A Working Man is watchable enough, with the occasional interjection of humor, but it’s a formulaic punch-’em-up that simply jams in as many fights as it can with little effort expended on plausibility.

Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect.

Hot Pursuit is about two women finding sisterly common ground despite ethnic, religious, philosophical, temperamental and/or phonetic differences. It also seems an inevitable stop on Hollywood’s perpetual recycling drive, which caters to an audience perfectly content with the creaky and familiar.

The whole film is an argument about nothing less than the future — can we fix our troubled world or not? But for all of its vaulting ambition, its sumptuous eye-feasts and its leapings back and forth in space and time, Tomorrowland never comes together as coherent drama in the here and now.

Prometheus, in efficient 3-D, places most of its bets on the wonders that today's visual artists and technicians can work with digital tools. This tale of an interstellar search asks cosmic questions about the meaning of life, but comes up with lame answers in a script that screams attention-deficit disorder.

Thanks largely to Ms. Parker and to the delectable Zooey Deschanel as her anhedonic house-mate, the filmmakers still manage to squeeze some juice out.

A case can be made that it’s gutsy and honest for Mr. Apatow, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Eichner to place such an obnoxious (and recognizable) figure as Bobby at the center of a rom-com, but as we saw in “The King of Staten Island,” comedies about jerks work only if they’re funny, and Bros isn’t.

Madagascar 3 is all about exuberant motion, cute characters and gorgeous colors. It aims for the eyes, not the heart.

Talented as they are, the wheelchair-bound stars of Rory O'Shea Was Here can't transcend a manipulative script.

The safe course is to recommend the film, which seems pitilessly long at 147 minutes, only for the transcendent quality of Javier Bardem's performance.

The film, like its subject and everyone who talks about him, is frustratingly short on analysis or insight. It’s as if BASE jumping had been invented and psychology had not.

Spasms of kung fu wire fighting, Spider-Man acrobatics, huge explosions and a lethal polo game can't replace the first film's beating heart and witty soul.

Quid Pro Quo, a bizarre but audacious debut feature by Carlos Brooks.

A model of mediocrity.

The experience is interesting, in a flattened way.

This remake isn’t terrible, just tentative and too long by at least 40 minutes.

To its perverse credit, “Venom 2,” as it’s being called, manipulates its audience with all the tentacles it can deploy, most of them cheerfully ridiculous, although a climactic battle between Venom and Carnage is the dreariest face-off since the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel duked it out in Zack Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice.”

The intentional and unintentional absurdities of the plot do pay off, with a happy ending that's outlandish enough to be entertaining.

The most horrible thing about The Lodge, a horror flick set mostly in a snowbound vacation house, is that it’s no fun.

The only reliable source of energy is Homayoun Ershadi, a powerful actor who plays Baba, Amir's Westernized father.

Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.

Inside the mysterious factory, a psychedelic realm where Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka holds sway, pleasure gradually gives way to a peculiar state that I can only describe as engagement without enjoyment.

Oh, what awful voices -- clumsy words as well as cheesy accents -- come out of the actors' mouths! Though I wanted to appreciate the human story, and the lavish spectacle, I couldn't get past the clangorous echoes of Charlie Chan.

This attractive, superficial stab at biography, with Renée Zellweger in the title role, is more concerned with a lonely woman's quest for acceptance and love than with an author's worldly achievements.

Five or 10 children might have led to comedy; 533 of them make for farce. All the same, Mr. Huard is endearing in the role of a perpetual adolescent who finally wants to stand up to his responsibilities, which include the one baby he has fathered the traditional way, and in his own name.

Sanctum is far from a good movie, just as 3-D is far from the movie industry's savior. But it certainly looks good, and watching it through those plastic glasses reopens your eyes to the promise of the third dimension.

The movie looks lovely, but it's luminous prose.

It should be said right off that this provocative off-black comedy, starring the Gen-Xer’s dream cast of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, is not for everyone. And the people it is for will have to be in the mood.

Terrific performers doing what they're often forced to do, overcoming sorely flawed material.

It grows repetitious, both in its account of Crane's ritual behavior and in clumsily written -- and stolidly directed -- scenes between Crane and Carpenter, two men acting out their own unacknowledged sexual drama.

It’s decently entertaining action; Mr. Campbell knows what he’s doing in that regard.

Yet most of the film's energy is generated by flamboyant cinematography and music-video cutting, and much of that energy is false.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.

I might have liked About Adam more if its supposedly irresistible hero -- and the movie itself -- hadn''t been so smirky.

A two-hour documentary that feels like three, it certainly has a worthy subject, and a charismatic one; it commits a trove of valuable cultural lore to posterity. But it also commits a sin in never finding its rhythm, or a through-line on which to hang one of the great stories of American popular music.

