Bay has two great assets in Connery and Cage. The special effects give The Rock a James Bondian feel so Connery's wry, world-weary devil-may-careishness looks right at home here.

What could have been an insightful, irresistible movie is instead a simple, self-contained fable, pleasing to look at but meaningless

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

Freundlich's problem is that he has made an essentially interesting movie that never seems brave enough to say what it really intends.

All the parts of Return that deal with Luke's faith in his father and his appeals for him to reject the dark side of The Force are very emotional. In fact, the best sections of Return are extensions of the melancholy implications of "The Empire Strikes Back." [Special Edition]

Passably entertaining with moments of Grimm fairy tale gruesomeness.

Classic in feel and loaded with sumptuous performances.

Director Mark Pellington's spin on the transition from adolescence to manhood as viewed through the eyes of novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield makes "Going All the Way" something special.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

Queasy comedy.

Despite its subject - an addict's dark interior life - Permanent Midnight offers little in the way of character development and no jolting insight.

Like sitting on the beach under a cozy, warm afternoon sun. The view is beautiful, but not much is happening and soon you drift peacefully to sleep.

Beautiful. Simply, beautiful.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

An impressive low-whistle, hardscrabble look at the world of pool sharks and the people who crisscross their lives.

The director bludgeons us dumb with her genius.

First Knight has all the elements of a crowd-pleaser.

Foster has whipped the actors into the sort of comic frenzy usually reserved for farce, and the ready-for-anything energy serves the material well.

Directing his first movie, Jack Green, cinematographer on several Clint Eastwood films, shows an ease with the material (written by Jim McGlynn), but there's something a bit dull about the movie.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

This flashy aloofness puts it in a league with the John Grisham racism-courtroom movie "A Time to Kill" rather than the more moving - and far superior - Harper Lee one, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Brady 2 redeems itself with those subplots (and another hilarious RuPaul cameo). But at the center, it feels as hollow as a smile-face cookie jar.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

What director Charles Russell ("The Mask") and co-writers Walon Green ("RoboCop 2") and Tony Puryear do right is supply the kind of non-stop action and laconic one-liners we live for in Arnold movies.

It's a fun movie - full of laughs and touching moments.