As a sports documentary, Murderball is tame and uninvolving. It does however, offer a hard-edged and unsentimental portrait of strong-willed people.

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

This bloodless, nuanced little thriller carries small weight save for Huppert's enigmatic, thrifty performance.

The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

Moormann's reverential documentary, seven years in the making, is most successful as a self-narrated autobiography. It fails, however, to deliver a balanced portrait of the man's life and work.

Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

But too much of this movie is unstructured and stylistically haphazard. And by the time we get to its highly predictable conclusion, Gas Food Lodging is just one more formula coming-of-age drama. [28 Aug 1992]

Most successful as a tribute to the martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle. It fails, however, as a well-reasoned documentary on the subject of the relationship of music to social change.

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

It's a well-acted but rote and strictly by the book "war movie."

While young Coppola is a pro with her camera, she'd be wise to brush up on her storytelling skills.

An inspiring story of pluck, but its politics fall flat.

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.

Pleasant viewing, but the unbalanced script and amateur performances keep it from being much more than a walk in the park.

While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.

A fairly routine heist drama and a never especially believable puzzle film.

Meanders as aimlessly as its drugged-out characters.

It has its charms, but fails to strike a similar emotional chord.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

(Arteta's) yanked an eerily accomplished performance out of his lead actor.

Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.

Given the possibilities it's not particularly inventive, but it is nice to see a comedy so affectionate with the conventions it spoofs.

A beautiful angel of death (Virginia Madsen) meanders through the final broadcast, gracing beatitudes over the backstage romances and egg-salad sandwiches.

Although entertaining, Rize is a somewhat duplicitous undertaking.

The character crossovers between narratives, however, are too contrived to work.

A 108-minute film of a two-minute song.

Fascinating as these spiders and frogs must be to one another, a human being need not be put into such close proximity to their private dances.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

It's all so visceral that it overwhelms the near-abstract story and smothers what passes for characters.

This documentary fails to grasp AIDS as a theme.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

Rampling is fascinating as Ellen, the aging romantic who hardens her vulnerability with a materialist philosophy regarding the buying and selling of sex. The other two actresses give more superficial performances, with Young totally unconvincing as a Southern neurotic.

Craig's got the stuff but the ending of this cake is soggy for its protagonist and audience.

Judd Apatow brings no cleverness or wit to his one-joke situation, and he can't give it the kernel of credibility that even a low comedy needs to sustain itself for a feature length.

Its heart is in the right place and it resists the temptation to junk up the story, but Depp does nothing with his character and the movie has little of the unique wit or panache that would make it appealing to an older-than-10 audience.

It's vintage Moore: on one level the courageous act of a gutsy journalist, and, on another, a callously unfair and self-serving spectacle that makes Moore seem like a big bully, and puts his audience into the position of a vigilante mob.

It is preachy, didactic and heavy-handed as only an Oliver Stone movie can be. And yet ... and yet... despite all this, the film has an undeniable cumulative power. [20 Dec 1991]

Haskell comes off as a jerk -- but Mark somehow looks even worse: not just insincere but weak, vain and vindictive.

For all its f/x pageantry, it is rather tired, as if it's the third sequel of a franchise, not the initial episode.

It wears thin, but also provides some insight into how comics interact and view their craft. At the very least, it confirms all suspicions that they have way more fun than you.

There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.

It's a little sloppy and full of convenient coincidences, but at its best roils with edgy character tensions.

Autobiographical or not, the frankness and family hysteria of this rolling therapy session gets awkwardly intimate and at times tough to endure, as much for its raw candor as for its confessional contrivance. Too bad the revelations of past mistakes are more interesting than the story played out screen.

One lousy little movie -- utterly devoid of any real originality or charm.

It's a much more interesting and engrossing film than its somewhat nefarious reputation may indicate -- though, granted, elements of it are very hard to take, and it finally leaves you feeling pretty down and out.

Fails to be anything special. It makes passable preteen entertainment but comes off as clunky and heavy-handed in most of the places it should be graceful and enchanting.

Unfortunately, director John McNaughton cannot give the script the stylistic unity, black humor or plausibility it needs to rise above an incurably adolescent macho sex fantasy. [5 Mar 1993, p.6]

Ultimately emotionally flat and eminently forgettable.

To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.

In the end, it's just a pointless downer.

