The show is redeemed by its co-stars, up to a point. They struggle womanfully, and sometimes successfully, to find truth in the script's silly symphony of false notes.

It’s a passable bloody-knuckles action piece for those who enjoy relaxing with a couple of hours of crazed carnage.

Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a shrill biopic of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.

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.

Despite Mr. Howard's best efforts in the role, though, the film rarely realizes its subject's potential.

As pure comedy, The D Train is far more cringe-worthy than outright hilarious. But as a study in human nature, it’s beyond provocative — and maybe even instructive.

What’s lovely about The Adam Project is its treatment of grief, the love between mothers and sons and, to a slightly lesser extent, fathers and sons.

Shakespeare has been quoted many, many times over the past 400 or so years, but never to such empty purpose as in the inchoate, self-indulgent musical drama Idlewild, a star vehicle for the wildly popular hip-hop duo OutKast.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Surviving Picasso is merely the worst movie ever made about a painter; worse movies have been made on other subjects, though none comes immediately to mind. [20 Sep 1996]

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul.

Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

You may wonder if this screen version of the book of the same name is as unfunny and strangely mushy as it seems, but trust your instincts.

Higher Learning put me in mind of a long lecture by a well-meaning but dull professor. What he has to say may be worthwhile, but it's delivered with plodding predictability. [12 Jan 1995, p.A12]

Ms. Stone is entrancing, whether Sophie is in or out of her trance state, and so is the movie as a whole.

The movie's real locus of anger must have been the director, Ang Lee, once he realized what an epic clod his computer wizards had wrought.

A cast this good would have a hard time delivering something less than watchable, and Goodbye June is watchable, even if little of it works.

The movie's failures are all the more unfortunate because they detract from its central and conspicuous success, the performance of Riz Ahmed in the title role. Mr. Ahmed turns the quicksilver quality of the book's internal monologue into a tour de force of his own creation. He's a bright star in a dim constellation.

For better or worse, Woody Allen turns out a movie every year. Last year's "Midnight in Paris" was better than better; that is to say, sublime. To Rome With Love is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired.

No one could save Is Anybody There? from its treacly self and Michael Caine doesn't, but he gives it a grand try.

The good news about Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies and Gentlemen -- there's no bad news -- is that the man who made the sublimely superficial "A Man and a Woman" almost four decades ago has grown in wisdom and artistry, but hasn't lost his love of glossy surfaces.

Mr. Murphy rises to every occasion, not only with the crisp wit that has long been his hallmark, but with restraint and tenderness that serve him well.

Impressive landscapes, plus Kristen Wiig's appealing Cheryl, the fellow worker who inflames Walter's passion, make the movie enjoyable enough. Yet its style is a constant bafflement.

The film functions as a high-wire act that can leave you giddy with laughter.

On screen it looks crazed, but the comic energy is huge, if indiscriminate, and Mr. Sandler's performance -- think Topol doing Charles Boyer -- can be as delicate as it is gleefully vulgar or grotesque.

For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.

There's so much of so many flavors of cleverness — a surfeit of surfeits — that sensory overload causes aesthetic suffocation.

For all its flashy trappings, weighty ruminations and zero-gravity floatings aboard the International Space Station, Life turns out to be another variant of “Alien,” though without the grungy horror and grim fun. In space no one can hear you snore.

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.