Mick LaSalle

The first half is a lavish exaggeration of the original movie, with inventive turns and gimmicks and what at least passes for a real heart. And then -- all at once -- it begins to unravel. I don't know what happened. [22 June 1990, p.E1]

Fire in the Sky doesn't look like it had an expensive budget, but it uses what special effects it has to good effect, and the scenes of Travis on the space ship are genuinely scary. You stop asking, ''But did this really happen?'' -- not a bad question, actually -- and start imagining what it might have been like. [13 Mar 1993, p.C3]

It starts exploring different facets of its premise and transforms itself into a fairly competent suspense thriller. That's enough to make it respectable, but a few things keep Next from being lovable or memorable.

For all this, there is one unalloyed good thing to be said for High Tension. When all is said and done, it really does live up to its title. In every other way it's trash, but that truth-in-advertising aspect is a major weight to throw into the mix.

Maren’s direction is tonally right, full of warmth and touches of humor; he makes it an inviting film to watch.

What distinguishes Pattinson in the role is the sense he conveys of someone roiling and churning beneath a surface that is almost, but not quite, calm.

Like many films that attempt to be inspiring, Heavyweights uses the sound track like a rubber hose to beat the audience into submission. The movie is so honest and good-natured that it's hard to stay mad at it for long. [18 Feb 1995, p.E1]

It’s average. If you like this sort of movie, knock yourself out.

The pleasures of Suburbicon are in the moment, and the moments fade before the next moment. There’s no build, just flashes of virtuosity — flashes ultimately in the service of nothing.

Ritchie aspires to be a great British director, but his working his way through British icons — Sherlock Holmes wasn’t even safe — does no one any good. He just reduces them to his own vernacular, his own level, and he ends up revealing nothing about them and everything about his own narrow vision.

I found myself enjoying Lionheart, mostly because Van Damme is appealing and easy to root for. I like the steady, oddly unjudgmental look that crosses his face when he's about to beat someone to a pulp. [12 Jan 1991, p.C3]

I had a migraine when I started watching Larry Crowne, and by the end, it went away. None of this quite adds up to a recommendation, but it's close. Very close.

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.

A caper comedy with some definite problems.

An occasionally charming, sometimes amateurish film .

An extremely funny movie, and this is coming from someone who barely cracked a smile during ``Friday,'' the first installment of this franchise.

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.

Seriously, don’t see Black Adam. Don’t encourage this. I don’t even want to admit that it’s an actual movie, but assuming it is, it’s the worst of the year — and one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

The movie unfolds as a series of enjoyable, pressurized encounters between the lead character and everyone else — particularly, Bobby Cannavale as Carol’s ex-boyfriend.

The movie goes to Vienna, to Egypt and to Italy and was probably more fun to make than watch.

False Confessions can be admired for its high style and distinct tone, but if you really want to enjoy it, you’ll have to force yourself.

There's run-of-the-mill bad, and then there's a movie like Hardware. [14 Sep 1990, p.E3]

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

With the exception of Jessica Lange, who tears into her fairly brief role as a wealthy and wicked former movie star, everyone in Marlowe is directed as if to seem groggy with depression. It’s as if they’re all bored with the story before they tell it, and then they tell it while trying not to fall asleep.

This is a welcome and unusual movie, and Gere gives a compelling performance.

For all its faults, some of the action scenes in The Rookie are spectacular. [07 Dec 1990, p.E1]

The thing most people will take away from Stand Up Guys is that it contains Al Pacino's best performance in years. So if you don't think Al Pacino still has it in him, this is a welcome chance to be proved wrong. But here's something interesting. Stand Up Guys also contains Christopher Walken's best performance in years. In addition, the film is extraordinarily well cast, and the acting, even in the smaller roles, is more than noteworthy.

The sweetest little movie about a neurological disorder that we're ever likely to see.

Movies don't get worse than Good Burger, a wretched little comedy. It's a movie that inspires wonder -- at how it got made and released.

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

An entertaining film for kids and young teens. It's also a product of the era in which we're living, and weird times make for weird movies.

The picture doesn't come close to approaching the near-classic quality of the earlier film.

The only problem with this movie, a substantial one, is that there’s a major sag in the story about halfway through. For its first hour, Moonfall is a blast.

