Lawrence Toppman

You cannot always judge movies by their titles, but you sometimes get good advice. The sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, supplies its own five-word review.

This stale, redundant story goes round in the same tight circles, revealing one piddling new secret and containing one unconvincing change of character.

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

If this project is some kind of huge in-joke, I’m willing to admit I didn’t get it. But if I did get it (and I’m afraid I did), it’s a huge disappointment.

No characterization. A plot you could write on a single sheet of toilet paper. Sadistic violence we’re meant to cheer. A surprise that wouldn’t fool anyone who left the theater after the opening credits and came back for the last 10 minutes.

For all the talk about passion, the main feeling Youth conveys is self-pity.

At the center of the film, like a man trying to pull a donkey out of a peat bog, stands Craig: inexpressive, uninflected and obviously tired. Perhaps he’s trying to play a chap who never allows himself access to his emotions, for fear loved ones may be snatched away, but he just looks like an actor who wishes he could quit his job.

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

Writer Simon Fuchs begins with a reasonable idea – we’re all likely to be curious about the origins of Peter Pan – and does unreasonable things ever after.

I think Baumbach and Gerwig mean Brooke to be a life-affirming free spirit who can’t find a place in our mercenary world. Instead, she comes off as selfish, rude, deluded, irresponsible and mean-spirited.

Plotting has never been writer-director Allen’s strong point, and the story falls apart. It depends on coincidences that are unlikely individually and ridiculous together.

To call the film “unwatchable” is to unfairly insult Josée Deshaies; his lush cinematography delights the eye when the camera roams around Saint Laurent’s workrooms. But “incomprehensible,” “interminable” and “immaterial” all apply.

It’s hard to stay connected to a disaster film where the biggest disaster is the script.

The most frustrating thing about the movie (as with “Cloud Atlas”) is that it could’ve been memorable, had the Wachowskis turned their vision over to more talented storytellers.

The rest of the film couldn’t convince a sixth-grader it might happen. CIA agents search a home for evidence but leave the front door unlocked and unguarded, so Devereaux sneaks in and knocks them out.

Many movies require us to turn off our brains, and many rely on clichés and/or coincidences. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to do both, and Into the Storm has that in spades.

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

Here’s something I never expected to say, something I doubt I’d have believed if someone else had said it to me: Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street.

What do you get? A reboot of "The Lone Ranger” that metaphorically drags this noble story – and literally drags its title character – through a steaming heap of horse droppings.

It begins as energetic, clichéd nonsense and ends as irritating, clichéd nonsense.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

The movie that's meant to be his (Apatow) most personal turns out to be his most dully generic.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

The film's filled with inconsequential scenes and supporting characters who add useless atmosphere or by-the-book diversity.

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

The Critic's Code of Honor forbids me from explaining in detail why the storytelling is so inept, because I'd have to spoil the silly surprises. So I'll say only this: You can interpret the climax two ways, and both will probably infuriate you.

You can get all of this free on television any week, so why pay for it?

This film might have been daringly funny 10 years ago, even with its broadest elements intact. Now it's comfortable as old slippers and unthreatening as a sleeping kitten.

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.

Totally underwhelming.

It's an uncoordinated, flailing hodgepodge of music videos, chases, crashes and moronic plot twists.

Director Vondie Curtis-Hall has managed to top (or should I say "bottom"?) his last theatrical release, Mariah Carey's "Glitter," with a movie that offers not one praiseworthy moment: not a scene, not a performance, not a technical achievement, not even a line of dialogue.

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

We waited 10 years for a sequel to the movie version of "The X-Files" – and the best Chris Carter could do is The X-Files: I Want to Believe?

Epps emerges mostly unscathed, and Dutton gives an excellent performance; he's as able before the camera as he is inept behind it.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

Bad actors, bad music and bad plot make it a hellish bummer.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

Dragonheart is all dragon, no heart. [31 May 1996, p.3E]

See not only the original "Detective" but the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters film "Pennies From Heaven." If you insist on giving Downey and company $8 instead, you'll be getting wooden nickels from Hell.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

How bad, really, could it be? I couldn't have guessed.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

Once again, something that might have been a faintly amusing sketch on "Saturday Night Live" -- maybe even a tolerable 30-minute short, had the writing been more clever -- gets tortured into the shape of a feature film.

Souza and Shelton throw in all kinds of ridiculous devices they learned in second-year screenwriting class.

