Liam Lacey

Big, lavish and dumb as camel spit -- is proof that sometimes it's better to let sleeping genres lie.

The trouble is that Antichrist feels progressively symptomatic of a director losing heart.

A high-pedigree, low-interest affair that serves mostly as an exercise in postmortem speculation: Why is a project with so many prominent names attached to it so sterile and lifeless?

If you think Little sounds like something a 10-year-old might come up with after seeing Tom Hanks’ Big, you would be entirely correct.

Short, flashy and about as complex as a beer belch, Men in Black II is also brisk. The film clocks in at 88 minutes total running time, and it's loaded with new special effects and monsters.

The major problem with Around the World is that there's just not quite enough Chan, or at least the Chan we want to see, which is the acrobatic clown.

By the conclusion, the movie turns into the ursine answer to "Free Willy," veering dangerously close to New Age parody: Free your inner bear -- and begin to heal from the last time you got mauled.

A good-natured and well-acted small-town drama about midlife renewal, Gary Lundgren’s Phoenix, Oregon is the opposite of topical or urgent. That’s why it can be recommended as a distraction and a slice of comfort food.

Overall, Stalingrad is a bizarre concoction, part Putin-era patriotic chest-thumping and part creaky war melodrama, all set in a superbly recreated ruined city.

One of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results.

Lyrical, dreamy and too complicated for its own good.

Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.

Unassuming only in its title.

Having seen the TV series "Hogan's Heroes," we already know that a German prisoner of war camp can be cartooned; Hart's War goes further as a cartoon that takes itself seriously.

Has a deliberately minimalist, retro look to it as well.

All in all, it’s many prayers short of a revelation.

The superiority of the musical sequences, and laziness of the writing, creates a dynamic where you find yourself wishing the characters would shut up and dance.

Between a string of post-Friends dismal rom-coms, Aniston has succeeded in these kinds of grownup roles every few years. Here, she negotiates the character’s quirks and contradictions competently, but nothing short of a rewrite from scratch could make Cake palatable.

The differences between the two movies are, first, that Scoop is a comedy and, second, unlike "Match Point," it's not very good, as Allen also returns to pre-Match Point mediocre form.

Director David Dobkin, best known for comedies such as "Shanghai Nights" and "Wedding Crashers," demonstrates his serious intent mostly by paint-by-numbers psychology and a ponderous pace.

Too often, the script collapses into what feels like improvisation, in which the characters find a kind of common ground: Infantilism.

A spring-autumn romance that comes with side helpings of local colour and melodramatic backstory.

A high-school talent show, no doubt, but, at its best, well worth glorifying.

With its jazzy saxophone noodlings during the opening credits and its bruised black-and-blue look, it's so quaintly and conventionally pulp that you feel like filing a report with the cliché police.

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.

Though it's undoubtedly ingenious, for such a clever movie, it's a shame Rubber couldn't be more fun.

The movie is a preholiday trifle that’s mildly risqué and a lot sentimental.

Ultimately, his (Silver) film settles for a queasy mix of high-toned intentions and commercial compromises.

At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses with a series of swing-and-miss gags, often with an abusive twist.

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

Aside from Jones’s broadly entertaining performance as the egotistical Supreme Commander, the movie, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with the Pearl Earring), is a dud.

The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

Frankly, if I were Mrs. Claus, I might be looking for Santa Clause 3, outlining the grounds for annulment.

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

Though complete redemption of Brown's fiction may not be possible, Howard's new film at least represents an upgrade from a mortal to a venal movie sin.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

Though Sandler's resemblance to a pro athlete is indiscernible, his mockery of authority and his penchant for buffoonery and slapstick violence make him more of an heir to Reynolds than might be expected.

A bawdy comedy about male strippers that lives up to mediocre expectations, Back On the Strip is directed and co-written by Chris Spencer who has previously worked with the Wayan Brothers comedy team.

A first film from director Mark Palansky, written by sitcom veteran Leslie Caveny (Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You), and the two are obviously indebted to the fanciful imagination of Tim Burton.

Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.

Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

Whatever glimmers of cleverness Martian Child offers, it all comes to Earth with a thud in the shamelessly manipulative climax.

