Petersen leaves out, largely, character, back story, anecdote and warm personal relations. Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

The problem is that, in focusing on what makes a good caper, director Louis Leterrier forgot about what makes a good movie: character development, carefully constructed tension and believable plot points.

INDULGE me for a moment: Funny Farm, the latest lame critter from the Chevy Chase stable, is hogwash. A real turkey. A load of horse manure. There. Now that I have the farm puns out of my system, I can calmly urge you to avoid Funny Farm. [3 June 1988, p.N37]

All of the supporting characters -- notably tubby Richard Griffiths as Tess's nurse and mousy Austin Pendleton as her chauffeur -- are thinly drawn, but neither MacLaine nor Cage leaves much room for anyone to overact.

Even by its own standards, the movie becomes increasingly macabre and ludicrous as Anne's machinations get the better of her, and everyone, including the audience, is left feeling shattered, shaken and vaguely unclean for having participated in all this.

Director John H. Lee isn’t big on John Le Carré-style intrigue and introspection. (The dialogue comes in only two flavors: blustering and sentimental.) He’s better at the shootouts and chase scenes, which are loud, lively and well-choreographed, if sometimes outlandish.

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

The movie builds a moderate, if less than monumental, level of spookiness, regardless of your ignorance. It’s a workmanlike piece of suspense.

The lightweight nature of the plot is, arguably, appropriate to the film’s gentle comedy, which elicits chuckles here and there, but rarely stings or draws blood.

Obliged to launch the hero on an effective counterattack down the stretch, Wallace goes through the motions proficiently enough for exploitation thriller purposes. He should have quit while he was ahead, but Halloween III demonstrates a reasonable ability to control comic-horror effects on his first derivative try. [27 Oct 1982, p.D9]

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.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.

A loving throwback to the classic westerns and sci-fi adventures of yore, this celebration of two of cinema's most revered genres doesn't stint in lavishing their most cherished conventions with even-handed affection and respect.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

The film defies one of the fundamental rules of capitalism: Exploitation of the proletariat may be well and good, but don’t execute them all. At the same time, “The Purge: Anarchy” obeys a cardinal law of Hollywood: Shoot first and ask questions later.

Reductive, ghoulish and surpassingly boring, “Blonde” might have invented a new cinematic genre: necro-fiction.

About as funny as digging your own grave in an unmarked part of New Jersey.

The bad news? The story, which rumbles along like an unattended wheelchair on a gently sloping sidewalk.

The movie's deeper problem and its primary disappointment: its unwillingness to deal directly with the issue of colonialism.

The French now proudly prove they can make a big stupid violent cop movie, just like our gifted Hollywood professionals.

The documentary never gets more than skin deep. It rarely delves into the troubling regions that are the very orchards of documentary.

Occasionally amusing, technically lovely but ultimately dated.

War is hellishly entertaining, especially in Behind Enemy Lines, a 21-gun salute to the commitment and preparedness of the U.S. military.

Another product from Industrial Light & Magic, this fire-breathing, soaring creature is a technical wonder to behold. But they've skimped on everything else. The script douses the movie's fiery potential and director Rob Cohen soaks all remaining embers with his cheap, made-for-TV direction.

In short, Magic is unworthy of its name. It's frightfully feeble and obvious. [11 Nov 1978, p.F11]

It all amounts to a missed opportunity considering how many female athletes and sports fans would probably flock to the first film that targets their demographic since "A League of Their Own" nearly 20 years ago. The people behind The Mighty Macs could learn a lot from that film, especially that following formula is fine, as long as you don't skimp on the details that complete the portrait.

There are a few cheap thrills in Elm Street 3, but there are also plenty of effective effects, including mirrors-as-drowning-pools, Ray Harryhausen skeletal work and Freddy's body as a living frieze from hell. The film's major weakness can be summed up in two words: Craig Wasson. Wasson, who has the charisma of a bowl of wet chow mein, plays the sympathetic doctor who must try to outwit Freddy.

Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.

There’s a story here, all right, but it’s a heartless and bitter one.

Don’t Let Go manages, at times, to generate a nicely weird “Twilight Zone” vibe, but fails to sustain it, as it also runs into some of the same problems that plague movies of this ilk: If you tear the fabric of time by altering what has already happened, it can be difficult to sew it back up straight.

Humanoids is a clever combination of Jaws and Alien. [09 Jun 1980, p.B1]

The plot itself is predictably divorced from reality, containing more holes — and smelling staler — than month-old Swiss cheese. All of which means that Stallone and Schwarzenegger end up having to do all the heavy lifting.

