Robert Rodriguez’s big-studio sequel to his breakthrough 1992 debut, El Mariachi, this glaringly reveals the very weaknesses that the modest Mariachi allowed us to forgive. Here the emphasis on violent spectacle and effusive gore nearly snuffs out the comic flair of the first film. (Rodriguez seems to forget his mariachi’s own advice: “It is easier

Yet another one of those movies you thought you had to see until you actually saw it, this three-hour World War II epic is bloated with a silly romantic triangle (between Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale) and bolstered by a competent re-creation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At its worst, this

Leave it to Steven Spielberg, inventor of the summer-movie season with 1975’s Jaws, to pull off the seemingly impossible: Create a contemporary blockbuster wowing enough to silence rude, modern movie audiences in their seats. This take on the 1898 H.G. Wells’ novel about merciless invading aliens – starring Tom Cruise as an inept dad forced

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s working with a decent story this time around – he plays a helicopter pilot in the near future who’s illegally cloned – but he’s a long way from the cutting-edge special effects of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (that’s what happens when you lose your box-office clout and studios refuse to give you blockbuster

There are at least 16 ways the pressure-cooker situation at the center of 16 Blocks could be defused, but most of those would negate the movie’s reason for being: to pair aging action star Bruce Willis with rising talent Mos Def in a claustrophobic thriller plot. That plot is a series of contrivances, absurdities and