For Morgan Freeman ("Seven") fans, it's a chance to see a great actor save a movie from itself.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

Murder at 1600 has velocity and excitement, and that takes it a long way. It stars Wesley Snipes, which takes it a bit farther. And it's also lightweight, cliched and borderline ridiculous, which takes it back a few pegs.

Fortunately, Beau Garrett brightens things up with her performance as the neurotic Brenda.

This will never be the movie of the month, but you could do a lot worse at the multiplex.

Tolkien’s fantasy world is always worth revisiting, and that makes “The War of the Rohirrim” worthy of watching even if it ultimately doesn’t amount to much once you look past the obvious visual panache.

So while director Evgeny Afineevsky practically makes the case for Francis’ sainthood — immersing the viewer in a nonstop barrage of swelling violins and inspirational music, featuring interview after interview of people who have been touched personally by the pope — his bloated two-hour film leaves many unanswered questions.

Doc Hollywood has its moments, including some nice comic turns by Barnard Hughes as a curmudgeonly doctor, Bridget Fonda as the local coquette and David Ogden Stiers as Grady's folksy mayor. And Julie Warner is certainly hot stuff. But Caton-Jones' approach is too facile, and his use of Southern-cracker cliches too offensive, to capture my vote. [02 Aug 1991, p.D1]

If you're like me and think that any Pacino movie is sort of worth seeing, so long as he never says, "Hoo-ha," then 88 Minutes won't be a total disappointment.

Cheadle the actor is nearly perfect in the role.

The lead actors on both sides of the vampire divide are all strong personalities.

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

These guys are very normal off stage, making them easy to like and not very exciting to watch.

Handsomely weathered John Hurt, as Pelagia's father, gives a performance of such unhackneyed dignity that it provides a moral compass for the action and helps to keep the ricocheting emotional content of the film in balance.

Memphis Belle goes off in several different directions at once, and the result is a movie that's scattered and unfocused. [12 Oct 1990, E1]

Unfortunately, structural flaws and a built-in lack of suspense keep it from being nearly as moving as it was intended to be.

Greed is boring.

What's impressive about Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats is how he marries his goofy, comic side with his dramatic side.

It should have been the poker equivalent of "The Hustler." But it suffers from iron-poor blood. No energy. It just lies there.

Instead of building in impact, the film feels smaller as the cast dwindles. You get the feeling that the most important actors are getting killed first, so that they can go off to act in better movies. [20 Apr 1994, p.E5]

Only partly successful.

Despite a decent cast of mostly British voice actors and better-than-average computer animation, the movie seems rushed at 76 minutes and is only marginally funny.

A fast-moving Congolese crime thriller loaded with graphic sex and violence - basically an exploitation picture. But it's hard to surrender to the gritty flow because the story is stitched together from such crushingly familiar bits.

It’s cute and easy to watch, though we can’t overcome the feeling that it’s an unambitious film about an ambitious topic.

There’s lots of eye candy, and the pace is fast, but somehow the movie falls short. You’re forgiven if you get the idea that “Scorch Trials” suffers from “middle movie” fatigue.

Although the film’s content falls squarely within the PG rating, it provides about 20 percent more visual terror than you’re probably expecting. Plus, the presence of a scary clown should automatically trigger a special MPAA rating. (PG-C?) Take your 5-year-old knowing that he may be visiting your bed every night between now and Halloween.

Ladybugs isn't a very good movie; but it's a Rodney Dangerfield movie, and that's not bad. They used to call pictures like this ''star vehicles.'' Here the story, the plot, the other actors and everything else serve as nothing but a bland backdrop for Rodney Dangerfield's humor and appeal. [28 March 1992, p.C3]

Has no insights, no point, no urgency and no importance.

Even a mediocre David Mamet movie is still a David Mamet movie. That means there are lines to savor, partly because the lines are so good, partly because they are so Mamet.

An uncomfortable ride.

The film refuses to soft-pedal Dickinson’s heartbreaking descent into bitterness and near-misanthropy, but sometimes operates with a heavy-handedness that’s certainly at odds with her poetry.

