With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

The movie's coda is completely ridiculous and, worse yet, boring.

Implausibly dainty.

One of those things that probably seems hilarious when a couple of guys are sitting around hashing out the plot over a couple of beers.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

The direction by Roger Donaldson is facile and understated, as is, for the most part, the script by Dennis Feldman. Even the actors pitch in to play down the silliness of it all.

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.

Good-looking and empty.

Unfortunately, all the good parts didn't add up to a great movie.

The best movie she ever directed was "This Is My Life," a biting comedy she also wrote that was soundly defeated by both critics and audiences. I think she's lost her nerve and her edge ever since.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

The considerable appeal of this movie has to do with its roots in those nice, comforting love stories of the 1930s.

The film itself never felt quite so densely plotted as Yimou apparently had hoped.

Whatever It Takes is DOA -- dated on arrival.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

It is a visual tour de force, but as a whole the movie slowly deflates into a cross between "Arizona" and "The Hudsucker Proxy".

When you really think about Breakdown - and believe me, that would probably require spending more time thinking about the movie than the filmmakers did - it doesn't make much sense.

Troisi, who was a star in Italy, hasn't been seen widely in the United States, and from this film it is difficult to be certain how he achieved his fame.

The movie is decidedly old-fashioned, aiming to send kids and their parents out of the theater feeling good about themselves.

A slew of writers and an enthusiastic cast all do their jobs admirably enough to provide a couple of hours of unembarrassing entertainment.

The dramatic payoff is a bit disappointing; the movie is often overwrought; and its sense of its own importance finally wears you down.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

It starts out well and winds up no worse than most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood.

This movie would have had a chance of being interesting had it been about Sally Hemmings.

At some point, the movie itself crosses the line, from a modestly thoughtful attempt to extrapolate a drama from real and urgent events to a generic action piece with predictable good and bad guys and pat, civics-book morals.

In general, the script is just slightly above sitcom level, but a few lines, owing to great delivery by terrific actors, raise this a few notches on the comedy scale.

Leigh plays the tragic and annoying Sadie as if she loved and hated the character simultaneously. And to the degree that this courageous movie succeeds it will elicit the same feelings in the audience.