That the film works to the extent that it does is largely due to the superb performance by Kilcher, who imbues her starring turn with a radiance and magnetism that makes you fully believe in her character's ability to woo audiences

Much like its characters' romantic lives, How to Be Single is more enjoyable when it's being casual.

The film proves at least somewhat compelling, with director Latif providing enough tension and chilling visuals to keep viewers engaged.

Steeped in high-tech paranoia, Winkler's film has a nice kinetic energy, effectively portraying the extent to which computers have become an intrinsic part of our lives. The screenplay, however, for which Winkler shares credit with four others, feels like watered-down John Grisham. [24 July 1995]

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

Not as committed to its spacey perceptuo-metaphysical premise as it seems at the start, the film seems more interested in whether one woman can convince another to buy into a project she doesn't understand.

A wheel-spinner. The more the film stresses and strains to be funny, the unfunnier it gets.

The result is very pleasing, even for moviegoers who don't pine for the Western's return, and represents a big step forward in the directing career of D'Onofrio.

It's all sufficiently well done and amusing enough to satisfy the appetites of fans who mainline this sort of thing, but it also sports a concocted, second-hand feel common to this sort of throwback homage.

If the metrics by which you want to measure Love are its brute sexiness and technical panache, then the film is indeed rather extraordinary. Thanks to Noe's regular collaborator Benoit Debie (who also shot such recent visually bravura films as Spring Breakers and Lost River), Love contains some of the prettiest shagging scenes in cinematic history.

Even though Whishaw is mesmeric, by the end of the 105-minute running time the whole experience starts to feel like being trapped in a broken-down subway car with a violent mental patient.

With a refreshingly diverse cast and a compelling premise, there’s a lot to appreciate about Darby and the Dead — even with its muddied execution.

There's little facetious comedy a la the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. It's all traditional stuff, done well but without an original spark.

But nothing taps his own particular talents to unsettle audiences with truly edgy material. Funeral gets no more edgy than a potty joke and a corpse tumbling out of a coffin. This is nothing more than juvenile slapstick.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

If the story is meant to represent a microcosm of the immigration problem, it’s woefully reductive. If it’s meant to be first and foremost an action thriller, it does have a few nice moves to offer.

Director Bao Nguyen doesn't try to dig too deep, leaving serious behind-the-scenes lore to the SNL obsessives who've been poring over backstage accounts for years. Focusing on talking heads, almost all of whom say nice things about their experience of the show, he offers a puffy remembrance just a couple of notches more substantive than the supplemental doc in a DVD box set.

A psychological thriller without bothering much with psychology. Come to think of it, the thrills are pretty much missing, as well.

Chipper and fun if occasionally superficial, the doc finds its subject too large to address in a way that satisfies the most curious outsider or devoted fan. Everyone else will have a good time, though.

Engrossing on a moment-to-moment scale thanks so some very fine performances, the film doesn't click together in the transformative way such stories occasionally do, and does less with themes of wealth and class than it surely intends to.

This is a wannabe shocker with a clever premise that doesn't really get down and dirty or betray the base instincts of a born horror filmmaker.

Remains mostly fascinating even in an amateur storyteller's hands.

This solidly crafted Ridley Scott production is sprinkled with classy ingredients, including Alicia Vikander as headline star. But it is also a fairly flat treatment of over-familiar plot elements, and fatally low on the key psycho-thriller elements of suspense, surprise and dread.

The performances by the highly attractive cast are terrific all around, and the directors have well managed to convey the literally and metaphorically sultry aspects of a hot summer day.

Utterly charming and not without those subtle insights into character and culture that mark their (Merchant Ivory) best films.

A surprisingly uncritical doc from a filmmaker whose rep is built on skeptical investigation, Joe Berlinger's Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru doesn't seem to know whether its title is ironic or not.

Only the comic parts soar, and they fit uneasily with the pallid romance and half-hearted family drama.

It's a delightful piece of filmmaking with a marvelous cast topped by Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever.

