Revolutionary Road isn't emotionally engaging or moving; it's awfully similar in theme to Winslet's 2006 movie "Little Children."

Yeah, it's pretty funny. And it's a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it's also a little -- and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie -- expected.

Its compelling cast and sincere matchmaking goals are reason enough to play along.

The movie falls flat at the end, unnecessarily linking all of the characters in what seems to be an attempt to show how it really is a small world after all.

Weisz infuses comic complexity into the ensemble, which is at times genuinely funny.

Law owns every scene he’s in--which is literally all of them--plus a decent supporting cast and dapper dialogue truly make for a breezy good time.

It's an overall heady conceit about image and invention, clever and fun with compelling lead performances -- especially Reynolds, who finally gets to show some chops in a career littered with Van Wilder–grade junk.

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

If the resultant wreckage is a little underwhelming, and the film's coda useless and trite, the getting there is pretty absorbing.

Best appreciated as a rather amusing farce called The John Malkovich Show, the movie's every scene is anchored, then stolen, by the commanding thespian's Alan act.

Not bad for summer jollies, au contraire, but -- "Holy Raised Bar, Batman!" -- let's pray that the next installment measures up to the sequel summits of "Spider-Man 2" and "X2."

Ultimately all of the ado about men in shades and dark suits running around shooting and shouting at each other comes to a satisfying, if predictable, conclusion.

When Vantage Point is staying with Quaid and Fox as they hunt the suspected assassins (including the arrestingly beautiful Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer) it's a perfectly serviceable thriller with high production values and some better-than-average car chases.

Hobbled by weak argumentation, a character who winds up a complete muddle, and Sayles’s inclination to romanticize Latin American revolutionary types, Casa is as mixed an effort as the filmmaker has essayed in some time. [October 2003, p. 18]

This movie’s sole purpose is to make teenage boys high-five each other, and it’s faithfulness to that concept makes the cartoon carnage almost endearing.

It does deserve points for casting and some clever humor, but falls short of the classic high school movie canon.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

Comic-book enthusiasts can breathe a sigh of relief: Brett Ratner hasn't completely ruined the X-Men series a.k.a. "The Franchise that Bryan Singer Built."

Touching.

A modestly scaled film on every level, but Hedges and company manage to ring true on almost all the material's sweet and sour notes.

So you'll laugh, you'll groan, you'll leave the theater singing "I'm gonna beat off….all my demons/That's what lovin' Jesus is all about" -- and isn't that, ultimately, a good thing? Yes.

It's a decent comic-book movie that delivers its goods with good humor and a minimum of bloat.

At opening night, with every seat in the cafeteria filled, you realize that the students have not only carved out a fledgling drama department in this sports-mad place, they’ve updated Grover’s Corners to Compton.

Sure, it's a pleasure to watch Thornton stretch his legs in Matthau's role, but I miss Tatum O'Neal as his firebrand daughter.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Time is more than reasonably diverting.

As a thriller, The Statement is relatively disappointing, but as a moral study, the movie proves far more promising.

Belongs to the same class of cotton-candy romances as "Chances Are" and "Somewhere in Time," although it steers its light-hearted subject into darker territory with the life support subplot.