Mick LaSalle

Murder at 1600 has velocity and excitement, and that takes it a long way. It stars Wesley Snipes, which takes it a bit farther. And it's also lightweight, cliched and borderline ridiculous, which takes it back a few pegs.

If you're like me and think that any Pacino movie is sort of worth seeing, so long as he never says, "Hoo-ha," then 88 Minutes won't be a total disappointment.

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

These guys are very normal off stage, making them easy to like and not very exciting to watch.

Memphis Belle goes off in several different directions at once, and the result is a movie that's scattered and unfocused. [12 Oct 1990, E1]

Unfortunately, structural flaws and a built-in lack of suspense keep it from being nearly as moving as it was intended to be.

Greed is boring.

What's impressive about Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats is how he marries his goofy, comic side with his dramatic side.

It should have been the poker equivalent of "The Hustler." But it suffers from iron-poor blood. No energy. It just lies there.

Instead of building in impact, the film feels smaller as the cast dwindles. You get the feeling that the most important actors are getting killed first, so that they can go off to act in better movies. [20 Apr 1994, p.E5]

Only partly successful.

Ladybugs isn't a very good movie; but it's a Rodney Dangerfield movie, and that's not bad. They used to call pictures like this ''star vehicles.'' Here the story, the plot, the other actors and everything else serve as nothing but a bland backdrop for Rodney Dangerfield's humor and appeal. [28 March 1992, p.C3]

Has no insights, no point, no urgency and no importance.

Even a mediocre David Mamet movie is still a David Mamet movie. That means there are lines to savor, partly because the lines are so good, partly because they are so Mamet.

The film, actually, is a little like Reeves himself: It starts promisingly and trails off into indistinctness and mystery.

The material is ripe for black comedy, but Stewart’s screenplay, staying true to Bahari’s real-life experience, steers a middle course. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and sometimes absurd, but never any of those things fully, or effectively.

Almost all of its screen time is taken up with explosions, chases, shootouts, heads coming off, folks getting sliced in half -- and the odd thing about it is that after 40 minutes, it's not disturbing anymore. Just dull. [21 Nov 1990, p.E1]

Epps is a leading man on the rise, and Cool J. is something to see.

The lesson here is something we already know but sometimes don’t admit: A movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be good. Sometimes it can just be nonsense that’s easy to watch. “The 355” is a guilty pleasure, only don’t waste time feeling guilty.

Easy Money takes its time telling us how all the fortunes of all three men intersect, and the movie's failing - or at least its significant imperfection - is that when the stories and lifelines do converge, the results just aren't satisfying.

Blue Gate Crossing is 85 minutes of wistful gloom.

Things are a little off. The style is gritty 1970s-style crime thriller, but the morals are straight out of 2007, and the movie is set in 1988.

The good news is that the pace picks up — Giant Little Ones actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about – not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.

Some of the best bits of the original movie are replayed here but lose their punch the second time around - the horse manure bit, the skate board sequence. Maybe people who never saw the first movie will get a big kick out of them. [22 Nov 1989, p.E1]

A mildly pleasing romantic comedy, a trifle held together by Drew Barrymore's charm and a decent high-concept gimmick.

The Mummy is the rare Cruise film that doesn’t quite give audiences their money’s worth.

This is the sequel to “The Craft,” folks. For what it is, the movie’s OK, except that it tried to be more than it is, and it isn’t.

Considering what the filmmakers had to work with, and the fact that it has all been done before, Freddy Vs. Jason isn't bad. And sometimes not bad is almost good.

It's a film of unquestioned visual artistry, and the filmmakers' empathy and human understanding are apparent moment to moment, scene by scene. But despite sensitive performances, it's an experiment that fizzles.

Little White Lies is never boring, always watchable, always reasonably rewarding. It's just that, when it's over, 2 1/2 hours seems too big an investment for just pretty good.

Stomp the Yard, at nearly two hours, has a decent story, a good subject and a horrible plot.

Intermittently entertaining.

The showcasing of Basinger's body becomes ludicrous. Twice she is shown taking a shower. In another scene she lounges in some very nice designer underwear -- white satin, very becoming. She ends up looking foolish, constantly having to undress in this feminist role. [11 Feb 1994, p.C1]

The result is that most of the picture plays out as a series of scenes in which our hero sits there, gets angry and loses all his money.

