The Sandlot is so exploitative of the myth of baseball and rings so false as a nostalgia piece - and is so unfunny as a comedy - that it makes "The Bad News Bears" look like "Pride of the Yankees." [7 Apr 1993]

A sweet if bland film.

The movie smacks of old-fashioned Hollywood phoniness. [22 Jan 1999]

It's a very slight and forgettable affair, and a formula job all the way. But it's easy to watch, the dance sequences are sporadically enjoyable (if hardly innovative) and Antonio Banderas is wonderfully magnetic and charming in the lead.

Director Takashi Miike's dish of sukiyaki spaghetti ala Sergio Corbucci is badly seasoned with scraps of reservoir dogs.

The old formula is showing its age. The movie just doesn't deliver the emotional highs that addicted millions to the Rocky cycle. For the first time, one does not leave the theater floating on air. [16 Nov 1990, p.8]

Here's yet another take on "Pride and Prejudice,"...but all spiced up as colorfully as a dish of curry.

Anges has nothing but affection for its characters and fondness for their quirkiness.

Peter Riegert's is a labor of love film where you feel love much stronger than you feel the film.

What remains is a sumptuous-looking film that sniffs at but ignores deeper Freudian implications.

If the Polish brothers haven't quite mastered the mechanics of mainstream filmmaking, they have succeeded in bringing an independent spirit to the studio film.

The film still shines.

It's crowd-pleasing stuff, to be sure.

Inspiring without sinking into sentimentality or cliche, Hearts of Atlantis is intelligent, heartfelt and genuine, a rare story of childhood for adults.

Belongs to that distinctly '90s genre of sadistic crime comedy whose time has clearly come and gone.

Istanbul-born director Ferzan Ozpetek has outdone himself with this wise and ruminative mystery about memory, unfulfillment and yearning.

For all the tough-minded talk and frank portraits of inner-city life, however, the film is not altogether convincing.

The movie also has a supernatural element: the leader of the renegades (Eric Schweig) turns out to be a sorcerer with occult powers. It's very clumsy, and speaks to the pandering streak in Howard that has always prevented him from being a truly first-rate film artist.

Besides being inept, it's also pretentious and boring: an ambitious art film gone horribly wrong.

In his first role since turning 40, Cruise displays a likable new maturity, and an unexpected willingness to look weak and foolish.

Writer/director Michael McCullers sprinkles the film with sight gags and comic characters (the lisping birth coach becomes funny out of sheer doggedness), but his pacing is poor and doesn't know how to showcase the small-screen chemistry of Fey and Poehler on the big screen.

As exasperating as it is conventionally satisfying.

It's more ambitious and passionate than thoughtful. Singleton is better at criticizing than understanding, and he leaves too many characters lacking a legitimate voice.

It may not be original, but it's often shamelessly funny and more clever than I expected. Not much, mind you, but enough to catch me off guard with a few surprise throws.

This is a familiar journey and director/co-writer Todd Phillips sidesteps every opportunity to inject a little edge or originality into it.

The most ridiculous period film since rappers took on the Old West in "Posse."

Hopkins' Picasso is a first-rate performance.... With his intense stare, his air of subtle lechery, and his life-devouring zest, he not only looks uncannily like the real Picasso, he was actually able to convince me that he was Picasso. [4 Oct 1996]

Yu has a good time making fun of white people, in particular a pair of rival ping-pong teachers who seem inspired by the gay villains in the Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever."

The film is not without its flaws, but it sports a terrific production design that integrates magically into the story -- as well as another top-notch performance by Anthony LaPaglia.

To call the haphazard string of gags a story is to give it far too much credit, but it is funny in a blunt, profane frat boy way, thanks to the bulldozing energy of Ferrell, the smarmy manipulations of Vaughn and the anything-for-a-laugh excess of Phillips.

As this all plays out -- and basically segues into "King Kong" -- the movie wins its biggest gamble: its entirely computer-generated monster works.

Not a moment rings true in this sentimental drama.

The horror and spectacle of medieval battle has never been re-created on film before with such ghastly beauty.

So uninvolving as basic storytelling that it quickly becomes boring.

It's too insubstantial to support its two-hour-plus running time, and too arbitrary to work as a story, so you walk out wondering not happened, but whether anything actually did.

The dismal high school comedy Charlie Bartlett has the look, feel and sentiment of a made-for-video cheapie that might have been grudgingly whipped together by Robert Downey Jr. as some sort of court-ordered community service project for his many drug busts.

Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.

As energetic and irreverent as it is -- the movie never finds the inspired blend of edgy black comedy and gleeful journalistic adventure that it's after.

This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.

It doesn't leave you much to hold on to in a comedy about apathy that can't even muster the energy to care.

Pleasantly modest, endearingly etched and briskly set to a pounding beat.

It's the first film I know of in which we get to see all five of the top-billed actors vomit

Mostly very good. It's exactly the big fix of Saturday-matinee adventure, blazing special effects, inside humor and sly self-references for which its fans have been lusting.

With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

It is strangely paced (especially in the beginning), always confusing to follow, and extremely awkward as a romance.

It's mostly quite enjoyable. Director Joe Johnson's many action sequences are lively and engaging, the location photography (mostly Morocco) is breathtaking, and both the horse and Sharif (in his biggest Hollywood role in years) are adorable.

The story is so compelling and the movie is such a pleasure to the eyes and ears.

Trespass has no story drive; its principals are cardboard caricatures and its production values are as cheap and amateurish as a bad home video. [26 Dec 1992]

There's simply nobody beneath the derisive attitude worth caring about.

