Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.

Solanas’s daring takes the form of ambition. Upside Down has a visionary look that has affinities with everything from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” to “Children of Men.” Solanas has the temerity to split the screen horizontally in many shots. Usually, this works, though “Upside Down” is not recommended for anyone subject to visual dislocation.

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

Its muddled, overambitious story leaves us unsatisfied - you might even say hollow.

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

The film is content to remain at the level of the mildly entertaining, with no real surprises and not much sass. [04 Dec 1992]

Watching this movie in 3-D is very much like sticking one's head in a blender and hitting "pulse."

Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]

Hall Pass is the brothers' 10th movie, and their most gangbusters since "Me, Myself & Irene."

The F&F series is the 21st century's beach movie, one for some beachless future world where the kids are crowning 25 and seem capable of living off of hair gel and exhaust fumes.

Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.

while not without pleasures, I Love You to Death essentially seems a film in search of a tone. [06 Apr 1990]

The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.

Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.

Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.

May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.

Overall the concept is strong and expertly fleshed out; it's just a pity that Hollywood tropes are allowed to invade.

An inferior, though quite respectable, follow-up. [22 Mar 1991, p.73]

A movie about ordinary American heroes that stars ordinary American heroes. About 15 minutes of the film concerns the actual heroics. The rest is . . . ordinary.

Writer-director Burr Steers delivers a screen mash-up that’s generally done in the right, warped spirit. It lampoons Austen cleverly enough at points, without winking any harder than needed.

A reasonably watchable sci-fi B movie, a case of a good director and some intriguing ideas struggling to overcome formula plotting, limp dialogue, and a serious case of the sillies.

Three minutes into the film, we feel the sharpness of Stone's ax to grind. It's dull to be told what to think.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.

She-Devil has its moments, thanks chiefly to Meryl Streep's way with the comic role of a la-de-da writer of romance novels. But devilishness is precisely what it lacks. Unlike "The War of the Roses," the other marital vendetta comedy opening today, She-Devil hasn't got the courage of its nasty convictions. [8 Dec 1989, p.59]

The movie also plays as an extended reminder of why we love Goldie. It’s enormous fun seeing Hawn up to her old tricks — at 71! — even if they’re tweaked to help sell someone else’s brand of comedy.

When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.

A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.

A terrifyingly cheap-looking B-movie comedy mocking terrifyingly cheap-looking science-fiction B-movies. As such things go, this one has its moments.

The women of Perry's army will come out feeling they've been well-served, and for the rest of us there's Bassett, getting her groove back after a spate of less than worthy roles. Perry's getting his groove, too - I give him two more films and an A-list cameraman.

Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.

Studding your movie with friends, admirers, and sycophants is having a ball; it does not bring us to question the illusory power of cinema or the politics of entertainment.

This is an old-fashioned sports hagiography of the sort that Gary Cooper used to star in while Teresa Wright sat smiling and worried on the sidelines, and, amazingly, it engages your attention and even respect while trotting out every clubhouse cliche in the book.

In light of our recent crackdown on runaway nudity, the steady stream of exposed breasts in the gnarly Eurotrip give it a nostalgic feel.

Paint is so haphazardly thrown together it’s painful to watch.

It would have been nice if someone had included a script, too.

It's a fearsome and giddily unhinged performance in a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with it.

Perry is a playwright, and his dialogue here is usually entertaining.

It has its moments, most of them owing to a quite-phenomenal Mckenna Grace,as a 12-year-old techno wiz, and Paul Rudd, as an easygoing science teacher, but they don’t make up for a general flat-footedness and tendency to wobble.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

More machine than mean, although it's anything but a smoothly running operation.

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.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.

The engaging dynamic between our hero and his gargantuan, computer-generated pal is the movie’s best surprise, with silly and straight bits both working mostly as intended for director Brad Peyton (Johnson’s “Journey 2” and “San Andreas”).

The director gives us a small, sincere and nearly perfectly realized film about adolescence in Oklahoma, aptly entitled The Outsiders. [24 Mar 1983]

Expendables is the closest thing to movie Viagra yet invented. It's reprehensible. It's stoopid violent. It's a lot of unholy fun.

While the movie seems designed to be a breakout for Jang, it's Lee whose work actually makes an impression.

Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.

Its swooping 3-D visuals let fans briefly feel they can touch a group that barely exists behind a wall of beefy security men.

Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as "City of God." Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of "Gomorrah."

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

Strenuously as it tries, and pulse-poundingly successful as the embassy rescue scene is, Rules of Engagement never engages us.

