It's a genre film, not great art, though there's a good joke about art - a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough - but it's a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

While the film is partially redeemed by a couple of surprisingly touching late scenes involving Ridley and her dad, for the most part it’s merely a weak satire in which we’re meant to cheer as the moneyed class gets a sanguinary comeuppance, with crushed skulls and spilled intestines presented as hilarious.

A wildly wondrous reinvention of the story of the chroniclers of dark, occasionally horrific, child-pleasing fairy tales.

Even the Bollywood ending, a pleasant echo of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is intercut with darker reminders of dwindling days. Much of this sequel is clumsy, and awfully silly, but consistently shallow it is not.

What passes for the movie's reality is interlocking episodes of ersatz ecstasy and angst -- a Cupid-governed "Crash" -- plus snippets of wisdom dispensed by Mr. Freeman's character.

Good and very pleasurable provided you know what you're getting into, which is a comic roundelay of amorous ambitions and delusions-punctuated by wistful old ballads like "If I Had You"-that lead mostly but not entirely to disaster.

The basic problem is the script, which is credited to three writers plus the director - seldom a good sign. Never mind that it's a retread of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" minus the trains, and minus John Candy.

Jack's problem is that he's a commoner, but the movie's problem is that its script is commoner still, an enchantment-free pretext for animated action, straight-ahead storytelling and ersatz romance.

Seldom has such a glittering wagon been hitched to such dull stars.

It’s a nail-biter, a solid thriller, an immigration-themed takeoff on that old chestnut “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which humans are both predator and prey. It’s not particularly nuanced. In fact, its lack of nuance is its most distinguishing characteristic.

Ms. Richardson and Mr. Csokas are sunk mainly by the script (it's the handiwork of "Closer" playwright Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis) and by their complete lack of chemistry. Still, their performances do them no credit.

There's nothing wrong with beguiling star turns, but I wish this one had been surrounded by more of a movie. Birthday Girl is a harmless trifle that makes 93 minutes go by as if they were hardly more than an hour and a half.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Yes, of course this is fairly old-fashioned entertainment, but it's really, really entertaining.

She's All That isn't mindless, just techniqueless...What's on the screen says they aren't yet up to speed on making feature films. Most of the actors mumble while the script lurches from one sketchy notion to the next. All the same, She's All That offers insights into life as it is lived, or at least filmed, in Southern California. [29 Jan 1999, p. W1]

Skyscraper is a tribute to duct tape, and to Dwayne Johnson’s enduring appeal. The movie is great, outlandish fun because the star makes it so; he’s a soft soul in an action-hard body.

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.

To get to the beginning, one must first get through the end, which is almost literally unendurable.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

Disney’s new Dumbo is one ponderous pachyderm, a live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with a grim tone and a dead soul. It’s astounding that Tim Burton and his colleagues could have created such a downer from a long-beloved source of delight.

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

This “Peter Rabbit” has certain charms, chief among them the bond of fondness between Peter and Bea, and the cinematography by Peter Menzies Jr. (whose father shot 63 episodes of “Skippy,” a once-beloved Australian TV series about a boy and his kangaroo).

The picture's blandness - and hollowness - is startling when you consider the collaborators. [26 Nov 1986]

Like many dreams that enliven filmmakers' nights, this one derives from other, better films, though it does have a few clever twists.

The movie is, at times, funny enough to make you cry, and, when it's not, it moves nicely as a parody.

It's impossible to say who's more unhinged: Darwin, caught between faith and reason, or the filmmakers.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

I feel for the marketing person charged with devising a tagline for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a fantasy whose turgid pretensions defy the very notion of marketing.

The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.

Hoffman and Beatty are so tone-deaf they don't even know how to play the songs for deadpan humor. They seem old, white, and without shtick. [14 May 1987, p.26(E)]

An effective and even affecting pop thriller.

Alternately precious and vapid, the movie attempts to wrest metaphors from a jar of house keys, and eternal verities from pastry. Slice the pie how you will, it's still half-baked.

White Bird in a Blizzard is an alibi for Mr. Araki to flex his considerable muscle as a visual artist, using a palette that ranges from the blissful to the grotesque, and an atmospheric score by those eminences of the ambient, Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie.

It's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process.

