Future III is all smiles, nostalgically respectful of the western genre, serenely sure of the strength of its own more immediate heritage and of our affection for it.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

The movie looks like every other rom com, all spacious apartments and sleek, woodsy vacation homes, but it takes you through a wider range of responses to the relationships and characters than most.

The action is plentiful and thumping; Marvel-size thrills await you and the generations of kids who still believe in Superman. I just mean that the movie finds its true, lofty footing not when it displays Kal-El’s extraordinary powers but when it dramatizes Clark Kent’s roiling humanity. The super part of Man of Steel is just O.K.; but the man part is super.

A ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises.

Even the weak moments are saved by Poitier, who invests his role with a subtle warmth.

One of this summer's more pungent pleasures: a well-made sex farce of classical proportions. If there is a horse to fall off or an airplane forced to land at the wrong airport, you may be sure Teddy will be aboard.

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a bleak book, but it’s not an ugly one: beneath its cloud cover of misanthropy, there’s feral, wildflower grace. Fennell has tossed all of that out, substituting her own unimaginative vision, plus a bunch of crappy dresses.

You’ve seen most of this before, but that’s pretty much the point: The familiarity of the setup means the actors can just knuckle down and do their thing, and their energy keeps the movie rolling at a clip.

I'll stipulate that in Austen's time spinsterhood was a fate to be strenuously avoided. And being a woman writer was by no means an easy path either. Yet, she embraced it, and the immortal results more than justify a hard choice this film never really explores.

Thin, gulpy, awkward, it stands before us, artlessly begging sympathy but betraying its creator's worst weakness. [9 Mar 1987, p.86]

The Devil All the Time is just a pileup of awful people doing terrible things, for no reason other than to prove how wretched humans can be. The template is pure Southern Gothic, but without the subtlety of top-drawer practitioners of the genre, like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."

It's a feel-good frolic, which is fine for anyone who prefers their Hitchcock history tidied up, absent the megalomania, the condescending cruelty and tendency to sexual harassment that caused his post-Psycho blonde discovery Tippi Hedren to declare him "a mean, mean man."

Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?

Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

Like the provocative classics Dog Day Afternoon and Network, this is discomfiting entertainment–its edges are serrated, sharp enough to cut. The camera moves to just the right place every minute, and the editing is crisp. Moments of nearly unbearable tension are broken by bursts of energy and even humor.

Yesterday, a fantasy that works well enough as a Beatles love letter but falls short in the love-story department.

For a surprisingly solid stretch, Ambulance is great fun.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

Screenwriter Frederic Raphael has managed to preserve the book's broad vision while clarifying its bucolic speech. His most valuable ally is Director John Schlesinger (Darling), who displays the best sense of Victorian time and place since David Lean in Great Expectations, alternating his stars with a brilliant cast of minor players who serve as a Greek chorus in tragicomic peasant roles.

Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

They’re cute together, these two big stars, but the film around them, a sort of Tarantino lite, is desperately empty.