If the premise sounds tired, what’s surprising—or perhaps not—about The Contractor is how well Pine carries it.

Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications. [10 Nov 1997, p.102]

80 for Brady is brassy, ridiculous, and shameless. It’s also irresistible, maybe because watching older ladies having fun is almost embarrassingly seductive.

It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.

A well-meaning handspring of a movie that doesn’t necessarily land on its feet.

in a larger sense Be Kind Rewind declares that the riches of cinema history touch each of us personally. Films become so deep a part of us that we own them that our memories of them, whether faithful or fanciful, become their meanings. As a movie critic and, even before and above that, a movie lover, how can I disagree with that?

The first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent... What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. [20 Aug 1990, p.63]

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

Ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.

Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness.

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

The movie’s top-flight cast is left in ridiculous positions.

Rather than juicing each element to blockbuster volume, Clooney has delivered it in the tone of a memorial lecture, warm and ambling, given by one of the distinguished academics he put in his movie.

If you take Tykwer's film even half-seriously, it will be like one of those horror movies that you leave, suspecting that the crazy, ingenious super-killer is waiting for you outside. A warning, then, to the susceptible: After seeing The International, don't dare go to an ATM.

There's no attempt to address the show's endemic weak spots--a slow start and a contrived end. Mostly Stroman just lets it rip. But in some respects the movie is an improvement on the show.

On the Come Up is a thoughtful and generous-spirited entertainment, and a reminder of how hard it can be, when you’re young, to figure out who you really are.

There is no sadder genre than the tedious thriller, a movie that works hard to entice us with suspense, rough and tumble action, maybe even alluring locales, only to fizzle out far from the finish line.

Doesn't touch (Li's Hong Kong movies). But it is trying something clever.

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.

It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.

The joke barrage becomes hit-or-miss, as if the creators — including screenwriter Dan Stewart, working from a story by Rogen and Greenberg — don’t know or care which is which.

Beautiful Creatures is good fun and I want to know what happens next for Lena the teenaged witch.

The movie isn’t a melodramatic tell-all, or a total downer. But it manages, even while being unapologetically entertaining, to feel like an honest reckoning with all the things we didn’t want to know about Houston at her fame’s height. It’s a film that takes our failings into consideration, rather than simply fixating on hers, a summation of all the things she tried to tell us and couldn’t.

It relies almost exclusively on the celebrated eyes, ears, nose and throat of Streisand. Her musicianship remains irreproachable. But her mannerisms are so arch and calculated that one half expects to find a key implanted in her back.

There's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon.

Not till the very end of the film, when King Richard pops up, portrayed, in a surprise appearance, by an actor who has launched many a grand movie adventure, will audiences get a glimpse of epic star quality. Then, like the Merry Men, they will unleash a hearty ho-ho. The rest of this Robin Hood merits only a ho-hum.