This little serio-comedy contains absolutely nothing that warrants big-screen release. It's lit like TV, acted like TV and staged like TV.

A blending of international film sensibilities -- France meets Hollywood meets Hong Kong -- with a very cool anti-hero protagonist.

Disconnected and even disoriented, Assassination Tango is an atmosphere in search of a reason.

Eventually the movie wants to have things both ways: to approvingly entertain mainstream audiences with the glittering spectacle of space battles and to pay lip service to the notion of conscience.

How truly, madly, deeply mediocre is Indian Summer, the comedy-drama about adults returning to summer camp, released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures? So mediocre it makes the 1966 Disney scouts-in-the-woods comedy ``Follow Me, Boys'' look good. [26 Apr 1993, p.D05]

Even though it doesn't feel like an appropriate send-off, the lethargy of Star Trek: Nemesis is probably indication enough that the series should end here.

Handsomely photographed, artfully edited and acted with skill and conviction. It is also so stupid that you expect to see strings of drool dripping from the corner of the screen.

Now that cinema technology has made a live-action "The Lord of the Rings" possible, these versions are likely to be displaced. They'll retain a nostalgic charm, though, especially for those to whom they were the first peek into the fantastic world of Middle Earth. [24 Aug 2001]

Though filled with charm and led by three likable characters, the picture spreads its plot points and whimsy so thinly that we can never just relax.

Yes, the film jumps up and down on a high wire over the chasm separating Pretension and Art. But that's also a form of courage.

Watts is a champ for seeing this through now that she's actually famous.

When all is said and done, The Favor is just another comedy about comfortable yuppies wondering what they might have done differently, dipping a toe in adventure, then returning to the cocoon of yuppie comfort. [03 May 1994]

A movie adapted from a novel inspired by a person who probably never existed.

As with so many of his appearances, Franco manages to bring a jolt of energy to the film even while skewering its credibility.

It does assemble a compelling collage from the experiences of several real-life witnesses to the event and its aftermath.

John Carter is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer.

If you find the film's xenophobic undercurrents distasteful, take solace in this: Taken was co-written and directed by the Frenchmen responsible for "District B13," so at least the xenophobia is imported.

The interesting ethical and moral issues of the situation are hashed out in courtroom scenes (with Joan Cusack as the judge!) that devolve into hysteria in jarring contrast to a sensitively handled death scene that soon follows.

Are Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay getting tired of their own shtick?

Romeo Is Bleeding has a core of such mean smugness that the genuine shock is that the picture got made at all. It isn't so much that the film is violent, misogynistic and hateful. It isn't even that it so often lapses into senselessness and laughable pretense. It's that a certain competence has been deployed in the service of such degrading and juvenile material, that a group of actors and filmmakers and financial backers all said ``yes'' to something that ought never to have happened. [4 Feb 1994, p.15]

I suspect audiences will divide sharply on the movie's wild tone shifts. I found them sort of fearless.

Always has the benefit of likable characters and actors. Dreyfuss, Hunter and Goodman are good. But several scenes seem needlessly slow, and the film as a whole would be better if it had been pared down from 120 to 90 minutes. At times it seems the title and the running time are one and the same. [22 Dec. 1989, p.R13]

True Story, made with obvious seriousness by talented professionals, never establishes itself.

Crowe is a commanding lead actor who could have made it into something special if he'd stayed out of his own way. Maybe he should have stayed home. You should.

Closed Circuit ultimately feels like a cynical attempt to capitalize on security-state anxieties while examining them in only the shallowest ways.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

Freeheld isn't bad -- with that kind of source material and topline acting talent it almost couldn't be -- but it could have been much more than it is.

Eat Pray Love is magazine-spread self-help bullcorn with the highest possible production values, and I wasn't having any of it.