Provides tepid but fun entertainment.

On Fire does the best it can with what it has. It’s still not enough to move the needle.

All I can seem to muster, post-screening, is a modicum of fondness and a probably impermanent relief that the film isn't anywhere near as awful as it might have been in less capable hands.

The original Shazam! may not have broken new ground as a superhero movie, but it did what the rest of the recent Warner Bros. superhero films seemed unwilling to do: Restore compassion to the realm of heroes. Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses the thing that made it special.

The characters never come across as anything more than self-interested parties. It’s hard to have a rooting interest in any of their fates, and even less in the outcome of this movie.

There are flashes of wit and flair here, including two stylish sequences detailing the French obsession with food and scarves, but they are but brief respites from the film’s near-pathological drear.

Kunis and McKinnon don’t exactly set the screen on fire with their chemistry, and there are only the most perfunctory shadings to their characters.

Viewers with a low tolerance for schmaltz may suffer; one heartfelt speech even drew nervous titters from the otherwise indulgent preview crowd.

Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it.

Try as they might, the Jackass gang can't quite snatch the year's ultimate 3D gross-out from the pricking jaws of "Pirahna 3-D."

Peeking its head out from this pile of trash is the ghost of one of the year’s most wildly entertaining movies.

There is also a lot of good supporting work in this movie, including the performances of Irma P Hall, Tom Bowser as Evie's clueless dad, and Bruno Kirby as Kiddie Acres' gruff impresario.

Not only is Kikujiro sweet and funny, it is, no doubt, Kitano's experimental "art film."

The episodic nature of Beau's misadventures serves as both distraction and bloat, a metaphorical cavalcade that lacks the acerbic agility of many of its predecessor.

My conclusion is that exploitation of a child for the sake of one's career is a shameful act.

The script fires off clunker after clunker so fast you don't know whether to laugh or cry. (I chose to laugh as I'd already done enough crying at The English Patient.) Vintage bad Stallone, this lost-in-the-shuffle Summer of '96 blockbuster is just what you thought it would be: loud, boisterous, and without a single original line of dialogue. It's enough to make you miss Judge Dredd.

Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.

There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion.

Matt Brown’s movie is a perfunctory highlight reel, featuring tepid performances and dull cinematic technique. Although the movie’s 108 minutes are hardly infinity, its duration gives the concept a run for its money.

A far more profound and moving film about this particularly Aussie/Kiwi campaign (and one that will probably never be topped) is Peter Weir’s devastating Gallipoli, starring a very young Mel Gibson. Given the choice, I’ll take that over Crowe’s earnest bombast any day.

Retelling of White's classic children's book is a spun-sugar treacle-bomb, though a darn good-looking one.

While first film Mugen Train was a box-office smash and a rare instance of using the movie format to more succinctly and dynamically tell the next arc of the Demon Slayer story, To the Swordsmith Village is – and I can’t stress this enough – just a music videoesque recap of the first couple seasons followed by three episodes sloppily jammed together, with even their intro and outro segments still fully intact.

The first impression is definitely one of all style, and precious little substance.

The Killer Inside Me is hardly uninteresting, and you get the sense that everyone involved tried really hard to pull off this difficult adaptation. But it would be impossible to view The Killer Inside Me as anything but a vast miscalculation.

Salerno spends more time talking to photographers with telephoto lenses who, over the decades, laid in wait for Salinger in the hope of capturing a grainy picture, than he does talking to literary analysts and historians.

Turning Poirot into an action figure with a gun is simply heresy.

It’s a bold and certainly credible move, but the execution is something of a belly flop. Thanks for Sharing isn’t really about a disease, only the cure, and that bias makes it a plausible picture of the Friend of Bill community-based recovery, but kind of a sham as a portrait of actual human beings.

A good concept yields scattershot results in this horror-film anthology.