Shot in a rich palette, the film does provide diversion with some of its funkily detailed sets and supporting actors.... Otherwise, the film distinguishes itself for its miscasting and misuse of its cast.

It’s tough to stay focused on the provocative bits when soapy talk of teenage yearning and angst keep making us snicker.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

The concept is derivative of about a dozen other movies and their sequels.

This is no “Bridesmaids.” What the film’s premise has in novelty, it lacks in execution. The characters are uninspired, and they continue to lack depth and plausibility throughout.

The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who’ve never left the Upper West Side.

Despite a few diverting moments and some ambitiously dramatic themes, this one is simply too uneventful and too populated by thinly sketched characters to keep its target audience engaged.

The film’s lone strength is the fleeting dramatic scenes offering a little back story — and pathos — on Rafe’s home life with his sweetly understanding single mom (Lauren Graham, who you’d guess wouldn’t have bothered otherwise).

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.

That’s one of the problems with Brian Ackley’s no budget sci-fi psychological thriller. No horror can compensate for the preceding 75 minutes of tedious, repetitious bickering. It’s about as thrilling as a couple’s therapy session with a married pair who hate each other and for good reason.

The Wild Life, while pleasant, is just too flat to meet the challenge.

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.

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.

After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.

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.

The upshot is that Blair Witch comes to the party very late and very tired, and it doesn’t improve from there.

It is a contrived, bombastic, well-intended failure.

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.

It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.

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.

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.

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.”

Venom, the movie, is a reptilian Marvel mishmash whose touch saps the life force of almost everyone in it.

And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.

Home “again”? It seems that first-timer Meyers-Shyer isn’t setting so much as a piggy toe beyond familiar territory, and this listless rom-com shows it.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

A woozy, wheezy impressionistic take on a woman’s nervous breakdown that aspires to the avant-garde but plays like a bad head-trip movie from the late 1960s. It’s dreadful. Worse, it’s not quite bad enough to be much fun.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is yet another factory product that plays more like a marketing strategy than a comedy. Like the other farces bearing the National Lampoon brand label, it's a comedy of obliviousness - family man Chevy Chase refuses to alter his sentimental notions of family rituals despite repeatedly being slammed in the face with evidence of how far short of his expectations they fall. Here, the word "vacation" is a misnomer. The Griswold family, headed by Chase, doesn't go anywhere. Neither does the film.

Road House is the kind of action movie whose rigging is so blatant that there can be no air of heroism about it. Although Swayze and Sam Elliott, in the role of his mentor, have the decency to look sheepish most of the time, there's no end to the cynicism and merchandising on screen, especially in the sex scenes. [19 May 1989, p.45]

John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]

Mostly plays like an artificial stupidity experiment. Zappy visuals aside, it's essentially a reactionary take on science, stemming from the movies' traditional belief that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of knowledge is worse. Think of it as Faust Goes to the Lab, with an ambitious doc serving as Mephistopheles. [6 Mar 1992, p.30]

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]

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

A by-the-numbers B flick with a preposterous script and a good cast trying their best.

The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]

Ultimately, the film's self-censoring will to sweetness and innocence is even more fatal than the flimsiness of the plot. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

Soapdish should have been a laugher. But this new spoof of TV soaps isn't nearly as funny as the real thing. Soapdish holds only the merest sliver of entertainment. [31 May 1991, p.28]

The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.

Perhaps that is Roskam’s ultimate point: volition and individuality are illusory; only love and death matter. That truth comes through with somber clarity in the film’s eloquent coda, which almost makes up for the silliness that precedes it.

Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]

A few of the sequences are bad enough to be funny, especially the ones involving Sheen skulking around alien central in a red jump suit, falling down a lot, as if directed by Ed Wood. [31 May 1996, p.52]

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.

Although 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a classier failure than Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the glum truth is that both are lost at sea. [09 Oct 1992, p.85]

In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.

Although Species benefits from a new generation of computer-generated visuals, it can't hold a tentacle to Alien. Alien was more old dark-house thriller than sci-fi. Species turns into just another day in the LA pest-control biz. [07 July 1995, p.28]

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

Son of the Pink Panther is merely lame and labored as it huffs and puffs over a plot involving the kidnapping of a Middle Eastern princess, Debrah Farentino, from her yacht anchored off Nice. With frequent explosions taking the place of wit and style, it plays like stuff James Bond left on the cutting room floor 30 years ago. [28 Aug 1993, p.26]

Even the valiant mastiff, with his soulful eyes, splayed crocodile teeth and industrial-strength jaws, can't keep "Turner and Hooch" from going to the dogs. Unfortunately, it's the kind of picture any self-respecting dog would toss back. [28 July 1989, p.29]

In short, the film panders to teen-agers - but not smartly or stylishly. [07 June 1991, p.48]

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]

There's no comic edge at all to Sister Act. It's all Whoopi and the three sisters, battling plastic writing and chintzy production values, convincing you that filmmaking this pedestrian ought to be declared the eighth deadly sin. [29 May 1992, p.34]

Leviathan may be mediocre, unoriginal, boring and nauseating, but it probably won't be the worst sci-fi we'll see this year. [17 Mar 1989, p.46]

It's not only the flattest film in which Williams has appeared; it's also the most anemic Levinson has directed. [18 Dec 1992, p.47]

This adaptation feels like a soap opera made by someone who has seen too much late-stage Woody Allen and flounders with the self-importance of a director unable to read either text or city.

