He (Allen) seems to have forgotten that comedy is all about timing, letting individual scenes meander -- often to accommodate his own stammering monologues -- and giving viewers far too much downtime in which to consider the staleness of many of the film's gags.

The surprise is how utterly original his (Woodley's) gorgeously mounted curiosity seems.

Ruzowitzky concentrates on delivering on sporadic scares at the expense of figuring out how to make individual scenes coalesce into a coherent chiller about medical megalomania.

The less time you've devoted to thinking about the nature and uses of the erotic imagination, the more challenging this will seem.

Wan's debut feature is a twisted, squirm-inducingly nasty bit of work, which isn't a criticism because that's exactly what he and cowriter Leigh Whannell had in mind.

The limp thriller plot Deery constructs to frame his theological inquiries is both artificial and not very interesting, a lethal combination.

Orenna, Thornton and Belton deliver strong, surprisingly subtle performances that make the modest fireworks genuinely engaging.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

The prodigiously talented Allen, Bates and Lange give it their all, but there's a limit to what even they can do with platitudes and prefabricated homilies.

No one was exactly clamoring for this one, and Bronson has vowed it will be the last Death Wish.

The film veers wildly from decent black comedy to dumb slapstick, and director Reynolds seems unsure of his own intentions. In a few places this film is quite funny, however, although De Luise and all the scenes he's in are unbearable.

By all accounts, the events depicted are historically accurate, but historical accuracy does not always guarantee a well-paced, interesting film.

Where Coffy had an exhilarating sense of fun underlying the mayhem, Foxy Brown is a darker, more mean-spirited picture. Rather than treating Foxy's travails as a setup for the inevitable vengeance, it seems to revel in her degradation.

Director Furie's stylistic method of dwelling on certain scenes, a penchant for close-ups so large and exasperating as to blot out the screen and confuse the vision, worked effectively in his Ipcress File, but here his shots of teeth, guns, horses' eyes, Brando's jowls, and Comer's brow are merely specious, distracting, and as amateurish as a TV director shooting into the sun for reflection or allowing water on the camera lens to remind the viewer that technicians are present.

Although not so clever or original as its predecessor, Futureworld is effective.

Die-hard fans will appreciate this rare glimpse of the great band at work, while mavens of unique musical instruments will delight in seeing Page "play" the seldom-used theramin (previously restricted to the Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations" and schlock horror movie soundtracks). Also, it's kind of fun watching the backstage hysterics of band manager Peter Grant, the man of legendary bad temper who was the basis for Spinal Tap's manager, Ian Faith, in THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984).

Fred Zinnemann waited 40 years to make this surprisingly lifeless film, a major disappointment from the acclaimed director of High Noon and From Here To Eternity.

The film is pleasant but too hackneyed and heavy-handed to work well.

A good film for the viewer who isn't interested in being entertained but is willing to be thrown into the muck of the problems facing hard-working American farmers.

The result is the farthest thing from a bland, spineless sequel: It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

Funnier than you might imagine.

Done in by its tone.

You may give up on Ian Iqbal Rashid's feature debut long before things get interesting, courtesy of a distracting conceit that shatters whatever spell the hackneyed premise might cast.

Although the body count averages one murder every 7 1/2 minutes--which will undoubtedly please the gorehounds it was intended for--this film is slightly better than most slice-and-dice efforts and contains several genuine surprises.

Simultaneously sober and silly horror picture.

The film makes no real impression; it's amiable, occasionally funny and indistinguishable from dozens of other romantic comedies just like it.

Frequently brilliant director Boorman--always an interesting visual stylist--falls flat on his face with this pretentious piece of science-fiction claptrap that presents its dull ideas in such a confused and annoying fashion as to anger even the most devoted fan of the genre.

His emphasis on acting is welcome at a time when shallow, smirkingly self-referential performances threaten to become the Hollywood norm, but the film's slack pacing and narrative indiscipline undermine its intensity.