The remake is poky and overstuffed. It’s also 17 minutes longer than the 1940 original. Granted, eight minutes of that is closing credits, but still. Pinocchio’s nose isn’t all that’s wooden and too long here.

More than any of the sappy writing ever does, their collective presence reminds us that any church is about community. The film is tired and trite, but they're terrific, every last one of them. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

I’m not implying that a horror movie needs to be coherent to deliver the chills — watch any J-Horror movie for proof that this concept can work. But “HIM” doesn’t even try to be scary. It’s too busy bombarding us with nonsensical, quickly flashed images that divulge nothing.

Almost nothing works in this movie.

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

The strip is now a cartoonish sitcom pretending to be a romantic comedy about a drama queen and his adventures in lust. The movie might have gotten away with it, were it interested in romance or comedy.

The movie is made livelier by its bit players -- King, Murphy, Lupe Ontiveros as Lucia’s bigoted grandma, Anna Maria Horseford as Marcus’s grandmother, Shannyn Sossamon as one of Whitaker’s airhead girlfriends, and, best of all, Anjelah Johnson as Lucia’s car-mechanic sister.

Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]

As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.

Because the characters in the movie have only stock obsessions and vague personal histories, there's no reason to be interested in them.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

The film is stuck in the inconsequential rut of the series. The characters are static, and the comedy is situational rather than dramatic.

"I'll be back," the man said, and he kept the promise, but I'm not sure we wanted him back like this.

It’s a not-unwatchable retread that has been tricked up to pass as a whole new thing. The problem with high-frame-rate productions is that they don’t look like what we’re used to calling “movies.” The problem with this one is that there wasn’t much movie there to begin with.

The mess that's been made with all this money is maddening. This isn't economical moviemaking. It's a deluxe trailer for "Eragon 2."

Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.

The characters, in short, are never given enough dimension, enough chance to develop the individual tics and eccentricities on which this kind of comedy thrives.

Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.

Bay's movie is also a confident mega-production that feels it doesn't need to lean on its visual frills if it has Smith and Lawrence -- it's a natural-born buddy flick.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

Although Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson aren’t at all bad together, neither do they strike sparks. That’s unfortunate, since the movie flirts, and that is the word, with the idea of a romance between them.

The movie flaunts its ridiculousness and offers a relentless string of jokes about blindness, groin-bashing, and bodily odors.

When the big twist is revealed at the end of The Life Before Her Eyes, you might think the only way to appreciate its cleverness is to see the film again. I did that. It didn't help.

It's hard to believe anyone would think importing a French comedy was a good idea.

A tall glass of hogwash that's terrified to declare itself the racial-healing melodrama it is.

Invites us to both hate King David and admire his style, and there will probably be some hand-wringing about that.

Eric Roberts, making his movie debut, shines as a Travolta-ish hero who wants to surmount his family origins. [19 July 2015, p.N]

No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

Gigantic plays like a Sundance movie with half the nouns removed; fetchingly cryptic for a while, it's ultimately just obscure.

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

Sadly, the film rapidly devolves into an AARP version of a Jason Bourne-like vendetta, only bloodier and less meaningful.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

There's a whole lotta latex goin' on. The trouble is that not enough else is going on.

There's not much of a script. The direction is the pits, and stars Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore, playing dueling divorce lawyers who fall in love, are lousy, too.

Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.

The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

As one of the WWE's marquee pro wrestlers, John Cena is some actor. As a straight actor . . . he's a great wrestler.

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

This time casting Sharon Stone as the victim instead of the predator, it's both sillier and baser than "Basic Instinct," but not as funny, or even as laughable. And it's certainly not sexy. Essentially, it's an industrial object, badly manufactured, filled not with hot stuff, but with the cold dead air of calculation gone wrong. At least no artistry has been wasted on it, although it does squander a provocative theme under its pile of softcore hardware before struggling to its limp ending. [21 May 1993, p.23]

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

Think Like a Man Too vastly surpasses the septic “The Hangover Part III.” If Story and company keep thinking like filmmakers, maybe three will be the charm.

The Hollywood version of one of those fawning "60 Minutes" segments about musical prodigies. For most of it, I could hear the congested awe of Morley Safer.

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

One doesn’t really want to beat up on Girl Most Likely, because it means well and everyone in it appears to be having a good time. But so many things are wrong with the film, from a script that’s bright but never sharp to the editing that leaves scenes hanging flaccidly in the breeze.

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

Regardless, it's sad that Singleton is taking Diesel's sloppy seconds.

Occasionally veers so far into absurdity that it manages to make its central character - capable, smart, working mom Kate Reddy - look like a nitwit.