The New Age plays like "Night of the Living Dead," only with better clothes. [23 Sept 1994, p.52]

Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]

Moore shows newsreel footage of Hitler delivering a speech. Only it’s not Hitler’s voice we hear. It’s Trump’s. Get it? Sure you do, and as you do the documentary slips the surly bonds of sanity — even of agitprop — to enter a realm of its own polemical making. Words cannot do justice to such an editorial decision. Well, maybe five can: intellectually null and morally contemptible.

It's a neighborhood comedy for kids that squanders the high energy of a group of young actors on a stubbornly unimaginative script. [25 July 1997, p.C5]

This take, like so many Hollywood takes on French comic originals, is diligent, but, with too few exceptions, irredeemably soggy. [09 Aug 1991, p.42]

Basically what we've got here is talent spending itself on something tired, pointless and unrewarding. [24 March 1995, p.60]

Even the presence of Walston himself, as the government heavy in charge of tracking Lloyd's zany Martian, does little to alter the inescapable conclusion that this My Favorite Martian reincarnation is more likely to find favor with the undemanding than the nostalgia-minded. [12 Feb 1999, p.E5]

Neither dense, distracting makeup nor confused, convoluted chronology can disguise the fact that Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, scripted by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, is a mediocre mash-up of genre clichés.

By placing all its faith in production design and high-powered computerized effects, and not enough where it really matters, namely character and atmosphere, The Haunting relegates itself to the slag heap of embarrassing claptrap. [23 July 1999, p.D4]

Isn’t it a bit early for Isabelle Huppert to be entering the late Bette Davis era of her career? Why else on God’s green earth would she be appearing in Greta, a botched attempt to build a camp horror movie around a grand diva of the screen?

This is a story that needs to be told, but McKay turns out to be precisely the wrong man to tell it. By comparison, Oliver Stone is a model of sober restraint.

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]

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

Powerful stuff, but unpowerfully told.

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 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.

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

Great Balls of Fire is little more than just a whole lotta fakin' goin on. [30 June 1989, p.41]

The thrill of watching an Olivier Assayas movie is that you often have no idea where it’s going next. This time out, it seems, neither does he.

Andy Serkis directed. Serkis, who’s given so many memorable acting performances (Gollum! Caesar the chimpanzee!), doesn’t elicit any here. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the movie, which makes its lack of visual texture all the more dispiriting.

The problem with the realization of this concept, Drop Dead Fred, is its lack of subtlety. The filmmakers go too broad. Where there should be whimsy, there is grating farce. The character of Fred is like "Laugh-In" comedian Alan Sues doing Monty Python comedy skits on Billy Idol for "Sesame Street." Whenever he's onscreen, he's picking his nose and slinging food and muttering insults. Early into the movie, he gets on your nerves. [24 May 1991, p.52]

Fire in the Sky, the latest abducted-by-aliens movie, is no Close Encounters. It's hardly any encounter at all. [13 Mar 1993, p.10]

When the best thing about a movie is the title, that’s never a good sign. It’s all downhill from there? Exactly, and that’s the case with Downhill.

Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

His Unhinged character is a pill-popping mouth breather with a sweaty beard and big, big gut. He combines the cruelty of a bear-baiter with the appearance of an actual bear. It’s kind of a neat trick, actually: the unbearable bearishness of Russell Crowe. If Disney goes the “Jungle Book” route again, consider him a lock for Baloo.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

A bad dopey Will Ferrell comedy – overlong, underwritten, as strained as its title, and running on schtick and storylines that are practically rims.

A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]

We’ve been here before and many, many times, and Monday, newly available on demand, doesn’t give us enough reason to be here again.

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?

All kinds of stuff happens. Much of it is loud, confusing, and badly paced. From a superhero-movie perspective, it’s the last one of those three that’s most problematic. Leaden and flaccid are a bad combination.

Both writer and director are men, which perhaps explains why much of the talk in Chick Fight about female empowerment and channeling one’s womanly rage comes off as lip service on the way to the next beat-down or snuggle-up.

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]

Son-in-Law (bet you can't guess the ending) would be brain-on-vacation fun if it weren't so smug and patronizing. [2 July 1993, p.44]

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

For all its sugary sweet coating, this movie is nothing more than mindless, mundane distraction.

It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.