question: A boozy depiction of a struggling writer, Big Bad Love is too messy and self-indulgent.

numbered reviews: 1. The draw [for "Big Bad Love"] is a solid performance by Arliss Howard.
2. Howard conjures the past via surrealist flourishes so overwrought you'd swear he just stepped out of a Buńuel retrospective.
3. Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
4. Arliss Howard's ambitious, moving, and adventurous directorial debut, Big Bad Love, meets so many of the challenges it poses for itself that one can forgive the film its flaws.
5. there's enough meat on the bones of Big Bad Love ... to keep it from being dismissable.
6. In the end, this is a story about a hard-to-know guy who loves his typewriter most of all. Everything else is just dust-jacket photography.
7. Though Howard demonstrates a great eye as a director, this Southern Gothic drama is sadly a tough sit, with an undeveloped narrative and enough flashbacks and heavy-handed metaphors to choke a horse -- or at least slow him down to a canter.
8. ... alternately charming and annoying.
9. [F]rom the performances and the cinematography to the outstanding soundtrack and unconventional narrative, the film is blazingly alive and admirable on many levels.
10. Far too clever by half, Howard's film is really a series of strung-together moments, with all the spaces in between filled with fantasies, daydreams, memories and one fantastic visual trope after another.


question: The storyline is overwrought and awkward, and the audience is distanced from the flatly drawn characters.

numbered reviews: 1. An achingly beautiful and quite touching movie.
2. The whole film rings true to artful tones and positions, because Vierny sees the triumph of freedom over oppression as a kind of graceful, superlative production.
3. After a vivid start, [Potter's] movie turns into an inventory of set-pieces nearly devoid of tension, momentum, even much sense.
4. It's impossible not to succumb to its lush romanticism and irresistible fusion of contrasting musical styles.
5. What she lacks as a dramatist, Potter ... compensates for with a painter's eye and a composer's ear.
6. Ricci's strong work is ultimately just support for Potter's entrancing and emotional vision.
7. a survivor story set against a historical background writ from the movie screen
8. While we may like what we see, it's impossible to comprehend what much of it means or why we should care.
9. If [Potter] personally, in her 40s, can go to Argentina and become a tango dancer, then we can't complain about anything that happens to Suzie. Not that we'd want to.
10. A poetic look at transience, betrayal, loss and doom.


question: Saint Ralph is an amiable tear-jerker that walks a fine line between being inspirational and being hokum.

numbered reviews: 1. Saint Ralph sticks, for the most part, to the road less traveled, delivering a droll feel-good movie that has a little something to say about modern-day miracles.
2. As predictably uplifting movies go, Saint Ralph isn't completely charmless.
3. Writer-director Michael McGowan must be exhausted after all the tugging he does on our heartstrings in this sentimental drama.
4. Your interest is bound to fade long before Ralph does.
5. Writer-director Michael McGowan proves there's a reason people keep making underdog sports movies.
6. It succeeds in flashes, but the movie's mixture of humor and inspirational fluff never quite meshes.
7. You can't argue with the message. But its well-worn homilies might give you reason to question the messenger.
8. The lack of condescension, the decent jokes and an absolutely terrific performance by Butcher make Saint Ralph an honest-to-God crowd-pleaser.
9. What began as a too familiar coming-of-age story set in an all-boys Catholic school steadily morphs into something arguably as familiar but more satisfying -- a triumphant sports tale.
10. It's hard to dislike schmaltz as mild as Saint Ralph, but let's try: The film is as bland as a communion wafer, sentimental as a Christmas homily, and predictable as the liturgy.


question: The Sentinel starts off well enough but quickly wears thin with too many plot holes and conventional action sequences.

numbered reviews:
1. Desperately wants to be as thrilling as ... In the Line of Fire, but it has much more in common (from a quality standpoint) with "Guarding Tess.
2. worse than those episodes of 24 featuring cougars chasing Kim Bauer
3. Recommend this one to a friend with a bum ticker. Not a single moment in the 108-minute running time is sufficient to even quicken the pulse.
4. Just good enough to not embarrass anyone involved.
5. sleepy
6. And that's really the point here: The Sentinel is about boys, bonding, squabbling, scheming, running, and shooting. Shooting a lot.
7. A political thriller that lacks thrills--and motivation.
8. The characters are underwritten but the stars' natural charisma holds our attention and keeps us on their side, the action scenes are crisply filmed, and the location shots provide an authentic feel.
9. In an age when surprise endings and indie budgets are hip and trendy, it's nice to get a decent throwback thriller. The script may be manufactured, but the sweat stains are real.
10. Director Clark Johnson ("S.W.A.T.") brings a little style to what is otherwise a pretty meat and potatoes presidential thriller with a solid if unexceptional cast.