Be Cool

Despite a cast and production that seem to promise one of the year's first movies of any note, Cool never translates its promo-photo flashiness into authenticity on screen.Read Full Review »

Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?Read Full Review »

The hell of it is, Be Cool is tepid entertainment that could be cool if it spent less time entertaining us as if we were demanding a definition of rhythm.Read Full Review »

Travolta keeps you grooving even when the movie's motor runs down--although it has never revved too high to begin with.Read Full Review »

Lacks both a focus and an edge, making it an amorphous mess.Read Full Review »

It's kind of -- hmmmm, less than good, a little better than not bad, almost all right, mediocre without being grating, sort of in the C-minus-to-C-minus-minus range.Read Full Review »

Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Mr. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here.Read Full Review »

Isn't assaultive or dumb, just slack and de-energized, as if its batteries start running down in the first frame.Read Full Review »

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.Read Full Review »

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.Read Full Review »