This mix of titillation and sentimentality can pass as family entertainment because 17 Again is so weightless, a succession of one-liners, sincere monologues and logical absurdities.

This one's just painful.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

Though Shark Tale will make waves at the multiplexes and move a lot of plastic toys at Burger King, the movie lacks real heart. It feels like a cold-blooded, always moving, profit-making machine.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

Writer Andy Breckman and director Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinnie ) don't even try to recapture or eclipse the past. Instead, they offer the movie a comfortable plug-in-and-play system for their well-known comic stars to be all that they can be. [29 Mar 1996]

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

At its best the movie is still innocent enough to slide past your guard, and inventive and lively enough to make the average Hollywood comedy seem to be on heavy tranquilizers.

The mainstream prominence of pornography gets a shove forward with the teen comedy, The Girl Next Door, an improbably-not-terrible teen sex comedy.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

With its wry tone and mild emotional disturbances, In the Land of Women is less a chick flick than a chick flicker.

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

Lions for Lambs appears to have taken its inspiration from Al Gore's stolid "An Inconvenient Truth," using the stage lecture and Power Point presentation in lieu of dramatic momentum.

Falling in the pillowy cleavage between mildly awful and slightly entertaining, Burlesque is a clichéd rags-to-diva story that culminates in a series of Christina Aguilera videos.

Relentlessly twee as all this is, Wasikowska's warmth and Hopper's off-beat timing (he's the son of the late Dennis Hopper) are appealing to watch.

An entertaining takeoff and a high-altitude ride eventually runs into some bumpy weather and a clumsy landing in Mike Newell's new comedy.

This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.

As directed by Bob Giraldi, well-known for his work in rock videos, Hiding Out manages to offer a brief catalogue of the cliches from both genres, before allowing the teen flick to take over. The film is essentially a series of comedy bits in the service of an MTV soundtrack. That soundtrack, which includes the first revelation of K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison's duet on Crying, may be the film's only creditable achievement. [10 Nov 1987]

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

As far as story is concerned, the whole thing feels like a rerun of a raucous Saturday-morning television show aimed at hell-raising five-year-olds.

A big bloated bore-o. Think of a combination of "Wild Wild West" and "Spy Kids."

Almost everything about this starring vehicle for Katharine Heigl feels borrowed from some previous romantic comedy.

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.

The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject.

The story is shockingly ordinary. The movie plays like an extended mediocre episode of the X-Files TV show or, for that matter, even a contemporary crime series such as CSI.

It's not so much a movie as a joint promotion for the National Basketball Association and teenaged rap and adolescent poster-boy Lil' Bow Wow.

Who really wants to go to an escape movie and have to work this hard to figure it out?

Rousing? Sort of. Never before, one feels, have so few given so much for so much real estate.

As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.

Here's a vote of gratitude for Samuel L. Jackson, who has become a specialist in making mediocre movies far more entertaining than they should be.

A welcome antidote to the usual seasonal sweetness.

Narrative-driven and determinedly unpredictable, The Disappearance of Finbar is true to its mandate as a mystery story to a fault. [18 Jul 1987]

The updated Dickensian sensibility of writer Craig Bartlett's story is appealing.

Even the visions of attractive half-dressed bodies lolling about in various Madrid bedrooms or leaping into spontaneous music videos don't prove compelling for long.

Eventually, Typhoon succumbs to the usual special-effects bombast and plot overkill.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.

Where it stumbles is in the script by Matt Healy, which is often clever, but never quite takes hold.

The result is that, rather than tragedy, this unfolds like a plodding morality tale in which Wrath and Cowardice play out their respective parts.

A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.

The resolution includes an overlong and underfunny chase scene.

Wheatley gives us one grotesque dream sequence of guests at a masquerade ball, but the rest is palely conventional. Like the character who gives the film its title, the adaptation is pretty much dead in the water.

Reminiscence doesn’t leave us much to remember it by, apart from those mournful CGI vistas of water-logged Miami.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.

Though much of it is glum and muddled, it does find an anchor in Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) as a gravely wise, ailing crime boss named Duke.

The goal is apparently a double exercise in heartfelt lessons and deep hilarity, but it's hard to tell because the pace feels so lethargic. Director and screenwriter Wil Shriner is a TV-sitcom veteran (Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond) whose idea of directing a movie is to make another sitcom, only four times as long.

