Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

It has none of the minor virtues of Schumacher's other films. It looks bad: cluttered surfaces, production design reminiscent of overblown Broadway musicals, editing too fast for the eye to catch up, poor staging of fast action.

Nunez's movies go places, but with no acceleration.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

It would be imprecise to say that the thrill is gone, because The Lost World recovers from its turgid opening and comes to life, or does so in spasms.

It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.

An overpraised yet amusing satire.

Volcano is just another $100 million genre movie, and a pretty lousy one, to boot.

It's alert to its characters' constantly evolving desires in ways that high- and low-culture movies, with their strict aesthetics or their mass-market formulas, tend not to be.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

ark delivers an abstract exercise in style, a movie so dissociated from any recognizable human emotion or behavior that its actors come to seem like animatronics... I’m bored writing about it.

The film features plot turns of howling implausibility, leading up to a mechanical climax that resolves the story without forcing either of the principal characters to make the uncommercial decision to blow the other away.

The new movie of Selena's life ponderously carves each element of the myth in stone, as if this 23-year-old were a bust to be included on Mount Rushmore.

For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

It's hard to think of another American film with this range of moods: satirical, sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously.

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.

The talk sounds a little canned – an adult's foggy reconstruction of what it was like to hang out – but, for a while, Linklater is able to extract odd momentary glances and giggles from the actors to freshen it up.

Amounts to a pantheistic love-in: "A Fish Called Wanda" for vegetarians.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

Movie audiences today may want a little more, and the fundamental problem with the movie is that there is nothing in the story, as Rice and Lloyd Webber have designed it, to engage our feelings.

A surprisingly fresh didactic comedy that preaches the hollowness of glamour and status and the American cult of winning.

The acting of this central trio is brilliant, in part because the crisscrossing of these and other stories and the gorgeous backdrops take some of the weight off: The characters are free to be flawed without losing our interest.

Right from the opening shot of Breaking the Waves...von Trier seems to be looking for the first time at life, not just the movies.

It may be the most visually imaginative Shakespeare film since Akira Kurosawa's "Ran", and certainly one of the more operatic Hollywood creations of recent years.

Leigh at his best is a renderer of moments--the wisest and deepest observer, probably, among living directors.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

Altman's grief once seemed a revelation. With this movie, it begins to look like a misanthrope's stubborn routine.