Any originality in this new movie is overwhelmed by its lazy eagerness to embrace the new standard for R-rated comedy.

Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.

It's a B-flick all the way, but it has no pretensions to the contrary, and that's some kind of refreshing.

Walking Tall, which is credited to four different writers, is wanting for a reason to be.

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]

Who's Harry Crumb? has a beginning bright enough to make you hope that John Candy might at last have his first good movie role since Splash. But no. Who's Harry Crumb? crumbles into yet another slack, witless misreading of what makes Candy an appealing performer. [03 Feb 1989, p.43]

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.

Along the way, good food is eaten, the scenery is fabulous, and when the son and a local woman meet cute she not only speaks excellent English but is gorgeous and endlessly understanding. There are some laughs. There are some tears. There’s even a little swearing. Made in Italy has been saddled with what must be the year’s least-deserved R rating.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.

It's a little too long, a little too corny, a little too packaged, but its warmth and regenerative energies make it a winner. [03 Jun 1994]

Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.

It's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' with all the emotions and half the artistry.

Provoke us into examining whether the onus is on the man for turning it into a commercial proposition or the woman for agreeing to his offer.

Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.

(Duffy) navigates the twisted collision of religious faith and the thrill of the kill, altruism and brutality, with an ingenious mix of humor, horror, mysticism, and just plain hipness.

This film’s comic antics are relentless, exhausting, and devastatingly unfunny. Waititi’s script (co-written with Iain Morris) can’t go 30 seconds without attempting a laugh — and failing most of the time.

The original tv series was sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightening, and sometimes a bit too allegorical, but it was almost always entertaining. Serling gave us more in 25 minutes than Spielberg & Co. give us in nearly two hours. [24 Jun 1983, p.1]

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

Does not sink to the bathos of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film (“Life Is Beautiful”), but it does reduce a period of irredeemable horror to the heroics of a single person.

When the two veteran actors team up in Vermont writer-director Jay Craven’s wry, uneven Northern Borders, adapted from Howard Frank Mosher’s novel, they mesh so well they almost hold the rest of the movie together. But their nuanced performances underscore the weakness of the rest of the cast, and Craven’s erratic tonal shifts from the whimsical to the sentimental trip up the episodic plot.

An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.

Gets better -- more rambunctiously astute -- as it goes, and its comic engine sputters into fitful life when Bernie Mac arrives on the scene.

Bring on the bread and circuses. Into the Storm features laughable dialogue, far-fetched situations, and generic characters played by actors who almost look like more famous stars. I still had a blast; and if you lower your resistance, you may too.

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a sturdily crafted but only mildly amusing goof on Kevin Costner's 1991 Sherwood Forest outing. It further confirms that Mel Brooks has lost something off his fastball since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. [28 July 1993, p.22]

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]

It’s an August dog-day special, in other words: a few easy laughs, one or two flashes of inspiration, and enough sentimentality to ensure that no one actually gets hurt.

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]

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.

There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.

Scares up few chills.

Dramatically speaking, The Caveman's Valentine is a dead end.

The sweetly enticing Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire repays the bit of patience it asks.

Where Mia and the Migoo triumphs is in the art department alone, with rich brown charcoal outlines, majestic pastel washes that give depth to the landscapes, and riotous colors that are more vivid than the story line.

The film is too long for some toddlers and too dull for some older children, and anyone over 12 will likely find it as much fun as a 75-minute root canal. [03 Apr 1998, p.D9]

Unknown is punchy and entertaining. Maybe not the sort of thing you'd want to spend $10 plus a mortgage for popcorn on, but a nifty surprise on DVD several months from now -- or on pay-cable on-demand right now.

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.

It’s entertaining enough if you turn your brain off.

Although Americans may be overwhelmed by the dizzy mix of music, dancing, and kung fu, they should have no trouble appreciating the talent of this extraordinary entertainer.

The movie's queer delight is contagious. You'll exit lip-synching.

Spellbinding if ponderous.

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

Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]

Hardcore fans and gamers will thrill to the contractually required scene where a fighter has his still-beating heart ripped out of his chest. But that’s the only time Mortal Kombat shows a pulse.

Disappointingly, this scruffy indie doesn’t live up to its promise either, despite a few flashes of subversive inspiration.

Dylan and Nikki are an awkward match at best, and their combined story is about as creative/convincing as a Hallmark card.