OK, so no plot, really.

You won't see a single joke here you haven't encountered before, all in funnier forms.

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

You could dismiss it, as I do, as an impenetrable and insufferable ball of pseudo-philosophic twaddle.

You may enjoy "Quest for Camelot" if you have no sense of animation history, no sense of movie musical history and no sense of mythical history, especially the Arthurian legend. Otherwise, you'll wish you could drink yourself under the Round Table. [15 May 1998, p.9E]

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!

It's well-shot and well-edited by Hollywood standards, though special effects don't reach the top Hollywood level. The stars have their hearts in their work: Cameron and Johnson don't have great depth but give their all. Currie makes a subtle villain.

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

Visually compelling, relentlessly loud and so shallow you need just a fragment of your brain to follow it.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

Even if we leave aside the obvious time travel paradoxes, we can have a good horse laugh at the rest of the plot's inanities.

Attaching Chris Rock to I Think I Love My Wife is like chaining a Kentucky Derby winner to the merry-go-round in a petting zoo. His humor is hobbled, his personality dulled, his energy depleted. Who's responsible for this lapse in judgment? Chris Rock.

The special effects excite at first but wear out their welcome.

This script by the husband-and-wife team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean is hopelessly contrived and takes forever to get to the point. (I warn you: The film does not absolutely identify the killer.)

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

De Niro wears a shamefaced look most of the time, as if doubly embarrassed: He agreed to a movie he knew was worthless, yet he's too lazy or indifferent to give us his best.

I expected Get Rich or Die Tryin' to be gritty, scary, maybe disturbing or thought-provoking. What I didn't realize was that it would be so dull that any other effect it could have made was wiped away.

Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.

It's blah. Worse than blah, actually, because it's so stupid.

Wilson brings low-wattage amiability to his part, as always. Hudson's mismatched with him but tries to set him afire.

Self-respecting filmgoers will find this a "Walk" to dismember.

Plays like some uninformed seventh-grader's view of gay men.

The movie is as padded as Allen's jelly belly.

Campion has no clue how to sustain suspense and no actress of the caliber of Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman or Kate Winslet (her recent leading ladies) in the main role.

Messing may simply be one of those actresses who's the right size for TV and the wrong size for the big screen.

The filmmakers find "laughs" in sadistic violence.

Yet even the language, finally, becomes as inauthentic as the accents.

Like the Big E himself. It starts out fast, dangerous, sexy, confident, funny with an edge. It ends up confused, bloated, unable to leave the stage when it should.

I do have one overpowering Y2K fear: that Hollywood will keep belching out movies as excruciatingly dull, brutal, mindless and overlong as End of Days.

Dark Blue proves again what a remarkable actor Denzel Washington is. Too bad he's not in it.

Utterly generic.

Solaris is a film where people...often...speak... like... this, and the camera moves slowly across sterile interiors.

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.

Long before this interminable film reaches its bogus finale, you'll realize that the people in it aren't real.

Goes wrong in less than two minutes, which may be a world record for sequels to decent movies.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

Studios can release movies even more insultingly dumb, crudely assembled and cheaply produced than this one, though such an achievement will require some effort.

Interesting and idiotic elements almost exactly balance each other.

Kilmer is adequate, though he's always more interesting when allowed to play a character with a dark side; Patterson's too squeaky-clean for Kilmer to exploit the most useful part of his range. [12 Oct 1996, p.4G]

Everything about the film seems to have been done on the cheap. The music sounds like it came from a high school band.

The writers supply character traits that seem to point toward a pay-off but never reach one. People all end up as tight-lipped, indistinguishable automatons who plummet 50 feet down jagged rocks with scarcely a scratch.

Repeated lapses in continuity and common sense.

Affleck simply wasn't meant to play action heroes or tough guys. He's about as tough as tapioca pudding.

Designed to appeal to people who thought "She's All That" was too mentally demanding.

Though the writing doesn't work, you have to give Burns credit for shrewd direction. He gets the best performances I've seen from Graham and Murphy.

It starts as enjoyable B-movie pulp, degenerates to camp, then turns into laughable lunacy.

Sandler proves even a hardened Israeli secret service agent can be an imbecilic juvenile.

It's theoretically possible to make a fascinating film about a thieving, self-indulgent, freebasing, treacherous scumbag who pimps his girlfriend to a gangster and contributes nothing to society. Wonderland isn't that film.

A frenzied, cacophonic cartoon.