But if you can check your brain and go along with the preposterous plotting of a mystery thriller as generic as its title, there's a certain baseline pleasure in watching the more or less wholesome young couple at its center swim in a murky cesspool of deception and death. Oh, and diamonds!

As executed by an appealing ensemble of smooth operators, this adaptation often hits its amusing marks, but with a weighty running time of two hours, it often feels more like a lecture than an intended romp.

This film debut of the carapaced comic-book heroes features solid animatronic effects and a straightforward approach to superhero adventurism that should appeal to young Ninja Turtle fans, who should be pleased to see the terrapins brought so faithfully to the screen. However, a long-winded plot, broad characterizations and barely adequate fight scenes will prevent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from generating any breakthrough business.

Unusual for this sort of thing, Snitch is a film after which you remember the characters and actors more than the big action moments.

What makes Project Power entertaining is its canny combination of familiar ingredients in a textured real-world milieu that gives it fresh flavor. Well, that and the dynamic execution of co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their crack stunt and VFX teams.

Much like Rodriguez's Spy Kids films, We Can Be Heroes proves silly, light-hearted fun for its target audience, blissfully free of ponderousness and enlivened by antic humor.

Although its very R-rated humor inevitably starts to wear thin during the course of its feature-length run time, Fixed manages the neat trick of injecting some genuine heart into its nonstop offensiveness.

Visually, the film is skin and bones. Iscove and cinematographer Francis Kenny ("A Night at the Roxbury") have the most fun with "Grease"-like dance numbers in the finale. [27 January 1999]

Rawson Marshall Thurber's Skyscraper is one of the most idiotic action movies to come down the pike in some time. It's also a lot of fun if you're willing to go with it, and getting viewers to go with things is one of several fronts on which The Rock routinely earns the money he gets paid.

A bright and breezy tween fantasy romantic comedy that coasts along on its charming performances and the light comedic touch of first-time feature director Elizabeth Allen.

The filmmaking here is plain, prosaic and earnest. For some, just getting worked up all over again about capital punishment will be enough, but without flair or fresh insights into its chosen subject, this just seems like spinning more wheels about on oft-discussed subject.

Indeed a wary viewer must get past the film's infatuation with celebrity culture to enjoy this movie's charms. But charms it has.

Annette Bening captivates as the self-delusionist, with Ed Harris ruggedly irresistible as the object of her fantasy.

The film only intermittently displays the snap, precision and stylistic smarts a mixed-tone project like this requires; a half-good effort is not enough where buoyancy and a sly-to-mean spiritedness are required at all times.

A tweener but not necessarily a good one. It falls into the gap between good intentions and faulty storytelling.

The didactic screenplay sinks the film. Instead of exploring characters, or having them spout witty lines, Ting has them explain everything to each other, out loud, almost all the time. ... It’s great to see more films with Asian and Asian-American actors and stories, especially one written and directed by a woman. But while Ting’s movie may be heartfelt, it offers viewers more fluff than heart.

While Taurus does eventually get around to making a point — something about how the toxic combination of fame, addiction, and the music biz can destroy a young talent — it feels for most of its 98-minute run time like a plotless meander through one dude’s very awful week

Risen is fairly engrossing in its thriller-like section, with Fiennes' restrained performance providing a solid dramatic anchor and the Maori actor Curtis being a nice change from the usual blonde-hair/blue-eyed Jesus. But when the film shifts into inspirational territory it ironically becomes far more prosaic, depicting the miracles in a low-budget, low-key fashion that will hardly win any converts.

Easily the worst in a trilogy that has been notable mainly for the presence of its everyman action star, Transporter 3 is a nonsensical, choppily edited bore, with awful dialogue.

A somewhat claggy, uneven work with stiff performances from the leads, both of whom seem to be sleep-talking lines as if they learned them in Yiddish first.

While this tale of a couple experiencing myriad romantic ups and downs has its occasional amusing and insightful moments, Meet Me in Montenegro doesn't quite render its characters' foibles endearing.

