question: While Eddie Murphy is still hilarious as the entire Klump family, the movie falls apart because of uneven pacing, a poor script, and skits that rely on being gross rather than funny.

numbered reviews: 1. The movie is bloated by empty, unhealthy and unnecessary calories.
2. It relentlessly humiliates its many obese and elderly characters.
3. Never manages to feel like a sustained story.
4. The Klumps are relegated to the sidelines, gross caricatures meant to distract us from the movie's disjointed, inane plot line.
5. Splintered, would-be comedy.
6. Lacks the heart of the first.
7. The original Klump experience still stands out as a winner.
8. Murphy's targets are selective, his timing shrewd.
9. Jokes that are funny the first time are repeated over and over, well past the point where they stop being funny, and far into the realm of annoyance.
10. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps is a waste of a brilliant actor


question: This mature and eloquent meditation on grief and loss sports measured performances and moments of humor.

numbered reviews: 1. A beautiful tissue-paper piece of art that falls to shreds should you so much as blow upon it
2. All but remaking the 1953 art-house classic Tokyo Story in its first third, Cherry Blossoms fortunately sidesteps rank mimicry in favor of wry homage and something more.
3. Doris Dorrie's Cherry Blossoms translates a foreigner-in-Japan experience much better than Sofia Coppola could.
4. This portrait of an aging couple is a deeply rewarding, heartbreaking, utterly worthy successor to two films which inspired it: Ozu's Tokyo Story and Leo McCarey's great, forgotten 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow.
5. The film's soggy visuals end by reducing the plight of the grief-struck central figure to the stuff of overly prettified kitsch.
6. A quiet, moving tale of love and loss.
7. It's a gentle lesson in facing life's hardships with acceptance rather than grief.
8. As Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten - Hanami) begins, Trudi is surprised when she learns her husband is dying of an unnamed condition.
9. Cherry Blossoms is an exquisitely and delicately crafted film about love, loss, and a kind of spiritual healing.
10. If you have ever seen Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story -- one of the greatest films ever made -- you may respond to Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms, which is a kind of homage.


question: Near Dark is at once a creepy vampire film, a thrilling western, and a poignant family tale, with humor and scares in abundance.

numbered reviews: 1. Ruthless, inventive and surprisingly lyrical.
2. A wonderful little vampire movie. Most enjoyable.
3. a perverse, penetrating vision of modern vampirism in which the word vampire is never mentioned
4. [A]n intense film, an eerie depiction of the isolated, empty middle of America... surprisingly haunting...
5. Southern-fried vampire-noir romance action horror tragedy. I love this movie.
6. Kathryn Bigelow took on the big boys and won.
7. The great Kathryn Bigelow made her solo directorial debut, and managed to emphasize the relationships between the characters while using the gory showstoppers as support.
8. You might call this the scattershot school of film making.
9. Cool little vampire flick
10. It's a smart, creepy, violent, funny, and modern vampire movie that benefits from some wonderful performances, a stunning visual texture, and music by Tangerine Dream.


question: Charles Ferguson's documentary provides a good summary of the decisions that led to the mess in post-war Iraq, and offers politically interested audiences something they'd been looking for: a lowdown on the decision making.

numbered reviews:
1. No End in Sight offers an emphatic, well-supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows: Who lost Iraq?.
2. A damning appraisal of America's handling of the Iraq war.
3. The larger picture presented here will likely be old news, although it will jab the memory and still will shock.
4. Want to kick start a drinking problem? Just give No End in Sight a look, and you're assured a cold, dark night ingesting anything nearby that will sooth the post-viewing depression.
5. The anger that fuels Ferguson's film is felt in nearly every frame.
6. The most compelling and least partisan of all the Iraq documentaries.
7. Rehashes information you already knew and tries to inflate trivia into scandal.
8. A valuable summary of a variety of missteps that have led to the current debacle.
9. Doesn't offer startlingly new information, [but] its calm, methodical presentation of the evidence is a solid contribution to...the American public's understanding.
10. Its message should be dispassionately studied by anyone who presumes to care about the future of this country.