In short, the film lacks the social context that would have enabled Death Becomes Her to take on invigorating breadth and bite. It needs more of the malicious zest that Streep's character has. Its last half is as hollow as its first half is funny. [31 July 1992, p.33]

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.

Single White Female is a frustrating proposition. It has impact, given its two stars. But it spends a lot of time trying to get its footing, find its tone and rhythm. Surprisingly, Schroeder has trouble pacing a film any one of a dozen Hollywood hacks could have handled more sure-handedly. [14 Aug 1992, p.41]

Tombstone is a big Christmas pudding of a neo-Peckinpah Western that doesn't quite hang together and is a bit too self-conscious about its looks. [24 Dec 1993, p.23]

RoboCop 2 isn't brain-dead, and perhaps that should be enough in this summer of pummeling sequels. But it isn't. Not in an action movie. [22 June 1990, p.43p]

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

Subpar stuff with a few multiplex-worthy bits: a gonzo opening chase with the US Border Patrol, some wisecracking narration, and grungy location atmosphere. [15 July 2012, p.N10]

Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

There's no getting around the fact that the movie is pretty ponderous. The problem is that its writers and producers haven't really expanded or deepened the basic Conehead setup - they mostly drown it in more time and money than it ever had the first time around. [23 July 1993, p.42]

The Comfort of Strangers seldom makes sense, and the bizarre behavior often seems arbitrarily trowled on from the outside as opposed to something bubbling up from within. The best that can be said for it is that its maze-like ways at times intriguingly replicate the mazelike streets of Venice [12 Apr 1991, p.82]

The best thing about the movie is its look. The great Dick Pope, Leigh’s go-to cinematographer, returns to the 19th century he so masterfully re-created in “Mr. Turner,” earning an Oscar nomination. The colors in Peterloo are rich but not at all sumptuous. They look lived in. The moviemaking line between beauty that’s absorbing and beauty that’s distracting is thread-thin. Pope, who also served as chief camera operator, makes sure that the thread never breaks.

Dumbo flies! The movie, sadly, never soars.

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]

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

State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

Director Roger Donaldson seems a bit too obviously caught up in the slick technology of zapping us with mayhem and death to allow Thompson's gritty viciousness to take root. [11 Feb 1994, p.41]

The reconstituted Vanishing is a pretty banal proposition. [05 Feb 1993, p.27]

Essentially, it's 90 minutes of mostly disarming nothingness. [10 Dec 1993, p.59]

When the plot turns coy and arch as Alfalfa falls in love with a kewpie doll named Darla, however, the film turns insufferable. [05 Aug 1994, p.48]

Kids who like the TV episodes will find more of the same here, and larger. [30 June 1995, p.53]

There's nothing really awful about Angels in the Outfield." But it never becomes more than an efficient, by-the-numbers reworking of the 1951 baseball fantasy about cellar-dwellers turned pennant-winners with a little supernatural help. [15 July 1994, p.41]

Robin Williams and Billy Crystal don't quite hit a dream team level of hilarity in Fathers' Day. They don't send you home empty-handed, either. [9 May 1997, p.C7]

After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.

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]

Very like a gummy bear, Teen Spirit gives you a nice little sugar rush until the lights come up and you realize you’re still hungry. Part of the problem is the script, which includes lines of dialogue so generic it’s as if Minghella is daring himself to squeeze a drop more juice out of them.

History is just one big playpen for The King’s Man, but some games are less fun than others. Maybe using a glimpse of Hitler for a cheap thrill wouldn’t seem quite so grotesque in a movie that were more entertaining, but The King’s Man isn’t so it does.

The title might trumpet Harley Quinn’s emancipation, but she again feels like a character trapped in a movie that’s mediocre at best.

Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]

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]

Neither the film nor the play has figured out where to go with Barry Champlain once it plants him at the center of his can-of-worms microcosm. We're never bored by his whiplash flailings, but on screen, as on stage, we can't help asking ourselves to what end they're being deployed. [13 Jan 1989, p.46]

It's technically sophisticated and intermittently engaging, and its showdown is more than up to genre standards. But fresh it isn't. [19 July 1996, p.G4]

Above all, it’s a meditation on art and creativity that’s by turns earnest, troubled, sentimental, and middlebrow. It’s a big, glossy affair that somehow feels rather small.

To Dust has several things to recommend it. It’s decidedly different, and that is no small accomplishment in this day and age. Snyder’s direction has real assurance, though not enough to overcome the films self-conscious — maybe self-congratulatory — weirdness.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.

Pike understands the woman she’s playing was a genius and that genius is rarely likable; her performance bristles with charismatic impatience.

All is True is expertly acted and handsomely filmed but suffers from an excess of sentimentality, a rash of revelations, and a surfeit of subtext, with characters blurting out the hidden motives for their behavior instead of simply behaving them. I imagine Shakespeare himself might be simultaneously tickled and appalled.

Mo' Better Blues has problems. Lee hates being compared with Woody Allen, but it looks as if he's going to do what Allen did in trying a new kind of film until it works. [03 Aug 1990, p.29p]

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]

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.

