The truly bizarre Ben Stiller farce, Night at the Museum, is no laugh riot, and misfires all over the screen, but it develops its own unique charm and leaves a pleasant afterglow. A family audience could do worse for a comedy this holiday season.

It wobbles between a conventionally quirky lighthearted goof and an oddball farce in which character is sacrificed for sight gags.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui ("Tokyo Pop") cannot begin to find the style that would give some unity and originality to this mess. The result is a grindingly dull horror comedy and an unnecessary satire of Valley Girls - a full decade after that phenomenon has come and gone. [31 Jul 1992, p.12]

Momentum, motivation and story are all swallowed by simple sensation, and the film finally exhausts itself for lack of stylistic imagination.

Sommers is a pure pop Steven Spielberg who's put his deft technical skills in the service of the ultimate rollercoaster movie ride. It's sometimes more exhausting than exciting.

Wants to be an offbeat, hard-edged, inspirational sports movie, but it misses its target by a country mile.

It's overblown and greedy and feels like more of a merchandizing scheme than a movie.

Travolta has dusted off his folksy Southern character from "Primary Colors" (one of his most acclaimed roles) and he has his moments with it.

Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?

It's a consistently funny script, tastefully packaged by super-producer Brian Grazer and directed with just the right touch by Dean Parisot.

Has neither the raucous energy and impudence of "Animal House," the defiance of "If ...," nor the grace and wit of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

It's a romantic fantasy of the gangster brotherhood and their doomed lives, executed with Takeshi's unique mix of stoic ruthlessness and giddy energy.

Offers precious little inspiration, and the only irony it manages is surely unintended.

A new millennium version of "A Hard Day's Night" without any wit to balance the silliness.

Wenham and Porter make the film better than it should be.

It all feels pretty empty.

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

Actually, the film may be too grubby and sordid and ghoulish for its own box-office good. It's certainly going to send more than a few of the New Zealand director's sensitive women fans running from the auditorium.

It's an art-house genre piece, very much in the tradition of "Enchanted April," "Shirley Valentine" and "Under the Tuscan Sun." But, a few charming scenes aside, A Good Year is in the hands of the wrong star and wrong director.

A pedestrian movie with a predictable romance at its heart.

Somehow the screwball concoction does not jell. The stars are pleasant but unexciting, the goofy ensemble has a few moments of hilarity but never catches fire, the laughs are very scattered and the film's title is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For all it's warmth and wonder, it carries little more power than a storybook fable.

Favors giggly juvenile humor over inspired satire and ends up not with a moral, but a moral vacuum.

Easily the least passionate romantic comedy I've seen in years.

No, it doesn't exactly re-create the magic that made the original such an instant classic, but it's faster and more involving than "Reloaded" and it rounds off the premise and themes of the trilogy in a surprisingly satisfying way.

Most of this is harmless enough, but Kasdan's Hollywood logic is simply too implausible.

All the good intentions in the world and solid performances from three of the biggest and most respected movie stars of our time cannot disguise the fact that Lions for Lambs is resting on a talky, disjointed and not-very-well-thought-out script.

An uninvolving film.