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement.

Audiences looking for a so-bad-its-good bit of kitsch catharsis will likely be let down. The Meh – sorry, The Meg – is so calculatedly flattened out for international markets, especially its Chinese financiers, that even the dialogue feels as though it’s in translation.

Mangold's larger problem is trying to hold together a movie that jerks about in tone as much as it does location, veering between grisly humour and cutesy sentiments.

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.

This remake is distinctly a Farrelly brothers' flick -- sentimental, rambling and raunchy.

Fitfully daring, Pumpkin isn't quite sure what it's about -- the tone bounces between thudding satire and toothless camp parody -- but it's definitely a bad-mannered child of our times.

The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.

The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.

As Whatever Works creaks along, the attention-getting nastiness of the first half dissipates and it turns into just another Woody Allen overacted sex farce. Of all the insults hurled about in the film, perhaps the worst is its pandering conclusion. What exactly does Allen take his audience for? A bunch of mindless zombies?

What big ambitions you have, Grandma. And what a disappointingly modest follow-through.

It's the most jumbled and tonally confused movie yet.

It's more like a filmed allegory.

A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.

A talented cast and moments of brutal violence can't dislodge a sense of ho-hum predictability in Pride and Glory.

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

The movie is a competent formula kid flick stuffed to the dimples with movie deja vu, a sop to those Hollywood-bashing politicians who want old-fashioned family values on their celluloid. [17 Nov 1995]

For all these references to the fairytale, Sydney White soon takes an easier path, recycling familiar "Mean Girls" and "Revenge of the Nerds" scenarios.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

Never comes together as a persuasive whole. Instead of moral complexity, we get an overfamiliar pursuit tale and investigation story. Worse, the movie fails the first test of a thriller: It lacks any significant suspense.

The questions the movie raises have less to do with science than movie execution: Do the actors sound so robotic because they are playing robots well or humans badly? And did a machine write this dialogue? If so, could we please apply for an upgrade?

The Lost Skeleton also reminds you that real filmmaking -- the illusion of one event following another -- is actually a skill.

Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a sequel to his father Ivan’s hit 1984 comedy about paranormal exterminators, is an exercise in family homage and over-familiar exorcism.

The style here is much more in the spirit of the smash and slash of the Conan movies than the banter and computer-generated monsters of the Mummy movies.

A redemption allegory so poker-faced you might forget that redemption is supposed to be a good thing.

Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.

It's the same package with new wrapping.

While 88 has characters who have lots to say about the history of white supremacy, dark money in politics, and the delusion of fixing a corrupt system from within, this is a stiff, artless effort that barely makes the transition from explanatory journalism to fiction.

When you watch Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, there's often a sense that you're not just watching him perform in a movie, you're watching the next stage of his unfolding career plan.

Strictly for the midnight-movie crowd, Drive Angry serves up a non-stop stream of female nudity, flying body parts, gun battles and smart-alecky dialogue.

Actress Kristen Stewart – coolly intense, androgynous, and intelligent – remains the series' strongest asset, as Bela, the emotional centre of the story.

The plot is stale though some of the moves are fresh.

Estela Bravo's film Fidel, The Untold Story has the kitsch appeal of a farm implement on a restaurant wall, or an Andy Warhol Mao poster: Interesting, but not for its original purpose.

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

Sometimes researching the background of a movie proves more revealing than the film itself.

The movie rattles through ninety minutes of episodic jolts, the visual style is jumbled. Distinctive only in having a better effects budget than your average demons-in-the-attic quickie. While the super-parody elements offer a few snorts of amusement, the movie avoids taking on more complex ideas about Superman as an American ideal, though the filmmakers are obviously aware of the Bizarro context.

As rock-and-roll flicks go, director Joan Freeman's Satisfaction , is a real bar band of a movie; it's derivative, unambitious and uneven, but it's also not half bad. If you bend your mind around its most awkward moments, it also offers at least some of what the title promises. [19 Feb 1988]

Mortal Engines, which is produced by Peter Jackson and written by the team behind the Lord of the Rings films, is grandly, majestically, epically inert, a high-concept fantasy with a wide chasm between the money we see up on the screen and poverty of the story.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"

[Hoffman] gives gross-out comedy a whole new depth.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

Watts evokes a classic Hitchcockian virgin-whore duality.

