question: A bland, formulaic tween version of Fame.

numbered reviews: 1. Oh, the comparisons just come so easily: Like Coyote Ugly, only sillier. Like Crossroads, only sickening-sweeter.
2. flavorless... unappetizing... torture
3. It's easy to play the middle-aged critic and...dismiss the proceedings as trite, but for the... young teens seeing it, [it] will seem... relevant to their own lives.
4. Overlong, blandly soporific movie.
5. To be fair, the normally likeable Duff gives an adequate performance, but the poorly executed scenes in which Duff's singing voice was clearly post-dubbed and her own lack of emotional range keep the film from rising to whatever potential it may have had.
6. So pure at heart that, even with its over-the-top moments and cliches, one is willing to forgive the flaws and admire all that it achieves.
7. Ms. Duff's screen presence and the film's infectious high spirits will make this piece of fluff appealing to young moviegoers without conveying any sinister messages.
8. More annoyingly bland than genuinely awful. However, the presentation of its cute-as-a-button star is genuinely, absolutely, immeasurably awful.
9. Another bland, prefabricated feel-good vehicle for another chirpy Disney-cultivated pop-singer teen queen.
10. The movie is the most fun kind of terrible.


question: This middling installment in the Transporter franchise is a few steps down from its predecessors, featuring generic stunts and a lack of energy.

numbered reviews: 1. Silly, imaginative fun.
2. Incoherent and inconsistent, this is a step back for Statham in his quest to become more than a cult figure.
3. The flashy editing gets on one's wick and no one's going to win an Oscar - but, really, who's complaining? This is straight-up fisticuff fun.
4. With its eco-trappings, car chases and fights, the film feels very sub-Quantum Of Solace. The fact that Quantum itself felt very sub-Bourne says even less for Transporter 3. Even if you're a Statham fan, this series is starting to feel tired.
5. With insulting action sequences and a tacked-on love scene, the movie quickly veers into a downward spiral.
6. As a fan of Statham and the Transporter series, it's a massive disappointment. The story makes no sense, and there aren't even very many fight scenes.
7. I wanted to be transported out of the theater.
8. For the most part, the fights and chases are as implausible as the story, but there's an extraordinarily clever escape-from-certain-death bit about 20 minutes from the end that I don't think I've ever seen before.
9. Transporter 3 is a reassuringly beefy thriller in which Jason Statham has to drive very fast across Eastern Europe with a Ukranian beauty queen on the seat beside him. No one, including Jason, has the slightest clue why. Never mind.
10. Statham is a relatively entertaining action hero - though he is better in the Crank films. The script is by Besson, but the director is Olivier Megaton, whose surname is the most exciting thing about the film.


question: Overlong and superficial, A Time to Kill nonetheless succeeds on the strength of its skillful craftsmanship and top-notch performances.

numbered reviews: 1. Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.
2. A Time to Kill has it all.
3. A skillfully constructed morality play that pushes all the right buttons and arrives at all the right conclusions.
4. Never has a 145-minute film been less thrilling and more predictable.
5. A handsome but riotously cluttered melodrama with maybe 145 subplots.
6. It's McConaughey's commanding performance (or the way scenes between him and the equally camera-friendly Bullock practically eat through the screen) that will make this movie one for the history books.
7. The hype is true. Matthew McConaughey is all that.
8. Sandra Bullock, given an extremely misleading first billing, turns in what may be her best work yet as the cocky legal prodigy who smells a ticket to notoriety in the much-publicized case...
9. Really not moving and perhaps not even greatly intelligent in the way that To Kill a Mockingbird was, but it gives a feel for Southern politics and law better than other Grisham films and it tells its story engrossingly.
10. The performances are strong, the issues provocative. I was glad I saw it, but I was also glad when it was over; my chest was sore from Schumacher aiming wallops at my heart. Sometimes he connected, but I wished he'd aimed more often at my brain.


question: Cheap, predictable, formulaic and unimaginative generic dance film. Comes across as Showgirls for simpleton teens, but with much less flesh on show.

numbered reviews:
1. It's all just filler between the dance scenes, which are admittedly fun. Think Pussycat Dolls with slightly more clothes on. Unrepentantly formulaic, but enjoyable all the same.
2. The film should have been called Rehash Dance, because it is Flashdance without any new ideas.
3. ...yet another tedious inspirational tale revolving around a would-be dancer's efforts at transcending her wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing to become a professional hoofer.
4. Another dance movie this year? Seriously, where the heck do they keep coming from?
5. This film's limp retelling of the against-all-odds cliche just doesn't bump, grind or sweat enough to make it happen.
6. We know the trajectory, it's a question of how brightly the rocket burns and how interested we are in the astronauts aboard this dance missile from small town Indiana to Chicago Big Time Dance School
7. It's hard to dislike all these urban musicals aimed at teenage girls, and even harder to tell them apart.
8. Mary Elizabeth Winstead [has] star quality.
9. Then you wait for the moment one of the regular girls gets injured, the hostess has to find a replacement and... the rest you know.
10. So predictable that you know exactly what's going to happen at any given minute.