The movie is so enamored of Walker, and Colter radiates so much charisma and pleasant mischief in the role, that it takes about half the running time to realize that the movie is not delivering on the basics.

It's that wonderful, totally unambitious yet satisfying thing, a really good movie.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

The Substitute is a guilty pleasure, but it's not garbage. Berenger brings to the role an appealing ruggedness and world-weariness, and Ernie Hudson, as the corrupt principal, is sleazy and elegant. The script isn't bad, either.

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

Career Opportunities is a real strange one, a tasteless and completely off-key comedy that has the elements of the much-more serious and more interesting picture it could have been -- if only the film makers had a clue as to what sort of movie they were making. [30 March 1991, p.C3]

Another dreadful, not-funny Owen Wilson movie, in which Wilson is the best thing.

Desperados is a lot of fun and announces “Saturday Night Live” alum Nasim Pedrad as a comic actress in the tradition of Sandra Bullock.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

This time the martial arts philosophy lesson rings hollow. [10 Feb 1990, p.C5]

An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

A pleasant surprise. What looked to be yet another science fiction movie turns out to be one of the year’s few romantic dramas, one which just happens to be set aboard a space ship.

All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.

There's something heartening about a film that aspires to do nothing but entertain -- and does.

It's a pumped-up, intricate and fast-moving yarn that never flags and continues to play out in unexpected ways as it unravels.

Sabotage cannot be called a good movie, not with a straight face. But as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it has something.

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]

A real surprise. It seems to promise an exploitative genre movie, about gangsters and drug deals, and it delivers on that, but it’s something more. Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocet have taken a Mexican thriller, with a female victim at its center, and have turned it into an intelligent feminist film.

Before I Go to Sleep emerges as a mystery — one with a slow burn leading to a big payoff. But what keeps the movie going, beyond questions of what is true and what is false, are the issues raised by the illness itself.

Benefits from Smith and Lawrence's chemistry. As long as they're on screen together, things breeze along. But when they're apart, the movie flounders.

I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great night’s sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.

This is the picture the Belgian actor has been waiting for, the step up in class that has seemed inevitable since his breakthrough in ''Bloodsport'' six years ago. ''Nowhere to Run'' is not just a boy movie. Women can enjoy it, too, and Van Damme's boyish good looks and gentlemanly manner -- gentlemanly, except when he's smashing heads -- won't hurt. [16 Jan 1993, p.C3]

It’s a good sci-fi action movie, too. Far be it from me to give this movie the kiss of death by making it seem too serious for its core audience. Chappie is everything it has to be — but it’s everything it should be, too.

The most notable thing about Hop is its technical perfection. It puts live action and animation into the same frame so seamlessly that the filmmakers might easily not get credit for it.

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

After a month, no one will talk about this movie, ever again. Still, with a picture like this, there's really only one question: Is it any fun? Yes. Lots. Definitely.

Metro, the new Eddie Murphy cop picture made in San Francisco that opens today, goes beyond cliched: It's shameless. The relationships, plot turns -- even the action sequences -- are trite and uninspired. Murphy is fresh, as usual, but "Metro" is not.

In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

Here Today is a weird case — not mediocre, not lukewarm, but genuinely bad and good, cringe-worthy and moving. Take this as a recommendation, and a warning.

Come Away is an idea that never takes flight.

There's an appeal here, for sure, but if you're not 8 years old you may never figure it out.

Josh Brolin plays the leader of the gangster squad as a kind of dedicated dunce, which is appropriate considering their clumsy antics. Ryan Gosling has more nuance as his right-hand man, but Emma Stone is completely out of her element as a slinky film noir heroine, a walking anachronism.

A nonstop action picture with a fair amount of laughs, car chases and exploding buildings. [15 May 1992]

Vantage Point has nothing going on. There's no artistic, philosophical or even jolly entertainment reason for adopting this strategy. It's just arbitrary, a gimmick.

Little gem.

A useless film in every possible way.

This is how bad Table 19 gets: At a certain point in the movie, there is absolutely no reason that any of the characters would remain at the wedding or anywhere near it. So the movie devises a false reason to keep them in the general vicinity.