As a testimonial to the powers of creativity and the imagination, Barney's Great Adventure is pretty unconvincing. [03 Apr 1998, p.C7]

As with so many movies where the script constructs experiences that are contrived and off-putting, you hope the actors can capture the emotional truth of some scenes, even if the entire apparatus feels bogus.

Vardalos has a talent, and there is one sequence in the movie that works. In the romantic subplot, Connie falls for Peaches' brother Jeff (David Duchovny, as Vardalos's sleepy, hunk replacement for John Corbett in Greek Wedding).

Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable, a shopworn gothic plot focusing on stereotypical characters with disabilities, with no ambitions beyond playing a simple-minded audience head game.

If Jobs had been a producer on Jobs, he would have sent it back to the lab for a redesign.

Providing expectations are kept low, there’s some fun to be had in the elaborately preposterous action set-pieces, and especially Jason Patric’s campy performance as the movie’s villain.

The movie, which is roughly as predictable as the attraction of flies to dung, is a hackneyed mix of sentimentality and anarchic comedy.

With less expensive actors, it might just have been called Chase Movie, and played for laughs.

The premise feels so quaint it might as well be framed by Cinderella-like animated bluebirds.

Taken in micro-doses, Peter Rabbit 2 has clever moments and a relentless eagerness to please. But the movie trips over itself when it attempts to satirize what it practices.

Sad news for Bard watchers: Julie Taymor's adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is not such stuff as dreams are made on.

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

For most of its duration, Suicide Kings turns into something like a hoary murder-mystery theatre piece in the Agatha Christie/Clue tradition.

A movie with a sincere social message and an exploitation movie sensibility, Antebellum is a clumsy cousin of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, an allegory of racism in a horror film about entrapment that goes wide of the mark.

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (who co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) offers nothing unexpected here, in what amounts to a complicated exercise in paint-by-numbers movie-making.

A sweet and sloppy jumble of fantasy, sentimentality, comedy and soul-searching that feels like a sitcom that never got past the pilot stage.

Slick and slight.

The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

The plot creaks along reasonably effectively and Sellers' solo sequences - the disguises, the pratfalls and the speech mannerisms - are familiar, but fun. [18 Dec 1982]

Price has written a screenplay that may be complex and ambitious to a fault.

Yes, Final Destination 3 is a roller-coaster ride of a movie from start to -- well, only about 10 minutes later. The fun part is over and we settle down to watch a sadistic assembly line of characters making premature exits.

Director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out," "Species"), working from a script by Leslie Bohem ("Daylight"),does a serviceable job, wrapping his narrative around the big kabooms, but the real interest comes from the extraordinary barrage of sound and spectacle.

Except the real Nazis, every character in The Aftermath has good intentions, marred by some moments of poor impulse control. And they are a little dull.

If this were a pilot for a TV series, home audiences might be willing to baby it along until it grows stronger. As a stand-alone movie, this particular mutation looks like a badly-adapted dead-end.

Each of the actors has strong moments but the relentless intensity becomes monotonous.

Director Steve Oedekerk, who also wrote the script, simply provides a frame for the string of Carrey sight gags, which come fast and constantly. Some work, some fall flat, but the overall momentum is never allowed to flag seriously.

The sharks are disappointingly not scary but they’re interesting-looking with their plastic torpedo heads and serrated-saw smiles. When they leap out of the dark to dismember bodies, they bloody the waters in swirling lava lamp patterns that feel almost peaceful. Or perhaps I’m just trying to find a nicer way to say dull.

Breezy, sleazy and a little bit wheezy, The Big Bounce combines a short running time, a portrait of island-life corruption, and a retro surf-and-scam plot. Throw in a vintage, funky-soul soundtrack and you have the ingredients of ever so many bad television shows.

In the battle between dystopian science-fiction movies about butt-kicking young heroines, the new Divergent movie, Insurgent, is actually slightly more believably glum than the third Hunger Games movie, "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1."

As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.

Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.

