I wanted to give this movie a fair shake, though I can't pretend to be an admirer of Ayn Rand's writing. But the movie, the first installment of a projected trilogy, doesn't give the book a fair shake.

Mr. Cage's knight ends up playing second banana to a digital devil. Welcome to the January dead zone.

If the movie had even a moment of freshness or wit, one honest laugh. It doesn't--and that's the ugly truth.

Jiu Jitsu is an ambitious undertaking in its way, one that will probably tickle hardcore martial-arts and samurai movie fans, although the attraction may be more academic than adrenaline-fueled.

Sara is supposed to be an adorable screwball with a fatal disease. Ms. Theron certainly gets the adorable right. With a comic style that's close to unerring, she not only deserves better than this junk but the very best.

It is shabby, as well as disjointed, superficial and just plain dull, a dislikable rendering of a tumultuous life.

It has its moments, several of which are provided by Ms. Rudolph, putting a spin on the girl-friday role. She has one scene of utter hilarity that shouldn’t be spoiled, and can’t be printed anyway, but may lead to “pilafing” becoming the word of the year on Urban Dictionary.

Real feelings lurk just below the surface--Samantha's terror of growing old, Carrie's fear of eventual tedium in a childless marriage. Yet the surface is where the movie stays, like an old submarine with dead batteries.

Designed as a disposable commodity, it's a film I'd dispose of with no further ado, except for what it says about minimum standards in a certain tacky niche of the movie business, as well as for what it suggests, in its lunkheaded way, about the perils that marriage may pose.

The worst would-be-big-and-Capraesque-but-actually-bloated-and-bloviating-beyond-belief movie of the year.

Qualifies as top-grade catnip for connoisseurs of trashy camp.

Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.

Wild Hogs, which includes a cameo by a live revenant from "Easy Rider," gives a bad name to carpe diem, but could have been worse; the trip might have started from Bangor.

A brilliant but completely muddled concoction about the relationship between fantasy and reality. [16 Jul 1992]

I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

All the same, it's a feat to find the lowest common denominator at 40,000 feet; View From the Top would be perfect as the first in-flight offering of the new Hooters airline.

This film bespeaks a truly startling mistrust of the movie audience, and, what's more, a disrespect for the feature film medium. Yes, of course it was conceived as an unpretentious entertainment pitched mainly to girls and young women. Yet that doesn't explain the nightmarish quality of the finished product.

Too much tumult and chaos, not enough dramatic focus; too many animals with clever names spouting glib one-liners, not enough simple human — or for that matter nonhuman — feeling. What a waste!

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

Basic Instinct 2 is pretty awful. Rarely has a meaningless thriller had so many meaningful glances, or such arch acting by good actors who know better.

Certain words should be reserved for special occasions. "Abysmal" is one of them, and Georgia Rule is as special as such occasions get.

The inert License to Wed shambles along one lame scene after another.

Costner has never been further from the lively, engaging actor he can be, or at least once was.

The crude, sophomoric Sex and Death 101 is neither particularly dark nor even remotely funny.

The remake stumbles from a ragged start into a child's garden of worses -- worse than the original in more ways than you could imagine.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

Beyond being entertained, I was delighted by the movie's outpouring of slapstick invention (one crazed sequence in a pet store has all the pawmarks of a classic), and the genial energy of its star, David Arquette.

The road taken by The Love Guru could hardly be lower, and leads nowhere.