Susan Sarandon has never looked better in her 29-year screen career than she does here.

While potent and well-paced, Contagion doesn't come together as the fearsome bio-thriller it starts out to be. But it may make audiences twitchy about the guy coughing in the next row.

Hemsworth’s machismo is all real, though, and for two war-torn hours, you’ll forget about that iconic hammer of his.

Passable but never exciting, Heist is on a level with those minor Burt Lancaster action pics the actor's name helped bankroll in the '70s.

Hart is much like Murphy: fast-talking, mischievous and irresistible. He's so confident and good-natured that we see how Angela fell for her pint-sized slacker.

More than anything, the striking spectacle of primordial flora and one-of-a-kind fauna makes it easy for audiences to get pleasantly lost in the adventure.

A riveting and disturbing documentary that falls short of greatness by not providing enough insight into the characters. It is mostly intent on inciting a sense of outrage in the viewer, and it succeeds.

Though a tacked-on fisticuffs finale has its charms, it rather contradicts the preceding. Mere subtleties are beyond Stallone and returning Rocky I director John G. Avildsen. [16 Nov 1990, p.4D]

Thanks to a disproportionately superior second hour, Fat Man and Little Boy improves on its historically valid, but commercially suicidal, title. It is not, however, even the screen's second best chronicle of atomic bomb development in wartime Los Alamos, N.M. [20 Oct 1989, p.4D]

Largely because of its engaging cast, Admission is an amiable, but only slightly-above-average, comic romp.

A well-paced action film in the vein of "Speed."

Bettany is the best thing about the movie. A wonderful dramatic actor, he also proves to be richly skilled at romantic comedy, playing Peter with an easy grace and a droll sense of humor.

Borderline amazing and borderline dull at the same time.

The beauty here is in the set-up, which offers Hugh Grant a role to match his star-making turn in "Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Delpy is clearly a gifted writer, especially of comic dialogue. But she and Goldberg don't quite work as an engaging pair.

The movie occasionally reveals truths about relationships that, while not earth-shattering, are nonetheless entertaining and worth considering.

Dragging on too long is a more serious flaw in a romantic comedy than it might be in a complex drama. We don't ask much of a movie like this, but we do require it to be snappy, clever and quick.

The martial-arts sequences take this prosaic thriller to a higher level.

It's a cut above most spooky-kid movies, with a twist that sets it apart.

The superior yet still extraordinarily cheesy "Here We Go Again" suffers from many of the same fundamental problems, though the film exudes an infectious energy and hearty spirit that’ll put you in a powerful Swedish super-pop headlock until you submit.

Intelligent but exasperating, its monotonous tone will wear down even viewers who started out in its corner. [27 Dec 1996]

Things move fast enough to make it a movie to enjoy and then forget.

Director David Fincher shovels on more gloom than even the serial killer genre can sustain in the murkily moody, but self-defeating, Seven.

Despite Thurman's unlikely role, she's rather appealing with De Niro, but the De Niro-Murray chemistry isn't convincing. Murray, a breeze in Groundhog Day, seems tensed up here; the film, long on the shelf and with long-shot cult potential, brings no discredit upon its makers, but no glory either. [5 Mar 1993, p.5D]

Friedkin's latest is good for a few jolts, but also too many unintentional yuks. [27 Apr 1990, p.1D]

Spacey's brazen casting isn't as beyond the pale as it ought to be. In fact, it's hard to imagine this strange and only occasionally successful movie without him.

By contrast, other Hornby screen adaptations are "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity"- superb comedies both and, in Fidelity's case, a treatise on male obsession with far more depth and even more laughs.

A remake of a 2003 French Canadian movie, The Grand Seduction is more bland than grand and more eccentric than seductive.