Though by no means a good movie, The Internship floats along for fairly well for about half its length, thanks to the easy interplay between the two stars and a certain melancholic topicality.

In a film that offers itself as a Gump-esque moral fable, Phenomenon could serve as a case study of When Smart Films Fail.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

It's a movie about a nice guy with a lot of friends who dies. It's not really about the wider tragedy the film aspires to represent.

Crude, rude, nasty fun.

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

Somewhere in literary afterlife, dear reader, Jane Austen has just rolled over and reached for her musket.

Trying to pick faults with a sound-and-spectacle juggernaut like Armageddon is like taking an ant gun to an elephant: All the movie's staggering conventional weaknesses -- ludicrous plot, weak characterization, incomprehensible staging and ambient racket -- are irrelevant.

This entry has been described as a “cousin” to the other movies. Specifically, The Marked Ones is a Hispanic cousin, customized for Latino audiences in the United States where the series is particularly popular.

The film is too slapdash and self-serving to take seriously (it’s release is timed to the precede thesame-named album’s release next month), but it’s a casually entertaining trip, aimed at fans of the charismatic rapper and his recreational substance of choice.

The one thing that’s briefly enjoyable about From Paris with Love is John Travolta’s appearance. In a black leather jacket, with a shaved bald head and a goatee and a perpetual scarf to hide his jowls, he looks like a well-fed pimp or a gay bear.

All of this is accomplished with buckets of blood, but almost no sense of flesh: It's hard to recall a more sexless vampire flick.

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

But don't worry about remembering the characters - the movie certainly doesn't.

All in all, the new movie version of Leave It To Beaver is faithful to the genial instructive spirit of the TV show, as well as to a recurring theme, Ward's constant adjustments to the Beav's underachieving ways. [22 Aug 1997, p.C5]

Well-intentioned but emotionally straitjacketed.

A wearying spoof, the film, with its Regency-era setting, takes a smart, sombre drama and turns it into a juvenile inanity.

Ultimately, Next is just the next Nic Cage vehicle, another quirky story that allows him to do his patented neurotic balancing act in an askew world. The problem here is not just that Cage's shtick is wearing as thin as his hair; the role is a bad fit.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not bad, as in the sense of inept; it's artful enough to show how truly trite it is.

Hathaway may be in a royal rut, but the tiara seems to fit.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

There’s nothing here that sparks surprise. The film remains mechanical and stilted, like some grim combination of taxidermy and ventriloquism.

A try-anything, fitfully amusing muddle that wears its mocking cynicism a bit too proudly.

Director Irwin Winkler (Night and the City)is rarely better than pedestrian in handling this story. At worst, the dramatic elements are plain clumsy.

The film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.

The terror sequences (not only animals but monsoons and earthquakes and quicksand) are scary until they get monotonous: after a while, you have a sense you're watching a clip reel from every Hollywood disaster flick ever made.

As shrill, partly-animated musicals about singing vermin go, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel really isn't all that bad.

Remember Pam? Lost in the Himalayas of big egos and overacting, she's the invisible character here. If they create a special Oscar for the most thankless part in an ensemble comedy, Teri Polo is a shoe-in.

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

Korean-American actor and former model Yune (who played a similar role in "Die Another Day," the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond film) makes a colourful villain – handsome and insufferably assured, and also an unchivalrous sadist who kicks around the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo in a pageboy wig) as though she’s a hacky sack.

I was intrigued to find that Finding You was not produced by an AI romance plot generator, but an actual book — Jenny B. Jones’ 2011 YA novel, There You’ll Find Me.

Perhaps the only scary thing about the new horror movie The Curse of La Llarona is the fear of mispronouncing the title.

No doubt the audiences in the Coliseum would offer a thumbs-up to the scale of the destruction, though even they might have had some quibbles about the special effects, which, too often, resemble a very large pile of melting crayons.

Most of the personality work in the film is left to Steve Zahn.

Only a few events happen in this minimalist film, and most of them keep getting repeated through most of its running time.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.

Running Scared's relationship to "The Cooler" is roughly that of industrial metal to a quaint torch song.

Throbbing musical crescendos and flickery flashbacks abound but apart from some outlandish plot machinations, nothing here is good or bad enough to be memorable.

