Part comedy of manners, and mostly gender warfare, "Something" is designed to get the partisan juices boiling. Screenwriter Callie Khouri, who wrote the marvelous "Thelma & Louise," has a gift for catching the oppression of women in everyday situations and putting a sanguine comic twist on it. But in her zeal to portray a world full of male scum, she creates a morally mismatched, pandering scenario.

The result is a curios, unsatisfactory pastiche of documentary tidbits acquired from Reichenbach and speculative filler supplied by Welles himself, who appears prowling around in his Felliniesque hat and cape, performing a couple of magic tricks and mostly pontificating about himself, Hughes, Irving, de Hory and the nature of art and illusion in the editing room or a the dinner table.

Although this dialogue-free, mostly animal-action movie has its moments, Gerard (The Name of the Rose) Brach's man-meets-bear scenario is barely a soft, high-budgeted muzzle ahead of the Disney wilderness pictures. [27 Oct 1989, p.N43]

Rather than a movie that breaks the mold, it looks like Anning has inspired one we've seen before.

Like a dream you’ve half forgotten by the time you get to the breakfast table, it’s neither good enough to make much of an impression or bad enough to completely forget.

Don’t think about it too hard. Freaky isn’t AP Bio. It’s a shop class project: a couple of mismatched planks cobbled together well enough to get a passing grade.

Patchy, underbudgeted pop-music satire a la This is Spinal Tap but lacking its professional assurance. [30 Jun 1994, p.M28]

When Van Damme isn't duking it out with the English language, scriptwriter Chuck Pfarrer is filling Henriksen's mouth with villainous pseudo-profundities. Even in a second-rate action picture like this, and despite Henriksen's commendable efforts, they're painful to listen to.

It's all good, stupid fun.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

Blue Bayou strikes a nerve, of that there is no doubt. But then it keeps poking at it, pointlessly.

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

The great Cornish king becomes merely a corny one as the tale devolves into a compromise between the principles of Camelot and of Hollywood.

With its widely acclaimed source material and a cast of distinguished actors, A Good Man in Africa held the possibility of being a welcome departure from the ordinary. Instead, ordinary is what it rises to at its best.

“Reminiscence” has all the ingredients for electrifying summer entertainment. But despite its considerable star power and impressive set pieces, the sprawling meditation on memory is simply an attractive mess.

Ultimately, there's not enough genuine wildness to these dark, passionate and half-crazy people. Miss Firecracker is the South made cute.

The Marksman proves itself to be the cinematic version of comfort food: satisfyingly familiar but full of starch and empty calories.

It's a kung-fu Die Hard picture, and, frankly, just plain silly.

The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities.

The slick, Hollywood repaint that director John Badham gives it is actually an improvement, even if a heartless one.

There have to be better ways of wasting money and killing time than the fashionable nihilism of Killing Zoe.

Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story: If Boogie were fully evolved, woke and enlightened, there would be no "Boogie." But the film is just rough and unformed enough to suggest that Huang might still have some growing up to do as a filmmaker, too.

Beware of horror films that begin with a bad dream -- they usually go on that way as well. Case in point: Popcorn, which has several good ideas that, unfortunately, go unrealized.

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

Crimes of the Heart is a well-intentioned effort, but also a deeply misguided one -- Henley's humor, while suited to the stage, disintegrates in a more literal-minded medium.

Unfortunately, director Randall Miller can't put an original spin on the familiar material; he just doesn't have the offbeat comic gifts that the Hudlin brothers brought to the rap duo's first film outing in House Party.

It doesn't help matters much that director Thomas Schlamme pays homage to great marital murder mysteries of the past, mostly because the attempts to borrow from the classics are so halfhearted.

Filmmakers John Hughes and Chris Columbus go for repetition over comedy.

With its musty scenario of a dissolute middle-aged man and a clingy, devouring child-woman, 60-year-old co-writer/director/producer Polanski's film smacks of wish-fulfillment and self-justification.

An uneventful actors' exercise better suited to off-off-Broadway theater.

In this touching story of boy toys helping boy toys, it's almost impossible to root for characters who are dead in the first place.

The Cursed is stylish and scary enough for what it is. That’s an old-fashioned creature feature, effective enough to give you a mild case of the heebie-jeebies but nothing chronic.

The movie sounds — and looks — tasty enough, but this “Strawberry Mansion” just doesn’t bear much fruit.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

All of the actors acquit themselves admirably, especially Stolz, who has a star's low-key magnetism, and the jazz stylist Harry Connick Jr., who makes his acting debut here as the drawling rear gunner. But the roles are too generic for anything like real depth. The fight scenes are about what you'd expect; they're competently shot, but even when they deliver thrills, every scene, every passage, is familiar. We've seen it all before.

