It’s hard to decide who’s more dull here: Kevin Costner or his movie. Costner stars as a doctor whose late pediatrician wife tries to contact him through her former patients, but the film can’t manage either the open-hearted romanticism of Ghost or the subtle spookiness of The Sixth Sense. Instead, director Tom Shadyac proves to

A remedial-course version of Dead Poets Society, this manages just enough good will of its own to excuse any lack of innovation. Kevin Kline stars as William Hundert, one of those boarding-school instructors who spends so much time inspiring his students you wonder if he ever does any actual teaching. Watching him may feel a

Disney’s fact-based, sports-movie formula has become so drowsily familiar by now that watching another one of these films nearly serves as a sedative – if not outright anesthesia. The only thing wrong with Glory Road – a dramatization of the 1966 season of the Texas Western basketball team, which was the first to start five

Audiences have stuck with Cameron Diaz through a lot – the There’s Something About Mary rip-off The Sweetest Thing, even Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle – but In Her Shoes pushes the star’s likability to the limit. That’s partly the movie’s point – this is meant to be a tale of betrayal and reconciliation between sisters

An awkward attempt to mold the Imax documentary-travelogue format into a traditional movie narrative, China: The Panda Adventure ends up failing at both aims. Maria Bello stars as real-life Ruth McCombs-Harkness, who traveled to China in 1936 to fulfill her late husband’s dream of discovering wild pandas. The result is a nature film without much

When it’s not burdened by trying to be a cautionary parable about the dangers of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, this fact-based drama makes some interesting observations about stardom – what it looks like, who has it and why everybody seems to want it. Mark Wahlberg certainly has it, which is why his performance as

A landmark in terms of science-fiction style and influence, The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a wavering, theremin score (by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann), a shiny, disc-shaped spacecraft and even a robot named Gort. Yet it deals in these sci-fi cliches with an amazing artistry. That score is delicately employed, the special effects still

It’s hard to say which is worse, this romantic drama’s annoying first half, in which Charlize Theron plays a perpetually perky free spirit who cracks the shell of a selfish advertising executive (Keanu Reeves), or the baldly manipulative, tear-jerking climax. Put together, it’s like watching a manic-depressive crash and burn.

Gwyneth Paltrow suffers beautifully again as the depressive daughter of a dying, delusional math professor (Anthony Hopkins) in this adaptation of the stage play she performed in under returning director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). It’s all very earnest and weighty – with some nice on-location filming at the University of Chicago – but I

This begins as a provocative exploration of class divisions, as a car accident between a hotshot attorney (Ben Affleck) and a poor divorced father (Samuel L. Jackson) escalates into a dangerous feud. Then, as the two men continue to disrupt each other’s lives in increasingly frightening ways, the movie becomes an even more interesting consideration