Steven Rea

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Rock Star sinks into a morass of melodrama.

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

Wincer shoots the whole thing - which is dressed up with cherry-red vintage fighter planes and boxy Pan Am Clippers and offers a few sequences in Thai lagoons of gloriously shocking turquoise - in a manner that renders even surefire stuff (collapsing rope bridges, horseback rides through crowded Manhattan streets) ho-hum. Kids of a certain age may be distracted by the bright colors and broad acting - the film is, at least, devoid of any gratuitously nasty violence - but most audience members who find their way into the theater will wonder when the Ghost Who Walks is going to walk off into the sunset. It ain't soon enough. [7 June 1996, p.03]

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Ultimately, 44 Inch Chest has very little on its mind.

Shows glimmers of great drama, but jettisons too much essential cargo (character development, relationships, plot, common sense) in an effort to be lean and clean.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

Their apartments are chic, the architecture is impressive, the restaurants richly appointed. And yet, while the atmosphere and cinematography of director Leon Ichaso's grandly conceived movie evoke The Godfather series (as does its theme of brother vs. brother in a criminal underworld), Barry Michael Cooper's screenplay falls short of any such epic design. [25 Feb 1994, p.03]

Gimmicky artifice.

A merrily macabre things-we-do-for-love yarn.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

DiCaprio provides one of those tailor-made Oscar turns - cocking his head at odd angles, twitching and gesticulating with childlike awkwardness, his face a mask of sweet innocence and uncontrollable tics. [4 Mar 1994, p.03]

A disaster of a disaster movie that veers from the parodic to the preposterous. [6 Dec 1996, p.03]

And did I mention that it's long? It's long.

Michael Hoffman, whose credits include the far more lively Soapdish, directs this predictable business in a predictable fashion. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

Feels downright ancient.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

Aspires to the devilish crudity and unfettered social commentary of South Park. But Zwigoff's direction lacks the exaggerated cartoonishness necessary.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

A sappy excursion to Edwardian days.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

There's a fine line between stupid comedy that's actually pretty smart and stupid comedy that's just dumb, and The Other Guys crosses the line - into realms of unredeeming dunderheadedness - more often than it should.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

The Weather Man belongs to a school of earnest, artsy Hollywood flicks that includes the Michael Douglas-goes-bonkers "Falling Down," and a lineage that goes back to revered 1970s pics like "Five Easy Pieces."

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Catastrophically overdone.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

Let sleeping bros lie.

It's still a submarine movie, confined by the ship, the sea, and a convention-laden script.

Despite its penchant for the crude and lewd, is gooey in ways that have nothing to do with bodily fluids.

Far-fetched and utterly humorless, with a literally tacked-on conclusion (yes, more text on the screen), the only thing that's surprising about Unbreakable is how lame it is.

The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

Boy, can Harvey Keitel be bad -- and not bad like "Bad Lieutenant," bad like bad acting.

Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film.

Too cute by half (or maybe three-quarters).

Zemeckis, who blazed trails mixing live-action with animation in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," blazes not even a footpath here.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

Run All Night isn't dull. The pace is breakneck, and necks get broken. But the violence is relentless, ugly, unredeemed by any real humanity.

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

As a commentary on gender roles, maternity, paternity and test-tube fertilization, Junior does manage to get in a few good yuks - but far fewer than you'd expect given the story's, um, fertile premise. [23 Nov 1994, p.E01]

A loud, abrasive comedy that squanders the talents of its three stars, The Ref is the sort of project that stands or falls on its writing - it needs to be deep and deliciously dark. But as scripted by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss (he penned The Fisher King, this is her first produced screenplay) and directed by Ted Demme (Jonathan's nephew, making his feature film debut), all we get is superficial rage. [11 Mar 1994, p.03]

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

This is not about a reluctant hero drawing courage from some deep personal well. It's not about dread and danger. It's about visual effects.

In Don McKellar's remake of "Seducing Doctor Lewis", a 2003 French-Canadian comedy, the charm feels force-fed.

The trouble with The Last Kiss comes down to Paul Haggis' screenplay.

Jeremy Irons slithers on board with a haughty sneer and papal vestments, playing Bishop Pucci.

With a clamorous soundtrack and a whirl of elaborate chases and busily choreographed fight scenes, this is Sherlock Holmes with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Not even Halle Berry, emerging from the blue Caribbean in an orange two-piece -- can bring this thing to life.

For high-speed action, eye-popping locales, and chopsocky fight-fests galore, watch The Transporter - on video.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

Non-Stop gets increasingly far-fetched as the jet makes its way across the Atlantic. Certainly, there are more red herrings on the plane than there are in the sea below. And Neeson has to stare down every last one of them.

Joltingly graphic and atmospheric (Nixey and his crew at least know how to set up a few good shocks), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark fails to involve us in any meaningful way with its characters.

A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

A knuckleheaded period piece.

At least an hour of Man of Steel's excessive running time is devoted to the sort of crash-and-burn, slamming-into-skyscrapers CG fight scenes that we've already seen in "The Avengers" and "Dark Knight," "Iron Man," and "Spider-Man." Man of Steel is just the same old same old.

A silly melodrama.

Cloud Atlas is pop spiritualism, comic-book grandiosity, Zen for dummies. I can't say I didn't enjoy it on some level, but it's not the level of universal wisdom the Wachowskis and Tykwer would have us be on.

Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.

Jaw-droppingly corny. [22 Jan 1999, p.03]

If only the screenplay had more going for it than hackneyed homilies and living-in-the-ghetto stereotypes. If only first-time director Sunu Gonera had a surer hand, a knack for something bolder, wilder, goofier.

An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.

There are so many things wrong with Luhrmann's Great Gatsby - the filmmaker's attention-deficit-disorder approach, the anachronistic convergence of hip-hop and swing, the choppy elision of Fitzgerald's plot, the jarring collision of Jazz Age cool and Millennial cluelessness. But at the crux of things, the problem is that it's impossible to care.

For all its visual delights, Magic in the Moonlight, the 44th feature written and directed by the admirably industrious Woody Allen, has to be one of his bigger duds.

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

A lush, lovely snooze-fest.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

With its themes of family tradition, heated passion and parent-daughter conflict - not to mention lots of splendid preparing-the-meals sequences in the Aragon kitchen, and not to mention the contents of Keanu's case - A Walk in the Clouds could just as easily been called Like Wine for Chocolate. But anyone hoping for a second helping of the sensual romance of Like Water for Chocolate will come away disappointed. The movie's glinting incandescence is oppressive. [11 Aug 1995, p.14]

Bobby has its heart in the right place (on its sleeve). But it doesn't have its screenplay anywhere - or at least, anywhere near the heft that its subject demands.

The big shift between Carpenter's B-movie and filmmaker Jean-François Richet's comic book-style remake is that instead of a troop of bloodthirsty gang members encircling the precinct, the bad guys here all look like good guys.

A woefully thin and pointless musical comedy boasting the no-chemistry coupling of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyonc?

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

If only RocknRolla's characters were at all believable - even in the context of its own cartoon universe.

It's old, old hat.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.