The dolphins are charming, which is at least 50 percent of the concept of the film. The flip side is the film's predictability and shallow characters. Audiences may walk away feeling that they got a pleasant dose of cinematic Dramamine, but that it takes a long time and is a little tedious en route.

An intermittently pleasing children's film.

Summoning silliness Roman Polanski salutes and spoofs satanic thrillers .

In style and tone, Igor seems more like a short from the adult-oriented "Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation."

There’s authenticity in the coach’s belted khaki shorts and in the anguish Hunt brings to a moment where the coach no longer can bear being at her star player’s wake. This moment is the film’s most moving until images of the real coach, and real Caroline Found, accompany the credits.

Clearly, the goal was to make a visually opulent Christmas movie, but these visuals end up sucking up much of the film’s life and spirit. It de-emphasizes the human element, and it makes the movie too long.

How one likes Taxi has everything to do with how one responds to the hapless cop character, played by Jimmy Fallon.

This film by Alison Ellwood feels thin. Anemic. Even shortsighted. Sure, the documentary frames the band’s story with that astounding fact of their first number one record, but beyond that underscored point, “The Go-Go’s” plays like paint by numbers for music documentaries.

The pleasures of Suburbicon are in the moment, and the moments fade before the next moment. There’s no build, just flashes of virtuosity — flashes ultimately in the service of nothing.

The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy.

Like a coffee-table book, it looks inviting and teases you with sumptuous photography but leaves you cold.

Though far from memorable, it's a moderately charming number calculated to radiate a certain Father's Day glow. [17 Jun 1994, p.C3]

A tense, expertly acted Russian film clouded by its intentional ambiguity.

It's too much feel-good movie to take in one sitting, but Stroke of Genius captures just enough detail from the greatest sportsman you've never heard of to keep the historical drama interesting.

The movie is like one of those newfangled Vegas casinos, where what appears to be open sky is really painted ceiling. What's initially dazzling becomes stifling.

Divine cast keeps 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood' from falling flat

At its best, Kajillionaire provides a chance for Rodriguez to play a breezy extrovert and for Wood to play a damaged introvert, and for their characters to alter and deepen through contact with each other. They’re both excellent, but they can’t make the movie any less slow, and July’s relentless whimsicality occasionally sounds some false notes.

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

The film does have enough visual interest and occasional revelation to allow it to limp with dignity to its conclusion.

Every now and then, an interesting character pops up: Kyra Sedgwick, almost unrecognizable, is quite good as a homeless woman who collects aluminum cans. But these moments are as fleeting as George’s grip on reality.

Fortunately, the people save Operation Dumbo Drop, and it's their determinedly good-natured performances that keep the film moving through several well-paced misadventures.

Compared with other Jane Austen movies, it isn’t much, but compared with other zombie apocalypse movies, it’s an intelligent, literate effort.

Finding Amanda is a minor movie for Broderick, but considering where it takes him, it's understandable why he took the role.

It's all so cute -- except that Weber wants this to be a thoughtful film.

John Lithgow and Blythe Danner make an offbeat and winning combination, with total belief that they’re in a really good movie. Unfortunately, they’re not.

None of this bears much or any resemblance to the real world, but the violence crunches, the editing snaps and the humorous one-liners pop at well-timed junctures.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

Pleasing but routine British comedy.