Gary Thompson

The animators have figured out horses and falcons and snakes, but human body movements are stiff, awkward, and mechanical.

Fast Color is disciplined and restrained, yet feels a few tweaks away from being the rousing origin story it aspires to be.

A bawdy, bloody but only sporadically funny spy spoof and buddy comedy.

Kin positions itself as a B-movie cobbled together from sci-fi favorites of the past, and so we grant the movie wide latitude to be goofy. It's meant to be out there. Even by those lax standards, though, Kin tries the patience.

As Knightley and Skarsgard wrestle with this material and each other, the movie around them goes plot crazy.

The movie works reasonably well as a thriller but falls apart in other areas.

As a symbiote, Brock/Venom is sometimes funny, and for a while the movie finds a rhythm that seems to suit director Ruben Fleischer, best known for Zombieland.

The remake, directed by Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, makes substantial changes — taking the bare bones of the story and turning into a sort action-fable about female empowerment, starring Jane the Virgin headliner Gina Rodriguez.

If HGTV and Lifetime had a TV channel baby, it would produce movies like The Intruder.

Something to Talk About goes wrong when it allows its agenda to interfere with the integrity of its characters. Duvall, Roberts and Quaid strive to humanize their characters, only to be undone with narrative detours that strain credibility. Kyra Sedgwick has a more rewarding, better defined role as Grace's smart-aleck sister. The movie also falters when it turns away from relationships and toward a limp subplot about a show-jumping contest. It ain't exactly "Rocky," but it does introduce us to the movie's only sympathetic male character. A gelding. [4 Aug 1995, p.37]

The movie seems even longer – replacing Argento's splashy colors with dull, chilly greys, and lengthening the story (Argento clocked in at 96 minutes) with layers that feel over overwrought and overthought.

There’s nothing especially striking about the movie’s visual presentation – the Artemis is threadbare and creaky, a purposely anachronistic blend of the future tech and throwback furnishings. The actions is competent, the performers game.

Greenfield makes an ambitious attempt to tie all of these things together as symptoms of capitalism gone wrong in Generation Wealth, although her thesis is weakly argued, and thinly sourced – the movie often turns out to be a curiously insular polling of family, friends, and high school and college classmates.

Fans can best enjoy the movie the way the bad moms make the best of the holiday: lots of alcohol, lots of forgiveness.

Little Big League is wholesome, safe, reassuringly familiar. On the other hand, Little Big League is a recycling project that lacks an original or exciting moment. [29 Jun 1994, p.31]

OK, so it’s ridiculous, but slightly ridiculous action movies are Johnson’s brand (they’re actually making a sequel to San Andreas), and what fans want in the context of that silliness are reasonably competent action and suspense.

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

Plummer and Farmiga seem like a potential dream team, but the pairing instantly feels wrong – they don’t scan as father and daughter, and Plummer’s continental bearing seems ill-suited to his character’s backstory.

No neuralizers needed for Men In Black: International — you’ll forget you’ve seen it not long after walking out.

Though fact-based movies are often guilty of bending truth to improve a story, Finding Steve McQueen goes in the other direction, downplaying strange-but-true elements that might have helped its saggy narrative.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

Director Wes Ball allows nearly every scene to overstay its welcome.

Robert's relationship with Elizabeth is actually one of the film's better features – it is here that Pine's low-key charisma is put to its best use, and his chemistry with Pugh is useful in establishing the emotional foundation of their resilient marriage, which held together during the times of defeat, separation, and victory.

Graham has crafted some decent monologues for her characters.... But, even at a hair over an hour and a half, the movie would benefit from a good trim, one that might give the movie’s parallel romantic stories more shape and snap.

Much rides on the actors’ ability to connect as they brush aside the obvious credibility obstacles, and the movie’s pop genericism doesn’t help — half the movie’s running time feels like it’s a pop music montage of the fetching young couple kissing, nuzzling, holding hands, so it often feels less like an ad for Invisaline.

The plot particulars are flimsy and laughable by design — this Shaft has been put together by folks with an instinct for comedy.

if I want to know what Will Smith looked like in his 20s, I can always return, happily, to Men in Black.

It's formatted entertainment aimed at undiscriminating children, full of stale little bits like music video interludes, and obvious rehashing of Home Alone situations in which Culkin's resourceful character outsmarts adults. [17 Jun 1994, p.57]

In the end, a coherent tone eludes Elba, but he shows promise as a scene-setter, and the movie displays an effective use of color.