White Chicks could and should be a much more mischievous movie. A half-dozen writers have managed to create a succession of thin sketches that add up to "Some Like It Warmed Over," with a touch of stink.

A movie about a robot policeman given a childlike conscience, Chappie is one of those incongruous Franken-films that’s simultaneously bombastically brutal and treacly. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial crossed with Transformers, or RoboCop starring Jar Jar Binks, it’s a recipe guaranteed to produce aesthetic indigestion.

In this Willy Wonka-like animated world where multihued candies move about on assembly lines, the constant introduction to Rube Goldberg-style devices and slapstick action grows increasingly tiresome.

There’s a sense that the film is attempting to navigate a sort of Atom Egoyan-like exploration of the ripple effects of trauma but it stumbles over a mishmash of a screenplay — the clumsy fragmentary flashbacks, the rushed climax and time-jumping, cross-cutting wind-up — none of which are improved by David Fleming and Hans Zimmer’s generic thriller score.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is not the heart-warming, life-affirming, feel-good hit of the summer. Let Pocahantas and Casper provide the hugs and lessons. The Power Rangers, as usual, are on hand to kick intergalactic butt. [30 June 1995]

Quaid and Whitaker, who serve more or less as the designated humans in this clockwork contraption of a film, are capable in corny roles, but otherwise Vantage Point is as stuffed with cardboard performances and expositional speeches as any seventies disaster flick.

It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

The confrontations involve a lot of prolonged, quasi-slapstick bullet-spraying firefights, which are hard on windows… and on viewers’ patience.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

A movie so hysterical it worked best as a black comedy.

With its glum litany of naked corpses and mutilations, and understated actors looking bluish under the morgue's fluorescent lights, Nightwatch drains the fun out of horror. [17 Apr 1998]

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

3 Days to Kill is a comic variation on the "Taken" movies, which Besson also co-wrote and produced, starring Liam Neeson as a daughter-rescuing spy.

The movie is like a glass of Sprite that has been left on the counter too long: transparent, sweet and flat.

In a summer of low movie expectations and worse results, Fantastic Four is a not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.

A plot so preposterous it could only have emerged from the underground comic world.

There's a scientific law to be discerned here that producers would be well to heed: Mediocre movies start to drag as soon as the action speeds up; when the explosions start, they fall to pieces.

Coming from writers responsible for such material as "Snow Dogs" and "The 6th Day," National Treasure is not so much a no-brainer as a brain-stunner, so audaciously ridiculous you are initially intrigued, then soon irritated by its incoherence.

Continuing directly from where 2010’s "Insidious" left off, Insidious: Chapter 2 follows the further misfortunes of the Lambert family with diminishing insidious rewards.

The new Jason Statham movie Homefront aims to be retro, greasy comfort food but despite its lowly ambitions, there’s barely enough spice here to merit a decent burp.

None of it rings true, except perhaps the presence of an ambitious local TV news reporter (Kyra Sedgwick) who begins recording every macabre moment with relish.

Parents should find the warm-and-fuzzy sentiments of the movie tolerable, mostly thanks to the reliable star, Michael Keaton. [11 Dec 1998, p.C3]

Deep Impact, a triple-strand ensemble disaster flick, has a few good opening minutes, the biggest tidal wave you've ever seen in the closing minutes, and a cluster of little meandering melodramas in between.

As a message movie, it's preachy without being serious; for an action movie, there's a lot of racket but not much fun.

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

There are moments of salty wit to its teen TV sensibility, and the story offers proof, once again, than there are few stories that can't be adapted to the theme of teenaged popularity politics.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

What gets sacrificed on the altar of this new franchise launch is any real sense of fun.

This movie is exceptionally brutal, cruel, savage and without conscience -- and that's just the comic parts. In contrast, the violent action sequences are quite entertaining.

There’s little here to improve upon the stilted quality of the original, and it’s even more cumbersomely plotted.

The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen.

Irresistibly funny in its brightest moments. At other times, this comedy about a black-white culture clash sags until it scrapes bottom.

