By the time of the fabled match -- which you could swear lasts a full 90 minutes -- it's all you can do to keep your skin from crawling off your body and slinking to the safety of another room. Do yourself a favor: Follow it.

The Giver has taken a slow route to the screen, passed by newer, sleecker dystopian novels for young adults. "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent" owe much to Lowry's worldview and style while lacking her depth. What they have is strong female leads and plenty of action, elements absent in the spare parable of The Giver.

Jaa's performance as Tien is mostly wordless and humorless.

After getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, Skeleton Key just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops.

The only reliable smiles come courtesy of Steve Buscemi, a frequent presence in Sandler movies, here voicing an exasperated, over-extended werewolf dad.

It's clear that Fidell meant to craft a nonjudgmental, non-exploitative exploration of this taboo situation. And she deserves credit for avoiding both tawdry melodrama and earnest moralizing. But by refusing to judge or exploit, she ultimately ends up without much of interest to say on the topic.

Worst of all, not once does Mulder answer his cell phone to hear those immortal lines: "It's Scully. There's been another death."

It's something we might mildly enjoy on an airplane (well, not anymore) or on a lazy Sunday TV day when nothing else is on, but in theaters, it's a clunker.

A film of curiosities and asides, it deliberately eschews plot in favor of character quirk, which is fine in theory and even commendable. But the quirks are lame, the ultimate conflation of story lines is clumsy.

Hancock's direction isn't flashy, and the pacing is a little curious...Still, he has the quiet chutzpah to suggest that a man can be both flawed and heroic, cowardly in his personal life and noble in his public one.

Grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca.

Lonely ends up being confused and repetitious. [27 May 1991, p.B08]

It’s offensive, really, this blatant pandering to emotions.

The second half of Pink Cadillac is almost like a perfunctory sequel to a better film. It is slow and aimless, and when it's finally over, the strung-out finale seems especially futile. [26 May 1989, p.F11]

Exploring the possibilities of low-budget digital filmmaking is a worthy endeavor, but November is a little too in love with the grittiness of it all.

The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.

It's shaping up to be a long, dry summer, at least at the multiplex.

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

Hey Arnold "don't get no respect," it's not half bad, either. Kids will certainly like it. For adults, it's perfectly watchable in a Rugrats sort of way.

The only thing Stratton, a former television actor making his first feature, has going for him is the casting of Jessica Lange.

Aselton is clearly trying to broaden her reach as both actress and director beyond the rumpled indie comedy of "The Freebie," her directing debut, and the concept is there, but a movie like this needs a much more polished execution that Black Rock gets.

Plays like a certain brand of indie film I hadn't seen in a while: the Self-Consciously Odd Journey of Self-Discovery Through the American Southwest, in which people learn Important Life Lessons while encountering "colorful" characters in small-town diners and motels amid the tumbleweeds.

A quite competent and energetic effort that uses live actors. [10 Apr 1992]

Effectively cast and shot with exciting immediacy.

Kudos to the makers Red Tails for paying homage to a remarkable group of men and their genuinely heroic deeds, and a hat-tip as well for the idea that the best way to tell the story was the old-fashioned way. But would that the film's old-school aura felt knowingly retro rather than dutifully rote.

Flirt fails because the basic story isn't very good and its retelling adds only incidental insights. [11 Oct 1996]

Serious Acting Opportunities abound! Unfortunately, sharp dialogue and characters who keep you riveted do not.

It's technically impressive but sluggish, with an uneasy mix of cute and gloom. It occasionally finds an effective balance -- mostly in the scenes that explicitly recall the book -- but inevitably lacks Seussian soul.