Like an acquaintance couple's baby pictures, Friends With Kids induces coos but isn't as cute as they think.

This true story fills a needed niche, spotlighting women's basketball in the era before Title IX promoted equal treatment.

Penn has created a colorful tour guide, but in This Must Be the Place, there's no there there.

Happy, Happy has the makings of a Norwegian "Ice Storm," but it goes out with a whimper.

There's little that's new, revealing or stylish about this basic-black horror story, but if you've got a Goth sensibility, it might suit you.

With such a strong cast, the film has the right ingredients but it doesn’t quite make a perfect meal.

If you haven't seen a wasting disease in real life, you might think Restless is romantic. If you have, you might diagnose it as terminally cute.

Toast is lovely to look at, evoking both the gray-green milieu of Midlands life and the sensuality of good food, but it's like a whipped topping with no base.

Canadian director Denis Villaneuve knows how to stoke a hot debate about the legacy of violence. But in this case, where there's smoke, there's not enough air.

A SURPRISING number of good, long, serious, thought-provoking movies have opened in the past few weeks. This isn't one of them. But if you're looking for a break from heavy fare, this fluffy serving of junk food might be just right. [12 Nov 1993]

Don't let anyone off the hook. That's a basic rule of good satire, and on the whole Amos & Andrew follows it. The result is a generally amusing, occasionally hilarious send-up of racial posturing in America. [05 Mar 1993, p.3G]

Compared to other Marvel characters, Thor is a difficult sell.

Although the film begins promisingly, it proves to be little more than a soap opera.

It's a compelling tale of surf and survival.

Easy to watch but hard to pin down, like a creature with eight legs going in different directions.

There’s a lot of comic and fantasy potential here, but much of it gets squandered.

The Bay is better than a shallow exercise, but crabby horror fans may have preferred that Levinson took a real plunge.

This true-ish story adds a romantic subplot to the prosecution of Japanese war criminals by American general Douglas MacArthur, but neither the love nor the war are completely baked.

Though the situation is far from realistic, the dynamically directed and swiftly paced Marry Me remains emotionally grounded, which is crucial to the execution.

Good but not-good-enough schlocker.

THE WAR ROOM would have been a great motion picture if either James Carville or George Stephanopoulos had been elected president - or if there were more involvement of Bill Clinton. Although none of those occurred, the documentary on the 1992 campaign, from the Democratic side, is interesting, sometimes amusing and always has a sense of immediacy.[14 Jan 1994, p.7F]

Christopher Nolan's "Memento" was a movie-lover's dream come true, a puzzle that was engaging both intellectually and emotionally. But his Inception is a wake-up call, a blaring reminder that cheap tricks can't compensate for personal investment.

Home delivers like a mailman on Valentine’s Day. But when we scratch beneath the sugary surface, there’s something tart inside that’s difficult to digest.

Like a newborn planet, Melancholia is magnetically beautiful, but it's also an unformed mass of hot air.

The moral lesson that this movie feeds us smells fishy - because it's not in the book. But the backbone story about a guy who inherits some penguins is enough to tickle the kids.

Non-Stop: It is what it is.

On that vicarious-pleasure level, the movie version delivers. Yet for anyone with a sense of irony or social justice, it’s also frustratingly soft around the edges, with no real sense of the drugs-and-violence underside of show business or the spiritual cost of failure.

This is a movie that Holden would have skipped.