Walter Addiego

Home Again is plain vanilla, from start to finish.

A fall-off in writing is part of the problem, but I think a more important issue is the replacement of Terry Zwigoff (“Crumb”) as director. Zwigoff’s humor is razor-sharp and incisive, qualities missing from Bad Santa 2.

About the only time the film emerges from its stupor is when Lewis bares his fangs and shows us that Max has a bilious, acerbic side.

This kind of psychological mystery, with its suggestion of fugue states, needs to work by hints and whispers, but Pali Road has pretty low expectations of its audience. It ought to be light on its feet, but it lumbers.

There are two main obstacles to enjoying The Last Witch Hunter. One is your ability to buy Vin Diesel as an immortal slayer of evildoers plying his trade in today’s Manhattan. You also have to swallow a by-the-numbers plot buried under an avalanche of fast-and-furious but underwhelming CGI effects.

Earnest and well-intentioned, The Identical is based on a "what if" that straddles the line between ingenious and loopy.

Moretz is an appealing young woman whose star is rising. She'll probably have an exceptional career, but If I Stay won't be a highlight.

Heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.

For Tim and Eric, what's funny is what's odd, ultra-cheap, pathetic or scurvy - and what's funniest of all is that some people just don't get it.

The film is morbid and mawkish, and packed with enough forced whimsy to make you scream.

No target is too obvious for Salvation Boulevard, a farrago of cheap shots aimed at Christian fundamentalism. It's a blunderbuss satire that criminally wastes a talented cast.

Depressing. So is director Marshall Curry's avowal in the press notes that the film will leave viewers with "a more nuanced view of the world."

For some, this sort of thinking is a much-needed revolution in human consciousness. For others, it's little more than New Age platitudes and questionable science.

Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Belongs in the holiday hall of shame.

The new version has been speeded up and dumbed down, which does not reflect well on the mouse factory's view of its audience these days.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

Has more in common with a horror movie than with a genuine political work.

Two hours of senselessness and overkill, decked out in lurid, bad-trip colors.

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.

A dimwitted, fill-in-the-blanks horror opus that slanders a fine and useful mammal.

Godawful.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

An hour into the picture, Spade offers a pretty funny imitation of belter Neil Diamond, but it's a long 60 minutes for such a pitiful payoff.

A way-below-par golfing comedy.

Maybe there's a real use for Carrie 2 after all. Stand it up against the original, and you have a pretty good lesson in what's happened to the movies in the last couple of decades.

Somehow, the funny stuff gets sucked into a kind of black hole in the center of the satire, along with all the comic debris. What should have been a surreal flight to the planet Lucas crumbles into a harmless collection of cosmic dustballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.52]

Grumpier Old Men certainly isn't relying on its mawkish and hokey story to put warm bodies in the seats. There's no reason to see the picture - a sequel to their 1993 hit, “Grumpy Old Men" - other than to relish the talents of these two veterans, plus Sophia Loren, a newcomer to the series.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

The performers don't really seem at the top of their game here.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

Stupid.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

The effort is undermined with crass humor, mugging and slapstick.

A well-intentioned, but all-thumbs down drama.

About as close to pure mall fodder as you'll see.

An unbearable exercise in provocation.

Second-banana material.

Hoodwinked is a computer-animated, "Shrek"-style satire of "Little Red Riding Hood" that offers a few laughs but overall is pretty tired.

A complete misfire.

The Phantom is a spiritless affair likely to vanish quickly from first-run screens.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.

A lot of noise and nothing to justify it.

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

Legends of the Fall never makes you think too hard; its woes-of-a-proud-family formula takes a back seat to a self-conscious visual style that strains toward the level of myth.