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.

Even the portrayal of the Hasidic community comes to feel like window-dressing, welcome for its exoticism but never truly understood.

The movie is mostly grim, largely nasty, and gloatingly violent. (It is never a good idea to start a film with a child subjected to violence.) Really, what Harder is is glorified, post-Tarantino violence punctuated by exposition.

Fear is a formulaic thriller that is like "Cape Fear" meets "Fatal Attraction," or "Splendor in the Grass" on crack, but without a hint of those movies' psychological complexities and camp moments. [12 Apr 1996]

You may have to be from Iceland to take dialogue like ''You can't freeze love like a gutted fish'' with a straight face.

Deathtrap is slick enough that you can't disengage from it without missing something. [19 Mar 1982]

It's a lot like a pumpkin spice frappuccino with extra sugar and extra cream. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll leave with foam on your nose. So cute. As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.

The movie is alternately preposterous and predictable, forced in humor and saccharine in emotion, and it’s not exactly steady in striking a balance between the two.

The chief trouble with Hardware is that it doesn't seem to contribute anything uniquely its own to the genre, although it works hard dismembering bodies and otherwise crushing and tearing them apart with its circular saw and drill-bit arms after homing in on them with its ruby laser eyes. [14 Sep 1990, p.40p]

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

What’s ironic — and frustrating — is how precipitously the movie itself eventually goes tumbling down the intelligence scale. In the process, Chiwetel Ejiofor is wasted, along with some potent moments from costars Roberts and Nicole Kidman.

The cynics will slap their foreheads, the squeamish will cover their eyes, but the revenge movie fanatics should be nice and satisfied after the whole ordeal.

There are some amusing looks at the elation - and panic - that come with winning big, from the praise-Jesus swooning of Kevin's grandma (underutilized Loretta Devine).

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

Guy Ritchie made a name for himself with scuzz, but even his shtick has exceeded its sell-by date. Nobel Son goes further, crossing the contortions of "The Usual Suspects" with the shallowness of certain intellectual family melodramas.

The man inside that legend has yet to come into focus 40 years on. Morrison wanted the world and he wanted it now, and he got it. What When You’re Strange can’t admit is that he had no idea what to do next.

It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.

Supposed to be a cheeky little lark but instead runs a narrow gamut from labored to aimless.

The Client is slick, but not much more than the sum of its surfaces. [20 July 1994, p.23]

The film is slow going with its mix of stilted political discourse and restless village folk just looking to celebrate life and dance. At times, it’s like “Footloose” gone didactic.

Broad as the side of a city bus and about as lumbering, Night School is a better-than-average Kevin Hart comedy — meaning that it’s an average comedy overall. It’s silly and rather sweet, and it’s blessed with an ensemble that makes the most of the dopey cartoon script patched together by Hart and five other writers.

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

Kevin James's latest comedy doesn't promise any bing or bang, only boom. Take it at its word.

Those looking for further enlightenment might want to pass on the feel-good cinematic hagiography known as Awake: The Life of Yogananda.

Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.

While never heavy-handed about its politics, the film makes no effort to disguise its strong anti-Chinese bias.

There are many complaints to be made about “Wicked Little Letters” — its forced humor, its even more forced moral lessons, its tonal unevenness (flat-footed jokiness here, cheap sentimentality there) — but chief among them is wasting Buckley.

Sensitively written, nicely shot, expertly acted, and intelligently ambiguous, Nobody Walks still manages to send you out with a shrug.

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

Race wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.

Numbing story.

Despite a few tangy black comic moments, Lucky Numbers' is bummer theater.

As it stands, The Expendables 2 is lazily satisfied with repeating the first movie's formula, shortcomings and grisly strengths alike.

The dialogue also reflects the material’s stage origins in ways that don’t always translate well.

It’s a cheat, a cash grab, and it makes for 125 dystopian minutes of set-up with no resolution. But come back next November, folks, and we’ll show you the rest! They should have called it “Mockingjay, Part 1 — The Shakedown.” Or “The Hunger Games 3: Rubble Without a Cause.”

They’re calling it a movie, but no matter how you squint at it it’s a TV show.

You marvel all the more at Litondo's and Harris's performances, considering how much claptrap Ann Peacock's script requires them to put up with.

The riot of color here brings to mind what the makers of “Ice Age” delivered with “Rio,” which in turn reminds us that these animators certainly aren’t just one-trick talents. Could be time for them to show us some new ones.

Seems embalmed in its own time, an earnest and handsomely crafted museum piece, not an urgent transposition of Miller's moral outrage to the new century.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

Nearly all the actors seem to be having a good time, and the action moves so fast that you don't mind when something nuts happens.

Narrated from start to close by an 8-year-old, it often seems like a coloring book on tape.