Eventually the concept buckles under the heavy blockbuster treatment, becoming a monotonous, repetitive spectacle of endless shipboard sword fights and pirate ghosts in the moonlight.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

It commits the only crime that can be committed against Shakespeare: It makes him boring.

An innocuous, fluffy little nothing of an almost-pleasant movie.

Douglas does his best acting while watching and reacting to what he sees on screen. If this ends up being his cinematic swan song, it will not have been a bad way to go.

Neeson also does a good job tracing his character’s cognitive deterioration over the course of the movie. As such, Memory is like a hybrid, mixing serious sections with Neeson’s usual action stuff. Call it a little bit of this and a little bit of that, or not enough of this and not enough of that.

Actually, the only truly obnoxious thing about 3 Days to Kill is that the violent scenes are more congenial than the family scenes, because the teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) here is presented as a sour, nasty brat.

Eventually arrives at a lovely place, but it arrives limping. Small but nagging problems drag it down, such as weird acting choices, bizarre casting and strange aging makeup.

A strange movie, in that it has the atmosphere of a comedy and some extreme characters set up to be comical, but there are really no funny scenes.

Onward goes on and on, but it barely moves forward. Long before its 114-minute running time has elapsed, it has overstayed its welcome.

Let’s get the bad news over with quickly: Captain Marvel is no “Wonder Woman.”

The film may be intended to launch the movie careers of Patrick Stewart and the gang from ''Star Trek: The Next Generation,'' but any vibrancy, any emotional power it has derives from William Shatner as Kirk. And it's not even his movie. [18 Nov. 1994, p.C1]

Don’t be misled by the middling rating attached to this review. Midsommar is anything but mediocre. It’s horrible and brilliant, a crashing failure but one with many good moments. What do you say about a movie that’s both a disgusting, tiresome and predictable endurance test and an irrefutable demonstration of real directorial talent? Perhaps, this: Ari Aster is definitely someone who should be making movies. But maybe not this movie.

Hunter Killer seems old-fashioned. It belongs to a genre that was pretty much exhausted before the Cold War was over. And it threatens us with a world that, from the standpoint of 2018, doesn’t look all that bad. The movie is overlong, at times confusing, and it’s self-important, with a soundtrack that keeps telling us we feel things that we don’t.

For all the movie's richness and dazzle, for all that money dripping off the screen, Batman Returns is a gorgeous failure -- flashy, intermittently appealing but, in the end, a big mess. Batman Returns lacks a coherent story. It lacks a point of view and a focus. And so everything suffers, even the art direction. [19 June 1992, p.D1]

Fallen is not perfect, and eventually it even becomes frustrating. Threads remain loose, and the movie doesn't fully exploit its premise. Still, it would be churlish not to appreciate the ride.

If you have to watch someone cooking or eating, Juliette Binoche is as good a choice as any, but even she can’t make scintillating entertainment out of chewing, stirring a pot and putting on oven mitts.

Some of that emotion inevitably makes its way into our perception of the film, which elevates it somewhat, but only to the level of mediocrity.

Violent Night isn’t terrible, but it’s stuck between parodying something and trying to fit the genre it parodies. And it really should have been funnier.

Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience’s believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in Trainwreck, that belief is hard to come by.

It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be. Neither is it something to be taken seriously, though it's intended to be.

It’s imaginative and even brilliant at times, and then it starts to cave in. But then we think no, maybe not, maybe everything’s going to be made right . . . until it collapses completely. A cynical, smart movie about the dangers of mass culture gives way to a sentimental embrace of the very thing it’s criticizing.

The story doesn’t deliver. The songs are forgettable. And the magic never descends. Supposedly, Mary Poppins returns, but that’s not Mary. Emily Blunt stole somebody’s umbrella.

One can almost feel the movie Away We Go might have been, if only we could believe that Verona loves Burt - or understand why Burt loves Verona.

Still, for much of “Madame Web,” even when it turns bad, it’s a pleasure to see Johnson in this kind of movie.

The filmmaking seems caught between a genuine desire to present life as it’s actually lived and an obligation (self-imposed) to be politically correct at all times. Even so, the filmmakers, here and there, craft scenes that have the ring of truth.

Brosnan has never been so opened up, so emotional and yet so precise in his work. It's a lovely performance in a film that only sometimes deserves him.

That gift doesn't desert him [Crowe] in Elizabethtown, but he clutters his movie with plot elements that confuse the focus, the central character and, ultimately, I suspect, Crowe himself.

This is a pretty good action movie with the added kick of Liam Neeson in the lead role.

