Bland and boring.

Those who want something to really sink their teeth into should head home on a rainy day, put on some goth anthems and reread the books.

When its big plot switcheroo comes, it proves to be not such a great idea after all: It actually weakens, rather than strengthens, the premise, and dissipates, rather than intensifies, the drama.

Visually impressive but exceedingly unpleasant little nail-biter.

The script offers neither character revelations nor plot twists. It unfolds by the numbers, like the product of an amateur screenwriter's salon. Its second-hand ideas originate in movies ranging from 1960's "The Apartment" to 1997's "The Ice Storm."

For all the grace of the animation and visual splendor, the stilted script and emotionless "performances" give this digital artifact a distinctly stiff, wooden flavor.

Despite Sheen's earnestness - and despite the movie's obvious good intentions - the script is confused and unfocused, and clumsily borrows elements of movies like From Here to Eternity and Bridge Over the River Kwai without any of those classics' higher meaning. [18 Jan 1991]

A low-maintenance crowd-pleaser, but we've seen the entire film, in thematic snippets, before.

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.

That may be enough to keep the kids bobbing along -- and there are worse heroes for a kid to have than Arnold -- but apart from the shenanigans of civil-disobedient senior citizens, this movie offers little to keep accompanying parents interested.

Finn Taylor's lark of a movie feels like two unfinished films awkwardly fused together and ever threatening to snap apart.

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

Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.

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.

The film, despite the occasional gross-out joke, can't disguise the fact that it's a sweet old sappy -- even dated -- love story. Only Molly Ringwald is missing.

Diverting, at times even visually impressive, but has neither the spirit or style of "Spider-Man" nor the ambition of "X-Men."

Step Up never quite does fly: its dance routines are low-voltage, the star chemistry is weak, the characters are clichés and the movie is practically an instant remake of Dewan's other '06 dance musical, "Take the Lead," which told the story better.

Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat is so charismatic in his second Hollywood outing, The Corruptor, that he almost makes us forget that the movie itself is one of the more pretentious, muddled and incompetent action films to come along in some time. [12 Mar 1999]

Never offers much enlightenment through its message.

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

The film probably should have been a comedy. It would be a lot more cathartic - and a lot more entertaining - to laugh at the grim modern world of Falling Down than it is to have a heavy-handed filmmaker rub our faces in the hopelessness of it all. [26 Feb 1993, p.14]

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

Fat Albert's originality is lost on the big screen.

A decidedly mixed bag.

The plot contrivances in which the story is ultimately sewn include the death of a father, an unexpected pregnancy, the sale of a house and the rest of the rigmarole that bad writers are prone to drag in at the last moment. It's too bad, because these characters deserved a better story.

Its one saving grace is Godzilla himself, the James Bond of giant monsters.

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.