Horrible Bosses 2 is harsh and tasteless, not to mention broad and shameless, but that’s not a bad thing in this case. Softness and good taste, as well as restraint and carefulness, are the enemies of comedy, and “Horrible Bosses 2” is a very funny movie.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

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

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.

The movie is a mess.

It’s the kind of torment you can wish on your worst enemy without feeling too guilty, not something to inflict permanent damage, just two hours of soul-sickening confusion and sensory torment.

It bombs, but not for lack of trying. It bombs for too much trying. [17 Feb 1990, p.C3]

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

Too grotesque for children and just too silly for their parents.

An exceptionally good movie in its first hour and an exceptionally bad one in its second.

Ultimately, no matter what angle you see Bliss from, the story converges on a choice and a question: Which world do you choose to live in? And what can bring a person back to reality?

Aside from Patricia Clarkson, who is practically this movie's reason for being, the great virtue of Last Weekend is that it's exactly as it presents itself.

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.

A little like spending the holidays with strangers. The spirits are high, the relationships are warm, the personal stories have a shared history, and even though you're on the outside of things, you appreciate the people in a remote and perhaps admiring sort of way. Still, when it's time to leave, you're not sorry.

They take on special powers that the filmmakers are incapable of making interesting, partly because the characters are ciphers, and partly because the story is listless and uninventive.

All the movie’s finer points — of audience response, of interaction, of the dances between people — are conveyed with a specificity so expert that it seems offhand.

It's a little of this, a little of that, and in the meantime there's not a single joke to crack a smile over. [20 Mar 1993, p.C3]

Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.

Gets most of the big things wrong and almost all the little things right. For two-thirds of its running time, it's a nasty little delight with an amusing and curmudgeonly central character.

It has a life and style that other buddy action movies lack

The result is mixed bag, an intermittently pleasing but mostly routine effort.

It's precisely Seagal's incongruity that has made him a great absurdist hero -- and that makes Fire Down Below a kick.

It has no ambition, little sense and false sentiment, but it does have velocity, high spirits and scale.

Intelligent, observant entertainment designed for an adult audience.

Aloha shows how far a movie can go on charm alone.

Remains exciting, even as we laugh at the amateur-night antics of the women.

Ernest Goes to Jail is a cute picture, good for what it is, which isn't much, but that's OK. [07 Apr 1990, p.C3]

As for Williams, he's a warm actor in an oddly cold movie, and his presence certainly doesn't make things worse. But Toys doesn't call for anything new from him. [18 Dec 1992, p.C1]

A film very much of its moment, in ways both good and bad. But the important thing is that its virtues are extraordinary, while its flaws are easy to forget because they’re so common.

Homefront has craft and humor behind it, but not much in the way of inspiration. Think of a dessert with lots of calories and no nutrition.

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.

It feels both big and little, concentrating as it does on the small movements in people's lives and the huge tides of history.

Maybe there's a metaphor here, but figuring it out wouldn't make Trouble Every Day any better.

Man on a Ledge doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."

A Kiss Before Dying is a thriller without thrills, though it has some of the built-in kicks of a crime movie -- wondering what's going on, wondering why it's happening, wondering how it's going to end. Unfortunately, it ultimately gets so silly that the main thing people in the audience may end up wondering is why they're still sitting there. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

To its credit, the movie eschews cheap dramatics, but at times it eschews dramatics altogether.

Aside from the disgusting parts, Spiral is a fairly decent thriller.

An attempt at a beautiful film about renewal -- about past love, love lost, longing and rediscovery -- but it has no emotional truth.

Running mainly on adrenaline and a gimmick, it's different from other holiday movies in that it's not ambitious, earnest or overblown, and it obviously wasn't made with one eye on the Oscars.

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

I liked this movie, maybe more than I should have, and would be happy to see anything this director wants to do next.

Credit the director for one thing. He could have stretched it to three hours, but he gets in and out of this mess in less than two.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

No campy vampire movie, and the early part of the film is well-made enough that the sadness of Vlad’s dilemma is truly felt.

Angel Eyes is the rare film that presents a family dynamic as demented as ones we know from life.

One could argue about which "Lethal Weapon'' is the best, but No. 4 is certainly the funniest, warmest and most idiosyncratic.

Much of the movie has a structureless, documentary feeling to it, which is good and should have been pushed further.