Flawed, flaky and exasperating, it's held together by two powerful eccentrics.

Feels like a personal vendetta.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Much like its own characters, it dithers too much - and it dares too little.

The film, actually, is a little like Reeves himself: It starts promisingly and trails off into indistinctness and mystery.

Eventually, the plot feels more perfunctory than palpable, but Watkins is careful not to drag things out. All in all, we don’t mind being taken along for the ride, yet in the end, we’re ready to disembark.

Panah Panahi, making his feature debut with Hit the Road, definitely inherited his old man’s trouble-making genes. His eye for composition is accomplished, but the movie meanders and the pacing sometimes drags. The problem, of course, is the filmmaker holds back the relevant information that would keep a viewer engaged until the end.

The material is ripe for black comedy, but Stewart’s screenplay, staying true to Bahari’s real-life experience, steers a middle course. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and sometimes absurd, but never any of those things fully, or effectively.

Almost all of its screen time is taken up with explosions, chases, shootouts, heads coming off, folks getting sliced in half -- and the odd thing about it is that after 40 minutes, it's not disturbing anymore. Just dull. [21 Nov 1990, p.E1]

By the end you can't help but wonder whether it was a good idea to keep the youngsters under camera scrutiny for more than 12 years.

A mostly absorbing but strangely inert espionage drama that could have been a heart-pounding thriller.

Epps is a leading man on the rise, and Cool J. is something to see.

The lesson here is something we already know but sometimes don’t admit: A movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be good. Sometimes it can just be nonsense that’s easy to watch. “The 355” is a guilty pleasure, only don’t waste time feeling guilty.

Easy Money takes its time telling us how all the fortunes of all three men intersect, and the movie's failing - or at least its significant imperfection - is that when the stories and lifelines do converge, the results just aren't satisfying.

Little rings true in The Commitments. The music, which is never lip-synched, is very good -- especially when Strong, only 16 at the time, belts Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness. But the characters are shrill and two-dimensional, and the performers, most of whom had little or no prior acting experience, are made to look like pro-wrestling buffoons. [16 Aug 1991, p.F1]

Dreary.

Blue Gate Crossing is 85 minutes of wistful gloom.

As we watch these four pros in action, we find ourselves wanting fewer flashbacks and more time with all of the folks in one spot. That would have been a satisfying meal in itself.

Much about Living Out Loud is pretty far-fetched, but at least it accurately portrays the dating possibilities for newly divorced women of a certain age.

Nikolaus Leytner’s competent, watchable but uninspired adaptation of the best-selling novel by Robert Seethaler does have a few attractions, chiefly a heartwarming farewell performance as Freud, the famed psychoanalyst, by the great Bruno Ganz, who died last year not long after filming.

Even with a script that doesn’t provide much behavioral variety and goes in many wrong directions, Bullock commands the screen with little more than closed lips and wary stares.

Despite highly enjoyable moments and the welcome presence of Kate Winslet, even sympathetic viewers will be put off by the movie’s bewildering variety of genres and tones.

Things are a little off. The style is gritty 1970s-style crime thriller, but the morals are straight out of 2007, and the movie is set in 1988.

The good news is that the pace picks up — Giant Little Ones actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about – not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.

Some of the best bits of the original movie are replayed here but lose their punch the second time around - the horse manure bit, the skate board sequence. Maybe people who never saw the first movie will get a big kick out of them. [22 Nov 1989, p.E1]

A mildly pleasing romantic comedy, a trifle held together by Drew Barrymore's charm and a decent high-concept gimmick.

A pleasant enough movie whose overt charm sometimes works against it.

The Mummy is the rare Cruise film that doesn’t quite give audiences their money’s worth.

An unfortunate casting decision, however, comes close to sabotaging a witty script.

There is a maddening sense of dislocation through much of the movie -- a feeling that genuinely fascinating questions have been squeezed out by woo-woo philosophizing and material (like Glennie's brief return to the family farm) of only minor import.