An odd little thriller that celebrates, in order of importance, Mr. Duvall, tango and his real-life significant other, Luciana Pedraza, who makes her attractive debut as a screen actress and, yes, tango dancer.

Not only does Ender's Game have many scenes in zero gravity, but this zero-sum fiasco has zero drama, zero suspense, zero humor, zero charm and zero appeal.

There are few moments in the film—one that is wearyingly indignant and emotionally inert—that feel genuine.

I'm sorry to report that Biyi Bandele's would-be saga, based on the celebrated novel by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, is disappointing, a romance pastiche that muddles the politics of the period beyond comprehension.

The screenplay, by Antonio Macia, is earnest and unsurprising--not a good combination--and neither the director nor the star quite knows what to make of the quirky character inside the traditional garments that signal otherworldly innocence to customs agents.

The result is a sequence of events that’s both intriguing and gossamer-thin. You enjoy the challenge of figuring out who’s doing what to whom and for what devious reasons, but it all goes out of your head once the story ends and the lights come up.

Does it all have to be so tedious? To the movie's credit, many of the inside jokes are pretty funny, and Mr. Lundgren is close to hilarious as a dissipated Swede named Gunner.

Might have qualified as dumb fun if they hadn't left out the fun.

An excruciatingly embarrassing display of ego and ineptitude.

Mr. Malek gives an eccentric performance, but he won’t make anyone forget Dustin Hoffman, whose original Dega was an endearing coward, a fatalist and a masterpiece.

Depressed and depressing drama.

There aren't many bright spots in Lovelace, although one is Amanda Seyfried's intoxicating smile, and another is the retinal insult delivered by a 16mm projector flaring out at the audience during the movie's opening moments, and which feels like an accusation. It's the odd film that indicts you just for watching. But Lovelace is an eccentric piece of cinema, made by unlikely people.

There are a few charming moments between Ms. Lopez and Mr. Wilson that prove beyond doubt that their characters are too intelligent to be in this movie. And yet, here we are.

The film turned out to be plodding and boring. No one can accuse Hardcore Henry of being plodding. It does get to be boring, but in the high-tech, cutting-edge mode of first-person-shooter videogames that dazzle your eyes, spark your synapses and numb your brain.

Sometimes you just want a crazy action movie to kill an evening, and “Lou” fits that bill. Just don’t expect to be thinking about it tomorrow.

This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.

For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting.

There's a good subject for satire here, the extended adolescence of American kids. But satire presupposes maturity, or at least some perspective. The movie's calculation is that its subjects and audience share the same point of view. The results are truly ghastly.

In a movie that rings false at every turn, Ms. Redgrave's Elizabeth is truly and infallibly regal.

Jack Reacher, which Christopher McQuarrie directed from his adaptation of a Lee Child crime novel, is not just another dumb thriller. It's almost peerlessly self-important, weirdly incoherent and eerily smarmy. It's also mysteriously inept, considering that Tom Cruise plays the title role.

Minka Kelly has a face that could launch a thousand cable movies and is the freshest thing about “Champagne Problems,” a holiday-season romance that takes the welcome tack of embracing its own clichés.

In stripping down the legend—no talk of ancient curses or silver bullets here—Mr. Whannell may have modernized it, but he has also made it so joyless that it might as well have been produced by Glumhouse. This “Wolf Man” chases its own tail.

Notwithstanding a thin script and a color-by-numbers ending, the movie is redeemed by its solid performances.

Far from rising to the level of truthiness, let alone truth, True Story rings false from start to finish.

Shockingly, the kind of cringe-inducing material upon which Mr. Mazer has built a career as a writer for Sacha Baron Cohen ("Bruno," "Borat," "Da Ali G Show") doesn't work when rendered by types who could have been cast in "Notting Hill" (someone even makes a Hugh Grant joke). It's rather close to excruciating.

With so much going on, there’s no time to make any of the action truly engaging, especially given Mr. Fleischer’s rigid determination to be as flashy as possible all of the time.

What can’t they do? Properly craft a shot, for one thing.

Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

An English-language debut by Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who also co-wrote its script, They Will Kill You is tongue-in-cheek but not witty, reveling in its excesses without bringing anything fresh to the party.