The masochistic brutality it's selling still seems glaringly out of step with the current mood of the country.

The most interesting moments in the film are the videotapes sent back and forth between the parents and students, as they communicate the sadness of children separated from their distant families.

Never more than a dull and confused film about Bolivia's 2003 presidential election.

The curious character study is a comedy in a minor key, but for all White's fascination with Peggy, he brings little conviction to the healing message under all this creepiness and social awkwardness, beyond what Shannon brings to the role.

Never offers much enlightenment through its message.

A confused and improbable redemption song.

After its irresistible first act, Owning Mahowny loses its energy and focus very fast.

The actors navigate tough characters through emotional mayhem with such intense determination it's a shame they're undercut by the intrusive voice-over.

It is not giving away much to say that everything ends as expected, just not soon enough.

The film may be like looking through a stranger's scrapbook. With sketchy and didactic scenes lacking narrative cohesion, it is a collection of often strong images that fail to come to life.

Perhaps, like Al Gore's lecture on global warming, the force of its argument will stir some of those who see it to further research the subject.

Ostensibly a love story, the film is also handicapped by Téchiné's strong gay sensibility and clear lack of romantic interest in his characters.

It was also a miscalculation to make the film so sexually explicit. It doesn't particularly serve the story and, for all his gifts, Macy is just not the kind of actor most people want to see in a whirl of sweaty, naked sex.

There are shocking facts and supportive images, but the film lacks investigative spirit.

Greenstreet captures all the hubbub on film but, while he makes the point that we are indeed a house divided, he can't quite persuade us that this particular situation is a metaphoric example of our national malaise.

A botched job: the various relationships and personal histories of the characters are never made clear, the last act is glaringly disjointed, the writing and direction are all over the map.

There are some nice ideas floating around this ambitious film, as well as attempts to say them in a unique way.

Romance has little to do with the bizarre tale, part true crime and part lonely-hearts drama, of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. While the now elderly pair may have found some happiness, that absence is heartbreaking.

Fascinates by its very premise: the fact that, on the basis of a Web site logo, these two bozos could so easily pass themselves off as important officials.

Much ado about very little because it takes no stand and gives little insight into the Chopper's psyche.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

But the main reason you might find the film a bad trip is that its 30-year-old Holden Caulfield-type hero is so harrowingly unsympathetic: unpleasant, unappealing, self-pitying.

Every frame of the way, it's eminently clear that Primer is the work of an engineer, not a film- maker.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

Presents itself as tragedy with the insensitive Joe as its tragic hero, but Joe's fantasies of artistic rebellion and individualism have rotted into simple, solipsistic selfishness.

Works best when it devotes itself to the small group of main characters featured on the show.

The bad news is that Ferrell's modestly likable performance is the ONLY good thing about this misguided comedy that's so tiresomely written, badly acted by a stellar cast and ploddingly directed (by art-house whiz Marc Forster) that it just never quite gets off the ground.

MTV offers an airbrushed portrait that does nothing but perpetuate the myth of an "angelic" hoodlum.

Ultimately a primer. Without actually putting it in direct terms, it proposes a revolutionary solution, not just in Argentina but everywhere that the corporate culture has failed its workers and their communities.

If you can forgive some woeful casting and a plot that is as creakingly thin as an old staircase, you can enjoy director Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

This is standard fare on the subject of father and son relations.

While their stories are well worth telling, first-time director Ruskin fails to shape his material into the dynamic film it might have been.

Ponderously plotted, poorly cast, visually undistinguished and devoid of any real verve or charm.

What it lacks is the wit or even the cynicism to lighten the emotional load.

The film can't decide between black comedy and bubblegum comedy, so it shoots aimlessly in between.

You've already seen this movie, right? Just a few months ago. It was called "The Score."

While all the "Mission" plots are convoluted and slightly preposterous -- the keyword in the title is "Impossible" -- the latest is just this side of insultingly stupid. The longer you think about it, the less sense it all makes.

Mystery Men must have seemed magically goofy on storyboards, but has somehow turned into unappealing mush by the time it made it to the screen.

The script sounds like literal diary transcripts, the camerawork tests the limits of eyestrain, and the soundtrack bleats with mediocre pop songs by unknowns.

Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.

A clumsy and incompetent thriller for nine-tenths of its length, but it has an ending so clever and that goes so wildly against expectations it almost exonerates the film.