A surprise and a not-so-guilty pleasure.

As reassuring and soothing as a nursery story.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an innately bad dog — or, who knows, maybe there is. But there are inherently bad ideas for dog movies, and one of them has just manifested itself in The Art of Racing in the Rain.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd are nearly always enjoyable, even when working with less-than-scintillating material, and each has a boyish streak that’s exactly the right register for this exercise in silliness.

While the action flashes back and forth in increments of centuries, years or months, we're adrift in the here and now, trying to get a grip on the characters and their relationships, yet finding it loosened with every new dislocation.

The writing sometimes collapses into overkill, but sometimes it is precisely on point.

Unfrosted is a bonbon, a truffle, a trifle and a distraction from dispiriting news and disappointing drama upon which one can gorge as if it were a package of Fig Newtons. No, too healthy: Honey Smacks.

I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.

Joyless and largely witless sci-fi fantasy.

Go in with lowered expectations, and expect to have them dashed.

Insurgent opens new horizons of repetitiveness, dramatic shapelessness, self-seriousness and a generalized oppressiveness that flows from all of the above as well as from visual clutter, cheerless color, 3-D dimness and plain old bad acting.

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.

Starts well with the stirring spectacle of young men and women, members of a National Guard unit stationed south of Baghdad, struggling to do their duty in an alien land of unfathomable danger. Once they return, however, wounded physically or shattered spiritually, the film turns didactic, contrived and occasionally ludicrous.

“Rise of the Beasts” is shamelessly vapid filmmaking that stacks up poorly against several other entrants in the series.

None of it is enough, though, to save this glum drama from its schematic self.

It isn't a great film, or even a greatly original one. Still, it has many grace notes, and interesting oddities.

Ambitious to a fault, this cautionary fantasy about artificial intelligence has so much on its muddled mind, and so little sense of dramatic grounding, that it grows ever more preposterous before lurching to a climax that's utterly unfathomable.

You need only watch the trailer to know that The Internship is a promo for Google; think Google for Dummies, as well as Summer Comedy for Dummies. It's as if the writers googled "how to write a script" and nothing came up, so they wrote this anyway.

The film has so much visual imagination that it tends to squander it.

This gets to be exhausting, since there’s hardly a scene that isn’t manipulative or assaultive.

If “Brave New World” isn’t an event film, at least it’s competently executed, without resorting to played-out gimmickry such as skipping across the multiverse. And it gives the audience plenty of analogues for real-world problems.

Manages to make its live actors sound -- and even sometimes look -- computer generated. This wan, sluggish comedy wouldn't pass muster as a premium-cable original, but here it is on the big screen.

Exemplifies Hollywood's standard practice of stomping a brilliant concept beyond recognition.

The story wanders unconvincingly and tediously into corporate law offices and big, splashy nightclubs. Still, Mr. Hackford has the documentary maker's eye for realistic detail, so it all looks right. [01 Mar 1984]

The essence of this grindingly violent movie can be summed up by what Parker says of his handgun to a terrified clerk at a check-cashing service: "It's small, but it hurts."

A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

The computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

Still, the action is ponderous too. Mr. Morel is no Kubrick, or Tarantino, just as Mr. Travolta's caricature of John Travolta is no Travolta.