The domestic drama, like the heist story line, fizzles out in the end.

An uneven look at the reclamation of a former child star, "Life With Mikey" has the strangely amiable feel of a cult movie for the peanut gallery. It's camp and cutesy all at the same time, like a kiddie-car ride down "Sunset Boulevard" with an aging Gary Coleman behind the wheel. Caught somewhere between a spoof and a celebration of child-powered sitcoms, it only hints at the real toll of being a has-been teen.

Edel gives us the grungy details of the atrocities without providing a context to give them relevance. In the end, the film's ugliness becomes ugliness for its own sake.

Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments. Beyond her corporeal qualities, March is thoroughly believable. When she walks up to Leung in his car and plants a kiss on his window, her swoonish tentativeness gives the act incredible weight. But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, "Lover" never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

The sci-fi thriller Voyagers is grounded in very real current fears. But otherwise, it’s a bit of an airhead.

It’s a heady dramedy, albeit without terribly many tears or laughs, except those that arise, perhaps unintentionally, from the incongruity of Stevens being repellent.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

Fat Man seems unsure of which human story to concentrate on.

Nothing in Dad moves below the surface. When the inevitable tragedies come, they take their expected forms. And because we have at least some susceptibility and human feeling, we give the expected response. What we are responding to, though, is not so much the film as the issues it raises.

Maybe it’s true that it’s never too late to find a new home. But in some ways, it feels like “Cry Macho” has missed the bus. Perhaps Eastwood should have kept his hand on the reins of this pet project while letting someone else sit in the saddle.

Betsy's Wedding is white cake and warm bubbly, not an unsuitable marriage, just a tepid one.

Unfortunately, Lumet isn't the brawny social commentator he would like to be -- he's a Jimmy Breslin manque'. His script chronicles a complex, gargantuan evil, but his insights into urban life haven't progressed beyond those of his earlier films -- the chaos of conflicting interests and cultural hatred is one that by now we're more than familiar with -- and his storytelling style isn't compelling or tightly focused enough to keep our attention from flagging.

If you’re looking for that kind of moral-rich message, delivered with equal amounts of sincerity and syrup, congratulations: You may have found the mythical source from which all other malarkey springs.

An engrossing but uneven comedy-drama.

But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.

Cinderella, the latest of countless adaptations of the centuries-old rags-to-riches story, is far less interested in enchantment than in dismantling the entire sexist, classist racket.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

As it is, fans of Candy are expecting a John Candy movie -- that is, a reasonably hilarious comedy about a sweetly sympathetic bumbler. And while he is as cumbersomely lovable as a Saint Bernard puppy, he's rarely allowed to be funny here. He seems miserably uncomfortable as a romantic lead, or maybe it's just that he's playing opposite the Stepford Actress.

Condorman is ingenious enough when it comes to mechanical resources. Its undoing is personality resources.

Director Ron Underwood, who came up with a happy marriage of schmaltz and shtick in "City Slickers," can't quite disguise the mechanical superficiality of the story.

Tate -- whose credits include Menace II Society, The Inkwell and Dead Presidents -- simply hasn’t developed the mature screen sex appeal to carry off this romantic lead.

Reinhold, as a little boy in a big man's body, looks and acts more like a sheep in shell shock. Savage, however, is an able comic when he takes on his father's yuppie persona, demanding Grey Poupon at the school cafeteria and downing martinis after a hard day in the principal's office.

Based on a spare, exquisitely crafted novel by Graham Swift, this thoughtful but ultimately inert dramatization respects its source material and tries valiantly to give arresting visual expression to its finely layered themes.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

Beyond Aline’s visual incongruities, there’s a problem with is its choice of focus.

The film would be utterly banal without the novelty of the high-toned Streep in an action role.

Sugar Hill is often more unflinching in its detailing of the death trip drugs provoke -- a pair of overdoses are particularly harrowing and the gun-violence is sufficiently sudden and shocking -- but much of its message feels as if it's being delivered by Western Union.

In his new thriller, Raising Cain, director Brian De Palma addresses his most vivid personal issues -- his obsession with Hitchcock and twins, and the loss of innocence -- but he runs through them impersonally, as if the luster of his own obsessions has worn off.

While she demystifies prostitution, managing at times to make it seem as boring as it must often be, Borden (and cowriter Sandra Kay) make the characters almost too sympathetic.

