This film isn’t terrible; it’s just empty. There are few things more disappointing than a genre movie that forgoes developing its intriguing premise to focus on cheap, failed attempts to thrill.

A hard-R espionage thriller heavy on themes of sexual degradation and graphic, sometimes sadistic violence.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

The Cutting Edge plays like the kind of date movie written by a computer, and not a very smart one...It makes shaved ice look deep. [27 March 1992, p.29]

The reason romantic comedies fail so often is that they attempt too much. “Fly Me to the Moon” may be the busiest example I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the worst, despite its eclectic needle drops convincing me that I need to buy its soundtrack album.

The point of all this solemnity may be to pay serious respect to those rescue swimmers, who courageously look after errant kayakers or victims of Hurricane Katrina. But what we get in exchange is a movie that feels too much like a Coast Guard recruitment film. Who wants to pay to see that?

The movie tries to do for forearms what the loosely similar science-fiction romance "The Adjustment Bureau'' attempted for men's hats: make them chic.

Green’s narrative confidence quickly kicks in, as well as the sharp dialogue by screenwriter Peter Straughan (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”). More importantly, the film indulges in the unabashed goofiness that stoked Green’s “Pineapple Express,” and which Sandra Bullock demonstrated to raucous effect in “The Heat.”

Solid, balanced period piece that focuses on a specific place and time yet resonates with universal themes.

Something is missing in Bounce, the muted dynamic of which calls forth a perhaps inevitably muted reaction.

A babe-athon, pure and simple.

Insights run more along the lines of which ''Sesame Street'' character each of them identifies with.

The film at times genuinely touches on the bittersweet magic of first love.

Despite a few diverting moments and some ambitiously dramatic themes, this one is simply too uneventful and too populated by thinly sketched characters to keep its target audience engaged.

Tomorrow Never Dies works too hard to keep the James Bond franchise going, sacrificing Bond's signature light comedy and stylish playfulness to become just another hectic action movie. [19 Dec 1997]

Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.

With his thoughtful exploration of the conflict between desire and responsibility, and his self-reflexive exploration of the themes of voyeurism, ambition, and personal identity, Reeves’s debut shows signs of a talented filmmaker.

In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.

The Penguin Lessons severely falters when it deals with the dangers of military occupation. It’s hard to watch a serious subplot involving people being “disappeared” by the government juxtaposed with scenes of cutesy penguin mayhem and classroom hijinks.

The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.

As a political thriller, Formosa Betrayed has enough suspense and intrigue to pull viewers along willingly. It doesn’t try too hard, which is refreshing.

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

It’s like a Parisian variation on Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” or the premise of another PBS Masterpiece Theater series with Smith.

A heady, sometimes blurry combination of fable, legend, and social-political commentary.

A blandly filmed and subtext-heavy talkathon that wastes a game cast on a group of characters about whom it's almost impossible to care. If this were a cocktail party, you'd be back home with a good book already.

There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.

This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.

Doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a sprightly sex comedy or an enigmatic little thriller. Unfortunately, it's neither very funny nor very thrilling.

Elsa & Fred does graze against an interesting idea: that the vitality of our youths lives on in the prison of aging bodies.

Unfortunately, Mann also leans on ill-fitting story elements that he might easily and smartly have avoided, and the movie’s rhythms and credibility pay for it.

Even if the story is hackneyed, it's hackneyed in a warm and universal way.

What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.

Egoyan ekes out an engaging and meaningful potboiler.

Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.

The movie goes after our dreams by dragging them through our Sept. 11 nightmares with an apocalyptic finale so ludicrous, overedited, and from out of nowhere that it's hard to follow, let alone to believe it's happening.

The Gospel of John is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.

Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.

A charming and funny look at the independent filmmaking business and the thin line between a masterpiece and a $9 nap.

Comes off more like a series of painful cliches than a comedy or a love story.

It was possible to hope that Blade II would turn out to be good. Well, forget it.

It wants, as Kate says about her documentary, to be a "seminal work on beauty and aging." But it wears like a gauzy romantic comedy.

It’s silly of mind and open of heart, full of visual and sonic eye candy while telling a predictable story with pleasurable generosity. The laughs are pitched right over the plate with the skill and enjoyment of a team of vaudeville pros. As reunions go, it’s a success.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.

The romantic comedy has never had a star as depressing as Jennifer Aniston. It's not the movies - well, it isn't simply the movies.

In other words, Citizen Koch is preaching to the choir. Which might not be a pointless exercise, seeing how the choir failed to show up for the last midterm election in 2010, and might need extra motivation not to repeat that mistake this November.

The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.

In Dito Montiel’s treacly, programmatic film, Williams succumbs to a recurring neediness, earnestness, and sentimentality.

How deeply silly is The Lake House? As silly as a movie about two letter-writing lovers separated by a wrinkle in time can be. How much sweet, dumb fun is it? More than you might want to admit.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

Okonedo and Bening fare best among the surprisingly lackluster cast.

It leaves you with an odd, sweet-and-sour taste - nostalgia painted in pastel colors, streaked with black smears.

The movie emphasizes personal relationships as other Marvel movies haven’t, and it has a vaguely religioso quality.

Not that the movie’s various shortcomings are all on Moore. British genre director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (“Storage 24”) gives her nothing but trite drama to work with in setting up the story, and an overload of distracting, reductive prattle once she hits the water.