The most serious flaw, and one that will irk a lot of Bel Canto enthusiasts, is the too-obvious lip-syncing of Ms. Moore to Ms. Fleming’s glorious singing. They simply don’t match up, and the music takes place at points in the film when viewers really don’t want to be thrown off. But thrown off they will be.

Still, Eat Pray Love preaches a sermon it doesn't practice-the need to open one's self to the world. In a pictorial sense this is exactly what Liz does; she vacuums up the transformative essence of three continents. Yet the world gets weirdly short shrift because this transcendently narcissistic movie is, in a narrative sense, almost entirely about Liz and the movie star who plays her.

My Homo sapiens brain was boggled by the movie's clumsiness, while my heart was chilled by the chance that otherwise mature members of my species might mistake this disjointed botch for summer entertainment.

Mr. Pandya tells a story of conflicted assimilation that's been told before, but he and his exuberant cast invest it with fresh energy and winning humor.

Constantine is yet another studio extravaganza that's all aswirl with atmospherics, though empty at its center. The invasion of the soul snatchers proceeds apace.

At no point does anything shocking, or even interesting, happen.

The Hunt occupies a special place in the chockablock landscape of movie junk. This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise. I liked it quite a lot.

You're tempted to keep watching, even though the running time is a bloated 154 minutes, to see if anyone, or the movie itself, turns remotely likable. The answer to that, alas, is no.

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.

Among the books that McCall carries with him is a volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”; we see the cover in pointed close-ups. That can serve as one of the hero’s life lessons. Take a pass on the movie and you avoid losing two hours.

Jean's material is so flat-out awful it's amazing she gets hired at all, let alone that she once supposedly had headliner potential. It's a discrepancy that Introducing the Dwights never addresses.

There’s also a sense of ineptness in a script that constantly reaches, with only modest success, for amusing things that the mammoths and their friends can do.

Tiresome, pretentious.

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

The pretext of the movie, which was directed in broadbrush-cartoon style by Anne Fletcher from a coarse-textured script by Dan Fogelman, is a road trip taken by mother, Joyce, and son, Andrew.

The movie that remains is lovely to look at, but spiritless, a listless coquette. But then, 9 1/2 Weeks isn't about talk. It isn't about sadomasochism. It isn't even about sex. It's about looking good. [20 Feb 1986, p.1]

This one’s pretty entertaining, although increasingly noisy and ultimately ridiculous.

A sentimental -- and modestly enjoyable -- fantasy of mutual need.

The shallow-seated problem with Murder by Numbers is that it's serious and doggedly intricate but not much fun.

A ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Those doldrums are relieved from time to time by spectacular effects.

The last thing I want to do is represent The Stoning of Soraya M. as entertainment, summer or otherwise. This is classic tragedy in semimodern dress that means to horrify, and does so more successfully than any film in recent memory.

Fur starts stylishly, and confidently, but the film dwindles down to a chamber piece in a claustrophobic chamber. Enter at your own risk.

As the runtime lumbers on to the two-hour mark, with one scene after another fizzling out, its warm nimbus of niceness seems to be the sole reason for its existence.

Instead of biting wit, though, the movie settles for sketch humor, standard-brand raunch and toothless slapstick that trivializes everything it touches.

As it is, Ticket to Paradise is tolerable, but to make it a true pleasure would probably require some priming with a few glasses of arak.

A provocative but eventually dislikable two-part film that dares us to dislike it.

What MTV's "The Real World" would be like if its characters admitted they were simply aspiring actors. Garage Days is more clever, more compelling and genuine.

Matching Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an amusing conceit played out in an entirely predictable fashion. It certainly isn't harmful, and Mr. Schwarzenegger is kind of cute when he smiles. [8 Dec 1988, p.1]

(It doesn't hurt that Ms. Redgrave gets to play opposite Franco Nero, who was once the love of her life and is the father of her son.) Not even she can transform lines like "Destiny wanted us to meet again."

Comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you comatose by the end. In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feel like a lifetime.

This dreary drama telegraphs every punch, emotion and plot point with a dedication that would have done the old Western Union proud.

Any shortfalls in Home on the Range a conventional but perfectly pleasant entertainment, have more to do with the ABC's of storytelling than with the D's of animation.

A deeply dreadful movie -- no, a shallowly dreadful movie -- that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining, even as camp.

After covering much of its ground at a stylish canter, The Other Boleyn Girl finishes at a plod.