Lawrence Toppman

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

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

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."

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

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

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

OK, so no plot, really.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

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

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.