Feels forgettable, even though, in the moment, it's often very funny.

Why Him? takes a comic situation and then does everything it can to undermine it. It’s more than unfunny. It’s anti-funny. It doesn’t provoke laughter or even neutral silence, but an increasingly stunned disdain. It is the movie equivalent of putting on a plaster life mask and letting it dry and lock your face into an expression of blank misery.

There's nothing here but a concept and a marketing and merchandising strategy, at the center of which somebody - oh, no - had to come up with an actual movie.

This is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters.

The action is difficult to follow.

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.

Holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.

Efron makes what he can of an impossible role. He’s watchable, that helps.

Man of the Year remains an interesting proposition throughout, and a tale well told.

There's no pretending this is a perfect movie. Yet I doubt I could have enjoyed it more if it were. [25 Nov 1992, p.E1]

If the film has any value at all it's as an example to illustrate the point that even a mediocre horror movie requires a certain amount of inspiration. At least a sense of fun, a little life and enthusiasm. Dr. Giggles is put together strictly by the numbers. It aims low -- at the floor -- and misses. [24 Oct 1992, p.C3]

Badly made, badly acted and badly written. [07 May 1994, p.E3]

For all the movie’s modest but palpable virtues, The Exorcist: Believer has one problem it cannot solve: No one has come up with a new way to do an exorcism.

A clever, atmospheric romantic drama that lacks something.

The movie is 105 minutes long but seems about 45 minutes longer, with uneventful stretches and at least three sections where the action stops for musical interludes featuring goopy pop music.

The presence of Washington lends the picture a much-needed dose of authenticity. But in the end Virtuosity is disconnected and uninvolving, despite -- or maybe because of -- a climax that comes in three distinct waves. One section seems to be a half-hour sound-and-light show.

Basically, The Gunman is a movie that asks audiences to sympathize with the equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald — that is, an Oswald who definitely did it. Oddly enough, it succeeds, partly because the moral climate it presents seems so confused, but mainly because of Penn’s particular aura of irascible integrity. He’s the most irritated action hero since Harrison Ford.

Dreary movie.

Playful and energized enough to keep an audience guessing.

Audiences looking for a nonstop laugh riot may be disappointed, but the big laughs are there, and they benefit from the movie's underlying sincerity.

This is one light comedy whose seriousness, hours later, lingers in the mind.

As a first-time director, Falcone has trouble maintaining a specific tone - the movie wobbles back and forth between sentimentality and silliness, sometimes even within the same scene.

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

“Dead Men” is a jumble of half-baked impulses.

Director Stephen Chbosky needed to bring this stage musical into greater balance with the film medium. He needed to make Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time. It’s still possible that wouldn’t have saved it, but it might have made it less awful.

Truly awful.

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

The phrase "lesbian comedy" is not exactly an oxymoron, but April's Shower is still a rarity, an expansive, talky and often zany romantic farce, with lesbian characters at its center.

The movies have been heading toward this for a while, and now with Mile 22 we get a film that is almost wall-to-wall violence. There is very little talk, and what little talk there is is entirely confrontational. People are either cursing at each other, threatening each other or killing each other.

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

Just about everything in The Chronicles of Riddick is impenetrable, from the convoluted story to the dark and baroque art direction. It's an inane film rendered sometimes laughable by an atmosphere of dead-serious reverence.

Nora Ephron directed it and had a hand in the screenplay, but without Travolta this film would have no reason for being.

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.

The party scenes are entertaining fantasy, but the insider-business end of the picture is occasionally interesting in its own right.

For all its weaknesses, Terminator Genisys is a "Terminator" movie that feels like a "Terminator" movie, more than did "Terminator 3," not to mention the ghastly "Terminator Salvation."

Incidentally, this is an Ang Lee film, though, beyond the first-rate production values, you wouldn’t know it. Lee seems happy that he has embraced technology, but what’s the point if the technology is in the service of an empty exercise? He has made one movie like this and doesn’t need to make another.

A gangster movie with the capacity to surprise. People do unexpected things and for reasons we wouldn't anticipate.

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

The film is mildly diverting, occasionally engaging, certifiably workmanlike and altogether too flat an experience to inspire any strong feelings, positive or negative. It’s just there. Some people watch movies for the same reason others climb mountains, because they are there. Well, this is a movie for that audience.

