6/10/07:  "The movie franchise that began with Steven Soderberg's 2001 remake of Ocean's Eleven is a truly odd duck.  Each film assembles as much star power as is possible in today's Hollywood, then lacquers on truckloads of gloss and production values, all in the name of mild, understated entertainment.  The formula worked pretty well in the clever and amusing original, then drowned under a tidal wave of self-satisfied smarminess in Ocean's Twelve.  The cute and entertaining Ocean's Thirteen is a back-to-basics romp that focuses on the camaraderie of Danny Ocean's cheeky band of thieves and benefits from adding a top-shelf villain in Al Pacino.  Fans should have a good time, but new recruits are unlikely.

Desperate to be part of an ambitious new Las Vegas undertaking that would secure his legacy, casino tycoon Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) ignores the advice of his friends and throws all his money into a new project with underhanded developer Willie Bank (Al Pacino).  But Bank is every bit the nightmare business partner he was advertised to be and violently forces Reuben to sign everything over to him.  Left penniless, he collapses with a heart attack, and while he hovers between life and death, his old friends assemble to plot revenge."  MORE

11/29/09:  "The movie business needs stars.  Sure, they're a great promotional platform to get potential ticketbuyers to listen to your pitch, but more than that, a true star can be expected to deliver a certain level of excellence necessary to elevate some of the astonishingly bad screenplays that are greenlit.  Case in point:  on the page, Old Dogs is one of those utterly miserable family comedies where a workaholic learns to fall in line and want a family like everyone else does/is supposed to.  But it's got a secret weapon in John Travolta, whose comic style relies on a certain edge-of-his-seat mania that means no gag can be going so badly he can't at least elicit a smile.  Throw in Robin Williams, game enough for anything that he makes a horrible role tolerable, and a movie that could have been 90 minutes of pure hell instead becomes almost worthwhile.  Interspersing stretches of genuine hilarity with others where it simply lays there like a dead fish, Old Dogs wastes the talent it's assembled to a criminal degree.  But once trapped in a theater with it, I couldn't have been more glad they decided to sign on."  MORE