It is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.

This is little more than a big-budget sitcom, with a guest appearance by Mike Ditka, who plays an unfunny version of himself as Phil's assistant coach.

Rather than a character rooted in some sort of reality-social, satirical, psychological, take your pick-Hesher is an abstract notion animated by false energy.

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

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.

It’s a deranged story, one that offers all kinds of opportunities for examining changes in the state of artificial insemination, medical ethics, the ways in which the human body has been opened up like an evidence locker, and the catchup that legislation has to play with technology.

Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

The movie isn't all bad, and it's sure to succeed with its target audience.

Dud notions abound. So do belabored situations, misguided performances and ritual salutes to other films. Even the cinematography is ill-advised, since it’s literally off-color; warm tones meant to evoke romantic feelings come off as a jaundiced homage to Woody Allen, from whom many of this film’s tropes have been not-so-piquantly purloined.

For all its seriousness, though, Levity struck me as pretentious and intractably lifeless.

Predictably dumber than its predecessors, though that shouldn't get in the way of its profitability.

The real-life Arizona case was likely a lot less funny than Queenpins, which was adapted by the film’s directors and uses the comedic gifts of its lead actresses (reunited from both “Veronica Mars” and “The Good Place”) to remain both outrageous and entertaining without ever abandoning an undercurrent of sadness.

Nobody fares well in this movie about sibling rivalry, doomed love and fringed suede. [05 Jan 1995]

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

Reasonably entertaining time-travel romance.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Oz the Great and Powerful, like so many products of movie studios that have lost their way, is a Tin Man of epic proportions — bright and shiny, with no heart.

Todd Graff's would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief).

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.

Some of it sputters, settling for smiles instead of laughs, and much of it flounders while the slapdash script searches, at exhausting length, for ever more common denominators in toilet humor.

Littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

Choose to pass this one up.

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Stepping is everything in Stomp the Yard, and, dare I say it, a stepping stone to DJ's redemption. The movie itself is redeemed -- slightly -- by its almost touching devotion to the hoary Hollywood traditions of college movies with battling frats, as well as its earnest endorsement of education.