Stephen King's Sleepwalkers represents the first time the author has ever written a story directly for the screen. The result is a nicely paced picture that unfolds gradually, with shocks and surprises throughout. [11 Apr 1992, p. C3]

Emotionally sophisticated, humane and worth talking about for hours.

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.

Ouija has something wrong with it from the first five minutes.

Inert, incompetent and emotionally fraudulent.

A small and not particularly ambitious movie, but it's pleasing and exceptionally well made. It was directed by Stephen Frears, and while it's not up there with his best - "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Queen," "High Fidelity," "Cheri" - Lay the Favorite lavishes the same attention on the personal, on relationships, and, like most Frears films, it puts a woman at the center of the story.

Aside from being annoying, depressing and repulsive, Chaos Walking has a lot going for it. It’s directed by Doug Liman (“Go”) and takes place in a fully imagined other world. Plus, it stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, who are smart and watchable, and the movie does get better as it goes along.

The Collection is bloody, disgusting and ridiculous, but the one thing it's not is horror, not real horror, not in the sense of tense or scary. It's not cinema, either. It's not even fun.

A strong thriller, slick and sleazy in a summer-movie sort of way, but intelligent too.[22 May 1993, p.C3]

The key to any Amy Schumer comedy is how often she gets to play self-delusion, embarrassment, fear and rage. As long as the emotions, terrors and humiliations are big, she’s funny, and her latest, “Kinda Pregnant,” gives her lots of opportunities to be funny.

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.

The appeal of A Rainy Day in New York, to the extent it has any, is nostalgia.

It's scary. It's well-acted. It's filmed with a degree of flash and elegance.

A little too corny to endorse fully, but no one should be discouraged from seeing it.

A lamebrained guts-and-glory fiction. [20 July 1990, p.E1]

A sour romantic comedy that arrives in theaters just in time to spoil Valentine's Day. Its plot is a catalog of unpleasantness. Its characters are repellent.

Scrooged doesn't pack the wallop of "A Christmas Carol" - you won't cry or walk out resolving to become a better person - but it's a funny and imaginative high-class effort. Best of all, it stars Bill Murray, who has only to raise an eyebrow to get laughs. [23 Nov 1988, p.E1]

The best of Jackie Chan's American movies, a pleasant little action comedy that makes one wonder how other filmmakers could ever get it wrong.

The spectacle is nothing short of refreshing.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

Third Person is Paul Haggis' best movie, and the one he has been building toward for years.

A mess.

The problem comes down to this: If you take the spirituality out of Ben-Hur, you take the Ben-Hur out of Ben-Hur.

The ultimate failure of Jurassic World: Dominion is not only that it relies too much on action, but that the action is lousy.

The movie doesn't have three brain cells to rub together, but the premise carries it a long way.

Though the film makers would probably like us to regard Guncrazy as a commentary on alienation in the '90s, in the end the picture isn't about much more than its own style. But this commitment to style and the movie's peculiar emotional honesty make it more than a self-conscious genre piece. [05 Feb 1993, p.D1]

As entertaining an action movie as you're going to find. [13 Apr 1991, p.C3]

This is a story that should have been, at the absolute most, 20 minutes long.

One of the smartest action thrillers to come along in the past few years. It's also one of the freshest.

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.

The only surprise is that there are no surprises.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

While Showgirls was funny the whole way through, Striptease has long, dreary stretches, where you're forced to watch Demi Moore undressing.

Trespass never advances beyond being a grand manipulation.

A remarkable treat. It contains information about the writer heretofore unknown, and though it’s a dramatic feature and not a documentary, it claims to tell the truth, without embellishment. Even better, it was written by someone who saw the events depicted firsthand.

A formulaic, predictable and yet reasonably likable picture.

Baywatch should have been a lot more fun.

So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.

Nia Vardalos has such a warm, alert energy that’s impossible to hate My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, even as it’s impossible to like it, even a little.

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 instantly forgettable, but smooth fun most of the way.

Gimme Shelter is an attempt at something grand, and though it doesn't get halfway there, it covers some ground.

