Juggles so many stories and characters, nothing ever develops into more than a rough sketch.

The real struggle in The Alamo is between historic revisionism and Hollywood notions of sacrifice, and it's not much of a contest: Hollywood wins, as it did in John Wayne's sprawling, factually spurious 1960 film.

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.

It’s rated PG, but trust me, it’ll give younger kids the screaming meemees.

Perrier’s Bounty is all stock material, full of characters that deserve more than the cliched shootouts and showdowns that befall them. Even the movie’s most natural impulses seem to come from a can.

It falls far short of the lighthandedness, whimsy and feeling it needs to override its slightness. You keep wanting to like it, to match the good will coming out of the actors, but the writing keeps shoving its fabricated nothingness in your face. [09 Dec 1988, p.36]

The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over.

Only the Lonely is an unflashy romantic comedy, one that is mildly romantic and mildly comic - though not enough of either to make it fully satisfying. [24 May 1991, p.48]

Once it’s clear the movie won’t be deviating at all from its formula, Frank’s journey gets tedious.

Pink Cadillac, you might say, is low on gas. [26 May 1989, p.43]

Offers cliches instead of chills.

It’s a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.

Just Like Heaven suggests that a post-coma Elizabeth might understand what life is truly all about. Of course, if being alive means having to live in this movie, maybe she was better off the way she was.

No matter how hard Richard Gere huffs and puffs, his performance as the hunky manic-depressive known only as "Mr. Jones" won't blow you away. Bouncing foolishly from super-duper euphoria to catatonia and back, Gere expends too much energy to ever be believable. [8 Oct 1993, p.56]

As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.

Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

Funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.

Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.

The ugly duckling of Nickelodeon's after-bath lineup. That's its strength.

Sexual doublespeak is everywhere.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

The film can be naggingly vague and patchily written where precision seems called for, but the familiar procession keenly digging into the wistful material does hold interest.

That’s the key to this movie — the way Thérèse looks at things; it’s a rare film that focuses on a woman actually looking and how she responds to what she sees.

Downey's cameo is one of the few unexpected - even terrorful - moments in this entirely pedestrian sequel, which like its predecessor is almost but never quite frightening. [21 Nov 1990, p.38P]

It’s all a fair attempt, but Aselton isn’t going to make anyone forget Kathryn Bigelow.

The result is a curious hash: warmly funny in the comic scenes and shamelessly sentimental during the sad bits, of which there are many.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.

Wonder Wheel, Allen’s new film, is one of the Very Bad Ones. Set in a post-WWII Coney Island that glows with the hues of popsicles at sunset, it’s a strained adultery melodrama that appears to have been written poorly on purpose, as a sour parody of 1950s theatrical clichés.

“2” is as flashy and splashy as the original. Both also register right up there on the implausibility scale — that’s like the Richter scale, only with head scratching — but “2” has a lighter touch and more interesting settings. Macau and London, here we come.

Figgis's film doesn't match its reach.

The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]

The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.

If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''

Like a surly teen pilot, you, too, might find yourself bored and muttering, “Honestly, maybe the fate of humanity and the world isn’t important to me, either.’’

The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.

Flirt has its moments, and Ewell and Nikaidoh are auspicious additions to the Hartley rep company. But Flirt will appeal mostly to Hartley completists. [23 Aug 1996]

Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.

The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.

The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

The best I can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it’s infinitely better than its predecessor. But you don’t need a power-up to clear that bar.

Maybe The Oranges does represent a middle-age male fantasy, but Laurie lets you see its pitfalls as well as its pleasures.

Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

It’s worth remembering that movies can have soul, too, if their filmmakers are willing to do the work to find it.

So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

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

Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.

Come on. You want to know if it's funny. And the answer is: kind of.

A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

After a fast, funny start, the new sequel, Johnny English Reborn, proves to be more of the same.

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

None of these characters provides more than a smattering of laughs, but Def is the one guy we might like to see more of, if only because his role is small and better executed than it deserves.

Unofficially, You, Me and Dupree is a companion piece to last summer's "Wedding Crashers," a movie whose lunacy is desperately needed this summer.

