Caryn James

Mr. Mamet can be a first-rate film maker, and in works like House of Games and Homicide he trusts language as much as he relies on small, subtle camera movements. Here both the language and Mr. Mamet's film making let him down.

That story deserves a great documentary. This well-meaning film is far from that. Rebel Nun is pedestrian at its best and cringe-worthy at its faux-arty worst.

The background is energetic; too bad the foreground is just as chaotic...Mr. Lowenstein - whose work includes many rock videos and ''Strikebound,'' a film about Australian miners - prefers sensory overload to coherence.

But the formula is pretty long in the tooth by now, and all the extra turns of plot can't disguise that.

Captain Kirk and his crew go where too many film makers have too often gone before.

Some films can re-energise a genre, like last year's huge hit Godzilla Minus One . . . Godzilla x Kong is the opposite, a dazzling visual accomplishment that already feels old.

This huge cliche of a movie isn't even a distant relation of films like The Color of Money, which can actually make you root for hustlers. The Big Town only proves we've gone back to the 1950's one time too many.

If you can't improve on Spielberg – and really, when it comes to this kind of film, who can? – better to try something bold to prevent any waning dino-interest.

Lover Boy should have had the courage to admit it is hopelessly tacky.

Behind the impressive CGI, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the definition of generic, all two hours and 25 minutes of it. The ending teases a sequel that offers a more intriguing conflict ahead, but that doesn't help us now.

The sequel suffers from a lame, saccharine premise and a fatally earnest manner.

The very best I can say is that Witchboard should encourage struggling film makers. Watch it and think, ''I can do better than that!''

Despite a few lighter touches, the film is still a gory waste of time that plays its murders for all the blood and guts they're worth. There are plenty of cliched reaction shots of faces in terror, more than enough frames filled with bloody knives and severed heads. There is not, however, any suspense about Jason or his victims. He stalks, they scream, he kills. None of it is enough to make you jump out of your seat, though it may be enough to make your stomach churn. [2 Aug 1986, p.9]

There have been worse ideas for innocuous summer films, but not many worse executions. The slapstick is tame and predictable. The characters and their inspirational message are served up as neatly - there's no avoiding this - as if they were in commercials.

Hot Pursuit is just what you'd expect from such a stale formula: a misadventure in paradise that makes ''Gilligan's Island'' look like ''The Night of the Iguana.''

This is the old, old trading places gag, and while a good idea can always be reinvented, invention is precisely what Taking Care of Business lacks.

Child's Play 3, directed by Jack Bender, misses the sharpness and dark humor that the director and co-writer Tom Holland brought to the original.

It might have helped if the film makers had had the humor to see they were turning out ''Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Seals.'' As it is, they take their explosives and their silly roles much too seriously.

Chris Weitz (most famously About a Boy and most recently Operation Finale) works hard to make Afraid a smarter-than-average horror movie, but the effort is conspicuous, and in the end the film is bland and obvious. And if horror can’t make us feel frightened in a way we couldn’t imagine ourselves, why bother?

Directed with pedestrian competence by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, The Miracle Club is about secrets that are all too obvious, and forgiveness you can see coming from the start.

Lorraine Gary has some affecting moments as Ellen, but Jaws the Revenge is mild and predictable, the very things an adventure movie should never be.

A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.

Both Mr. Danson and Mr. Culkin make the film's predictable ending far more effective than it might have been. They are warm without being sappy. It's too bad that the audience, parents and children, are likely to have grown restless long before then.

An uninspired circus film for children.

The didactic screenplay sinks the film. Instead of exploring characters, or having them spout witty lines, Ting has them explain everything to each other, out loud, almost all the time. ... It’s great to see more films with Asian and Asian-American actors and stories, especially one written and directed by a woman. But while Ting’s movie may be heartfelt, it offers viewers more fluff than heart.

Comprised of so many derivative bits and pieces that it's not surprising the movie has too little narrative coherence or momentum to keep us going, and no characters we care about enough to root for.

Noisy and meant for children only. A bored grown-up's only consolation is that the Rangers' popularity has probably peaked, and the next kiddie phenomenon must be on the way.

The best that can be said about When I’m a Moth is that it is not lurid, although it does seem pointless.