Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers. That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

There are two entertaining small characters in Freejack - Amanda Plummer as a gun-toting nun and Johansen as Estevez's exploitive pal. As the lead, Estevez is appealing, if bland. He takes his future shocks in stride. [18 Jan 1982, p.12]

The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns.

The question in Red Planet isn't whether there's any life on Mars, but whether there's any life in the film. The answer is no.

There are times when it moves into the guilty pleasure zone.

Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."

Lopez smiles, whines, and blinks her way through this movie. She seems more relaxed than she ever has. And yet it seems like she’s hiding in romantic comedies, lest we discover that she doesn’t have a “Monster’s Ball’’ or even a “Blind Side’’ in her.

The best moments come in seeing Galifianakis’s costars try to keep up with him as he finally, frantically lets loose.

A veritable rip-off of 1995's "The Usual Suspects," Beach's crime caper not-so-subtly apes Bryan Singer's use of multiple red herrings and flashback-heavy interrogation scenes, but lacks the stylistic flair and sophisticated narrative skills to pull off a similar feat of cinematic intrigue.

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Zada gets credible performances from Dormer and Kinney, but their characters undergo such unlikely psychological contortions that these efforts are to no avail.

As the film darkens, it intensifies its focus on tragedy and atrocity and begins to do some justice to one of the largest and least known genocides in history.

Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.

The laughless outtakes for ''Armed and Fabulous" helpfully remind us that it could have been worse.

Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.

In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.

The problem with the new movie is the same as with the previous one. Vardalos has this idea that she's a marm. And while it's true that she personifies her movies, I don't quite buy her librarian mode.

You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.

The movie makes me finally want to test-drive one of the “Dark Tower” novels, if only to see what King himself was able to bring to the party. Maybe that’s been his evil plan all along.

The script’s messy seams also show in the parade of sidekicks that passes through Kaulder’s door as a new threat develops.

Not that terrible, but dispiritingly generic — the kind of off-brand, cable-ready product that functions as advertised but could have been cast with anybody other than some of the most unique and celebrated performers of their generations.

In a season mostly given over to unwatchable movies being cleared off studio shelves, it's at least about something. And there's no denying the lurid urgency with which it jumps off the screen.

It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,

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

Audiences are going to want to brace themselves, too – for a movie that refuses to recognize when it’s going too far, with its wince-eliciting jokes about jailhouse rape in particular.

Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.

Rom-com turning into bomb-com (there are lots of explosions) is a funny idea. But since neither the rom-com nor the bomb-com is much to speak of, Ghosted isn’t either.

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Thurman is bespectacled again for Motherhood, and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.

Though “Red One” is a bit of a slog, it’s still better than about 98 percent of the Christmas movie junk flung at us by the studios and streaming services every holiday season.

The 6-year-old I went with had the villain pegged in the first 15 minutes. Needless to say, she completely ruined the movie for me. Meddling kid.

Dreary-looking and painfully slow, but it's not terrible.

None of this is visually compelling, and “Mercy” plays like it was written as an AI system’s prompt response.

That the mushroom-dwelling blue creatures still manage to be endearing even in their second big-screen extravaganza (in 3-D, no less) is about the best that can be said of The Smurfs 2.

To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.

It’s nasty and clumsy, tonally erratic, lacking in texture, and pretty stupid.

Jingle All the Way packs into its queasy bag everything we've learned to dread about the so-called holiday season. If it doesn't bring on an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder, nothing will. [22 Nov 1996, p.E6]

The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.

“You don’t need a man to define you!” Very true, and so much for feminism. The rest of the film takes a long, convoluted, predictable, and mostly unfunny route to prove that the opposite is the case.

It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.

Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.

Return is a slow-paced, incompetently directed film with both eyes focused on the box office. [26 Mar 1983]

It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.

Greer and Lyonne play off each other well; the combination of readily corruptible innocence and reluctantly innocent corruption elevate the material. Their badinage and interactions suggest a genuine sisterly relationship, with a long history of resentments, betrayals, and co-dependence. Too bad the filmmakers try too hard at making you laugh, and not hard enough at making you feel.

Angelo Pizzo knows inspirational sports drama. As the writer of “Hoosiers” and “Rudy,” Pizzo has made a career out of mining the genre and its themes of underdog determination and locker-room brotherhood. But he’s overmatched in his directing debut, the well-intentioned football biopic My All American.

A surprisingly warm and engaging entertainment - brassy, schmaltzy, funny.