For a movie with such a misplaced sense of history, The Scorpion King seems afraid to have more fun with its own stupidity.

Freeman and Hunter are both overqualified for material this ponderous, but she plays along, while he appears to have made a minimal emotional investment in the oncoming avalanche of coincidences and cliches.

Essentially, the film's strategy is to fight predictability with bonehead amiability, and on this level it's a crowd-pleaser. [27 Dec 1991, p.28]

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.

Cherry is three movies in one, none of them fresh, all of them overlong.

Julia von Heinz’s direction can’t handle the film’s tonal shifts, and the screenplay (co-written by von Heinz and John Quester) centers on two very poorly written leads who clash in ways that are supposed to be comedic but are mostly infuriating.

If we learn nothing else about Krasinski as a filmmaker, it’s that he thinks more is more.

Riggen has no shame when it comes to jerking the tears — surging music, cute children, suffering children — and sometimes her manipulations work even on the hardest of hearts.

It achieves something previously thought impossible: It renders Billy Bob Thornton unfunny.

A mixed bag. With such a brief running time, there are not enough high points to recommend the five shorts that make up the film.

The resulting movie is a nauseating flight of Hollywood navel-gazing.

It's a charmer.

The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.

Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.

Maybe if Mapplethorpe hadn’t been commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, it would have been a batter movie. As it is, this sour, undernourished biopic is a disappointment just shy of a disaster — a portrait of a boundary-destroying artist that stays well within the safe borders of convention.

Which is precisely what’s missing from Oz the Great and Powerful: that sense of emotional journey.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

Rush Hour 3 reminds us that Tucker is an utterly strange entertainment phenomenon: He exists only in the world of these movies.

It’s clear what MacFarlane is shooting for — nothing less than the chance to be both the Bob Hope and the Mel Brooks of his generation. Be careful what you wish for.

Despite moments of black comedy and some memorable images, this “debut’’ doesn’t offer a lot to love.

Although Warlock doesn't muster enough of a charge to shoot for genre classic status as Sands subsides, it does have a degree of interplay uncommon in such outings. [19 Apr 1991, p.43]

"Maybe" was watchable and blandly pleasant; "Theory" is a smidgen better than that, if not the cruelly funny farce the movie's best impulses and its own trailer would have you believe.

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

A supernatural thriller that is neither super, natural, nor thrilling.

Brightly sidesteps the cliches that cling to the genre like barnacles and reinvents a lot of the old moves.

The film never quite hits a sure-footed stride. The fictional love story stays fictional. But ''Pearl Harbor'' delivers the main event.

The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.

With its inventively nutso action, youthful vibe, and subversive topicality, the “Kingsman” franchise feels more relevant than even Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Screen espionage doesn’t come any hipper these days.

The few winning, not-so-secret ingredients in Dough are the performances of Pryce and newcomer Holder, who brings zest and freshness to a stale role.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

At its best when Anna confronts her tangled Afrikaaner legacy and when it brings the heretical notion of forgiveness up front, where a non-African audience can come to grips with it.

Where the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, plugged into Meyer’s vision of supernatural teenage lust with abandon, Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest.

It all might wash in a Johnny Weissmuller “Tarzan” movie from the 1940s. It no longer suffices today. Filmmakers, it’s time to pack up Greystoke Manor. Tarzan is dead.

For his part, Short, another pop choreographer, sounds like Vin Diesel, but he moves like a bee. When he dances, he makes sure every girl in the theater goes home stung.

Maybe if the filmmakers suggested that these villains were once children with mothers themselves, it might have made their crime, and the chase that ensues, less one-dimensional.

Manages a fairly rare trick: It's a movie that's both deeply felt and completely phony.

Unabashed Fidel worship.

In trying to play up the naughty, witty side of the rom-com equation, the movie settles for snarky. It’s an acrid fairy tale, if not without a few pleasures, and it arrives on Netflix just in time for — wait, Christmas?

Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.

In short, Nowhere needs more humor, more wildness. Its pandemonium is only on the surface - which could have been the premise of a really humorous take on teen chaos. But it doesn't push the envelope as much as Araki's previous films. Although it gives his pop sensibility a vigorous workout, Nowhere is Araki's Mallrats. [06 June 1997, p.D6]

For the haters out there, you could see where Sandler reprising his role as a cartoon Dracula in Hotel Transylvania 2 might just be the perfect metaphor: Yep, there he goes again, evilly sucking the lifeblood out of decent entertainment. Now come on, let’s grab the torches!