Greta is not just silly but obvious, and without any hint of a larger purpose, beyond hitting the various plot points of the human monster genre. Twenty minutes before the finish, it degenerates into a joke, and not a good one, but just fair enough to see through to the end.

Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest, and its portrayal of people demonstrates either an ignorance of human behavior or a disdain for truth.

The Wonder is no fun at all. It’s not even fun in the way it’s not fun. Even for a movie about starvation, it’s not a nourishing experience. The more the audience finds out about what’s actually going on, the less compelling the movie becomes.

Sniper is the Tom Berenger film that'll be forgotten by this time next week. [30 Jan 1993, p.C3]

Patrik Age 1.5 has a single drawback that can't be overlooked, at least from the standpoint of an American viewer. It's predictable.

The result is a mishmash that is sometimes moving, sometimes absurd and most of the time just oddly off balance.

It’s innovative and exhilarating at times, and then innovative and oppressive and relentless and repetitive and tiresome, but it’s never exactly boring. People will walk out of Climax, not for lack of interest, but for lack of endurance.

Long before the finish, Possessor descends into ugliness, with grotesque scenes of violence and lots of blood. You may feel creeped out, like you want to take a bath. But no, not in a good way.

It's not just that Pitt's performance is bad. It hurts.

Essentially, “I.S.S.” is a fine movie for what it is, and the only reservation is what it is. It’s a cramped-space movie in which the stakes feel higher to the characters than they do for us.

Its weaknesses are clumsy plotting and a less-than-satisfying ending.

It's a far better thing to remember Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than to watch it. Looking back, much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie's virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here - just be prepared to blast for them.

The movie has finesse, and the actors have charm, but there are no surprises.

Begins like a penetrating exploration of love, grief and suffering and ends looking like a highbrow version of "Bride of Chucky."

Unfortunately, “Operation Fortune” doesn’t consist entirely of scenes between Grant and Plaza. There are pockets of genuine life onscreen, followed by long, dull stretches. The movie always gets better, but then it always gets worse. Then gets better again. It’s that kind of experience.

Unfortunately, there’s a gulf between a great idea and competent execution, and this first feature, from writer-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, can’t bridge it.

Joachim Trier is a Norwegian filmmaker who made a strong debut in 2011, with his film, “Oslo, August 31.” Louder Than Bombs is his first English-language effort, and it’s disappointing.

As far as complete wastes of time go, Zookeeper is not especially offensive. Yet it is surprising that everything you might expect to be charming in it just isn't - namely all the bits involving animals.

Get past the comedy and there's something almost weird at the movie's core - a deep cynicism about family and a longing for family, both at the same time.

For about half of its running time, Hellraiser: Bloodline is watchable. In fact -- let's throw around the superlatives -- it's mildly entertaining. [9 March 1996, p.B3]

Will you find yourself wishing you were looking at someone else? Not really.

It might be enough that 12 Strong makes you feel good that the United States still produces guys like this. Too bad we didn’t get to know about the real guys and their actual story.

You could blast for it, and you still won't find 30 uninterrupted seconds of truth in Baby Mama. The characters are lies. Their emotional workings are lies. The jokes are based on lies about human behavior.

Let's just say it: It's great there's a movie that makes teenage girls scream. Half the movies Hollywood makes are designed to make teenage boys scream, and those boy movies are just as ridiculous and a lot nastier than New Moon.

Horrible Bosses has a handful of hilarious moments, but it's not exactly funny and not exactly serious, either.

The strange case of a movie that clunks in every possible way but the ultimate way -- it entertains.

True Colors is obvious and heavy-handed, loaded with cliches, and never really seems to inhabit the world in which it is set -- Washington politics. But more than just being mediocre, there's something obnoxious about the movie. It's a look at the ethics of the generation that came of age in the 1980s, presented by an older generation that has no more insight, sympathy or understanding of its subject than Gramps had of Woodstock. [12 Apr 1991, p.E1]

We are aware going in that Varsity Blues' cannot be a landmark of world cinema. Yet working within the tired formula, the picture turns out to be not so bad.

Yet, even at its worst, Zombieland is better than most movies of its kind - disgusting but not too disgusting, and with a few laughs.

Gooding can't will this well-meaning film into life.

The new film's social message comes through loud and clear, but something in the comedy seems constrained -- effortful, yet muffled. It might be a matter of the right tone never having been found.

