August 18, 2002 | At the risk of sounding like a chronic contrarian, I must confess I had a fair-to-middling good time with The Adventures of Pluto Nash, a prodigious popcorn…

January 19, 2001 | According to the late, great Howard Hawks, a good movie can be defined by these essentials: "Three great scenes. No bad scenes." To that, I would…

July 9, 2003  | The unwieldy title suggests a flurry of last-minute second-guessing by nervous marketing executives. And the sprawling length – two hours and twenty minutes – very nearly qualifies…

December 17, 2004 | I fully realize that not everybody has the time (or inclination) to take a second or third look at an older movie immediately before viewing its…

October 10, 1998 | Jerry Stahl makes no excuses and pulls no punches in Permanent Midnight, his sardonic account of his frantic days and desperate nights as a highly paid TV…

May 25, 2001 | There hasn’t been anything quite like Pearl Harbor in first-run theaters for a long, long time. Sure, there have been other recent films about World War II…

February 5, 1999 | In Payback, Brian Helgeland's unstable mixture of hard-boiled posing, heavy-duty violence and jet-black comedy, Mel Gibson plays a bad guy who runs afoul of worse guys while…

March 29, 2002  |  The premise is simple enough to be encapsulated in a TV Guide program listing: “A mother and  her teen-age daughter seek refuge in a specially-reinforced ‘panic…

July 13, 1998 | Sometimes the advertising guys can do a movie a disservice by selling it as something it's not. If you look at the trailers for Out of Sight, you…

January 18, 1996 | Very much in the tradition of Franco Zeffirelli's 1991 film of Hamlet, in which Mel Gibson did himself proud as Shakespeare's melancholy Dane, Oliver Parker's new version…