The movie pitches Connie’s behavior as the spur-of-the-moment improvisations of a hustler out to save his brother, often played for laughs, but a ruthlessness shows through. This adds a toxic tone to scenes that involve immigrants and minorities, though this is probably unintended.

A Heathers meets The Purge meets Russ Meyer free-for-all that takes elements of the Salem witch trials and transposes them to the age of the internet. That's a lot to take on, and there are diminishing returns by the time the movie reaches its bloody conclusion.

There are certain lines in certain movies that could be used to warn a certain kind of viewer to stay away. Such as: "We like the same merlot." It tells you everything you need to know about Playing by Heart, an ensemble drama about upper-middle-class people whose characters are defined mostly by their fabulous homes and apartments. [22 Jan 1999, p.47]

Years from now, chances are that when people sit around and talk enthusiastically about that movie with Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the subject is most likely to be Kong: Skull Island.

The story is ridiculous, the digressions many, but it’s all intended to be part of the fun. Like Besson’s "The Fifth Element," we’re mainly meant to enjoy the sensation of watching wacky green-screen worlds unfold before us.

The incident on the train accounts for just a few minutes of screen time — for another 90 minutes they’re in a flatlined buddy movie, without much help from Eastwood (he insisted they not train as actors) or the screenplay.

Leisure Seeker leans heavily on the charm of its two veteran leads. Sutherland and Mirren work hard to establish John and Ella as a couple worth pulling for, even as we begin to suspect that what they want is to go out on their own terms.

Half the movie has a game McCarthy starring in scenes that live up to the promise of the movie’s title (’80s dance off! Bust a move!), and yet there are major plot points built around this same woman’s fear of public speaking. It has you longing for the narrative consistency of Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School.

Waters' novel was content to let the evil within Hundreds Hall remain shapeless and nameless. Director Lenny Abrahamson's (Room) movie wants to give it definite shape, and even a name, though the movie is not better for it.

There are a few moments wherein Schumer has a chance to successfully deploy the brash, take-me-as-I-am persona she has cultivated on stage and in her starring debut, Trainwreck, but mostly the script shows signs of having been awkwardly retrofitted to accommodate the star and her brand.

Lanthimos is not Euripides, and not capable of — or interested in — staging a tragedy. And his aim to make something horrifying or at least excruciating out of this scenario gets lost in the iciness of the presentation.

The action is frantic and brutal, and the movie itself has an ugly tone.

For a movie that presents itself as formally inventive, developments in Brad’s Status are a little too easy to guess.

The movie’s distinguishing feature is its inclination to lurid violence. Every so often, a depraved Russian hit man shows up to murder and torture one of the characters, mostly to allow director Francis Lawrence to show yet another naked and brutalized woman splayed on a shower floor, or in a bathtub red with blood.

Clockwatchers is an updated 9 to 5, and as such, replaces that movie's straightfoward story of liberation from male oppression with something more Generation X-ish - liberation from a kind of self-imposed malaise. [12 Jun 1998, p.F7]

What is Cooper after here? He seems to want us to gasp at the naturalistic horror of it all, drawn from history and accompanied with the sober denunciation of actual frontier massacres (Blocker is a veteran of Wounded Knee), but the parade of grotesque violence (murders, rapes, suicides) suggests something more surreal, less literal.

What Sugar Hill lacks is modulation. The entire movie is played at the same high level of dramatic intensity - tragedy piled on tragedy, confrontation piled on confrontation, grand speech upon grand speech. Impassioned though this approach is, it eventually takes on a cumulative feeling of bombast. [25 Feb 1994, p.38]

Dark Phoenix has a cast of lame-duck actors wearing expressions that say, “Check, please,” and the movie has the kind of knotty, suspenseless plotting that makes the veins in your head throb.

Whatever slim chance this picture had of emerging as the sports version of "King of Comedy" evaporates amid a muddled plot and a thoroughly unconvincing feel-good ending. [19 Apr 1996, p.42]

Not long into Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, it becomes clear that the movie is never going to make what you might call sense.

Gore is his own form of renewable energy. He is tireless, never wavers in his devotion to his crusade — an apt term in “Truth to Power,” which invokes Pope Francis and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The movie’s money line has Gore (he repeats it in virtually every interview) invoking the Book of Revelation.

In conceptual terms, the movie has more in common with Scream, in that it’s an examination of genre clichés (in this case romantic comedies) that both satirizes and embraces them.

Flash provides some comic relief...Aquaman some terse tough guy laughs, but the jokes land stiffly, and Wonder Woman, recently the star of her own blockbuster movie, is back to being part of a superhero tag-team, taking turns in the end at beating on Steppenwolf.

