It’s got too much on its mind, and it’s unsure of its tone. This is the rough cut of a slimmer, better movie

The Other Woman earns a viewer's respect for the grace notes that director-screenwriter Don Roos finds beneath these familiar tunes, for the unassertive skill with which he paints upper-class life on the Upper East Side, and for the rightness of the performances.

You can, if you will, think of All the King's Men as a purely political parable, but that is to miss its blackest, bleakest meanings.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.

Reeves’ presence in any movie tends to be a sort of salve; even with bad material, he generally coasts by on his laid-back radiance. But not even Reeves can put an adequate shine on Outcome, a satire that takes one spindly premise and grinds it down to a nub.

The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's.

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

Mostly the movie is like the marriage: good casting, golden promise, yet somehow a grating ordeal.

The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost.

Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies.

It's a shame that W.E. smells so bad.

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him.

Filled with competent but unexciting performances and, like its protagonist, is strangely lugubrious.

Massively stupid: preposterous yet boring.

There's no denying that Pan is one ambitious fairy tale. But what's being labeled a "wholly original adventure" feels far from new, never mind necessary.

I can't deny I did feel fonder of my own family afterward, mostly because I know none of them would ever make me sit through Parental Guidance.

Instead of the meeting of maestros at the top of their form, Righteous Kill has the feeling of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds facing off for the first time in an exhibition game. It's like Old Timers' Day at the Motion Picture Home.

Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb.

A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.

Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.

Corelli is a coffee-table movie: one leafs through the gorgeous vistas and nods through the narrative.

Red Lights reaches for a "The Sixth Sense"-style twist and whiffs it completely.

You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.

There are gaping holes in logic throughout this sloppy, cheap-looking mess from "Disturbia" director D.J. Caruso.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army. What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. [30 May 1988, p.64]

But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs...and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the "Fame" kids.