its tone, somewhere between satire and farce. [07 Apr 1990]

Lost in this beguiling labyrinth, Vanilla Sky is more fascinating as a bit of evidence than as a movie -- and ultimately less pleasing than most audiences will want.

Tedious "message movie" proves hunting war criminals amid right-wing Catholic conspirators can be plenty dull.

There are wonders here, but there are as many things that just plain make you wonder. By the end you're too addled to be truly moved.

Incomplete, shrill and smug.

I love that fanboys fought for Fanboys. Unfortunately, their passion was misplaced.

Portland's dreary climate is used to good effect, but it's not enough to make up for the director's needlessly convoluted approach.

To quote Dennis Hopper from the film "Search and Destroy": "Just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting."

Feels like a tonic for its makers, a means of clearing the palate after a series of rich meals. For viewers who appreciate risks, it should be just as refreshing.

The film is weighed down by the decision of director David Atkins to throw too much into the mix. The result is a serious problem of consistency.

It's merely a by-the-numbers coming-of-age film

Quite possibly the single most artless gross-out comedy I have ever seen. It relentlessly slaps you with dead carp after dead carp of icky gags -- without any of the cleverness, cinematography or characterization that would give those gags even the slightest bit of juice.

It's passable, but in telling the tale of a man known to attempt the risky drive, it's a shame the filmmakers decided to shoot for par.

Oscar-winner Davis can maintain her dignity in just about anything, and she almost gives Lila enough depth to be a compelling character. Lopez gets points for trying something a bit more challenging than the hot-for-teacher dreck of "The Boy Next Door," but she inevitably struggles to hit more than one note.

The chief thing he (Susser) has going for him is Gordon-Levitt, whose intense immersion in his overwritten character is laudable if the result isn't exactly likeable.

There are movies that reach for the top. There are movies that go over the top. And then there is Smokin' Aces, a slick, shallow and sometimes quite enjoyable action film that is so far beyond over-the-top that it likely mistook the top for the bottom as it burst through it on its way to who knows where.

A by-the-numbers recipe that ought to have shot off at least a few sparks, is as drab as the inmates' prison blues.

The line between fearlessness and idiocy can be a thin one, especially in this sport, and the doc never gets too far under Way's skin. But when he soars -- on a skateboard! -- above the massive structure that kept invading armies at bay for centuries, it's pretty darn cool.

At times the movie feels like two Very Special Episodes of "Law & Order: SVU" stitched together, but on balance it's a smart, well-cast piece of grown-up entertainment.

Brainless, witless, inept, ugly and crude,

The few chuckles the film affords come early, and too often the script desperately tries to repeat them. By the end, it's not funny or happy -- just over. And you're glad for it, the one true emotion you feel in the whole two hours.

Peter Bogdanovich made a great screwball comedy. This isn't it.

Like Father, Like Son is amusing, occasionally funny, and swift. [02 Oct 1987, p.E13]

The surfing scenes are gorgeous and overwhelming. But the rest of the film...

Plays like an episode of "JAG," the naval courtroom TV series. A L-O-N-G episode.

Ponderous, pretentious and boring, Levity becomes ironic on top of itself. You won't pity these people. You'll start laughing at them. Like a clown.

Bang-bang, kiss-kiss, yawn-yawn. While dull death metal churns on the soundtrack, Johnson engages in one big brawl after another.

Roughness at least has a few good laughs in the formula. [30 Sept 1991, p.D08]

The acting is the strongest thing about the film. Pitt nicely balances the dashing and wounded sides of Tristan's character. [13 Jan 1995]

Jim Carrey kills it every time he shows up in his supporting role as street magician Steve Gray.

The romance is the movie's least interesting element. But Heder's low-key, surprising charm and Thorton's gleeful wickedness at least glide the film in for a landing. You'll enjoy yourself.

America's favorite romantic comedian is miscast in Kate & Leopold -- a disappointment with the warm and charming Jackman around.

Most of the time, though, it's a confusing mishmash featuring a fine actor too willfully operating outside his comfort zone.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

There are plenty of very funny jokes in the movie, but near-fatal lulls whenever it tries to make MacFarlane into a romantic lead or a genuinely inspiring hero — in other words, whenever it tries to make us like him.

A dull and hackneyed would-be thriller, it takes such elements as Satanism, time-travel and cross-country treasure-hunting and combines them to no effect whatsoever. [18 Jan 1991, p.R13]

You need to accept the fact that practically everyone in the picture, particularly the leading lady, is a boneheaded nitwit.

After a cheeky, campy start, The Ninth Gate leaves you with a bitter and dull aftertaste.

There's nothing worse than a sub-par Woody Allen knockoff.

It's a Ritalin-deprived sensibility, but it keeps you skating over the dull spots, in which the film unfortunately is rich.