Serenity is not just awful. It’s amazingly awful, which means that very few people will want to see it, but some probably will. People who can enjoy laughing at something made in dead earnest, who can appreciate, in a perverse way, a phenomenal, jaw-dropping mess, may find an experience close to pleasure in this strange, misbegotten, three-headed freak of a movie.

There are all kinds of bad movies in the world, but it's really only stardom that can create the exact variety of cinematic abortion we find in The Tourist.

The movie’s overall aura of cheapness, the cast of unknowns and the half-baked theology all call to mind the low-budget horror of the 1980s.

In “Atlas,” Jennifer Lopez does everything she can to act her way toward a good movie. Unfortunately, she can’t do it well enough to make a difference.

How bad does it get? How far past the basement can one elevator go?

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.

It represents 2 1/2 of the longest hours on record, a jumbled botch that is so confused in its purpose and so charmless in its effect that it must be seen to be believed, but better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies.

A limp, slow-moving and desperately unfunny comedy.

Sometimes excessiveness and implausibility are virtues in disguise. Movies this enjoyable don't come about by accident.

A delicate film - not flimsy, but fragile - that holds together on the strength of Efron's physical presence and performance.

The first and most honest thing to say about Miracle at St. Anna is that it's an awful mess.

It's fast, snappy and entertaining in a superficial way. But it lacks gravity and authenticity and seems more like a product than an attempt to tell a story.

Cage’s latest film, Jiu Jitsu must represent his career worst — and keep in mind, this is the man who made 1989’s “Vampire’s Kiss,” in which he ate a cockroach.

For at least an hour of its hour and a half running time, Fist Fight is a complete failure, a sour comedy without laughs. But then something happens in the movie’s last quarter. It doesn’t exactly redeem itself, but it comes into focus and starts making sense on its own weird terms.

It's just horsing around that comes to nothing. No, it's worse. It's horsing around designed to disguise nothing as something.

Mercury Rising is a Bruce Willis action movie, which means that most of us know what it will be like going in, and the only question is whether it's a good one or a lousy one. Answer: This is a good one.

It's a big disappointment.

Has many grotesque sex scenes, interspersed with sights of Chong rambling in a dissociated way as she sits in her squalid apartment.

It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

There's no point complaining that Honey is a tired reworking of an old formula, because it's intended for a young audience that doesn't know the formula.

Jonah Hill has directed and co-written an impressive little movie with “Outcome.” It could be called a Hollywood satire, but what’s striking about it — and audacious and unexpected — is that it’s dramatic and heartfelt. Here and there, it even comes close to being sentimental.

The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds.

Without the sheer watchability of Johnson, Reynolds and Gadot, Red Notice would have been intolerable. It also would have been pointless. But with them, it’s a pleasantly lousy movie that some people, if they look at the screen and squint really hard, might mistake for something decent.

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.

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

The movie's most inexcusable failing is that, despite all the flashbacks, we never get a sense of what this relationship was like when it worked.

Crush is that strange mixed bag -- an otherwise wretched movie in which an actress gets to do some of her best work.

If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it's going to be a sad, dead and awful future.

Whatever else W.E. may be (lousy, a waste of time, tin-eared, sleep-inducing, occasionally laughable, etc.), it's sincere and ambitious.

A spiritual successor to "The Pursuit of Happyness," but darker and more oblique.

Perry is at his best playing frenetic confusion.

Even without surprises, or drama, or clever dialogue, or even a single scene of any merit, Rebound goes along pleasantly.

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]

It's hard to sit all the way through Aeon Flux while fully awake.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

By the end, everything that was initially serious about the film becomes silly and everything appealing about it turns sour.

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]

Would be a completely routine horror movie, except that it has a superior director. Watch this film for five minutes, and it's clear that Victor Salva knows how to make movies.

Just another bloody cop thriller.

If anyone wants to watch naked men in the shower, naked men doing erotic dancing, naked men in bed and almost-naked men pumping iron, this is the film to see.

The result is a children's movie that's almost worth seeing even when not accompanied by a child. It's certainly a painless experience, and at times it's quite funny.

A stupid movie -- but a deliriously stupid movie, which gives it a certain grandeur.

A bleak, tedious enterprise, shot in earth tones and Gothic gray and blue.

