question: Despite its stylized and impressive sets, this horror-monster movie mish-mash suffers from endless cliches and wildly implausible plotlines.

numbered reviews: 1. If you gotta rip something off, might as well be a classic.
2. it isn't just tedious, it isn't just silly, no, it goes the distance until it actually becomes a personal affront to the sensibilities of everyone concerned
3. The first-time director Bruce Hunt is no stranger to inspired and stylish productions, but his horror-action film fails to inject new life into tired territory.
4. A turd held up to the flickering bulb of the projector would be a marked improvement.
5. Its job is to deliver a few jolty thrills and a couple of laughs and wrap things up before it starts to get too dumb.
6. Ten things I learned watching The Cave. 1. 'Beneath heaven lies hell. Beneath hell lies the cave.' 2. Beneath that lies the theater showing The Cave.
7. Vast and unexplainable, with plenty of places to hide. You'll want to find one.
8. Bruce Hunt's directing debut displays a cold-blooded efficiency and refreshing lack of Michael Bay-ish hyperactivity in what is otherwise a solid if unspectacular action-horror flick.
9. The best part is that it takes place in a couple of locales -- spelunking in a cave and diving underwater -- that we don't normally go, unless it's a nature documentary.
10. This latest exercise in claustrophobic mayhem is hole-y awful.


question: Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp make for an appealing pair of leads, but they're not enough to make up for The Lone Ranger's bland script, bloated length, and blaring action overkill.

numbered reviews: 1. Who has time to hypothesize about a Johnny Depp movie at this point?
2. Not quite a parody but broader than an homage, The Lone Ranger fights itself at every turn.
3. The film has plenty of combustion, but it's almost entirely devoid of charm or genuine excitement.
4. It's not quite funny enough to be a comedy, nor quite exciting enough to be an action film - until the last 20 minutes or so, when it's a little too late.
5. [A] bloated, misshapen mess, a stillborn franchise loaded with metaphors for its feeble attempts to amuse, excite and entertain.
6. An unwieldy and, at an inexcusable 149 minutes, overlong indulgence offering occasional thrills and giggles but none sufficient to warrant the effort; we've seen its type before, in the form of Barry Sonnenfeld's Will Smith misfire, Wild Wild West.
7. Tries so hard to be every kind of movie at once that it ends up being no kind of movie at all.
8. Funny stuff good, violence, preachy historical revisionism bad.
9. The Lone Ranger is a tonally imbalanced Western adventure, but random comedic gems mixed with the perfect dose of Depp make this franchise reawakening a serviceable cinematic escape.
10. They worked so hard to make a movie out of The Lone Ranger, responding to the pleas of absolutely no one. Calls for a sequel will be even less thunderous.


question: Invigorated by its talented cast and Francis Ford Coppola's strong direction, The Rainmaker is a satisfying legal drama -- and arguably the best of Hollywood's many John Grisham adaptations.

numbered reviews: 1. Director Francis Ford Coppola makes a good effort, but his interesting character-based approach eventually dissolves into yet another uninspired courtroom drama.
2. Satisfactory mainstream entertainment, with a handful of major actors in juicy minor roles tossed in for good measure.
3. A stronger bet than the previous 35 or however many Grisham movies before it.
4. With numerous entertaining subplots, plenty of well thought-out characters, brought to life by talented actors, and an invigorating trial, what more do you want from a Grisham film?
5. Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote and directed the film, has made the most of Grisham's ground-level realism.
6. Damon and Danes are fabulous together, and even more than the surprisingly complex story and nice cameos and deft and economical direction by Francis Ford Coppola, they are what makes The Rainmaker worth seeing.
7. Coppola has infused The Rainmaker with enough humor, character, honest emotion and storytelling style to make it one of the year's most entertaining movies.
8. Celebrates the zeal for justice espoused by a rookie Memphis lawyer.
9. Matt Damon is ideal as the young innocent David to Voight and Co's Goliath, determined and driven by the power of his purity. That's how Coppola sees it, and it is largely Coppola's cinematic acumen that makes this Grisham novel adaptation work.
10. It is just as entertaining as it is manipulative and corny.


question: Though not as uproariously funny as Guest's previous movies, A Mighty Wind is also more heartfelt.

numbered reviews:
1. Though it may not be Guest et al's best effort to date, it's definitely not a shabby one. Fans of the troupe's odd humor and scathingly accurate caricatures will find much to be pleased about here
2. A Mighty Wind looks like it wasn't a big challenge for Guest and his ensemble cast of mockumentary regulars. But if this is what [they] can accomplish on cruise control all the power to them.
3. A Mighty Wind is a decent comedy, but it's also A Teeny Bland.
4. Without a familiarity with its characters, the movie plays out more like what it is ... than what it pretends to be.
5. The humour is very dry, only occasionally absurd, and always extremely close to the bone.
6. Guest manages to create a movie that is funny and somehow more touching and heartfelt than his earlier work.
7. ...the movie never makes fun of its subject, but pokes gentle fun at some of the more eccentric folk involved in it.
8. The film is merciless as it takes sharp aim with smooth, subtle style at many of the celebrity affectations that have been given a pass for too long now.
9. There are fewer laugh-out-loud moments than in Guest's previous efforts, but the lost laughs are traded for a greater-than-expected amount of poignancy.
10. After his previous windows on the absurd ... A Mighty Wind proves that Guest has turned parody into an art form.