Though its tone is amiable and its performances are (mostly) professional, it's hard to care if these four people live happily ever after or never see each other again.

A tart and tender comedy that pulls off a little miracle of its own by being genuinely heartwarming without leaving any cloyingly sticky emotional residue.

Writer-director Shin’s labored attempts to use genre tropes to explore the complexities of domineering mother-daughter relationships never fully develops.

Slick superlobbyist Jack Abramoff is the colorful subject of Casino Jack a similarly slick and undeniably entertaining true-life D.C. crime story, boasting a robust Kevin Spacey performance.

What the production may have lost in a “nasty-wasty skunk” of an antagonist, it gains in an inspired voice cast (led by Benedict Cumberbatch) and a dazzlingly merry and bright visual palette.

While The Empire in Africa offers a litany of talking heads and shockingly violent images in its exploration of the conflict, it is more confusing and disturbing than enlightening.

A quiet, nearly plot-free drama enlivened by beautifully nuanced performances by its four-person leading ensemble, In Our Nature depicts familiar dysfunctional family dynamics with a welcome lack of melodrama.

A small but scrappy road-tripper whose solid sense of place and sure-handed blend of poignancy and unsentimental humor should earn it fans on the arthouse circuit.

Lam’s filmmaking team deliver thrills on schedule with solid effects, crisp shooting and fast cutting.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is a sprawling, meandering drama that doesn't quite deliver on its ambitious promise (and intriguing title).

Ultimately has few original aspects, but it is an intelligently wrought drama that makes it a respectable entry in the genre.

While it can be labeled a thriller or a murder mystery, the film is talky, unhurried, contains little action and shows more interest in how characters think and behave than in its plot.

Has some clever ideas up its sleeve, but otherwise fails to provoke much interest in the travails of its 40-something central character.

Even the easygoing Broderick can't inject any lift or charm into the story.

This posturing, airless exercise is wearing rather than exciting.

The film, which feels overlong at 145 minutes, suffers both from repetition and an over-reliance on melodramatic plot devices. But it nonetheless delivers a compelling portrait of a heroine whose story is too little-known.

When that visual leaves a more captivating impression than a baby elephant spreading its ears and getting airborne like a glider, something is definitely off in the balance. The new Dumbo holds the attention but too seldom tugs at the heartstrings.

All the talented women here are stuck playing types rather than characters, in a strained frolic in which both the verbal humor and the physical gags too often fall flat.

[A] modest but heartfelt picture. ... Lost Transmissions tells its story without engaging with foolish cliches about creativity and madness.

Director Campbell clearly knows his way around this sort of material, resulting in some tense, well-staged action sequences that make Cleaner reasonably diverting for its concise running time. But the film never achieves the heights of the classic actioners that clearly inspired it, and its overuse of familiar genre tropes (for once, can’t the main villain be uncharismatic, like so many in real life?) soon becomes wearisome.

While Potter devotees will no doubt be scandalized by the edgier bad-boy ‘tude now possessed by Mr. McGregor’s mischievous cotton-tailed nemesis, the greater offense committed is the awfully flimsy plotting that fails to take full advantage of terrific production values and the work of an engaging cast led by the affably energetic James Corden.

Under Tucci's direction, Blind Date careens into tedium as the couple plays out permutations of a blind-date pairing.

Damici more than holds the screen, too gruffly determined to be upstaged by a monster, and the script slips a clever trick or two up his sleeve.

Shot on sometimes lousy-looking video, it seems unreasonable to ask audiences to pay to see this picture on a big screen. But "Wild West," particularly with a bit of editing, would be a standout on cable, where shoddy production values would be eclipsed by some very funny material and the emcee presence of a sometimes charismatic (and sometimes obviously road-weary) star.

Mitra, clad in the requisite tight, sexy outfits, conveys a suitable toughness but little in the way of personality, while such distinguished British actors as Bob Hoskins and Adrian Lester dutifully show up to collect their paychecks.

Could easily be filled with cliches but in the hands of filmmaker John Gray, it's a sparkling piece of entertainment that deserves a wide audience.

