Problem: 1. Singleton just may be challenging us to laugh at the film or with it and then feel extremely uneasy for doing so. If so, that's admirable; if not, he's made a very strange soap opera.
2. A meandering, flawed, but electrifying film.
3. The subject is certainly worthy, but Singleton's script is too repetitive, pedantic, and protracted to do it justice.
4. Baby Boy earns credibility for its insights by moving beyond image and rhetoric and quickly establishing Jody, his friends, lovers and family members as complex, striving, fallible human beings.
5. Singleton hammers home his thesis ... with a monotonous single-mindedness that dulls the usual acuity of his perceptions.
6. A bold criticism of young black men who carelessly father babies, live off their mothers and don't even think of looking for work.
7. Baby Boy is more insistent in its didacticism than Boyz N the Hood, the passion and conviction are no less heartfelt.
8. 'Baby Mama Drama' in da Hood.
9. Tells it like it is with just a glimmer of how it ought to be.
10. What holds the movie together ... is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer: Preachy and repetitive in parts, Baby Boy still manages to exude authenticity, thanks to its competent cast.


Problem: 1. If only all reputed turkeys gave us such a trip.
2. Science-fiction meets emotional fact. An intelligent, time-spanning love story that deserves the benefit of any doubt. Watch. And watch again.
3. I was utterly absorbed in watching it, yet when it was over I had no idea what had happened.
4. I've sat through lots of navel-gazing movies that would have been vastly improved by the addition of some 16th-century conquistador action; Aronofsky's film is still a bore, Its ideas and images too airy-fairy to have emotional force.
5. The Fountain's message is that life is short, so we should make the most of it, and that's a message which should take one of two centuries, and one or two hairstyles, at most.
6. The key line, spoken by a Mayan priest, is 'Death is the road to awe', and this movie truly puts the 'awe' into awful.
7. Fantasy fable impresses and indulges in equal measure.
8. Aronofsky's last effort, Requiem For A Dream, was a heartfelt film about drug addiction which I greatly admired. Here, alas, he addresses a big, metaphysical topic with pitiful naivety. And he goes on and on and on, with nothing interesting to say.
9. Oscar winners Rachel Weisz and Ellen Burstyn provide solid support. But what they're doing wasting their time in this junk is as unfathomable as the film itself.
10. If Kubrick's 2001 got your juices flowing with its stunning, unexplained other-worldliness, this is a movie you could be mad for. Or it might be just a load of old tosh.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer: The Fountain -- a movie about metaphysics, universal patterns, Biblical symbolism, and boundless love spread across one thousand years -- is visually rich but suffers from its own unfocused ambitions.


Problem: 1. A heartfelt and surprisingly successful revival of the cinema-idyllic world of Frank Capra movies.
2. I think Americans are in the mood today for a sentimental movie about their values, and, frankly, it's wonderful to see people get teary-eyed over the First Amendment.
3. Do Sloane and Darabont really think they can drop the complex blacklist agony into this vat of mush, and say something real?
4. Darabont and screenwriter Michael Sloane's misty-eyed tribute may be pleasant in places, but it's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive.
5. It can't fake sincerity. It tries ever so hard, but it doesn't have a single believable second.
6. Marks a steep downturn in Jim Carrey's career.
7. If the tone...tends to lean toward mawkishness in the last half-hour, what is appealing...is its almost stubborn yearning to be like the motion pictures of yesteryear.
8. A decent picture that you really want to like, but that unfortunately doesn't come close to matching the director's previous efforts.
9. At 2 1/2 hours, this movie is about an hour too long, and this makes an obvious story obnoxious in the extreme.
10. Mr. Carrey may go to both Washington and a version of Bedford Falls in The Majestic, but he is neither the Jefferson Smith nor George Bailey of Stewart's best-loved films.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer:
Ponderous and overlong, The Majestic drowns in forced sentimentality and resembles a mish-mash of other, better films.