Everyone behaves themselves in this Rebecca, whereas the point of the book and the first movie is that our worst behavior is always floating just below the waterline, ready to bob to the surface at the wrong moment.

It's more of a throwback to one of the first SNL movie spinoffs, Steve Martin's "The Jerk." It's loaded with physical comedy and enlists Farley's SNL foil, David Spade, to serve as Abbott to Farley's Costello. Farley plays the blimp on uppers, Spade plays the pinched little know-it-all nerd with a chip - a computer chip, probably - on his shoulder. What mostly keeps it going is the sheer gusto with which Farley throws himself into the clowning. It's passably entertaining if you don't think about it too much - and to see it is to realize that it works mightily at getting you to not think too much. [31 March 1995, p.59]

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

Although it's more concerned with justifying its title than with making contact with any real subversiveness, criminal or cultural, Airheads is the kind of sweet fluff it's easy to say yes to in August. [5 Aug 1994, p.46]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Book Club: The Next Chapter was not only watchable but occasionally amusing.

Honey Don’t!, the neo-noir by director Ethan Coen and his wife, co-writer Tricia Cooke, is an unsatisfying mishmash of plot threads that neither intrigue nor coalesce.

Seeing the Ghostbusters in the Big Apple where they belong put a smile on my face, at least until I realized I was watching a sitcom about wiseass teens and their dopey parents.

Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.

Blame the unsexy subject matter if you want, but blame the uninspired casting first.

While Baruchel is fun to root for and watch flail about like a pipe-cleaner in the wind, this movie encourages a sick desire in me -- to see Michael Cera and all the runners-up in the Mr. Puniverse Contest knocked down a peg by a bully with a neck the size of a tree trunk.

You could argue that the only thing that’s automatic about A Dame to Kill For, really, is some of the firepower that its hardcases are packing.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.

The experiment in the new movie is this: What happens when his Type A's are forced out of their comfort zones? If only Brooks had managed to leave his. How Do You Know feels like a collection of scenarios he's done better.

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

The moviemaking is driven only by contempt; he (Roth) wants to nauseate us into submission.

A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.

Neither as rollicking nor as wild as one had hoped, but Tyler's tongue-in-cheek noir goddess transcends cliche and the screenplay's other shortcomings terrifically.

A romantic comedy with an adult sensibility, a film that avoids characters-as-caricatures (with one exception), and deftly mixes cynicism and hope.

A jokey, junky potboiler.

Red blood, white sands and a blue Corvette are the real stars of "White Sands," the slick new Roger Donaldson thriller that's more about its plot convolutions than its characters, and more about its visuals than either. [24 Apr 1992, p.85]

By 2009, the franchise has nothing new to offer. The culture, through video games and reality television, has caught up to the series and surpassed it.

The movie balances cardboard comic bad-guys with believable teenagers, has the courage to avoid romance, and unlike most Hollywood films suggests parents can be helpful and loving as well as clueless.

The director of the much-anticipated adaptation, Sam Taylor-Johnson, made what could have been a trashy TV movie into well-conceived cinema.

The movie tries to tell the whole story instead of just a good one.

Director Jason Moore and writer Mark Hammer have fashioned an action movie/romantic comedy hybrid that’s too violent for comedy fans and not thrilling enough for thrill seekers. It’s not romantic at all, despite the best efforts of Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel.

A heartfelt but muddled melodrama.

The script by Ian Abrams puts them through strictly formulaic moves, but it has flashes of wit and it's even literate. [10 Sept 1993, p.47]

The British actor works his gonzo Method madness with such rigorous control, though, that he’s mesmerizing to watch even when the movie around him is losing its mind.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]

This is one of those your-roots-are-showing family circuses where just about everybody seems like a clown.

Will “Mortal Kombat II” make a splash this awards season? Probably not. But this faithful adaptation should satisfy longtime fans of the franchise.

A small film, but its ease and grace are virtues that can't be overrated.

Bruce Almighty would rather go runny and bland, mostly where Aniston's Grace is concerned.

As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

Directed by splat-pack director Alexandre Aja (“Piranha 3D”) with uncharacteristic but still gruesome restraint, adapted from what seems a very busy novel by Joe Hill, Horns resembles an awkward collaboration between Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen King, and Rob Zombie.