To his credit, writer-director Jonathan Kasdan is sensitive and observant...But he doesn't know what he's talking about, not really, and though he structures the film around his areas of ignorance, that only works partially.

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is lightweight and fun -- not great fun, but it has its moments. The high school satire angle is both authentic and good-natured. [31 Jul 1992, p.D1]

In the end, “My Old School” is a well-made documentary that succeeds in most ways but that starts to crumple in the face of a single question: Who cares?

Priscilla could be described as the story of how the virginal wife finally got a clue, but it takes her too long. We’re left with a movie that mostly consists of a confused woman-child stumbling around a mansion in high heels.

The Lovely Bones is difficult viewing, a meticulously crafted experiment that, it turns out, wasn't worth it.

Shannon is worth seeing, and so is Spacey — hunched over, doing a funny impression of Nixon’s voice and body language. But this time the actors are better than the material.

What little pleasures the movie offers are small and intermittent. Kyle Chandler gets to unleash his inner Shatner by acting intense every moment that he’s on screen.

Just like a low-budget football comedy, only with money.

Since the hit-man career is probably one of the most familiar non-law enforcement careers in films, it should come as no surprise that Little Odessa has nothing new to say about it.

The real issue is that everything about Adam’s journey feels half digested and tossed back up. We’ve seen it before. It was better the first time.

The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.

A respectable and fairly decent movie.

Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of Pain Hustlers watchable.

Even now, I can’t decide if it was horrible or if I liked it and must conclude that both things must be true. It really was horrible, and I liked it, anyway.

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

When Costner is good, as he is here, his acting has a purity to it, an unspoken moral dimension. Underneath the sensitive, stoic facade is a loquacious, intellectually alert actor with an encyclopedic understanding of the film tradition he occupies: the rugged, humble movie hero, embodied by the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

The attempt is to create a reality wide enough to accommodate the extremes of absurdity and hard political truth, but the pieces never cohere, and so we end up with a rattling bag of disparate elements.

As for the movie’s ultimate resolution, nothing specific can be said here, except that it borders on inexcusable.

Even as a showcase for the actors, Bird on a Wire is disappointing. More than anything else it's an action movie, and not a very good one, with wall-to-wall chase scenes from start to finish. [18 May 1990, p.E1]

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Zohar gets the most screen time, though she’s the least engaging character.

More intelligent than most summer blockbusters and features at its center a thought-out and committed performance by Will Smith. But in the end it's merely ALMOST good.

There’s a Danish film called “After the Wedding” which was released here in 2007 and nominated for the foreign film Oscar. It didn’t win — it had the bad luck to be nominated against “The Lives of Others,” which was even better. But it’s a great film. The new After the Wedding is the American remake, and it’s fascinating. That is, it’s fascinating in that it’s not even close to great, despite using the same scenario. Indeed, it would be a real lesson in filmmaking to watch both movies back to back, just to see how to do things and how not to do things. And, just to clarify, the new After the Wedding would be in the “how not to do things” category.

Still, if you love this kind of movie, you will at least like Honest Thief.

Whenever the movie's point of view turns omniscient, and we're seeing events from the director's vantage point, Man on Fire becomes a blurry, shaky mess.

Yet it fails to enchant for a reason that might not be fair, but that's just how it is: We've seen outer space simulated so well in sci-fi movies that the real thing seems like old stuff.

The most Stillmanesque Stillman movie yet. It's about a mood, part wistful, part sardonic. It's about a time of life, about repartee, about the vivid character saying the unexpected thing.

As Ella, Mackey shows that she can carry a movie and remain sympathetic, despite a script that sometimes works against her.

As a 110-minute diversion, as a source of some laughs, as an opportunity for two funny guys to be funny — and to be funny with each other — what’s not to like? Just go in not expecting much.

The problematic result is not that The New Age is bleak -- bleak is fine. We all like bleak. The problem is that The New Age becomes static. [30 Sept 1994, p.C1]

In the end, What to Expect, isn't an inspired movie, but a manufactured one, but one with some laughs and some moments. Plus, it has Chris Rock, who gets to liven things up as the ringleader of a beleaguered fathers' group.

Ritchie is a director with no instinct for the audience, and he can’t hold things together for an entire film. He seems at a loss, from moment to moment, as to what he should emphasize.

The pure mechanics of Here Comes the Boom land it in an enjoyable, if forgettable, space.

