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]