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.