Recalls those corny Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids.

Might provide a much-needed fix for Mac's most ardent fans, but they'll have to wait for a star vehicle that fully exploits the range of his comic gifts.

The movie is pulled along mostly by James Marsden's cheerfully over-the-top performance as Ian's homophobic older brother, but Josh Zuckerman does a nice job of keeping Ian likable.

Like a cute version of Jekyll and Hyde.

The movie comes across as a political science course videotape rather than a movie to fully engage a general audience.

Each plot twist trumps its predecessor into ludicrousness.

It’s silly and a bit sappy, but it works, in a crowd-pleasing way.

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Far and Away is such a doddering, bloated bit of corn, and its characters and situations so obviously hackneyed, that we can't give in to the story and allow ourselves to be swept away.

The movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.

The movie's sweet, gentle nature may lack the subtle irony of the "Toy Storys" and "Shreks" of the world, but parents won't be bored.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

Brad Silberling, a TV director (Brooklyn Bridge, NYPD Blue) making his feature debut, obviously is out of his element in this grandiose extravaganza of sets and effects. Still, that doesn't explain the inert performances of Moriarty and her henchman, Eric Idle, and sundry other supporting characters. Much of the blame belongs to Sherri Stoner, Deanna Oliver and the many ghost writers who created this ghoulish hash of teen romance, father-and-child reunion and monster mash.

Marie Noelle fills the story with passion, debate and human contradiction. If the material ultimately eludes the director’s grasp, wandering off on unfocused tangents, it’s because of its ambition.

The oddball grief drama Demolition proves that an actor who could easily be dismissed as just another watchable face is actually possessed of subtle, fascinatingly protean chops.

2012 takes the disaster movie -- once content simply to threaten the Earth with a comet, or blow up the White House -- to its natural conclusion, the literal end of the world.

Great Balls of Fire, like "La Bamba," is thin on the meaning of the life in question, but big on '50s Billboard nostalgia. It's lightweight archaeology, a bent American Bandstand biography. Something has slipped away from McBride, Quaid and Fields: the truth, the heart, the soul. All that's left is the hip.

Writer-director Garth Jennings’s script hits the usual sequel plot points: No one over the age of 10 will ever accuse the film of originality, or wonder for very long whether this plucky zoo will ultimately manage to put on a solid performance.

Everything is utterly unbelievable; it's Blackboard Jungle without a moral intelligence, Rock and Roll High School without a soundtrack. Sitting through it is like paying for detention on a sunny day. [14 Oct 1982, p.D15]

We know the story will conclude with a crescendo of frozen-north hallelujahs. Cheering is endemic to Disney. They can't help themselves.

The direction has a fluid, no-nonsense authority, and the performances by Harris, Phifer and Cam'ron seal the deal.

Although the acting is committed and sometimes stirring, most of the characters are about as one-note as the biblical archetypes Martin wants to get away from in the first place. "The Name of the Rose" this ain't.

Nobody hits the jackpot here, certainly not filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, whose audacious, empathic first film, "Twin Falls Idaho," showed such promise.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

Not content with simply stoking rage and self-righteous superiority, McKay dares to infuse Don’t Look Up with an authentic, unironic sense of grief.

Sketchy but often entertaining.

I’m on to you, Spurlock. There are holes in your story about five lads who don’t appear to ever drink, smoke, fight, curse or partake in romantic dalliances of any kind. At least, not on screen.

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

Pereira goes in for lots of time shifts and split screens, piling on the contrivances like so many costume baubles when a single string of pearls would do.

What Men Want avoids some of the pitfalls of gender-flipping, given how loose its connection to “What Women Want” is. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. It would make a perfectly fine airplane movie. Or maybe save it for the bachelorette party.

There are worse things than being trapped inside a computer game with Olivia Wilde. In Tron: Legacy, the loud, long and less than wholly satisfying sequel to "Tron," that's the bittersweet fate of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the computer-nerd hero of both the 1982 sci-fi cult classic and its high-tech, 3-D update.

Dramatically and conceptually, the movie sits there, flat, naked and trying too hard with too little.

Neither smart nor exciting enough to justify the effort.

The movie covers too much ground with too little detail. It manages to be convoluted, complicated, incomprehensible and maddeningly thin all at the same time.

Nicotina skitters between dull and forced, this despite the use of split screens, jaunty music and the personable Luna.

As monotonous as Muzak, and when it comes to the plot, both bewildering and trite.