"Another Earth" and "Moon" transcended their financial and physical limitations with mystery and ambiguity. Europa Report goes ploddingly where bolder films have gone before.

The perverse fascination of Jet Lag is watching two superb actors struggle with material that doesn't suit them.

Last Breath, which runs a compact 91 minutes, doesn’t feel like a finished film: The dialogue is strictly functional, and there is so little time for establishing character that none of the three principals really makes an impression.

What Minions does have is abundant if relentless cuteness, which audiences are sure to accept in lieu of content; people love these little guys.

Ms. Leo is in the kind of role that befits her particular gifts—a character overwhelmed by her own emotions, who sucks the air out of whatever room she finds herself in. But Measure of Revenge moves with too much trepidation—or too much style, one might say—for a convincing urban thriller.

The great strength of Concussion is its star’s performance.

The tone is that of a telenovela -- soap-operatic at heart -- even though the film was adapted from a 19th-century novel.

Strangely, though, there isn't enough for one movie, and the first clue to why lurks in the title's ampersand, a sort of linguistic duct tape holding together two stories that never really function as one.

The story’s pleasures are more literary than cinematic. On screen, it’s more obvious that Mr. Moore’s ideas don’t quite line up.

Mr. Douglas's performance in the sequel measures up to Gekko's rep, but the rest of the movie is pumped up to the bursting point with gasbag caricatures, overblown sermons and a semicoherent swirl of events surrounding the economy's recent meltdown.

In the not-so-grand scheme of such things, Along Came Polly is certainly harmless, and occasionally very funny. It's just not clever enough to keep you engaged.

Two movies for the price of one, though only one of them-a fragmented romance within a ponderous parable-qualifies as a bargain.

That's one of the puzzles of this piece. You'd think a film with talent to burn - would provide some electrifying encounters at the very least. No such luck. Words fly, some of them medium-witty, but lightning doesn't strike.

Fitfully amusing.

The film is plagued by flaws: James Newton Howard’s relentlessly bombastic musical score, an elementary storyline, underwritten characters. As expertly as Mr. Greengrass recaptures the flaming horrors, his film is a somewhat superfluous successor to an excellent documentary on the same subject, Ron Howard’s 2020 feature “Rebuilding Paradise.”

Michael Winterbottom's films aren't always successful, but they're almost always interesting. And, in the case of this odd transplantation from Thomas Hardy's grim Wessex to the glare and blare of contemporary India, spectacular visually, though awfully somber dramatically.

There’s a lot going on and somehow not enough, because the emotional destination is so obvious, the tone so wearying and the performances, mostly, so stilted. The fight scenes, it must be said, are electrifying, especially the climactic battle.

The Kingdom comes down to a police procedural, and one whose procedures prove none too interesting.

For all its noble intentions, its striving for authenticity, its unblinking look at the savagery of war, The Great Raid is far more dutiful than dramatic.

Lavishly produced -- overproduced, actually -- and persistently unexciting.

Except for one terrifically adroit sequence in a subway, there is nothing understated about The Invasion. With all the shoot-outs, the screaming, the chases, collisions and fireballs, there isn't much time for storytelling.

As long as this deity remains childish, materialistic and narcissistic, Jim's in his heaven and all's right with the world. It's when the story reaches for maturity, spirituality and altruism that the divine spark of comedy sputters and nearly goes out.

It's going to be a hit with libidinous boys, and their parents could do worse (see first review) than to watch the lavish, James Bondish gadgetry and cheerful anarchy of an action-adventure that's been made with all the finesse it needs, though not a jot more.

Should you choose to watch Judy & Punch, the best way to do it is with the sound turned low or off. The downside is missing part of Ms. Wasikowska’s performance; she plays Judy with impressive ferocity. The advantage lies in losing the repetitive bombast of Punch’s drunken posturings while enjoying the genuine prettiness of Stefan Duscio’s cinematography and Josephine Ford’s production design.

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker have been through a lot together. To be exact, "Rush Hour" "Rush Hour 2" and now Rush Hour 3. Are they tired? Perhaps not, but their antics and action sequences certainly are.

The film too often feels like the plodding presentation of a sad story. And it gets sadder still, though as the plot goes on the movie tends to skirt genuine awfulness, reaching instead for the inspiring flashback, the righteous moment of justice or the happy, improbable surprise.

Earnest, mostly predictable and candidly didactic. That said, I'm glad it got made -- what's wrong with films that teach? -- and especially glad that a remarkably gifted newcomer named Nicole Beharie got to play the central role.

Mr. Rourke's performance is quite phenomenal, a case of unquenchable talent bursting the bonds of dehumanized artifice.

It's beautiful to watch, but it doesn't cover very much ground. Sumptuously appointed, meticulously detailed, the film sallies forth - and sags. [06 Apr 1995]

The movie itself -- which deals (not very interestingly) with the issue of journalistic integrity and (very predictably) with father-son relationships -- doesn't pack much of a wallop.

