Yet all this work, all this skill, serve as little more than an elaborate setting for a rhinestone. At its core there is no passion, no sincerity of conception, nothing that might have made The Quick and the Dead into anything more than moment-to-moment stimulation. You get lots of clothes here, but no emperor. Or rather, no empress.

The movie also benefits from the presence of Anne Heche as Ellis’ wife. Heche doesn’t say much, but she conveys a lot.

If only it weren't based on a true story. It might have been a good movie.

Takes some admirable risks.

It is the Eddie Murphy movie where Eddie Murphy has next to nothing to do. Do little says it all.

A substantial examination of character, morality and destiny.

This is a tour-de-force performance, delivered by an actor at the top of his game, and it's a shame that K-Pax, instead of engaging our imaginations as it promises to, devolves into such a conventional, paint-by- numbers disappointment.

The first half-hour of this movie is sensational, creating an atmosphere of dread that any horror master would envy.

A whimsical modern fairy tale.

To the extent that it's original, The Mechanic is insane, bordering on gloriously insane.

Patrick Stewart needs to work on his interpretation of Darth Vader in “Hamlet: Return of the Siths,” but it’s those little comic diversions interspersed throughout Hunting Elephants that make this Israeli movie a little gem.

There’s really nothing else to say about Gold, beyond one general point: It is illustrative of what’s particularly fun about being a critic in January. For most of the year, bad movies have the same general ailments. But in January, they have exotic diseases. They have things wrong with them that you’ve never seen before.

As a director, Schweighöfer deftly plays around with a few genre conventions, handles action scenes capably if not distinctively, and stages a decent enough Point Break tribute.

Perhaps the film's greatest strength is the performance by Kwanten, who appears in HBO's "True Blood" and may be familiar from his lead role in the big-screen Aussie thriller "Red Hill." Dermody also does well.

Movies go bad in all kinds of ways, but in 7 Days in Entebbe the filmmakers found a brand-new way for their movie to commit suicide.

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.

The Front Room becomes an exercise in psychological torture porn; it’s a movie you endure rather than enjoy.

Well-acted as far as superficial characterizations allow (Costner and Jon Baird share screenplay credit) and impressively mounted for a wide-open-spaces pageant that, quizzically, was not shot in widescreen, “Horizon” is most successful at filling its frames with ambition.

It's a bright and fun movie, but also repetitive and overloaded with plot. A nice enough diversion, but not a necessary one.

Killing Zoe is another jolly bloodbath about disaffected young people having trouble getting in touch with their feelings, so they go on a spree, killing people, killing everything, tra-la- la-la-la.

It doesn’t help matters that the movie seems to end three times before it ends, and none of those ends are satisfying.

It’s marked by a polished balance of humor, searing emotion, all the information about the toy business you’d ever want to know, and cautionary advice concerning investments in something silly like stuffed animals — or, by extension, NFTs.

After the first few minutes, viewers will get the feeling they just emerged from a 14-month coma. Even the non-movie jokes focus on last year's news.

Oldboy is an immersion into pure twistedness. The purity of its twistedness is its saving grace.

It's not just for people who like rap or the rap atmosphere. It's a well-paced, light comedy that can appeal to anybody. [05 Jun 1992, p.D1]

It's about what you'd expect _ a collection of gags, some good, some bad, with the bare suggestion of a story to hang it all on. Chevy Chase, as usual, is a lot better than he has to be and lifts the picture to the point that it's intermittently fun and fairly painless. [1 Dec 1989, p.E1]

Seemingly intended as a celebration of the power of books, it's an occasionally incoherent, sleep-inducing picture that reduces narrative to mere mechanics.

This is pleasant, safe entertainment that ought to appeal to kids younger than 10, especially to girls, with its female-empowerment fantasy.