This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

It's "Beach Blanket Bingo" revisited, but with a Eurocast and more exotic locations.

If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.

What emerges from this pretentious if diverting mishmash is a story that is equally predictable and contrived, but nonetheless offers some worthwhile insights into the notion of the male gaze and the subjugation of women.

Year by the Sea is for audiences who don’t trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly and for maximum applicability.

With what doubtless are the best intentions, the film wants to do several things, and does. The trouble is that it doesn't do any of them very well. [07 Feb 1992, p.32]

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.

As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.

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?

As a flawed but lovably lionhearted woman, Barrymore triumphantly comes of age as an actress.

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.

Do your tastes delve into the sick, ultra-violent, and disturbing? Then you may find The ABCs of Death, an anthology of about two dozen short films, inventive and funny. Otherwise, as you consume this serving of alphabet soup, “A” may as well stand for “atrocious,” “B” for “bloodbath,” and “C” for “check, please.”

Hocus Pocus is fun, as Dan Aykroyd used to say, within limits. [16 July 1993, p.40]

The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.

Unfortunately for Tatum and Seyfried, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams did a far more convincing version of this same basic dance in “The Notebook.’’

At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

It can't be easy to turn one of the most stirring human rights dramas of the past quarter century into stultifying screen pageantry, but director Luc Besson and writer Rebecca Frayn have managed the trick with The Lady.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

This version may not be as stylish or as sparkling as Richard Lester's 1974 outing with Michael York as D'Artagnan, but it's winningly rambunctious and pushes ahead in livelier fashion than the other versions. [12 May 1993, p.48]

An overblown urban crime drama that should be a lot better than it is.

Week in and week out, horror movies cheat us, so it's wonderfully cathartic to watch a bunch of kids cheat death in what turns out to be the best installment yet in the "Final Destination" franchise.

Where the Crawdads Sing, based on Delia Owens’s best-selling novel, is long on setting and atmosphere. It’s short on most everything else. Droopy in pace, it’s increasingly drippy in feeling.

On just about every occasion in Meet Dave, Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.

Solid B-level stuff, better than most filmed King novels. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.

The movie is decent and heartfelt, and it eventually settles into some sharp diamond action, but the small-town homilies are dropped like an anvil. If you thought 1993's "Rudy" was too spare and unsentimental, Final Season is for you.

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

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.

An effective, no-frills gruel-a-thon if that’s your cup of Swiss Miss, and it explores such burning questions as: What happens if you’re dumb enough to leave your bare hand on a metal safety bar overnight?

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

A brutally inane movie.

Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a slick, trashy, blatantly manipulative thriller that you won't stop watching once you start. [20 Mar 1992, p.25]

Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.

Crashes the slapstick of "Home Alone" into the youthful angst of "The Breakfast Club."

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — which sounds like a Boy Scout jamboree presided over by Donald Trump — is a very traditional movie masquerading as a very odd movie. What helps make it a good movie is how well it (mostly) maintains a balance between tradition and oddity.

A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.

But Skin Deep hasn't the energy level or the inventiveness to sustain the demands of sex farce. There's only one sight gag as funny, involving glow-in-the-dark prophylactics. There's also only one role that's sympathetic. As usual, it's the Julie Andrews role of long-suffering wife, played by Alyson Reed. One last complaint: In the guise of being unflinching about dancing on the edge of outrage, the film reveals a mean streak involving cruel things done to dogs. Skin Deep spends what seems like a lot of time living up to - or is it down to? - its name. [3 March 1989, p.47]

Along with Cusack's marvelously natural performance, True Colors offers a premise deeper than most twentysomething-audience movies. The ethical conflicts between Spader and Cusack are thought-provoking, if simplistic and exaggerated. At the same time, True Colors seems to scream Cultural Statement. It's self-consciously anthemic. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

Smartly, Anderson makes some eclectic casting choices that keep the story from feeling as though it's populated by video-game characters.

For most of Not Easily Broken, I wondered why the movie wasn't worse. Then I remembered it was directed by the veteran Bill Duke, who applies ample TLC.

Machine Gun Preacher is crude and ham-handed from its ridiculous title on down, but it still gets to some interesting places.

Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.

After Lake Bell’s smart, unconventional debut, “In a World. . .” (2013), her new film, I Do . . . Until I Don’t (she apparently likes ellipses in her titles), is disappointingly ordinary.

It's hard to care about people this generic - even when they're naked.

This is a movie that's built around characters the audience is bound to find more insufferable than anyone does in the movie itself.

Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.

For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.

Between Josh Gad’s charmingly earnest voice-over performance and more of the arthouse gloss that Hallström has drizzled on everything from “The Hundred-Foot Journey” to “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” it’s a weepie that can be tough to resist.

She (Bullock) has a way of landing on her feet and remaining simpatico no matter how cheesy the script is. That's what happens here.

More drama than tract, it's a low-budget Christian indie that just clears the runway on the sincerity of its performances and inclusiveness of its message.

What’s missing is the assurance of tone that a Lumet would provide.

Cronenberg's direction is technically impressive, but he's better suited to stories based on surges of feeling between killers, not lovers. This M. Butterfly never takes wing. [08 Oct 1993]

The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.

Glass isn’t a terrible film but neither is it a particularly good one, and it certainly doesn’t stick the landing the way the filmmaker and his hardy fans have probably hoped. It’s by turns intriguing, awkward, inspired, misguided, and very, very talky.

Cradle of lifelessness.

Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.

So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.

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.

There’s a real identity crisis going on here. I can’t tell if director Tom Gormican is making a new horror comedy based on the original movie, a straight remake, or a feature-length fan fiction controlled by its characters.

Flipper, the latest incarnation of everybody's favorite dolphin, doesn't exactly make waves, but it's easy to take, especially when the underwater cameras are working. [17 May 1996, p.56]

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

This last angle had us thinking back to “Risky Business,” as did the Chicago setting and the reveling gone off the rails. Here, though, there’s no edge to the wildness, nothing memorable.

It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.

The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.

If the movie's not as bad as it sounds, it's not all that great, either.

The film works because Depardieu is relaxed enough to turn in persuasive acting that keep us from noticing how plastic the setup is. [4 Feb 1994, p.52]

You'll laugh at Bones a lot more often than you'll be scared by it, assuming you'll be scared at all.

No one on the screen bothers to commit to a character.

The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.

Sitting through it is like waking up on Christmas morning to find a stockingful of styrofoam.

Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.

The film keeps being yanked back from nothingness by this or that clever sendup, delivered by a small army of invigorated performers who seem to push off from one another's energy levels.

With a by-the-numbers screenplay by Tripper Clancy and assembly-line direction from Michael Dowse (see his 2013 hockey comedy, “Goon,” instead), Stuber is just the umpteenth iteration of the buddy-cop action drama pioneered by “48 Hrs.” almost 40 years ago.

The cop-out is mitigated by Allen's ability to impart a comfortable, lived-in quality to his roles, this one included.

It’s a sequel that sticks to more routine territory of action, angst, and dystopian gloom — mostly a sound approach, thanks to the consistent strength of franchise lead Shailene Woodley and a mix of intended and inadvertent surprises.

A muscular Australian B-movie down to the thin characters and boilerplate dialogue.

Despite a high body count, director-cowriter Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s version is not gory enough to satiate gorehounds. The atmospheric cinematography, by Elisha Christian, and the bombastic score, by Chanda Dancy, fail to accompany or elicit a single good scare.

To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

The issue is contentious, messy, prone to wishful thinking. Some see a corporate plot to privatize schools. Others see a last chance to save them. Won't Back Down is on the latter side, obviously, and it has the boilerplate urgency of a TV movie that has been blessed with a high-end cast.

The result is a formulaic, underwhelming set-up for another era of Transformers movies.

The film's final scenes are among its silliest, unfortunately.

Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.

With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a handful of convoluted thematic twists involving family, history, murder, and death, The Abandoned limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue.

There’s a lot of intelligence in Transcendence. Ironically, almost all of it feels artificial.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

It’s the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula’s so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect.

While Mafia Mamma fails as a comedy, it succeeds in delivering the graphically violent moments one expects from a movie about the Mafia.

The bathroom jokes in Gun Shy wear thin.

It’s an inane, absurd, fitfully amusing time-waster that ranks low on the believability scale and somewhere in the middle as mindless entertainment.

A predictable, semi-shameless, yet not-unsatisfying action drama.

Stone Cold trips up at the end, but it's still recommended for fans of the genre or Road Warrior fans out for a night of cinematic slumming. It snarls, it bites, it roars. [17 May 1992, p.32]

Inferno is the exact cinematic equivalent of an airport paperback, which is what’s fine and forgettable about it.

While Lumbly brings a refreshing amount of Black anger and cynicism to his performance, Mackie is stuck in a kumbaya mode designed to not offend white viewers. It may be a brave new world, but it’s the same old story.