Mademoiselle C should please fashion devotees while leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

Richard Linklater's 19th feature becomes compelling in its final act, but before that too often appears tonally addled and dramatically dawdling.

Some of the dialogue is fun, especially as delivered by Plaza, who amusingly always seems to be commenting on the outlandish proceedings even while taking part in them. And now that Grant’s pretty boy handsomeness has matured with age, he’s eagerly leaning into the character actor stage of his career. Chewing the scenery with gusto, he gives the film a jolt of comic energy whenever he’s onscreen.

While Helen Mirren elevates the material with her usual aplomb and the events being depicted inevitably are stirring, this is a stodgy crusade-for-justice drama, directed and written with minimal flair.

One of the unfunniest comedies ever. Punch lines are lifeless. Characters are borderline catatonic. Running gags can't even walk.

Director Pat O'Connor (Dancing at Lughnasa) achieves a lot with a little... Adding greatly to the overall impact are the strong performances by the three leads.

The 3-D effects come fast and furious, rendered with a technical skill and humor that gives this otherwise strictly formulaic slasher picture whatever entertainment value it possesses.

U.S. viewers may be put off by its tangled sexual motifs and find its implied social critique a little close to the bone. But even Stateside, Julianne Moore, in her most challenging role in years, will win plaudits and attract mature audiences to a thoroughly absorbing and polished piece of work.

Amiel's greatest achievement is that Creation is a deeply human film with moments of genuine lightness and high spirits to go with all the deep thinking.

Although A Man Called Otto never fully rises above its obvious plot machinations, director Forster thankfully applies a fairly restrained, subtle approach. The result is a film to which you ultimately find yourself succumbing even though you never stop being aware that your heartstrings are being shamelessly pulled.

The chemistry between the leads and a few finely etched supporting turns provide welcome counterweight to the movie’s formulaic progression, welcome especially for those who have seen their fair share of entries in the love-story-with-medical-complication subgenre.

A road picture mired by unsteady camera work, lackadaisical pacing and cumbersome speechmaking, Free Zone is an excruciating cinematic trek. Israeli director Amos Gitai's narrative, both visually and conversationally, is a disappointing dud.

Jackman does everything required of him, and his range is quite admirable, while Weisz, who has nothing to prove, does looking gorgeous very nicely.

Some genre fans will be disappointed by the film’s slow-burn style and the cryptic nature of Sam Stefanak’s screenplay, including its twist ending that’s open to interpretation. But for anyone more interested in cerebral horror and less in watching arteries gushing and entrails popping out, The Woman in the Yard offers considerable rewards.

Voracious genre consumers should get off on trying to decipher the densely textured film's murky ambiguities.

Only one of the three episodes of the anthology film Eros delivers on the title's promise.

This latest addition to an apparently unkillable franchise adds nothing original to the formula. It’s a formula that works, to be sure, making for a pleasant enough time filler. But that’s about it.

Davis seems to be down for whatever develops...playing Izzy with energetic animation as she bounces from one manic situation to the next. Osment and Shawkat make the most of their brief, amusingly awkward scenes, while Coon's attempts to behave like an actual adult are skillfully undone by Izzy's determined disorderliness.

Manages to be enjoyable despite its contrivances.

The impression Pretty Lethal leaves behind is one of unfulfilled potential, an exciting premise executed as a fitfully fun but mostly forgettable distraction.

The story is a sketchy, dramatically muddled rumination on familiar Williams themes about the Old South and its brave, beautiful, rebellion women always on the brink of love, suicide or madness.

All the more frustrating because of its conceptual freshness and Ben Affleck's sly turn in the title role, this sleek action thriller ends up delivering standard shoot-'em-up goods after initially suggesting it might provide something rather different.

Dramatically and philosophically void and unprovocative on the grand scale of apocalyptic speculative fiction, this low-budget indie is somber and dreary on a moment-to-moment basis and leaves its talented cast stranded with few opportunities to alleviate the sense of stasis.