Here's the thing about the new The Thing. It isn't as satisfying as the old "The Thing." And it's nowhere near as enthralling as the vintage "Thing," which inspired every other "Thing" to follow.

Silly and slapsticky, Love in Space is too busy devising absurd set pieces to develop the characters or make their mutual attractions plausible. That makes it much like recent Hollywood rom-coms. It seems Chinese filmmakers have learned more than just a few phrases from American movies.

As a piece of filmed entertainment, The Fifth Estate shows why things like authorial point of view and visual sensibility are so essential in bringing such stories to life. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, “The Social Network,” this film doesn’t have much of either, and the weakness shows.

The script is well stocked with snappy put-down humor, including on-target jabs at Dan Quayle, Jerry Ford and George Bush. But director Peter Segal loses his light-comedy touch after the first hour and makes an unfunny mess of the final, crackpot chase sequence.

Steve Barron, who directed "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Electric Dreams" and a mess of music videos, understandably can't seem to whip up any enthusiasm for the project. Nor is he able to inspire this large, listless cast of zombies.

The mediocre screenplay (by Tom S. Parker and Jim Jennewein of The Flintstones) is a more sober version of Arthur, with elements from Our Gang, North by Northwest and TV's Gilligan's Island. The filmmakers seem to think of their movie as a fiduciary fable, but they're not quite sure about its moral.

At best, the filmmakers are guilty of wholesale confusion. For lamentable example, the plot degenerates into a hopeless tangle of loose threads and discarded hooks, beginning with the initial vicious teaser, which identifies Pam Grier as a drug-crazed prostitute who guns down a pair of unwary young patrolmen in their squad car. [7 Feb 1981, p.C1]

A cut above the usual hack 'em up, and perhaps even a hack above the usual cut 'em up.

An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.

Sentinel is a medium-dumb thriller that starts out with momentary promise but gets progressively sillier.

The Money Pit is Richard Benjamin's attempt to make a '30s comedy through the lens of Steven Spielberg -- there are contraptions and "smart" dialogue and, unfortunately, nothing to hold them together. [28 Mar 1986, p.D2]

A light but enjoyable souffle of erotic vignettes.

A beautiful and sometimes affecting film that (appropriately, some would say) has as much difficulty connecting with the world before it as its protagonist does.

It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.

It's just gunfights strung together, without a whisper of coherence or meaning. The fights are staged so that they all look the same, and the principle is always the same: The gunman's multiple antagonists never hit, and he never misses. John Woo at least had fun with this sort of thing 20 years ago. And Giamatti? What the heck is he doing here?

Between the gang's patois and Seagal's soft speaking, Marked for Death almost begs for subtitles; the breaking of bones, however, comes through loud and clear.

Overall, this is an entertaining diversion.

It’s a sterling cast, capably guided through the motions by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan — no relation to the author of this review, at least none that I know of — in this at times gently amusing and at other times modestly touching dramedy.

Surprisingly nimble and fun to watch, mostly thanks to the magnificent dogs Hoffman has found to portray his lead characters, and thanks to the actors he cast as the animals' voices.

It's good fun for bad boys.

It's effectively frightening. It's just not the kind of frightening that stays with you very long, unless of course someone decides to make the same movie . . . yet again.

The overall unevenness of tone is the movie's biggest flaw, but the slo-mo scenes of doggie derring-do are quite funny.

The result is a movie that takes itself far more seriously than the "Hasta la vista, baby" tone of previous installments.

Fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless.

Winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.

The fourth Ice Age freshens up the 10-year-old franchise by shunning easy ­pop-culture jokes and embracing its weird side.

The screenplay, contrived to suit the genre, is likewise replete with stock characters. Still, many of the actors manage to bring dignity, humor and even finesse to these tired roles. Gooding has the angelic good looks of Isiah Thomas and invests Lincoln with courageous sweetness. It's too bad the part isn't better developed.

The problem is that director Peter Berg, aided and abetted by Smith and Theron and third banana Jason Bateman, seem to have made it literally, not realizing its out-of-whack tonalities and grotesque plot twists were meant to be played for laughs.

Far from insipid, it's one of the funniest, and most affecting, movies to come around in a long time. The acting is polished, the writing superb. The jokes make you laugh. That's no small feat. [10 Mar 1978, p.15]

Mack & Rita feels, paradoxically, both too short and overlong. It could have examined the theme of aging much more deeply. Alternatively, it might have made a nice short film about a young person who becomes a senior citizen for a night. As it is, it’s a story that doesn’t need to be told and isn’t told very well.