Alternately shows the elder Bronner as lovable and nutty, sinister and terrifying, victim and victimizer. Ultimately, those disparate elements never coalesce.

The end is a long time coming in Reindeer Games and the dialogue is mostly slush.

Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.

Café Society is a romantic comedy where the romance is lackluster and the comedy an afterthought.

After Love is like being stuck at a dinner with an unpleasant couple who won’t stop squabbling.

As per sequel rules, everything has to be bigger. But bigger doesn’t always equal better, as Extraction 2 proves.

As a documentary about Lorne Michaels, “Lorne” isn’t much; it’s more of a look at “Lorne Michaels,” the character his mysterious nature created.

Full of action, but no soul.

All thing considered, MacGruber’ is a lot better than it should be. That still doesn’t mean it’s all that great.

The only laugh to be had in Total Recall, a ripsnorting sci-fi action extravaganza that starts well and works its way down to average, is in the opening credits, where we learn that the movie's primary production company is called Original Film. Really?

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

A disjointed patchwork of zany character sketches lacking in coherence and credibility.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

Viewed en masse, V/H/S can't generate the necessary suspense, and buy-in, to truly get under your skin.

The unworthy new Hollywood remake of Japan's horror phenomenon, ''Ring,'' has packed on a definite article and a whole lot of hooey.

When the film predictably limps across the finish line, you're left with the impression your time would have been better spent sitting in traffic.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

An hour and a half of cultural and sexual headaches only barely leavened by MacLachlan's performance.

What’s nice about this movie, actually, is that you can get a few shameless laughs out of it and then forget you saw it at all.

Herek's brisk pacing and skillful way with the hockey sequences gives The Mighty Ducks an urgency its manipulative copycat soul doesn't really earn. The Mighty Ducks - with its team calculatedly organized along gender as well as multi-cultural lines - is the kind of film kids like, then outgrow. [02 Oct 1992, p.49]

There's also new piety and self-righteousness about parenting. Comedies are nervous to find the real humor and wonder in having a family. It's usually tragedy or nothing.

The playfulness and high spirits bubbling from the pages of Leonard's novels are squelched by Schrader's earnestness. Schrader's touch with Touch isn't light, and it costs him. [14 Feb 1997, p.D9]

Young Guns had no vision at all. Young Guns II at least tries for poetry and irony and epic scale. And it finds humor in such things as the outlaws' keen appreciation of media exposure and image-making. But its chronicling of the gang's downfall just slogs. [01 Aug 1990, p.63p]

The slightly androgynous Curtis is always interesting to watch; her sentience, her thin lips pressed into an ironic smile, her hood-ornament sleekness are tempered by a believable capacity for edgy affection. But the fact that the force is against her is minor compared to the way the film is against her. Blue Steel victimizes her more than any of the celluloid heavies in it. [16 Mar 1990, p.42]

Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

Champions wants to be a clone of the 1976 sports movie classic “The Bad News Bears,” right down to giving us a Tatum O’Neal-style toughie, Cosentino (Madison Tevlin). While Tevlin is very funny and convincing, Harrelson fails to plumb the depths of unlikability in his character that Walter Matthau brought to Coach Buttermaker.

Isn't a first-date movie. As a third -date movie, though, it's just about perfect.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

Its commendable, if juvenile, sense of erogenous adventure is sullied by bland technique, canned suburban punk music, and the fact that all the exploration does amount to maturer characters.

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

Part of the trouble is casting. This is a movie that needs a great or gonzo performer to give it depth or heft.

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.

It's too diffuse, too turgid, an intelligent failure, but a failure nonetheless, with no real heat between Garcia and Thurman, riveting as she is as the blind woman literally and figuratively struggling to find a purchase on the world. In the end, it spends so much effort avoiding cheap obviousness that it seems to implode on its own muted restraint. [6 Nov 1992, p.38]

It plants a flag for a new corporate entertainment franchise and it will make international containerships of money, so does it matter that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is joyless and incoherent? Probably not.

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

A sequel seemingly eager to assert that monster mashes are about B-movie chills not "Twilight'' melodrama. Eager to a fault, ultimately.

The biggest problem One for the Money faces is trying to have it both ways: gritty-ethnic inner city vs. girly-girly comic.

Miley may vacillate, but for now her indentured servitude to Disney continues. The image that comes to mind is Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hutt, but that's probably just me.

Just a limp, jokey family film that wants to have its fairy tale magic and its hip irony, too.

The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.

Like its predecessor, Wicked: For Good benefits greatly from the fact that its two leads are fantastic singers, and its director knows how to stage a musical number.

This new goof might have been funnier still if the premise weren't so derivative, so just been there, done that.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.