This movie has nearly as high a body count as "Us"...Is this satire? Homage? More like the desperation of a director who’s supplanted “vision” for emotion. The story leaves Dumbo without meaningful links to the human characters, and the scattered story of Farrell’s cohering family falls flat.

While the movie serves as a pleasant piece of nostalgia, it’s not very deeply felt, and mostly serves to remind us of other, better movies that have covered similar territory, like Adventureland.

The movie is swimming with ideas, but it values concept over character to a problematic degree. The Cured maps out an increasingly elaborate set of internal rules that govern its characters without defining or deepening them.

The movie sometimes gets airborne, but with an obvious strain that hurts an airy fantasy like "North." [22 Jul 1994, p.31]

A slow-moving legal thriller that fills the many idle moments with scenes plucked from a random selection of Hollywood standards. [17 Feb 1995, p.52]

Wilson and Hathaway don’t click. The characters feel as if they were workshopped separately, and efforts to combine their comic energy on screen fall flat.

The internal logic of the movie is complex, confusing, and as a result the movie is not very much fun.

Forster does some interesting visual work here to suggest the perspective of a person who is (legally) blind, but in general, when your thriller requires the heroic intervention of an ophthalmologist, you’re in trouble.

It all feels flat-footed and pretentious.

The only creepy things about Brightburn, though, are its labored, derivative narrative, its giddy sadism (it gets off on Brandon’s adolescent power trip, and expects its audience to do the same), and its cynical built-in branding.

Who wrote this -- Oliver North?

A very sloppy piece of work, apart from the cinematography, which is pretty, and the Mills Brothers songs, which are fantastic.

It's rare that a movie so cleverly conceived is so poorly executed.

At times, Jarecki seems to be actively avoiding insight and empathy.

Gotti ends up feeling like a kitschy assemblage of other directors’ ideas.

Stories about the way men and women negotiate sex, power, money, work and relationships — Anastasia ends up working for a company Christian owns — should make the Fifty Shades trilogy relevant and exciting. They are, somewhat mysteriously, the opposite of that.

I give Elba enormous credit for maintaining a straight face — he and Taylor account for the movie’s few good moments — but the silly script seems to have awakened the dormant ham in McConaughey.

The fact that it’s a Razzie contender, of course, is no reason not to see it. In fact it could be an inducement — Razzie movies can be quite fun.

The chemistry between these two attractive people and fine actors is unaccountably bad.

The point of this enterprise is to put the slinky, husky-voiced Fiorentino into compromising positions with as many men as possible and to provide director William Friedkin (The French Connection) with an excuse to stage three long chase scenes. Seems like everybody got what they wanted out of this thing except for us. [13 Oct 1995, p.48]

There is mismatch of tone and content throughout The Kitchen, which is never sure how to pair its lurid turns of plot with its intersectional feminist ambitions.

The picture is apparently intended to mimic the bleak futurism of Blade Runner, but with its cheap look, punk styling and dirty-looking restrooms, Johnny Mnemonic looks more likes a bad East Village nightclub. Furthermore, Longo's staging of action sequences is bland, and he doesn't seem to understand character development at all. [26 May 1995, p.36]

Frankenheimer and company, perhaps realizing they were making a bad movie, have taken steps to make "Dr. Moreau" gloriously bad, with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter. [23 Aug 1996, p.44]

It's a pretentious, laughable Hollywood-type bomb that touches on police brutality and government cover-ups, but ends up being a movie about hats. [26 Apr 1996, p.54]

There is the potential here for an engaging adventure/survival tale, wrapped in a story of a woman finding her self-confidence by drawing on untapped reserves of strength. But Kormákur fails to find any shape in the narrative of Tami’s actual or psychological journey.

The Snowman is reminder that movies are hard to make, highly collaborative, often chaotic, and hundreds of things can go wrong. Here, everything did.

One of the worst Christmas comedies in history and certainly one of the worst pictures of the year, Trapped in Paradise is a movie with exactly one laugh. [02 Dec 1994, p.77]

Killing Zoe is the worst kind of bad movie, a violent comedy that's not funny. [14 Sep 1994, p.35]

Hollywood movies with anti-profiteering themes always strikes me as tacky. We're talking about an industry, after all, that sends trade reps all over the globe, lobbying other countries to prosecute anyone trying to dupe a copy of "Waterworld." There is a cheaper way to protect U.S.-made movie products. Keep making movies as bad as "Chain Reaction." No one will want to copy them. [2 Aug 1996, p.32]