The movie's storytelling is limp, and writer-director Neil Burger's ultimate unwillingness to commit to a point of view -- was this guy really the assassin? -- seems artistically chicken-hearted.

The problem on which the movie turns is this: Bill Murray’s natural quality as an actor exudes self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. If he looks depressed, the aura suggests, it’s not because he knows less than we do. He knows more. Murray brings that quality to bear in St. Vincent, but it doesn’t fit.

It's rough when it works and rough when it doesn't. Much of the first hour is made up of slow patches, while the last 20 minutes are ugly and terrifying.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Combines the usual dumb ideas with one good one. And not just good, but impressive, in that it makes sense of much of what went before.

Exciting and nerve-racking in the moment, but empty.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

With her first feature, "Manny & Lo," writer-director Lisa Krueger reveals a distinctive style. Though employing no surreal devices and remaining within a realistic convention, Krueger takes the story of two young sisters on their own and somehow makes it seem unreal, strange, outside time.

So at the very least, audiences will come away from Chasing Mavericks with a deeper understanding of surfing and an appreciation for surfers.

Yes, the movie's watchable, and there are about six good laughs in it, but six good (not great) laughs in 90 minutes is pretty paltry for a comedy.

Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it's really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.

I lost patience with a widow who is grieving one month and then making out with a guy in a bar the next. This is an emotional recovery even Hamlet's mother might have found unseemly.

Live Flesh lacks freshness.

A near miss, a respectable but uninspired thriller that's intelligent and considered in its details, but ultimately weak in its impact.

Me Before You is just a little better than it had to be. It’s not so much better that it escapes being what it is, a sort-of romance, liberally sprinkled with moments of corniness and emotional dishonesty. But ultimately, when it matters, it’s truthful — about the people depicted, and who they are, and what they face.

Elles has about half of a story stretched to feature length, and it manages to end just as a good story might have been kicking in. But that is often the way with foreign cinema: The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories.

Is he a hero or a lunatic? He's possibly neither, or possibly a little of both, but this is the problem with making a movie about a real person.

And give credit to Stallone: He just leaves the camera on Rourke, in the tightest of close-ups, cutting only once, to himself, for a one-second reaction shot, but keeping the focus on his actor. A great actor.

A corny, overblown romance, and while it eventually wins you over with its atmosphere and good nature, it's far from the masterpiece you've been hearing about. [15 Jan 1988]

It is probably unlike any movie you've ever seen, and in ways both bad and good. It is, by turns, inept and brilliant, shockingly amateurish and inspired. To see it is to sit there for long stretches amazed at how clumsy, fake and misguided it is. But then, five minutes later you might easily be riveted and moved by its awkward brilliance.

Just too much of a mediocre thing. It didn't have to be that way.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

Caught in the Web is of little interest as entertainment, and if it were set in an unimportant or overly familiar country, it would be entirely forgettable.

Radio is almost as bad as it gets. That it isn't is thanks to Ed Harris, who brings depth and focus to his performance.

Benigni sets out to do the impossible.

Ultimately, The Mountain Between Us tries to pull the audience’s interest in a relationship direction. It’s a difficult task, despite two charismatic leads.

From the beginning, Midway has awkward dialogue and an atmosphere that seems a bit too 2019, but for a time, the movie’s high stakes make up for that.

It's up to Ellen Barkin to carry the movie, and she manages until the thing just becomes a dead weight. [10 May 1991, p.E1]

The result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that's truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.

Where the movie goes wrong is that it sets itself up as a study of a pathological personality but never delivers.

The pace is slow and the story neither takes off nor arrives anywhere.

The result is a film that's far superior to Neil LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' and more entertaining than Todd Solondz's "Happiness.''

Adoration, despite a family resemblance to some of his finest work ("The Sweet Hereafter," "Ararat"), is Egoyan at his worst. The movie is slow and airless, with a script so weak one wonders why Egoyan bothered to film it.

Stranger by the Lake has no rating, but if it had, it would earn an NC-17 ten times over.

It's all swell, though after two hours of nonstop yin energy, one does begin to wish that someone like Bruce Willis might show up in a sweaty T-shirt, scratching himself.

Light entertainment that doesn't quite work. The film has too many scenes that meander, and the picture's offhandedness begins to seem less like clumsy charm and more like pointless vamping.

The story, like the protagonist, floats along in a noodly sort of way, intelligent, benign and ineffectual.

Meandering and inert. Yet as an etching of an emotion and a vehicle for Costner, the movie makes a case for itself.

Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.

Surely, there’s the potential here for a kind of Country and Western “Amadeus.” Instead we get I Saw the Light, which will do until something better comes along.

It's surprising to see John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell together in such a meandering mess as The Object of Beauty. It's also surprising that their being in it doesn't help. [19 Apr 1991, p.E1]

The best thing to say about “Munich: The Edge of War” is that it has an interesting take on Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who preceded Winston Churchill. In the opinion of many historians, it’s not the correct take, but at least the movie has a point of view.

Low-budget, oddly cast and strictly indie all the way.

The reversion to formula takes a pleasing comedy and drops it down a notch, but That Awkward Moment is still very easy to like.

127 Hours, about an unimaginably unbearable experience, is pretty much an unbearable experience of its own. And yet, it must be said, it's exceptionally well made.

With its fake-looking technology and empty characters, Volcano eventually becomes as obvious as its what-if premise.

With Kika Almodovar seems to be saying something about voyeurism, though what he is saying is never nailed down. [27 May 1994, p.C3]

We still have Kendrick’s performance. We still have the compelling situation. We still have the unusual subject matter. But it’s enmeshed with unreal nonsense.

This latest, from director Bille August, is merely respectful and respectable. It never sinks, but it never really soars either, though here and there it hits a powerful moment.

Going into this movie, there was a question whether “Bad Boys” might just feel like entertainment from an earlier time, but instead it feels like a cozy return — at least as cozy as possible, given that the movie is extremely violent.

It’s an elaborate and artificial concoction, without any discernible ambition behind it.

By the standards of most IMAX films, this is a bizarre entry, a documentary about bugs that was produced by Terminix, the pest control company.

Compared with other movies, Seven Psychopaths is clever and inventive enough to be considered a weak success or a modest failure, the kind of effort that usually gets damned with the faint praise of "not bad."

Trespass never advances beyond being a grand manipulation.

Cleverness won't carry it. Nothing less than overarching vision is required; otherwise, the audience will laugh for 10 minutes and then start to check out. And that pretty much states the problem of Mirror Mirror.

Hard to hate, but if you actually want to love it, you've got to force yourself. [27 Nov 1991, p.E1]

It's the supporting players who stand out.

Isn't all bad. It isn't good, either, but it's better than it deserves to be, and if one sits and watches, the laughs do come, a few.

Traveller is entertaining in a mild, relaxing way.

The result is that a story with a couple of good ideas founders for lack of a third or fourth good idea. Still, any picture that features Radcliffe having a nervous breakdown for two hours has something to recommend it.

There’s no way to call Havoc a good movie, but as bad movies go, this is a good one. Depending on your mood, its variety of craziness could be what you’re looking for.

This is a movie in which whole sequences consist of nothing but guys fighting stiff computer images. Such scenes would be boring even were they done well, but these scenes aren't done well.

To watch Rifkin’s Festival and Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York (2019), is to wonder whether this is a filmmaker who has ceased to understand the world.

If The Next Three Days were just a little more mindless, it might have been more joyful.

For 70 minutes, Antichrist is a rare exploration of pain, featuring two actors collaborating with each other in agonizing and intimate ways. It also contains some of the best work Gainsbourg has ever done on screen. And then - if I put it more gently I wouldn't really be saying it - director Lars von Trier loses his mind.

Though I wish Please Give were a little better, there aren't enough American movies like it.

The picture is in the same sappy, soapy, maudlin vein as last year's ''Beaches,'' but I didn't hate it as much as ''Beaches,'' which might mean that everybody who loved ''Beaches'' will think Stella isn't quite as good. [2 Feb 1990, p.E1]

If only Streep would have put down the microphone and let Springfield sing “Jessie’s Girl,” Ricki and the Flash might have had half a chance.

A few things make The Adam Project a little better than bearable.

In this her third feature as a director, Jolie once again shows a marked talent for the visual aspects of storytelling. Her shot selection is impeccable and her compositions are artful without being self-consciousness.

Stays emotionally mired because of a static screenplay that fails to express its issues dramatically.

As a work of entertainment, as a cohesive narrative and as an artistic whole, there's no way to call it anything but an on-balance average effort. Yet there's nothing remotely average about the movie's warm spirit, its imaginative and arresting cinematography or its handful of unique, brilliant scenes and shrewd, bizarre performances.

Movies go bad in all kinds of ways, but in 7 Days in Entebbe the filmmakers found a brand-new way for their movie to commit suicide.

