Inventive and intermittently amusing.

Flat and uninspired.

The documentary They Call Us Monsters tries, and mostly succeeds, at putting a human face on teenage criminals facing life in prison.

This latest, from director Bille August, is merely respectful and respectable. It never sinks, but it never really soars either, though here and there it hits a powerful moment.

One of 2005's must-see documentaries.

It's smart and good-hearted and boasts an amazingly good score, but the film is limited by the very private nature of the man it portrays.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants may not be the series’ most inspired cinematic outing, but it’s a likable one, buoyed by strong performances, a few inspired casting choices and just enough heart beneath the nautical nonsense. Sometimes, that’s more than enough to keep things afloat.

It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.

There was enough story here for an epic, but Napper chose to make a poem-like movie, one that sustains a tone of mystery and wonder from start to finish.

It’s not a bad film, just, strangely, not a good one.

Tremors gets its characters into a series of hopeless situations and then resolves these situations in unexpected ways. I tried to out-guess the movie and couldn't. The movie might be nothing more than light entertainment, but care and thinking clearly went into it. [19 Jan 1990, p.E1]

Last Night in Soho is full of color and darkness, and its melange of past and present evokes one of the world’s great cities. It never lets up.

Starts off as a comedy about an unlikely friendship between a white man and a black man who meet over a pick-up basketball game on a Los Angeles playground. Then it switches gears and for a time seems as though it's going to be a more serious look at these men and their world. Finally, it just falls apart completely, and the last hour is a chaotic, meandering mess. [27 Mar 1992, p.D1]

Some say all the great movie stars are gone, but I say we've still got Charles Busch. A one-man archive of vanished showbiz glamour and period acting styles, Busch has reincarnated the great ladies of stage and screen in such camp treasures as "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom" and "Psycho Beach Party."

Inky-black humor does strike on occasion, and when it does, it's surprising. So is the movie's star, who sweats and shrieks with game intensity and a capacity for discomfort that would impress a Byzantine saint.

It's a drama with elements of black comedy and suspense, European in feeling but American in attitude. Just for fun, it's set in 1949, an era of glamour, of Hitchcock and of husbands even more clueless than they are today.

I know this is heresy on a number of fronts, but much of The Love We Make is boring.

Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything begins as a fawning “greatest hits” collection. Then, in the second half, it deepens.

The tales are worthwhile, but it's challenging to find a common thread among them that goes beyond vague generalities.

Depressing. So is director Marshall Curry's avowal in the press notes that the film will leave viewers with "a more nuanced view of the world."

Tigertail, mostly a period piece that’s also a well-wrought portrait of a man closed off from life whose despair is etched in every line on his face, isn’t satiric or comedic in the slightest.

The film often stumbles in translation, trying to define too many characters in too little time.

With Body Snatchers you get a middling, respectable horror movie, one without any frightening unconscious echoes and with too much of a pedigree to try to scare you with something cheap, like gore. [18 Feb 1994, p.C3]

Complete with cliches and culturally cringe-inducing stereotypes — poor but happy villagers, sweaty villains — Peruvians will hardly use this film in their tourist advertising.

A particularly strong element is the story of Carlotta’s father, played with arresting intensity by Laszlo Szabo.

Stars at Noon has some interesting ideas, and a general fatalistic malaise creates a perversely appealing Le Carré-esque mood. But it’s so vague — perhaps because Denis doesn’t understand Central America as much as she does West Africa — that its impact melts in the heat of its near equatorial setting.

Like its singular central character, Before the Fall stands out from the pack.

There’s nothing unique about the setup. But Flanagan and Howard’s script has charming touches, wringing humor out of characters rather than gags. Even the retro opening title card foretells its self-aware sense of humor.