Gratuitous, yes, but Giannaris has the visual finesse to make it work.

This is the sequel to “The Craft,” folks. For what it is, the movie’s OK, except that it tried to be more than it is, and it isn’t.

In its way, the film is more concerned with the love between friends than the sex between strangers.

Considering what the filmmakers had to work with, and the fact that it has all been done before, Freddy Vs. Jason isn't bad. And sometimes not bad is almost good.

It's a film of unquestioned visual artistry, and the filmmakers' empathy and human understanding are apparent moment to moment, scene by scene. But despite sensitive performances, it's an experiment that fizzles.

Silly, but an enjoyable, well-paced fantasy-action story.

The Pillow Book sometimes seems like three different movies, each one an eyeful but together too much of a good thing.

The entertaining work by Spacey and Pepper is a good thing because the film has problems, including an utter lack of subtlety.

Blood Brothers explores compelling, often heart-wrenching moments; and if there’s a flaw, it’s in how little time the film devotes to the aftermath of that tragic rift.

Lacks the finesse of other puzzle films.

The most refreshing thing about the movie is having a more mature woman at the center of the action, and August knows not to overreach here. She is dryly funny, but also subtly affecting, and it’s a pleasure to watch her heart and mind slowly but surely open up to life’s possibilities.

Go in with low expectations and you might be pleasantly surprised.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

Perhaps this is a film that needs to be seen several times to fully understand the last 20 minutes. But in my book, that's not what a great ghost story should do.

Little White Lies is never boring, always watchable, always reasonably rewarding. It's just that, when it's over, 2 1/2 hours seems too big an investment for just pretty good.

Stomp the Yard, at nearly two hours, has a decent story, a good subject and a horrible plot.

Too self-indulgent.

The Color Purple now has been a movie, a Broadway show, a revived Broadway show and movie musical when it always should have been a TV miniseries.

Mouse Hunt is inane, antic cinema in the extreme. But even if half the gags don't quite work, the other half are inspired.

Has compelling stretches, but the film's formal concerns overwhelm the storytelling.

Intermittently entertaining.

The showcasing of Basinger's body becomes ludicrous. Twice she is shown taking a shower. In another scene she lounges in some very nice designer underwear -- white satin, very becoming. She ends up looking foolish, constantly having to undress in this feminist role. [11 Feb 1994, p.C1]

Less a story than a series of complicated slapstick bits.

The result is that most of the picture plays out as a series of scenes in which our hero sits there, gets angry and loses all his money.

Eventually the concept buckles under the heavy blockbuster treatment, becoming a monotonous, repetitive spectacle of endless shipboard sword fights and pirate ghosts in the moonlight.

The result is more lyrical than frightening - and there are some misses mixed in with the hits - but it's well worth checking out.

Like Someone in Love is best suited to viewers already familiar with this extraordinary filmmaker's better work.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

Perrier's Bounty puts on a pretty good show: fast, foul, corny, strange.

If the movie packs a weaker punch than the original, it has less to do with the action sequences than the script (by Edmond Wong, son of Raymond, who wrote the first), a flimsy affair with subpar villains.

It commits the only crime that can be committed against Shakespeare: It makes him boring.

An innocuous, fluffy little nothing of an almost-pleasant movie.

Douglas does his best acting while watching and reacting to what he sees on screen. If this ends up being his cinematic swan song, it will not have been a bad way to go.

Neeson also does a good job tracing his character’s cognitive deterioration over the course of the movie. As such, Memory is like a hybrid, mixing serious sections with Neeson’s usual action stuff. Call it a little bit of this and a little bit of that, or not enough of this and not enough of that.

While recognizably Ceylan's work, is more of a genre piece - a noirish suspense film - and less successful.

Actually, the only truly obnoxious thing about 3 Days to Kill is that the violent scenes are more congenial than the family scenes, because the teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) here is presented as a sour, nasty brat.

It’s all so heavy-handed that it’s hard to stay engaged with the movie.