Though overlong and formulaic, two things keep this street-racing movie of interest all the way to the finish line. The first is Aaron Paul ("Breaking Bad"), a sensitive actor in his first major movie showcase. The second: some extraordinary racing sequences.

It's made by a director who knows comedy, working from a script founded on a surefire slapstick premise.

That’s all it is, a little bit funny.

So this is fairly interesting history, not as interesting as we’d like it to be, but interesting all the same.

So there you have it, a so-so movie with a lot of good parts. In truth, The Last Full Measure has more good parts than most better movies, but everything connecting those parts feels rote, sometimes ham-fisted.

Valentine isn't scary, but it is unsettling; not ultimately satisfying, but arresting in the moment.

This world of entirely nice people seems like a trite fantasy — trite because the movie never makes you believe it. But it does makes you want to believe it, and so, like a lot of these movies, it takes you halfway there.

A melodrama about three cliches in search of a bloodbath.

It all becomes silly, monotonous and boring. Maybe not as monotonous as being cast out into void, but boring enough to put you to sleep.

You Kill Me is pretty light, but it's well made, and within the built-in limitations of its story -- a hit man goes to Alcoholics Anonymous -- it's fairly pleasing.

There's valuable information here and some human stories that deserve to be heard.

A romantic comedy that flirts with something serious but never gets past the flirting stage.

Army of Darkness has good moments and shows traces of wit right up to the end, though these moments wind up coming fewer and farther between. [19 Feb 1993, Daily Datebook, p.D1]

The pleasures of Gringo are the pleasures of genre: It’s a fun type of movie, but it’s not a good version of the type.

Incredibles 2 was 14 years in the making, and it feels almost that long watching it.

When Bertolucci points his camera out a window, it's like putting on your glasses. Everything is lush, drenched in color and right there for you to touch.

At heart, ridiculous -- ludicrous in its conception and silly in its spectacle.

Law often looks angry and frazzled onscreen. This time he looks angry and sure of himself.

It's the lightest of the Batman movies, the most cartoony, the dumbest and the least ambitious. But it holds the audience's attention, brings on a few laughs and never really gets boring.

But there’s not enough in “Finch” to sustain an audience’s interest for a full 115 minutes. At 85 minutes, it might have been a touching and eccentric novelty. As it stands, “Finch” is something of a slog. A slog in good company, but a slog all the same.

Connery's charm and integrity make all his scenes worthwhile, and Lithgow's stiff-backed turn as the classic British imperialist is in good fun.

Abuse of Weakness is 20 minutes of a great movie and another 85 minutes of nothing much.

The pace is quick, very quick by American standards. The script blasts through reams of plot with lightning dialogue, and even if you have a fast eye for subtitles you may come to the end of the movie with no clear idea what happened.

The most daring thing that Jonze and Eggers have done is make a children's film that might not really be for kids.

This society makes no sense except as a metaphor. The social layout of Divergent was supposedly devised so as to maintain peace, but putting people into airtight factions guarantees conflict.

It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.

It's a respectable B- movie -- airy, inconsequential and a little too cute at times, but fairly entertaining all the same.

The laughs do come, but not as readily, not as heartily and not as joyfully as you might expect.

Harrelson and Olson make a good pair. He’s genial and bewildered and expects the best, while she’s guarded and clear-eyed and expects the worst. They deserve a better movie, but they make Champions more than bearable.

Though the Jill problem is too insurmountable to ignore, almost everything else in this comedy succeeds.

There are people who like movies like this, who like when a movie screen looks like their computer screen and who don’t mind when everything is fake, including the emotions. Artemis Fowl is a genre movie, and as such, it’s an OK version of the thing it is. I just can’t stand the thing it is.

Almost everything that made "The Bourne Identity" refreshing -- the wit, the irony, the suspense, the novelty of its premise -- is gone in The Bourne Supremacy, and what's left is the spectacle of Matt Damon, with perfect posture and senses primed like a cat, making his way through a routine action thriller.

It seems naive, almost delusional.

Never takes off, but it never collapses. At times, it becomes frustrating -- for example, about 30 minutes are spent pursuing a lead that goes nowhere.

If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy Melancholia, rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary.

Call it a victory of conviction over substance, but when Argento is onscreen, you look at her - not because she's good, but because she's there in a way nobody else is.

In This Corner of the World is 129 minutes, an eternity for an animated film, especially one so wispy in look and so sparing in plot.

