This is middling Woody, at best: For every funny line or sequence, there's at least one misfire.

Everything you would want from a Big Brother film: Good-looking, preachy in an Old West kind of way, wobbling between humor and murder, hellbent and periodically brilliant.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

The best that can be said about this film is that it's watchable, and that's not the way it could or should be.

History rendered with enough brains and imagination to more than make up for its few stumbles.

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.

On the one hand, you want to praise it for its stylishness and originality in tackling some fascinating subject matter. On the other hand, it's frustrating because it could have been so much better.

One of the most complex and powerful literary scripts in recent times.

Such an ambitious, well-acted film that it's easy to overlook its flaws as relatively minor.

It fails to capitalize on its own gifts, coming darn close to greatness but never quite catching the brass ring.

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

While amusing and sometimes touching, Pleasantville is far from challenging.

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.

Solondz's greatest success is the pederast, heartbreakingly played by Baker...Had Solondz reached that apex in the other stories, it would have been a masterpiece.

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

The cast and crew and screenwriters seem to have had some fun with it, and the audience, coming along for the ride, has some fun with it, too.

A loathsome, quite unterrifying and mercifully brief entry in the ongoing series about that homicidal doll, is the best argument I could cite for planned puppethood.

It's also troublesome that Murphy, a generally charismatic actor, is downright dull here. He and Goldblum are curiously flat in their line readings; they don't seem convinced by the story they're asked to act out, and with good reason.

Despite the occasional uneven patch, the emotional punch of Slam leaves you wrung out as the credits unexpectedly start to roll. You want a happy ending, you realize the deck is stacked against it, but - thanks to the redemptive power of the spoken word - you have reason to hope.

That's not to say the entertaining Antz" was made by Woody, just that it's full of his personality.

A scary example of bad movies happening to good people.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

The cast's control and Dobkin's assured pacing keep most of the funny things funny and make most of the scary things scary - while maintaining the tricky balance between humor and fear.

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

It's simply terrible.

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

The emphasis is on comedic interaction, not plot - too bad, "48 HRS" had both - but the pair adds spice to the predictable opposites-detract gags.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.