And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).

Like "Fire Birds," another recent special-team flick, Navy SEALs is a transparent attempt to showcase adventure sequences. Plot? Character? Who has time for subtlety amid all those dangerous maneuvers? It's all an excuse for the action - but even the action in Navy SEALS is dismal. [20 July 1990, p.32]

Scrooged is that rarest of contemporary Hollywood phenomena -- a Christmas movie with Christmas spirit. [23 Nov 1988, p.21]

Moves from cheekiness to ineptitude, often in a single take.

Slapstick and potty humor for the kids, sly allusions and famous voices for the adults, and a light coating of aren't-we-lucky-to-have-each-other schmaltz at the very end - yep, Nickelodeon has the family-flick formula pretty much down.

What a disaster -- a dog.

The script boasts some tart TV-insider humor, but the film has not a trace of humanity or empathy.

Don't Say a Word can be thought of as a case of Dial B for Boring.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

The movie equivalent of a box of generic macaroni and cheese: bland, easily digested, comforting, forgettable.

Third Person staggers well over the two-hour mark only to self-destruct in a burst of overwrought cleverness.

It’s one of those multi-character morality plays — think “American Beauty” meets “Crash” — and it will play especially well to freaked-out parents, even as it distances itself from them by acknowledging that the kids (most of them, anyway) are all right.

If Crossing Over is less self-congratulatory than "Crash" about confronting its designated problem, it's just as inept at dramatizing the complex ways that problem unites and divides us. Here every cause is something you can wear around your neck.

That Morgan Freeman voice! It’s so rich and full and authoritative that even when he’s telling Judah, “OK, OK,” you almost believe people used that word in the year 33. If they were very progressive.

In its zeal to counter the negativity usually found in depictions of Mormons, God's Army eventually succumbs to overearnestness, sentimentality, and cliche.

With Ted Kotcheff's hackneyed direction and Joe Gayton's cliche-ridden script, this version of "Missing" for the soldier of fortune set is one of the most reprehensible exploitation films of the year.

Worse, by neutering the specifics of where these people live and come from, Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy renders the story meaningless.

Appealing as he can be at playing loose cannons, however, Cage can only go so far before being mired in a script that generates stereotypes as quickly as it thinks it's knocking them down. [05 Mar 1993, p.64]

One of the prime laws of the multiplex states that any action or horror movie series will devolve into ritualized violence, self-mocking camp, and egregious silliness by part three. Blade: Trinity is right on schedule.

Shadyac doesn't film how his change inspires more change, or showing him, say, starting a school for destitute orphans. All we see him give is this movie. It's not much of a contribution.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.

Hell itself is going to hell in Sandler's new comedy.

By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.

For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.

One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.

Just one more touch of “realism” in a sexual melodrama played so straight that it’s nuts.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?

The end is a long time coming in Reindeer Games and the dialogue is mostly slush.

Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?

One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962 was ruled a suicide, as was Hemingway’s in 1961. Both spawned conspiracy theories. Maybe someone should make a movie about that. Or a decent one about Hemingway himself.

Underdog! Rest assured, there is no superhero cliche left unchewed; they even manage to slide in a "Lady and the Tramp" homage while they're at it.

The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.

Directing Annapolis is Justin Lin, whose previous feature was the irresponsible high-school comedy thriller "Better Luck Tomorrow." This second movie is more his speed.

Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.

The result is a scattershot comedy that only intermittently nails either tone, finally just bogging down in flatly choreographed mayhem in the late going.

You get the impression that the cast and crew of Another Gay Movie could have made a genuinely funny film if they weren't obsessed with out-grossing the already gross "American Pie."

It swoops, it pans, it noses around. The camerawork is almost as agitated as the editing. The directors seem to be trying to compensate for all the speechifying with as much random motion as possible.

If you appreciated the first movie’s sweetness, then you’ll likely be charmed enough. Otherwise, you’ll find the oof-to-opa! ratio hasn’t changed.

Attempts none of the witty, provocative visual and metaphysical set pieces from any of the ''Nightmare'' movies. And it offers none of the real fright of the early ''Friday the 13th'' films. In fact, the movie is deeply, proudly unimaginative.

Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.

So nonchalant is Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in Paul W.S. Anderson's dystopian franchise, that its overarching premise isn't explained.

Gimme Shelter is sometimes moving and inspiring, but you have to wonder: Though Kathy and her movement give teenagers shelter, do they give them a life?

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

For the most part, though, the film maintains its low ambitions; it is mostly inoffensive, only occasionally ludicrous, and at times, at least for me, genuinely moving.

A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.

A slow and silly action-comedy romantic-thriller.