Wondering what’s real and what’s just a carefully crafted crock doesn’t make Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood a better experience. It makes it a little pointless and frustrating.

Director Stephan Elliott too easily buys into the drag queens' conception of themselves as valiant pursuers of illusion, without ever questioning the value of the illusion being pursued.

Husbands and Wives ultimately reveals itself as an extremely bitter film, with the kind of sour conviction that tries to pass itself off as wisdom. Allen knows how people talk and how they evade really talking. But his jaundiced vision -- as though he just found out that a marriage can't always be like the first month of dating when you're 17, and now he can't believe how crummy it all is -- just makes him seem naive. In the end his perception yields no insight. Old men like young women. Really? [18 Sept 1992, p.C1]

There's nothing about this thriller to prevent it from soon becoming enmeshed in the memory with others in which Michael Douglas wears a starched collar and grits his teeth.

At its best, Mermin -- who used an all-female crew -- conveys the sense of an entirely feminine world being created under the beauty school roof, and it's refreshing.

This latest adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel is careful, respectful and even enjoyable, and yet dry, singularly humorless and played without the lavishness of spirit that makes sense of Gothic melodrama.

Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have thought this was ''Last Tango in Paris'' all over again. It ain't. [19 Aug 1994, p.C3]

Even if the idea of The Desperate Hour makes you uneasy, you will be engrossed by it.

If it were just a middling effort, The Master would be a lot less frustrating. But the latest from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has greatness in it - two extraordinary performances, intuitive and revealing photography and scene setting, and a distinct directorial sensibility that hovers between sobriety and satire. Yet all those virtues are undermined by a narrative that goes all but dead for the last hour.

It's entertainment, but mild entertainment.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: If Gilroy wanted to set a horror movie in the world of art commerce, fine. No problem. It’s not a bad idea. But to do it, Gilroy needed to respect the horror genre enough to create something sophisticated. Instead he went to the horror bargain basement and pulled out the cheapest horror conventions he could find, straight out of slasher bin.

There's a spark missing, and where it's missing is in Roberts' conscientious but all too reserved performance.

It demonstrates a filmmaker in complete command of his craft and with little control over his impulses.

All over this movie there are cliches that are just plain embarrassing, and unsettling moments in which it's obvious Kloves is writing about stuff he doesn't know a thing about. [13 Oct 1989, p.E1]

About a third of it is a brilliant setup - but it's for a joke that never happens, at least not completely. A comedy, especially a broad sex comedy, needs to go to extremes. But Sex Tape is a little careful and contained.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is the best part of every movie he's in. Then again, when you consider the pictures he's been in, maybe that's not saying enough. [15 Sep 1990, p.C3]

In this film, whenever Harper gets to do nothing but direct, as in the action scenes, Heart of Stone works. It’s in the convolutions of its flat script that the movie falls apart.

It’s long, downright dispiriting, enjoyable only sometimes, and yet there’s a feeling of authenticity. It’s neither bad nor good, but interesting. It might improve with age.

Just not worth revisiting, unless one wants to tie one's brain into a knot for no discernible reward.

Tully doesn’t expand as it goes along. It feels insulated and hermetically sealed, and it seems to get smaller.

Almost as mindless as "Fantastic Four," but more annoying in that this one has philosophical pretensions.

Much of it is enjoyable and has the aura of a superior action film, but it collapses into a laughable wreck and ultimately reveals itself as a mild waste of two hours.

Marry Me is entirely Lopez’s movie, and she’s terrific, right there emotionally in some difficult scenes. But it’s too much Lopez’s movie — too many (lousy) songs, too many dance numbers. A half hour in, there’s no mistaking it: Lopez was one of the producers.

Never rises above the level of its gimmick.

It's a movie about an idiot in the grip of something common place. He starts off as a garden-variety idiot and progresses to a big idiot.

An Eye for an Eye may very well be the most unpersuasive documentary ever made.

Suffers from the bloat common to sequels.

It’s written by six screenwriters, and it feels like it.

Measured and somber, with few surprises.

The film's basic material, that is the history, is not without interest. And it must be admitted that every so often - for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes - we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century.

There's a psychological undercurrent. The movie occupies a zone where science fiction and nightmares collide and intertwine.

The Comfort of Strangers might look great and might seem to be heading somewhere, but ultimately the picture is just a lot of atmosphere dolling up a lot of hot air. [15 Mar 1991, p.E8]