As for Hawke's direction, if there is any, it certainly isn't apparent. The shots are frequently bland and uneven, and the players act as though their only instruction was ''Just show up at the set and remember your lines.'' At least they seem to have gotten that much right.

Falls flat on two fronts: It's neither deep and interesting enough to be a brainteaser nor sufficiently thrilling to count as a mindless diversion.

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

So, yea, it is a stinker. But it is prophesied that in six months time you shall come across 10,000 B.C.’ in the land of Pay-Per-View. And you shall say: ‘‘Pass the popcorn.’’

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

This is many lousy movies for the price of one.

Somewhat overstylized and deliberately enigmatic, The Girl won't appeal to everyone. But its ambition and beauty ultimately triumph over pretense.

Takes a vacation from quality.

All About the Benjamins has: flash, cash, and enough videogenic eye candy to make ''Miami Vice'' look like ''Little House on the Prairie.''

Among the ingredients “21” is missing: the infectiously random silliness of a Zach Galifianakis, the smug hunkiness of a Bradley Cooper, and any sort of Vegas-y gloss whatsoever.

A movie that passably ambles along in generic-melodrama mode before finally insulting audience intelligence one time too many.

The riot of color here brings to mind what the makers of “Ice Age” delivered with “Rio,” which in turn reminds us that these animators certainly aren’t just one-trick talents. Could be time for them to show us some new ones.

Not so much a documentary as it is a bald-faced party movie.

For all the adrenalizing positives in this reworked Point Break, inadvertent silliness remains

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

Starts out as a somewhat weary farce of infidelity, but turns into something a lot more gratifying, namely a comedy of mercy.

As she sashays, mirthlessly, from one thankless confrontation to the next, it's unclear why anyone would find Garner any more deserving of stardom than certain mannequins.

There's many a comedy to be made about money and the way it changes us and our perceptions, but Mr. Destiny - which wastes agreeable performances by Ron Lovitz and Bill McCutcheon as well as the principals - isn't it. [12 Oct 1990, p.33p]

Because the movie’s carrying a heavy load of corporate expectations, it gets pulled in different directions by competing agendas before eventually collapsing into incoherence.

What’s interesting about Vacation is that it holds on to the original’s acrid cynicism for the first 40 minutes or so before turning predictable and bland. There are some real, nasty laughs to be had here, but they’re front-loaded.

Love Hurts is an absolute mess, but its hero almost saves the day.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

In his last movie, The King of Staten Island (2020), Apatow was stretching, both emotionally and tonally, and it largely worked. Here he isn’t, and it doesn’t.

There's a cheap thrill in watching Hudson defuse Cook's pig antics with some foulness of her own.

The only thing sadder than Jonah Hex is what appears to have happened to his movie.

Schwarzenegger's mortality for the first time suits him.

Sadly unworthy of Douglas.

As cumbersome as most films in this subgenre, Angelina Jolie makes it watchable.

The movie's enthusiasm is as indelible and shiny as the lip gloss its star wears to bed.

Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.

It just feels misguided, not clever, when John Waters is dragged out for a cameo. That’s when you know the filmmakers must realize how hopelessly they’re caught in a loop-the-loop of punchless comedy.

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]

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

Just as you're ready to give up on Chasing Papi, Paul Rodriguez shows up, and the movie goes from plotless to wildly overwritten in just one scene.

This doesn’t even feel much like Tris’s story anymore, just generically overdigitized combat. The main thing she’s diverging from at this point is the tone that hooked us in the first place.

As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.

Entertaining in a B-movie sort of way, and you can't help admiring its earnestness about the philosophical issues it invokes.

New York looks very appealing: uptown, downtown, even the little bit of Brooklyn we see. Think of “Boy” as a Bridges highlight reel and Gotham travelogue, instead of precious coming-of-age story, and it’s not half bad. But it isn’t, so it is.

The appeal of Bedtime Stories belongs entirely to Sandler. As a comedian, he doesn't have to stoop to a kid's level. He's usually already there.

House of D, is like the kind of sticky greeting card you'd find on CBS some Sunday nights.

It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.

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]

The concept of Air America is refreshing, but its enactment goes nowhere fast. [10 Aug 1990]

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]

Gooding plays the worst role I've ever seen him play in a movie...he perpetuates a kind of black stereotype that should have become history years ago.

This is a manic hour and a half. It's full of pushy, grabby, assertive, borderline obnoxious characters, not all of whom went to Harvard.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

The movie tries going for a laugh or two. It even makes stabs at irony. But since none of the story is suspenseful, remotely believable, or, at the very least, cheaply entertaining, who cares?