Director Thomas Schlamme ("Miss Firecracker," "Crazy From the Heart") also does a better than average job of evoking the romance of his San Francisco locations; giving his mystery-comedy a Hitchcockian "feel"; and getting likable performances from Brenda Fricker as Charlie's mother, Anthony LaPaglia as his cop best-friend, and Nancy Travis as the maybe-murderess. [30 July 1993]

A canny but hollow pastiche.

So slight that it barely qualifies as a movie, 10 Items or Less squeaks by on the charm of its leads.

tTere are two things going for Melinda and Melinda: Woody's not in it and Radha Mitchell is.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

A frequently amusing and consistently outrageous but ultimately tiresome farce.

There's no conviction among these self-involved folks who sidestep commitment with a quip and a grin.

Get Smart is action movie and spoof and, though it's often a little unbalanced, the ultimate result is a harmlessly entertaining picture.

The concerts themselves are only exciting when Young is at center stage. Although a balding millionaire in his 60s, he retains the ragged energy of a rock 'n' roll road warrior. Not so with the other members, particularly Stills.

A welcome return to the courtship, cuddling and sweet nothings of yesteryear.

It's by far the most violent, most clinical and most sumptuously atmospheric.

Often unsettlingly funny, though it ultimately recedes into a dark womb of despair.

Barely substantial enough for a feature but just light and tasty enough to satisfy.

Underworld opera of the bravura kind, this is driven, like most Hong Kong action, more by emotion than logic.

Fierce People is no ordinary dud. This seedy soap opera is the most outlandish, campy romp through the mud since "Showgirls."

For all its unevenness, Bobby is a powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence.

The film plays like a Hollywood-influenced Japanese samurai movie, though nothing as subtle as Kurosawa's best, and with white subtitles that often are hard to read against the white of the Gobi.

At best, it's an inspired piece of free-association pop art held together by sheer momentum, at worst a noisy mess of juvenile nonsense passing itself off as a movie.

Makes a great time capsule, a shot-on-the-streets glimpse into the texture of a bygone time, place and attitude, but a listless, lightweight odyssey.

A teary appreciation of the value of a good teacher, the joy of music and the payoffs of discipline and hard work.

The result is like a "Waiting for Godot" for the video-game generation.

Rock Star roars to life with a promise of something inspired and inventive whenever Wahlberg leaps onstage. Offstage, however, even he can't breathe life into this same old song.

The riskiest move Seinfeld made was to create an unlikable protagonist who is wrong every step of the way, but treat him like a hero.

Lightweight fare. [3 Apr 1996]

This remake is considerably different and, for once, the changes have not hurt the film.

It's a methodical, friendly fairy tale in which everyone is good and the outcome is a given.

It is a fairly routine exercise in New Millennium movie mayhem.

A bubbly, high-spirited paean to the joys of pharmaceutical phun that grooves to a throbbing beat but constantly trips over flat, prosaic dialogue and literal, lifeless sight gags.

It's light and airy and, unlike the land-locked planes, runs the risk of nearly floating away into innocuous obscurity.

The movie is bursting with minor characters who upstage the main story with their comic routines and musical interludes.

Doesn't completely work on its own terms, mainly because its romantic casting just doesn't spark: It doesn't make us fall in love with its lovers.

Effective piece of election-year propaganda.

The combined efforts of three novice screenwriters fail to give shape to a life that was, although devoted to a noble cause, unexceptional.

Unfortunately, the life has been sucked out of DiCamillo's story about a brave, unusual little mouse.

The film's near-fatal flaw is its dialogue, which had to be invented wholesale from the Old English text. It alternates between sounding stagy and anachronistically hip -- with more overuse of the F-word than any two Samuel L. Jackson movies. It's a big mistake.

For all of the credibility of the performances (or at least the teens), it all feels like recycled social commentary.

Korine's latest film, Mister Lonely, is no different, but this film has a sweetness that has rarely, if ever, been present in his previous work.

For film buffs who want to see what's hot in Germany, Bandits is probably worth the price of a ticket. Those looking for action, drama, or rock 'n' roll may find the mix less than satisfying.

There's still enough of Doyle's hilariously foul dialogue and outrageous, culture-shocked Irish characters for the film to be a good bit of fun.

We leave hungry for more of the film's substantial, if less physically perfect, subjects.

Tries to both spoof the fairy tale and retell it from a fresh angle. Curiously enough, its strength lies in the clever approach, and not the goofy comedy around the edges.

The teen parties and sidekick silliness are time filler, and not very good filler either -- why even Bruce Willis shows up in a scene that has nothing to do with the story.

With such a good concept for a vampire movie, it's hard to believe it turned out to be this boring.

In this film, the clothes and the city are characters as vital as the four leads, and they don't disappoint. But don't expect any trend-setting in the manner of the series. This is a runway that begins and ends with the movie.

Goal seems destined to be an ongoing soccer-themed soap opera, but it's one that only the game's biggest enthusiasts likely will find compelling.

Woven from such promising threads that you wish it was better.

Like many of Chen's movies, which are so precise and composed and lush, it's not really emotionally engaging. It is, however, a dazzling and dynamic spectacle that risks being ridiculous to create an unreal world of the romantic imagination.

There is no denying the power of The Handmaid's Tale. It's a scary exaggeration of a world that many people claim they want to build. It should be required viewing for anyone who advocates a fundamentalist point of view of any kind. [09 Mar 1990]