The Village yields a trick ending quite lame, quite tame and quite old; Rod Serling thought of it 40 years ago and he did it better.

Gets bogged down in sentimentality, while its wheels spin futilely in life-solving overdrive.

An implausible action adventure with the most geriatric payload since a community of retirees lifted off in "Cocoon."

Though he is a master thief with a heart of gold, the new Templar has all the charm of one of those ladies behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

All credit to Carrey, whose one-man performance is almost enough to redeem the movie.

It's the sick humor that's most appealing about this odd little Danish film.

Doesn't pack the punch of Schrader and Scorsese's career-best collaborations ("Raging Bull," "Taxi Driver").

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.

Gripping, if manipulative and somewhat preposterous, drama.

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

Wanted isn't quite the real Slim Shady of hip-hop comedies. But you might lose yourself in a few of its amusing moments.

Controversial, yet undeniably powerful.

However many millions of dollars Rodriguez set aside for blanks and exploding squibs was a waste. Depp's salary, on the other hand, was money well spent.

Modestly amusing teen summer comedy.

Burke's face is impressively scaly, his head is adorned with shorn horns. He makes a great monster. If only he had a better movie to growl in!

Creepy and truly suspenseful in some places, unintentionally comic or plain awful in others.

Only moderately compelling.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

A thinly written, hoarily cliched story that serves mostly as connective tissue between the movie's chief draw, its dazzling dance sequences.

Enjoyable in some places, but dreadful in others. It's boring here and exciting there. And it's almost always goofy.

Still manages to one-up its predecessor, 1997's unintentionally campy "Anaconda."

Occasional clumsiness is easily coated over by the movie's overarching goodwill.

Threatens to become a serious movie, but they're quickly overwhelmed by another indecipherable rampage or outsize visual effect.

The skits that comprise Coffee and Cigarettes aren't fully realized short pieces as much as riffs or fragments; their appeal is mostly in their stars.

The movie has been made with consummate carelessness but with occasional moments of knowing humor.

Has its modest charms.

Charming as it can be, though, Home on the Range is still an overextended cartoon.

Good points aside, In Good Company is a bland, occasionally phlegmatic pastiche of cliches and dull encounters.

A compelling if singularly sour tale.

Provides some wry chuckles, but much of it is as dark as a Glasgow winter.

The best thing about all of this is Bettany.

The cheesy, unconvincing moments centered on the characters' serious discussions of life and friendship really seem unnatural and ruin the flow of the physical comedy.

This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

Sometimes charming, sometimes a tad too silly and all the time predictable.

You hope against hope that the lava flowing through the city will wipe out Los Angeles and everyone in it, if only to prevent them from making more movies like this.

Mike Werb's screenplay -- just a rickety framework for Carrey's consummate clowning -- lacks a propelling plot and has zip in terms of secondary character development.

Del Toro, expanding on a short story by Donald A. Wolheim, isn't able to invest his version of a familiar horror convention with either the supple wit or deep humanity he brought to "Cronos."

To enjoy it, however, you have to do the mental equivalent of squinting your eyes, so the credibility is only fuzzily ridiculous.

If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

Oscar and Lucinda seems like the perfect story for director Gillian Armstrong, that of a free-spirited proto-feminist chafing at the strictures of tight-laced colonial Australia. But in the end, she's created a beautiful but annoying Victorian-era melodrama. [30Jan1998 Pg.D.06]

The whole thing plays like some dreadful masochistic, self-pity fantasy.

Despite the movie's suffocating sense of chic Soho hipness, it touches on all the square cliches about the tragic life of the misunderstood artist.

Like so many other rob-the-mob movies, the plan seems pretty far-fetched, and the ending isn't much of a surprise. But if you like your films sprinkled liberally with sex, violence and humor, then you're bound to like Bound.

Its attitude seems to be: You met her and liked her in "Speed," now get to know her better. But while it's easy to like her, liking the movie is another matter.

The movie faithfully records the rivalries among the various members of a fractious Baltimore family, but it never really attempts to resolve any of the internecine conflicts. In that sense, it's less ambitious than many a TV series.

The sweet story turns stickygooey, however, as writer Ronald Bass sprinkles the script with saccharine lines that sound plain dumb coming from high schoolers.

Deceptively labeled a domestic epic by writer-director James Cameron, the $100 million movie is, in fact, a weird hybrid of action juggernaut, buddy cop caper and reactionary soft-core pornography.

Based on Gerry Conlon's own account of his arrest and subsequent incarceration, the film takes forever to do what "60 Minutes" does with the same meat in a single segment.

Undeniably, the picture now and again supplies that edge-of-the-seat sensation; yet, by action-adventure standards, Speed is leaden and strangely poky. It never seems to shift into overdrive and let fly.

What McGrath's Emma does have going for it is a breakthrough performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as the heroine.

The thrust of the film is to escalate the Superman idea to the point where the charm is no longer visible. A snide and knowing viewpoint has left a cloud of smudge over the original clean satire. [19 Jun 1981, p.19]

It never attains full dimension. It pursues the De Niro-DiCaprio war so singlemindedly, everything else is left high and dry.

