Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.

To reference yet another cultural touchstone, Aporia comes across like an expanded, indie-film version of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s never going to set the world on a new and unfamiliar course, but it does its job well enough.

The film is pretty conventional Disney fare: silly, slapsticky, all-too-neatly wrapped up and punctuated by a surfeit of poignant moments.

Romero has some fun with cackling frat-style boors in the background, all of whom get their comeuppance. But by and large, the acting is extremely flat and strident, and shot in a much more conventional style than Romero's other movies. Romero, in other words, seems bored by the whole enterprise, less interested in the story than in sausage-making. [23 July 1985, p.E2]

The overall effect is like wading through hospital waste. Verhoeven, who also directed the maliciously stylistic "Robocop," disappoints with this appalling onslaught of blood and boredom.

For the first hour and a half, WW84 is a delightful flight of escapist fancy, with Diana and Steve's love story ensconcing itself comfortably, if a bit talkily, within the confines of an action adventure. Then, at the 90 minute mark, it’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.

There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.

Directed by Britain's Beeban Kidron, To Wong Foo has a split personality—it feels like three separate spliced-together movies with the same characters. Part I is the most fun, as we watch Swayze and Snipes undergo their transformation, a la Torch Song Trilogy.

Despite broad satire about racism and border fences that will appeal to some liberals, the movie doesn't line up neatly along party lines -- except in that other sense of the word "party." It's a movie that just wants to have fun.

There'd be nothing wrong with this if the film 'fessed up to its kitschy soul. Instead, it pretends to be the high-minded drama it's not.

Unfortunately, the actors seem overqualified for their parts, delivering earnest monologues that come across as clumsy transplants from the proscenium stage.

Makes a virtue of its own simplicity. But don't be fooled. That simplicity is mere cover. You're kept wondering about the outcome until the very end.

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]

Maybe the ultimate goal of Tomorrowland remains obscure because once you know where the story is headed, you realize it’s a familiar tale. The movie can conjure up futuristic images, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen before.

A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.

Must-see viewing for anyone who thinks of Christmas as just a mall and its night visitors.

Bercot’s sense of atmospherics is more successful than her editing and camera work. Some pieces of the plot seem like they would make a bigger impact with a bit more backstory... But these series of vignettes still leave an impression, thanks in no small part to Deneuve.

What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.

The movie goes off the rails only when the filmmaker inadvertently legitimizes the Protocols' loony philosophical heirs by interviewing a New York medical examiner and a widow about the remains of one of 9/11's Jewish victims.

It’s a thoughtful and workmanlike portrait, but a less than profoundly moving one.

It can feel, at times, both overlong and oversimplified, but the story propels itself along while awakening in viewers some profound emotions.

There are much better Iraq documentaries than this one, but Brothers at War distinguishes itself by peering out over the emotional chasm between soldiers and their families.

It's certainly harrowing to sit through. Talk about your grizzly misadventures.

Unlike "Wild Hogs" or last summer's "The Expendables," this adaptation of the "Red" graphic novel series gets into a cool, sophisticated swing.

It’s occasionally funny and sometimes suspenseful, but it isn’t particularly imaginative. Then again, neither are Stine’s popular novellas.