Gary Thompson

Yes, Tolkien is a little on-the-nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well-cast, and well-acted.

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.

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

It’s an obvious formula, but when the movie sticks to it, it works well enough; Reynolds and Jackson have pretty decent chemistry.

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

The Ghost and the Darkness doesn't seem to know what to do with this unsettling bit of history. There is a little bit of Hemingway bullshit about manhood and courage and grace under pressure, but the movie always seems to be reaching for a philosophical/mystical edge that would have been better off in the hands of a director like Peter Weir. Instead, the job went to Stephen Hopkins, whose credits include "Nightmare on Elm Street 5" and "Predator 2," and whose taste for straightforward commercial thrills gets in the way of the stories more interesting possibilities. [11 Oct 1996, p.56]

The movie is a cheerful pastiche, unpretentious and efficient, and the giant shark, when it finally shows up, is a pretty good special effect, although I’m not sure I’d value it at $150 million (the amount of Chinese money it took to make the movie).

Even if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, you have a pretty good idea where the drama is headed. Still, The Upside nonetheless does an amiable job of taking you there, thanks to hard work by the two leads.

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.

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.

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.

Necessary Roughness has the right kind of rambunctious spirit for this kind of picture -- even if it's not quite as inventive as similar movies like the recent baseball send-up, Major League.

The movie needs an editor, or a bartender, to remind the director when he’s hit the two-hour mark: Last orders, Mr. Vaughn.

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.

While the movie is often dazzling, it’s also frequently dull.

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]

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.

All of this is in Hart's wheelhouse, and Night School might have fared better if it had surrendered completely to random comedy one-offs. It keeps coming back, though, to the desultory story of Teddy's strained romance, the least-compelling feature of the movie.

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

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.

Result[s] in pleasant but forgettable results.

There is a lot of plot in those final minutes, and don’t bother trying to outguess the magician. He pulls a rabbit out of a hat, just to distract you from the next rabbit.

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

It all adds up to a bicultural comedy that is good-natured if not especially or consistently well-written. The movie takes too long to get moving, stays a tad too long, and efforts to retrofit the movie as a vehicle for Derbez come at the expense of Faris, a talented comedian who has very little to do here.

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

It all feels flat-footed and pretentious.

Meyers-Shyer loves movies as much as the young men in Home Again and the best scenes reflect that.

It's a supremely goofy movie, and one that's almost hypnotically heedless of everything that is currently fashionable in Hollywood, especially in the inspirational teacher genre. You won't be inspired. On the other hand, you won't be bored. [19 Apr 1996, p.42]