The combination of emotional anemia, predictable plotting and tepid language makes what might have been a crackerjack treat play like a soggy piece of popcorn.

Entertaining, disturbing, sad, outrageous and often hilarious.

County Clare holds little of interest, with a generic story line and a cast that's mostly just going through the motions.

Tense, bloody, funny and smart; lacks original's conscience, but it's still a surprisingly gritty remake.

This gritty take on Grimm's suffers from mannered supporting performances and an inconsistent level of realism.

It turns out bigger is not better. Bigger is louder, you bet your pounding eardrums it is, but it's not smarter. More teeth aren't sharper. They're dull, and so is Jurassic World.

Rubber is engaging, brisk and smart enough that the audience wins, too. It's grand, mindless fun that makes a thoughtful point.

The movie isn't uniformly taut, but it's funny, acid and clever, the work of a fine craftsman working in a comfortable metier.

Reggio, who is sufficiently eager for a large audience that he has allowed his film to be distributed by Miramax, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co., surely one of the villains in his piece, is neither so honest nor so bold (as Moore's "Bowling for Columbine").

The first "Barbershop" was no classic but, as so often with sequels, if this were the first there would be no second.

Proyas does a jaw-dropping job, particularly in the opening scenes, of depicting Chicago in the year 2035.

Starts well, builds drama and then proceeds to fly sort of crazily off the rails.

Fox uses her earth-tone-clad, Ivy-League-schooled characters the way Jane Austen used hers: taking their privileged, rigid social structures and building a stage to explore deeper human problems.

There's a conflict between the film's need for some sort of closure and the messiness of the reality it depicts that leaves The Whistleblower even more unsatisfying than it was meant to be.

What makes Miss You Already work (when it does work, which is most of the time) is that it shows imperfect characters dealing imperfectly with situations ranging from the maritally frustrating to the existentially overwhelming.

Memphis Belle is an ambitious, lavishly produced, terrific-looking adventure about a B-17 crew and its 25th and last mission in May 1943 at a crucial point in the bomber war. Unfortunately, the film is at war with itself. [12 Oct 1990, p.R04]

Annaud shot in Vietnam, creating gorgeous, often exotic images. The compelling film is a journey to another world and time, seen from a unique and peculiar perspective. [23 Nov 1992, p.D05]

The flashback itself is a romantic dramedy that's far smarter than junk like "27 Dresses." Unfortunately, to enjoy that flashback, you have to ignore two gargantuan idiocies: No sane father would twist his daughter into knots by telling this story. It's full of booze, cigarettes, infidelity and sex with women who aren't Mom.

The film is a lively and absorbing document, filled with jaw-dropping materials, such as an actual audio recording of Kesey's first LSD trip in a Stanford University lab.

Tries to pretend that its premise isn't timeworn, and thanks to charming lead performances, it almost succeeds. But not quite.

An ascerbic swipe at family counseling, holiday dinners, small-town mores and baby-boomer marriages, ``The Ref'' is acted and written with such pleasure that its meanness becomes cleansing, a stripping-away of the sentimentality that suffocates most Hollywood films about families. [11 Mar 1994, p.AE15]

There are laughs to be found, as unfiltered improvisations on subjects such as Viagra, home electronics, pot cookies and the end of "Lost" come fast and furious.

The cast is almost uniformly spectacular -- particularly Angela Lansbury as a wicked aunt and Raphael Coleman as the sardonic, bespectacled child who delivers hilarious, verbose asides and somehow makes it look effortless.

A handsome, somewhat draggy and abrupt film that's more memorable in snippets than as a whole.

The only genuine laughs come from Peter's self-sabotaging inner monologue.

Alas, none of it, save Kristin Scott Thomas giving a peach of a performance as a political operative, smacks of real life or vitality. Even when it evinces spasms of life, this film is, more or less, a dead fish.

The film is filled with cool little scenes of fighting and shape-shifting, and gloomy atmosphere. Subtitles themselves have morphed into gimmicks -- sometimes they float, sometimes they dissolve, sometimes they appear in unexpected places in the frame. It's all darned nifty.

Time to retire OSS 117's license to kill before any more innocent people suffer.