Their (Danner/Lithgow) being together feels more like a device — there’d be no movie without their relationship — than it does a romance. There’s a lack of chemistry that makes for a listlessness of narrative.

It's no surprise that the mountainous, pseudo-mystical actor stuck to his recipe for The Glimmer Man, an inoffensive cop-socky flick. [05 Oct 1996, p.C3]

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

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

It’s content to keep things light and predictable, with the result that one of the richest song catalogs known to man is here to prop up an increasingly formulaic and far-fetched love story. Yesterday makes less sense the longer it lasts, albeit with some good bits along the way.

The best part of Ron Howard’s long-winded and fitfully moving Pavarotti occurs at the beginning with footage from 1995 of the world-famous tenor — who died in 2007, at 71 — visiting an opera house built in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The legend has it that Enrico Caruso had performed there 100 years before.

Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.

Casey is possibly on the spectrum, but one of the problems with The Art of Self-Defense is that all the other characters seem to be, too.

Flatly filmed, drably lit, and sluggishly paced, Yes, God, Yes takes a cheeky premise and slowly lets the air out of it.

It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.

The film’s greatest strength is its lead actress, Haley Bennett, who’s on camera for almost the entire running time and who portrays a desperately lonely woman’s journey through self-destruction toward something like sanity.

Ira Sachs’s muted family drama has locations to make a moviegoer swoon, rich music and cinematography, acting that’s attentive and wise. All that’s missing is a story.

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

Middling cop thriller, whose attention-grabbing city-on-lockdown premise is undercut by thin plotting and forced performances from the supporting cast.

The movie is almost wholly lacking in the Pixar touch — that extra oomph of wit, invention, creative craziness, darkness, depth of feeling, whatever, that makes the company’s products among the very few items manufactured for children in our sold-out popular culture to not feel like products.

It’s a PG movie with pleasantly canned life lessons, and it’s safe for kids and adults alike, although anyone with a shred of cynicism may not want to be seen caving in to the script’s emotional inevitabilities.

The movie is congenial, self-effacing, and reasonably dull, and since it promises an inside look at 30 years of being a Rolling Stone, that has to be considered a disappointment. On the other hand, Oliver Murray’s film about the life and times of Bill Wyman offers proof that even average blokes can be rock stars, and maybe more of them than we think.

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.

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]

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

A little Waititi can go a long way, and the arch self-awareness that gave “Ragnarok” its kickiness feels increasingly tired here: more schtick than kick.

The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski.

So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.

There’s nothing in Military Wives you haven’t seen before, but these are times of comfort food, and this formulaic comedy-drama about a group of British army-base spouses who start a choir is so determined to be uplifting that your up may be lifted in spite of itself.

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 Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

An acceptable creature feature at best and a waterlogged “Alien” at worst, Underwater sneaks into town as a true January release: a shelf-sitting production that 20th Century Fox’s new owner, Disney, is putting outside the store like a loaf of stale bread. It’s there if you want it, and you could chew on worse.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

Although Rush gives the film visual texture, he can't give it credibility or metaphorical dimension. Color of Night is nocturnal, but not much more. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

It's lacking in eventfulness and drama, but there's a sweetness in it that places it a cut above most synthetic children's films. As a writer and director, Evans doesn't always know where to go with his material, but at least there's some feeling behind it, and this sometimes rescues it from its becalmed predictability. [7 Apr 1993, p.49]

The Cotton Club does look terrific and has its moments. It’s certainly not an embarrassment. It’s just not . . . very good.

Landis spends too much time in the realm of the cartoony, where he's clearly comfortable, and less time in the area of the suavely insinuating, where any vampire movie really lives. Innocent Blood is pumped-up, but anemic. [25 Sept 1992, p.34]

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]

It’s refreshing to see Monáe show what she can do as a lead, and her performance as Veronica possesses a wit and savvy that complement the performer’s natural poise.

Anyone much over the age of 15 who saw the earlier movies knew they were silly. That didn’t matter. What mattered is that they didn’t feel silly. “Resurrections” does.

The animation techniques are sophisticated but the story tends to get bogged down in pop philosophy. [01 Mar 2015, p.N]

The best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

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.

Like Purple Rain, the record/film that made Prince a superstar, Graffiti Bridge is a hodgepodge musical that has a few satisfying bits - and a lot of sharp music - but fails as a narrative. [03 Nov 1990, p.22p]

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

A lot of skill and imagination went into making Blonde. It’s just that they’re misplaced. The movie has its own cracked integrity. That long runtime allows Dominik to give it a slow, inexorable rhythm. Everything has a slightly underwater quality. Stardom here has more to do with miasma than glamour.

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

As directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Old Guard is assured and textureless: competence doing the work of inspiration. The movie is like an extended trailer for itself.

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.

The movie gets credit for showing the struggles he and millions of others with similar disorders live with on a daily basis. They’re not pretty, but — aside from Emma — they’re real.