The director is Lee Daniels, of Precious (2009) and The Butler (2013), here evoking the historical era and its figures with verve and intelligence but unable to find a dramatic center other than his electrifying star.

Haggis finally finds the movie's groove late in the game, and the escape sequence itself is hectic, suspenseful, and enjoyably ridiculous.

Housesitter is the kind of sweet little user-friendly concoction that until very recently defined the term summer movie. It won't solve the environmental crisis or raise your IQ, but neither is it likely to promote brain damage, which immediately puts it miles ahead of, say, the presidential race. And, needless to say, it's funnier. [12 June 1992, p.29]

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

Visually dazzling and dramatically trite -- it's virtuoso piffle.

Hills is a far cry from its cheesy and predictable predecessor. "Gruesome" doesn't begin to describe the horrors that are revealed on-screen here.

Well, there are worse ideas for movies and certainly worse casts, and Michael Lembeck’s genial, predictable comedy rolls along on well-worn tracks elevated by the class and commitment of actors who’ve earned our affection over decades of work.

The initial close-up of Thompson - all sourly snaggletoothed and begoggled - is as funny as anything in the original. And just that one quick glimpse would have been perfect.

Eleanor the Great is one of the worst and most distasteful movies I’ve seen in a long while.

Truly, there is nothing the woman (Isabelle Huppert) can't do - except save "Promise'' from the valley of the shadow of bad French movie pretensions.

Anybody who's ever laced on toe shoes, or wanted to, will find something to take away from Center Stage.

Serendipity returns us, if only for a couple of hours, to the Manhattan of our dreams.

She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.

Despite timely and worthwhile subject matter, there is nothing very inspired or inspiring in what makes it to the screen. Maybe they're saving all of that for the sequel, too.

What’s most entertaining here, ultimately, is the performance that Stewart turns in as outspoken, play-it-loose Sabina, a completely unexpected, who-knew mash-up of sexy and offbeat.

The climax of The Amateur is one of the least satisfying meetings of hero and villain I’ve seen in a while.

A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.

An inspirational sports movie, soccer subdivision, and it stops at every expected station of the cross on its road to the triumphant against-all-odds finale (in sudden-death overtime, yet). Yet it also feels appealingly handmade in a way most jock dramas don't.

As the movie is in step with Connelly's aching heroine and not trying to scare our socks off, Dark Water is of a piece with Salles's sensitive filmmaking. Obviously, from a genre standpoint, that presents a tremendous problem. Nobody goes to a horror movie for a good cry.

It's got flashes of brilliance from Tom Hanks as an unstable comedian whose desperation gives his routines their edge. It's also got an embarrassing performance by Sally Field as a frazzled New Jersey housewife who, late in the game, confronts her resentful family and says, "I want to be a mom, I want to be a wife, and I want to be a comedienne." On the whole, Punchline does not wear its schizophrenia well. [7 Oct 1988, p.38]

Or maybe Major, like Oedipus, is really searching for herself? Do people even have selves? Are identities and souls just a bunch of clichés spun out by teams of screenwriters? If these questions interest you, do yourself a favor and watch the 1995 original movie.

Despite the return of director Steven Soderbergh (who also serves, as usual, as editor and cinematographer), writer Reid Carolin, and star Channing Tatum, this installment pales in comparison to its superior predecessors. Dare I say, it lacks — magic?

There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.

The film itself is painless, strained, occasionally amusing, and utterly disposable — just another studio buddy comedy/action movie that forgot where it put the script.

Director Wayne Wang and his screenwriters sometimes ape ''Pretty Woman." But Latifah's obvious forebear is Pearl Bailey, who was just as regal and straight-up.

The crazy train of Insidious runs fully off the rails when the filmmakers go logical and some of the strange gets explained away as a double shot of demonic possession and astral projection.

This is good, fun summer fare, shot in ominous shades of darkness by cinematographers Roman Osin and Tom Stern and fueled by an effective score by Bear McCreary that isn’t obtrusive. Ovredal knows how to stage atmospheric horror sequences, and the Norwegian even gives us a variation on a Viking funeral that serves as the film’s biggest emotional moment.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten that comedy is a requisite feature in a comedy.

Nora Garrett’s screenplay isn’t concerned with fleshed out characters; everyone here is a stand-in for some issue designed to get a rise out of the audience.

Scott’s “Exodus” is dutiful, deeply earnest, and more than a little dull.

Bring Wet-Naps to The Devil's Double. It's coated and fried in the same batter KFC uses for Extra Crispy chicken. The movie might be greasier, actually.

This fifth and mercifully final installment features so much idle anticipation that it's unclear whether we're watching a movie or an Apple product launch.

Not even John Toll, who won two Oscars for cinematography, can make this movie look good. Stay home and watch the real Super Bowl instead.

As much fun as A Working Man can be, I kept thinking there’s a better movie peeking out through the cracks of this rather OK one.

While The Last Boy Scout covers no new ground, and while it features one of the heftier plot missteps in recent junk-movie history, it's far from the worst of shoot-'em-ups to burst onscreen lately. [13 Dec 1991, p.55]

It’s essentially “Romy and Michelle’s Mission Impossible” or “Lucy and Ethel Live and Let Die,” and it’s an easy, awfully disposable two hours that scatters some off-kilter belly laughs among a lot of labored gags and efficiently-shot action movie setpieces.

Winton’s inspiring story deserves greater attention but this film isn’t the best representation of it.