For all its boldness of concept and carnage, The Prowler is never entirely satisfying. There are too many missed opportunities to transcend the genre’s schlock, too many passages where nothing happens, too many scares that fall flat. Still, it’s an intriguing artifact of an earlier horror-movie era, one that toys with the idea of villains and victims while slashing the slasher formula to bits.

Evita is a busy movie with an often noisy soundtrack that can get tedious and monotonous (particularly in the second half), but it's just as likely to sweep one away with its musical, emotional and historical momentum.

High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.

The plot, loosely derived from Madison Smartt Bell's "Doctor Sleep," is utterly stale. On their way to confront ancient evil, Strother and Losey keep tripping over timeworn cliches.

We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.

Mawkish, obvious and manipulative, “The Son” is, quite simply, a disappointment, from its pat setup to its equally false — and, quite frankly, cruel — resolution.

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note.

The movie is tentative, dramatically speaking...The most powerful moments come at the end -- documentary excerpts of Steve Saint, the son of one of the missionaries, and his friendship with Mincayani, the man who killed his father.

Hoodwinked makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

For real sparks keep a look out for Jared Harris in a supporting role that injects a mildly diverting note of corporate intrigue into an otherwise unsurprising procedural.

What transpires is part heist flick, part Mission: Impossible-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s existential darkness.

Though it lacks the gloss, twists and star power of earlier Grisham movies, The Chamber does possess Gene Hackman's most cantankerous turn since the lowdown lawman he created in "Unforgiven."

Setting aside the puzzling marriage of source material and medium, “Paws” at least makes for a breezy summertime diversion. Contrived but cute, the movie deserves credit for its indictment of insularity, as well as a few hearty laughs.

May look good cavorting prettily on deck, but ultimately it deserves to walk the plank.

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.

The sort of clumsy undertaking that trips up everyone and everything in it.

Proof of Life isn't a movie. It's an overpriced scrapbook.

Easily the worst of the four movies drawn from S.E. Hinton novels to date, and that's saying a lot. [9 Nov 1985, p.G14]

A thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers.

Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.

The movie benefits from a stylish, high-gloss look, a hit-filled soundtrack and up-to-the-minute dialogue (there's even a Korean shop-owner joke) that feels winningly off the cuff.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

It’s the right kind of bonkers for the right kind of audience, a gaga genre hodgepodge that, not for nothing, taps Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as its showstopping anthem and reminds us of a truism, of both cinema and life: Adding a dog or two — or 60 — can make just about anything better.

Colombiana, though, doesn't quite qualify as a chick flick. The filmmakers were surely thinking of the guys when they arranged for Saldana to play many of her scenes in a cat suit, a bikini or lingerie.