If one were to compare this film to one of Jobs’s own products, it would be more like the Cube than the iPod.

A glorious disaster.

The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed.

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

Unfortunately, the potential for screwball comedy is wasted because L!fe Happens never finds its thematic tone or comedic rhythm.

The kind of richly layered film that Hollywood seldom attempts, much less brings off. But it's more than brought off here in grand, solid style and beautifully crafted detail.

Explicit yet consistently unerotic. It's also intensely sad, capturing everything about these people except the high they ceaselessly chase.

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.

Never gets horribly bad, but can't sustain its moments of inspiration either.

Night Swim has its characters make infuriatingly asinine decisions to serve its plot.

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

Simultaneously overplotted and simplistic, the new barnyard/racecourse comedy from Warner Brothers is predictable every step of the way, and it contains at least three too many poop jokes.

A movie only a copyright lawyer could love. It strip-mines at least three Hitchcock classics - "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man," and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - then commits unlawful assault on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" just for the heck of it.

The kind of heartwarming, well-intentioned film many audiences claim they want to see at their local theaters.

Has a welcome humor but only in theory, and theory, chilly and self-involved, is where this filmmaker seems most at home. Like its bio-digital sirens, the movie never quite comes alive.

Kennedy doesn't take the character any deeper than a caricature of rich, nonblack fans of hip-hop culture. But as a caricature, he's fantastic.

The movie may feel tonally consistent with the first, but it’s also overlong and thoroughly routine.

For all its wide, open spaces, City Slickers II is mostly smoke and mirrors, but thanks to its humor and generosity of spirit, it's an enjoyable diversion in this summer of brang-yer-twang films. [10 June 1994, p.49]

Romero's Hatfields-and-McCoys setup feels more random than creative, and the idea that they're all Irish -- or cowboys! -- is more desultory still.

Larger Than Life is a thin, disjointed road comedy that contains a few laughs despite itself. No matter how loosey-goosey and silly the script gets, and no matter how contrived the premise is, Bill Murray manages to sneak in a number of typically zany actions and reactions. [01 Nov 1996, p.E7]

The neatness of the plotting becomes almost comical after a while. Construction is one thing; contrivance is another.

Don't roll your eyes just yet. Step Up Revolution, enhanced by 3-D and set in glitzy Miami, is not as cringe-worthy as you would expect from the fourth "Step Up" installment.

There are times when "Star Trek V" seems padded and low-impact, but there are things to like, too. [9 June 1989, p.81]

A new movie based on Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral” offers proof yet again that this writer’s great literary gifts are almost impossible to translate to the screen. Roth is a protean American inner voice. The movies, sad to say, remain better at exteriors.

There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

It's a terrible sign for a movie when the sole reason for its existence is a satanic opening date.

The film is mostly Lemmon's in a quietly stunning performance you frankly didn't know he had in him. [27 Oct 1989, p.29p]

Isolated offbeat moments aside, The Mexican mostly fires blanks.

Through it all, Rob Schneider comes off as a jackass in The Animal.

Eloquent and unapologetically cute.

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]

It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

Bob Marley: One Love opts to print the legend, but it will just make you want to listen to “Legend.”

If the movie weren't so playfully dumb -- did you ever think you'd see Ian McShane throw Andy Samberg through a basement shelving unit? -- this would be exasperating.

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.

What starts out as a lowbrow gag very typical of a pedestrian ’toon gradually balloons into absurdity that Mel Brooks would probably love. Here, at least, the Angry Birds fly.

Usually a French comedy such as this requires some crude modifications before a studio like Touchstone can remake it for American audiences. In this case, though, they just need to lose the subtitles and dub in the voices of actors like Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler. Until then, bon appetit!

And that’s what The Girl in the Spider’s Web is: soulless, bloodless product. Subtitled “A Dragon Tattoo Story,” it exists almost solely to drive a stake in the ground for the further franchising of author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

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

What The Shaggy Dog feels like, more than anything, is an old-fashioned Disney movie.

This franchise might be all about shedding light on lost details, but “Mistress of Evil” sometimes leaves us in the dark.

You’d think the 3-D effects would bring the action closer, but the kooky optics often have the opposite effect, turning the athletes into GI Joe and Boba Fett action figures zipping around a dollhouse set.