Polanski touch -- apart from a little suspense here and there -- is limited. And the story, which Ariel Dorfman adapted from his radical-chic play, is too contrived and smug to really hold.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

For every persuasive insight John Singleton brings to Higher Learning, his thoughtful but flawed movie about multiculturalism and racism, he throws in something equally disappointing.

It sits in a rather unspectacular niche between modern fairy tale and a disease-of-the-week TV movie.

Obviously, Priscilla is a one-note pleasure: Bitches in the Desert! Queens in the Sand! Nancy boys do the Outback!

This is not really riveting material if you didn't go to high school with these boys, and perhaps not even if you did. Played by Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon and Timothy Daly, they seem fundamentally decent, but hopelessly trapped in the limits of the time and place. That grubby atmosphere, looked upon as endearing, is the only thing the film has to offer, and while it's amusing at first, one quickly gets the idea. [5 March 1982, p.11]

The Quick and the Dead is made bearable by director Sam Raimi, who bombards us with frenetic editing, crazy-angle shots and enjoyably cartoonish cliches. But all the stylistic sleight of hand in the world can't hide the central problem: The star of the show is more Dead than Quick.

Douglas again takes on the symbolic mantle of the Zeitgeist. But in Falling Down, he and Schumacher want to have their cake and eat it too; they want him to be a hero and a villain, and it just won't work.

Our culture may be drifting toward the sort of calamity that Stone describes in Natural Born Killers, but the hysteria he depicts seems to come from within him. His soul is in turmoil and so he keeps trying to convince us that we're sick.

In his zeal to break the book down into bite-size, cutting-edge nuggets, adapter Paul Attanasio has squandered—and arbitrarily altered—many of those details.

I don't care what Dylan said, everyone must not get Stoned.

A wham-bam encounter, it gives you everything you (presumably) want, sets itself up for another sequel, and it makes sure you don't recall a thing about it in the morning.

There's nothing embarrassing about Zeffirelli's brisk new version, nor anything particularly remarkable; it's an entirely credible, middle-of-the-road production.

As a screenplay -- as a story -- Change is a silly mess. Its direction is also perfunctory, a bland rendition of the usual chain of Hollywood events. But the main reason to watch Change is for Murray, of course. And no matter what formulaic claptrap is around him, he always redeems it with something comic.

A movie that celebrates the life of the mind and the uniqueness of the individual but does so in glib slogans and is, itself, a sort of knockoff.

After a sensational beginning, the movie loses its way in the late going and somehow doesn't deliver. [12 Mar 1999]

A lot of this stuff is irresistible. In the early going especially, the movie's infantilism is snappy and surprising. But this is a great idea for a sketch, not a feature, and if Heckerling had resisted padding it out, it might have made a brilliant short. A comedy can ride only so far on high concept. It has to deliver the jokes, and this one doesn't.

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

A star vehicle from its onset, this peculiar, mediocre comedy strains to accommodate the talents of both Mutt and Jeff, Terminator and troll. It's a Frankensteinian thing, an unsettling combination of two-fisted beefcake and mean-spirited shtick.

This is exactly the kind of weird, sardonic texture the movie is aiming for - and unfortunately, most of it occurs in the first half of the story.

The story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered.

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

The movie is so beautifully filmed by Bojan Bazelli, and so skillfully edited, that its art house surface belies its exploitation content, making this a trip through a cool world rather than a cruel one.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

Getting teens to look past the superficial may be a noble goal, but when they're staring at the pretty but talentless Pettyfer, it's a hard lesson to take seriously.

A thoroughly unnecessary but nonetheless satisfying adaptation of the cheeseball 1980s TV series.

Unlike its forebears, "Greek" lacks a truly sympathetic central character to hold things together when it's time to get sappy.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Micmacs brings an infectious note of caprice to the old-fashioned caper film.

An energetic if empty-headed adventure based on the popular video game.

Except for the last five minutes, Robin Hood is the story of the radicalization of some guy named Longstride. Who?

The first dumb-fun action movie of the summer season has arrived early with The Losers, a loud, loving homage to guns and testosterone based on a series of comic books about a renegade band of CIA operatives. How dumb is it? You might actually kill a few million brain cells just watching it.

It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.

It never really feels like we've gotten to know the man himself, leaving the figure at the heart of I'll Sing for You a cipher.

Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.

Linklater, who introduced the blithe, but bemused slacker subculture to America in 1991, gets bogged down not only in Bogosian's for-stage structure, but especially his middle-aged perspective.

Its pedagogical tone perfectly suits it for viewing in classrooms.

Earnest if emotionally unsatisfying documentary.

Truly touching moments such as a surprise meeting between Ami and his estranged brother, Oscar, show us this movie didn't need any sentimental help.

Sad to say, the new Matthew Barney opus, Drawing Restraint 9, made in collaboration with his main squeeze, Bjork, doesn't advance the Barney oeuvre an inch past where he left it with his massive, megalomaniacal opus known as the "Cremaster" series.

In the end, we're treated to an overture of possibilities rather than a satisfying film.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

How about a well-sustained argument for saving the planet instead of this round-robin approach? And where are those holdouts of humanity who believe humans shoulder no blame for carbon dioxide buildup? Let's hear from them, too, and draw our own conclusions.