Criminal depicts a compelling situation, made rich and entertaining through its extreme characters.

Graffiti Bridge is a bad excuse for a movie but a very good excuse for a rock concert. [03 Nov 1990, p.C3]

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.

One of the most quietly powerful endings in recent memory.

A complete washout, a joyless, pointless and fundamentally idiotic enterprise.

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]

The problem is the script, which, in scene after scene, contains no surprises.

The heart of the picture has to do with the heroes realizing the error of their ways and finding redemption, but it takes a lot for an audience to forgive two murderers. Belly comes up short.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

Has the strengths and weaknesses of a one-man show.

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

Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in Serena. It’s not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

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

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

Has a vacant, inept, why-oh-why feeling from its opening minutes and only gets worse.

But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’ve entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

These people are so stupid that they make us think, well, wait a second: Maybe those livers and kidneys could be put to better use.

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

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.

This is anti-funny, where every attempt at a joke is like a little rock thrown at your face.

Its whodunit plot is easily figured out, and its story is a mess. Most surprisingly, its star, Bruce Willis, manages to pull off an entirely uncharismatic performance...Striking Distance passes through boring on its way from indifferent to laughable, with the last 20 minutes the most ridiculous. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

Despite its faults Rambo III has an undeniable momentum and, judged on its own terms, a certain comic-book appeal. [26 May 1988, p.E1]

It would be a mildly lovely thing to be able to say the movie isn't bad. But it is.

Written by William Gibson, who adapted his own short story, and directed by New York artist Robert Longo in his feature debut, Johnny Mnemonic is inescapably a very cool movie. Running at a fevered pace, with laser and light explosions, it introduces a fantastic yet plausible vision of a computer-dominated age.

Two awful things about Push are at least interesting: The first is the way in which the story is confused. The second is that the story makes no sense.

A funny action comedy that comes into your house in a good mood and gets the reaction it’s supposed to get: laughs.

A stink bomb of a movie.

A resoundingly unlovable movie that almost resists being watched.

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

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

It's astonishing what little impact even the most imaginatively choreographed and well-filmed aerial escapades can have when they're presented as neither an expression of a character's personality, nor in the context of a compelling mission.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

In the end, Venom exists in what may end up being regarded as a no-man’s land — too much like a superhero movie to appeal to people who despise the genre, and yet too deliberately silly to be taken seriously by superhero fans. There’s nothing memorable in Venom, nothing to talk about the next day. But if it happens to hit you right, its lightness is refreshing.

The movie has that fatal triptych that is becoming Reiner's romantic-comedy signature: drippy sentiment, zany scenes that trivialize the characters and a horror of adventure.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

When the end finally arrives, it brings no sense of completion, just a sort of numb awareness that the pain has stopped.

Pet Sematary Two' follows the usual horror movie pattern: The first half is a pleasure, because you know what has to happen and you can't wait. And the second half is a bore, because you know what still has to happen and you can't wait for it to end. [01 Sept 1992, p.E3]

A thriller without thrills. It's also a thriller that cheats. The story is stretched to feature length only by having the film's incidents arranged in such a way as to reveal as little as possible.

With Lake at the center, something that could have been innocuous becomes painful, and a sure shot at mediocrity is transformed into one of the worst films of the year.

The story is unbelievable and phenomenally silly, not a good combination.

110 minutes of Euro silliness mitigated only by the presence of Huppert and the striking ability of the actors to keep a straight face throughout this mess.

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

Speaking of female gangsters, no review of The Kitchen should overlook Margo Martindale, who steals every scene she’s in as a mob matriarch — a gravelly voiced monster with a gutter mouth and a big photo of John F. Kennedy on her wall. Martindale gets to be evil and has as much fun onscreen as she can without smiling.

Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.

Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.

uUninspired, unnecessary and formulaic.

Against all odds, Morbius is an intelligent, human story.

Revenge is like a movie about two idiots who jump off a cliff hoping gravity will take a holiday. When they hit the ground _ well, that's just too bad. [16 Feb 1990, p.E1]

Few pictures that start this well go so bad so fast. [7 March 1992, p.C3]

A premise so rock-solid, so guaranteed to please, that it almost doesn't matter that the movie is otherwise a routine slasher, and not a particularly scary one.