It's a purely sensory journey until the pictures start making editorial comments, in slaughterhouses and garbage dumps.

The result is impressively if overbearingly grotesque, boasting an ecstatic surface of blood, guts and deformities. But it’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.

For all his years doing "E.R." and other top-line TV series, Mr. Wells hasn't yet tailored his techniques to the big screen.

When the film finally gets around to monsters on a rampage, you'll get both more and less than you bargained for.

Why so gloomy? Well, this is a serious movie, for better and, more often, worse.

Mayhem is the point. And on that, at least, the movie certainly delivers.

The movie is grimly efficient on its own terms, a string of ever more naked calculations. But it looks like a business school opened up and all the marketing grads were allowed to start their own studio.

This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked when it actually comes.

The second film, in particular, grows tediously episodic, and the exploits become a blur. What never blurs is Mr. Cassel's presence. We're told that he bulked up for the part-though Mesrine was many things, lithe wasn't one of them-but it's his phenomenal zest for his checkered character that fills the screen.

The motion-capture animation is spectacular..Yet the action grows wearisome as it grinds on, and the film becomes a succession of dazzling set pieces devoid of simple feelings.

The material is hardly original, but the moment is affecting all the same.

Impressive for Patrick Tatopoulos's production design but depressive for the juiceless story.

Against heavy odds, Mean Machine adds darker flavors to the plot without curdling it. Beneath the comic craziness is real craziness, and desperation. These goal-kicking, bone-crunching cons are both actors in and prisoners of their own horror show.

Its crackly sarcasm and smart talk turn out to be simply coating for a soft, icky, center.

It's plain old lousy timing, this chronicle of a dedicated, exacting chef being released in the wake of the kitchen-centered "Ratatouille" and "Waitress." Alongside those two charmers, which beautifully demonstrate the transformative powers of food and love, No Reservations is strictly cordon blah.

The movie has a couple of problems. The lesser one arises from its opaqueness about the involvement of Mr. Stewart and “The Daily Show” in these events. The larger one lies in its narrative — enlivened from time to time by instructive absurdity, yet awfully familiar, overall, and padded with a notably clumsy dramatic contrivance.

Safe House is a sturdy enough thriller, but one that consistently defaults to the less interesting of its two lead characters.

The movie itself is neither a catastrophe nor major.

You can consume only so much gooey romanticism before someone gets seasick, and it’s precisely the soggy love story at the center of Adrift — a survival-at-sea adventure directed by the estimable Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur — that prevents this storm-tossed vehicle from achieving maximum upthrust.

For all of Ferris's desperate struggles, and for all the director's efforts to emulate the remarkable verisimilitude he achieved in "Black Hawk Down," his new film remains abstract and unaffecting. It's a study in semisimilitude, more Google-Earthly than grounded in feelings.

Quirky. Wacky. Offbeat. Outré. The words that come to mind regarding Paper Man might prompt you run in the opposite direction. And perhaps you should, except for the performances of Jeff Daniels and Emma Stone.

What’s missing from Stans is a sense of humor—not among the stans, who are self-reflecting and self-effacing. Mr. Mathers, outside of his songwriting, seems to believe that amused self-examination is a weakness to be hidden. The stans, ironically, are hiding nothing.

“Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.

The robbery isn’t sophisticated enough on its own to hold one’s interest.

If only there'd been a chance to contemplate the legend in blessed silence.

There's so much of so many flavors of cleverness — a surfeit of surfeits — that sensory overload causes aesthetic suffocation.

The director, Arie Posin, and his co-writer, Matthew McDuffie, have tried to do with their film — fill a bare-bones version of the Hitchcock film with an illusion of life. They do succeed sporadically.

I have an aversion to such intricately interlocked movies as "Babel" or "Crash" -- for all their pretensions and astral connections they're basically stunts -- and my feelings about Jellyfish are much the same. But this film is handsomely made, and I won't soon forget the almost Jungian image of a wide-eyed child -- emerging from the sea with a red and white lifesaver around her little belly.

Mr. Hallström, who has made some emotionally satisfying and even delicate movies (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “My Life as a Dog,” “The Cider House Rules”), doesn’t really have the material here that he had in his other films. His cast is pretty; the Sagrada Familia is more eloquent.

Of all the performances in a patchy production, only one achieves perfection. We get to see it through the modern medical miracle of ultrasound.

It's just a little film that strives to be likable, and is less so than it might have been.

For all the gushing about the “transcendent” nature of “American Pie,” Mr. Brooks is the one who actually mentions, and praises, the recording itself, which becomes a fascinating aspect to a show that seems to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying its existence.

Earnest but deeply flawed.