Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.

Having been deeply moved — though often exasperated — by Terrence Malick's previous film, "The Tree of Life," I don't have the heart to belabor the failings of his new one, which is depressed and deeply depressing. The only thing that's wonderful in To the Wonder is the imagery.

As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.

It plays like pure television by an Aaron Sorkin disciple, and there is no reason whatsoever to see this on the big screen.

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

The press notes boast that Mr. Cutler was given "unprecedented access" and the right of final cut; these advantages don't seem to have done much for this listless film.

Jennifer Aniston brings a needed liveliness to Derailed, though not enough to go around.

Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.

Why didn't Mr. Jordan spend more time grounding his self-enchanted script in some semblance of reality? Unlike "Splash," this film finally goes plop.

While Mr. Holland is a clear talent with a screen presence at once natural and vivid, his character is passive to the point of emptiness. Any interesting resonances that might have been found in the idea of an actor having to relearn his own character, so to speak, are unfortunately absent here.

This is moviemaking in a modular mode, an inspiration-free action adventure — with cheesy cinematography — that fills its modest running time by fitting together familiar elements into something reliably, even insistently, not new.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

To fill the downtime between commercials, there's a fitfully entertaining adventure.

The movie isn’t above using its star like a pin-up model. It isn’t above much, in fact, and it’s certainly below the level of the breezy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out with ease.

Aspiring to pure action -- several very long passages are wordless -- the movie ends up teetering on the brink of self-parody.

Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?

An exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.

In the end, the only question of consequence that the story poses is whether superior acting can prevail over inferior writing. The answer lies not in the stars.

As directed by Tom George from a script by Mark Chappell, See How They Run hits like a watered-down cocktail rather than a bracing belt of intrigue.

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.

UHF, a parody of trash television, is almost defiantly silly, but when it's funny it is very funny. This sloppy, good-natured satire certainly doesn't threaten "Network's" status as the classic decimation of the television business. [27 Jul 1989, p.1]

I dearly wished someone from Wick-land would emerge to take out this self-aggrandizing dunce.

This hugely elaborate production is supposed to be the reboot of a foundering franchise, but rebooting a computer wipes the silicon slate clean. In the movie, what's old is old again.

The best that can be said of it: inoffensive.

The world didn't need a superficial big-screen adaptation of a rich, dense book that's about, among many other things, the passage of time. The perplexity is why the film is so lifeless and remote.

Sacha Baron Cohen's tosses off some sensationally funny stuff before descending into a rat-a-tat rhythm of random insult and ritual vulgarity.

The film may be pretty to look at, but this passion project isn’t likely to generate much of it.