Rather than a meditation on desire, Ma Belle, My Beauty becomes a portrait of how people simultaneously crave intimacy and keep each other at bay. Viewers may wish there were more to it, but what’s there is teasingly intriguing.

Like Cheung's ethereally plaintive voice, the movie is a siren song that's appealing at first, but held too long. It becomes an increasing whine.

A meticulously balanced if oddly inert film.

While Fishburne is generally riveting -- his facial disguise is basically hardness layered onto strength -- and Goldblum is intriguing -- his wannabe urges are quite curious -- the film itself is only occasionally visceral.

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

Even at its most glancing and superficial, Together offers a diverting attempt at capturing recent history, in all its maddening contradictions and compromises, recriminations and rages. It reflects a time when all we had was each other, for better or — way too often — for worse.

Being oneself is (or, again, seems to be) the theme of Wolf, which at times plays like a clumsy allegory about, say, the challenges faced by trans youth — there’s a poster on the wall of the clinic about “species dysphoria” — yet most of the time is simply a more generalized fable about finding your groove, your bliss, your true, inner self — and running with it (naked, if need be, and on all fours). If it’s an allegory, it trivializes whatever it’s allegorizing.

Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.

For its eventual lurid machinations and hyped-up emotionalism, the film winds up being a handsomely efficient one-man show. Like the man Gyllenhaal so convincingly embodies, it gets the job done, even if it inevitably goes over the top.

As a fairly soggy, two-hankie melodrama, “Swan Song” is effective. But I wouldn’t recommend thinking about it for too long.

The Good House has a lot of potential and features some attractive amenities, including dramatic conflict and a seasoned cast. But like a subpar property, it just doesn’t show well in a highly competitive market.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

If you go to this, anticipate neither an endearing Quaid-Ryan vehicle nor a fully satisfying art film. By trying to satisfy opposing demands, Kloves misses the spirit of both and is left only with flesh and bone.

If the film is aspirational, showing Andy what it means to be a dependable ally, then MacLane sacrifices pure entertainment for a loftier purpose. A more straightforward clash between good and evil might have touched on the same themes, without sacrificing the action kids could mimic with toys.

As an attempt to expose college athletics for what it is — a laughably lucrative hierarchy that relies on free labor by student-athletes to line the pockets of coaches, commissioners and other bigwigs — National Champions gets a notch in the win column.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

For fans of Neeson as action hero, “Blacklight” may be something of a disappointment, at least measuring it against the yardstick of previous thrillers in this particular branch of the actor’s body of work.

It feels sharply, even painfully true, while also hazy and nonspecific. Its head is in the clouds, while its feet are grounded in the very real catastrophe we are all currently suffering through.

It has certain je ne sais quoi, if graphic nudity, self-referential humor and serial murder — neck stabbing, eye gouging, alligator munching and shotgun blasting — are your thing.

There are pleasures to be had here, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call “Peter” fun, by any stretch of the imagination. At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

In the end, “Breaking” feels like a foregone conclusion: a dismal portrait of a system — and a someone — already irreparably broken.

The result is a film that’s engaging enough, but choppily paced and oddly inert. Beyond an audacious opening shot and some period-appropriate needle drops — Nancy Sinatra, Malvina Reynolds and Vanity Fare among them — Call Jane is also decidedly unstylish.

Master might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.

It’s a fantastic idea, but the execution is inconsistent. Alice, the movie, dares to go through the looking glass, but it doesn’t entirely know what to do once it gets there.

Yes, “Honk” picks some low-hanging fruit. But it also, as it turns out, leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth.

Resurrection ultimately leaves us, like Gwyn, wondering if the story that’s just been dropped in our laps — a kind of sick, surreal poetry, fashioned out of curdled blood and guts — is a new breed of monster movie or some old-fashioned metaphor of loss made flesh. Sadly, given its acting pedigree, it doesn’t really work on either level.

Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.

The film’s inertness is unexpected, and a tad disappointing, considering that first-time screenwriter Joshua Rollins has unearthed some genuinely fascinating details about Bales’s backstory that were not in either published account of the rescue.

I Am Here is, at its core, something much less complicated: a bearing of witness to horror. It’s inspirational, yes, but sadly far from unique. In its oft-heard contours, then, lies both its power and its tragic familiarity.

Though lacking in the script department, this cinematic wonderland delivers on one promise: escape, to a place of such natural beauty that even these affluent characters, however cardboard, are forced to take stock of the important things in life.

It’s all diverting, if not ultimately sustained. Although the cast is thoroughly committed, as “Amsterdam” wends its way to its hysterically pitched climax, it sometimes feels like it’s two very different movies.