Every stage of the race and chase is announced on a webcast conducted by the secret impresario of the illegal De Leon race, a billionaire car enthusiast known as the Monarch, who “nobody knows.” Actually, the Monarch is clearly visible in a corner of the computer screen and he’s played, with jive-spouting brio by Michael Keaton. Hey, the movie isn’t called Need for Logic.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this greatest-hits patchwork approach or the correct racially diverse, girl-power script from Ashleigh Powell. There’s also nothing new or necessary about this jumbled, pretty mess of a movie, which barely covers the seams between its varied pilferings.

Sean Penn smokes, glowers and shows off his knotty naked torso in this vain, risible misfire of a thriller about a reformed killer, from "Taken" director Pierre Morel.

After the first five minutes of Down Periscope, though, you'll be more likely be thinking Voyage to the Bottom of the Dregs. As with Ellen DeGeneres's Mr. Wrong, this is the sort of film you expect a big TV star to do before he's successful, not after. [01 Mar 1996]

Apparently intended as a blend of "Bridesmaids" and "The First Wives Club," it’s often oddly engrossing, almost despite itself, largely thanks to the performances and the free rein the director gives his stars.

Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.

Bedtime Stories does divide into two types of comedy: There's the story comedy, in which Skeeter dresses in costume when he performs slapstick and insults people, and then there are the real-life scenes, when he does the same things in regular clothes.

Though there are a few annoying moments when the actors get in the way of the scenery, mostly it succeeds.

The most compelling performance here belongs to the Indonesian actor and martial artist Iko Uwais, who became famous in The Raid movies. Here, he plays the “asset” who must be taken out of the country. Uwais’ hand-and-foot battles are genuinely explosive and when he’s not fighting, he doesn’t say much, which is a welcome relief from all the rest of the babble.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

Gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting personality of its own.

As the movie flips through familiar Bourne/Bond tropes, the dialogue by David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke, feels clichéd to the point of parody, with lines like “It’s like The Hindenburg crashed into The Titanic!” Or, “I think I know why he’s as good as you. He is you!” Only, let’s be honest, not as good.

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.

Well-intended but maladroit, with a clever premise and cute animation that are undermined by the trite sci-fi parody plot and manic, unfunny banter.

Occasionally, the cast rises above the material.

A movie with a confident sense of its own worthlessness, it speeds by in a flurry of candy-coloured cars, bare midriffs, screaming engines and a pulsing rap soundtrack.

Mediocre movie.

Sporadically funny, twisted for sure, it risks becoming as repetitive and shrill as the kinds of programs it satirizes.

The best sequence is a five-minute set-piece where Clouseau struggles with an accent coach to learn how to order a hamburger like an American.

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

For a movie aimed at children, Shark Boy and Lava Girl is gloomy.

Except for The Fat Boys, who have some deft comic passes, nobody is required to act, or seems capable of it. But for what Krush Groove is - an unambitious film directed at a black teenage audience - it has its good points. [26 Nov 1985]

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

What should have sizzled fizzles.

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

Eccentric and misguided enough to be almost perversely fascinating, the film doesn’t lack nerve; it’s just not very good.

Though far from a disaster of Biblical proportions, Evan Almighty is a mild, sporadically funny comedy in an oversized sentimental frame.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

Throughout, Terence Blanchard's score swells and sweeps, reminding us, at every moment, what we're supposed to feel. If only we knew what we were supposed to think of this trite mess.

Feels stale, bloated and willing to get by on sheer familiarity.

The music, at least, is welcome.

What if Holden Caulfield turned into Charles Bronson? That piquant premise underlies the lively but confused teen exploitation film, Tuff Turf.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

The French director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, "The Artist," is everything "The Artist" was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

As for De Niro, he seems to have licence to do what he wants here, without much help from the writers.

The most disturbing aspect of the movie is not the sex scenes (shot from the waist up) but her face, especially in her porn-star persona: a frozen little smiling mask that suggests a paradoxically intense vacancy.

Love Ranch bounces between tongue-in-cheek wackiness and soapy melodrama while rarely hitting a true note.

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

The trouble is that the plot is so elliptical to be almost unfollowable (though it helps to have seen the trailer).

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

The fun of Biker Boyz should be in the racing, and though director Reggie Rock Bythewood throws around a lot of techniques, nothing really ignites.

A paint-by-numbers vigilante movie with the usual rogue cop, murdered wife and trail of vengeance.