This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

Generates very little heat.

This is the kind of story that might have been interesting had it not been populated with dreary characters played by actors who were clearly coached to be as dull as possible.

Most disappointing is the fact that the movie ends so abruptly that you can't help wondering what the whole story amounts to, moving as it is.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.

Could have been maudlin from start to finish. Instead, more than half the 154-minute film is riveting - filled with funny, touching bits that don't stoop to cheap sentimentality.

It's all quite inspiring, but despite the fact that this is based on someone's actual experiences, the whole thing has an unfortunate Hollywood ring to it.

One of the most blithely, giddily ridiculous movies to come along in ages.

There isn't much to hold onto with this movie. If anything, Cry trivializes the plight of the South Africans in its breezy treatment of apartheid.

Spiritually it's a John Woo-George Romero-Jim Thompson picture, outrageously bloody and weird.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

By casting model-turned-actress (and his now-estranged wife) Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, Besson gives us an over-amped spectacle with an annoying, sometimes ridiculous cipher at its heart.

An archaic rail-ride into the heart of boredom.

Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.

Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the great living movie directors. Sadly, this does not mean he can't make a mistake. Kundun is a mistake.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

Fails to be the histrionic bubble bath that you want to carry you away.

A gooey-sweet, beautifully photographed romantic fantasy…It's also -- at the risk of sounding like a Grinch -- a mess.

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

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

There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

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.

A filmmaker of Jordan's capability is not likely to make anything less than a competent, watchable movie, and that Michael Collins is. I think content rather than form detracts from the cogency of the finished product in this case.

Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.