The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.

It can’t be recommended even to people who mostly just want to see Amanda Seyfried naked.

A lot of talent gets wasted in Wilson: not just Harrelson, Dern, and Clowes.

A tasty diversion from the usual Hollywood fare.

In one amusing bit of dialogue, Stallone and Schwarze-negger kid each other about being smarter than they look. For a little while at least, we thought we might be able to say the same about Escape Plan.

The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.

Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.

Bertrand does his jelly-belly best to keep Starbuck a comedy. But even the broadest shtick can’t prevent a movie that features a Busby Berkeley-style group hug from becoming a male weepie. Or a testimonial to Planned Parenthood.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

Playing the character with this much girlish innocence is risky. Barrymore can seem dumb, but as Lucky You unfolds, we realize that the character is just a device to bring viewers into the parallel universe of poker.

Far and Away is a throwback to the handsome but stodgy historical romances Hollywood used to make, and it can at least be said that it's more ambitious than most of what we'll see this summer. [22 May 1992]

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

Big, noisy, harmless, and a little clumsy -- yep, that's Clifford, the Big Red Dog. And it's Clifford's Really Big Movie, too.

There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.

The techno-wizards at Industrial Light & Magic really knock themselves out here, but Casper is more serviceable than magical. [26 May 1995, p.85]

Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.

What keeps you interested in Demolition is accompanying Davis as he solves the mystery of himself. What keeps you checking your watch is that the character’s not terribly interesting to begin with.

The result is a state-of-the-art multiplex three-ring circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly.

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

Individual performances...are flavorful and simpatico.

The only victims in Paid in Full are the dealers and their families -- and the only word for that is one this paper can't print.

The movie has none of the embarrassing absurdity and cheap effects that made last year's trip back to the 14th century, "Timeline,'' such a joke. We should be so lucky. Instead, we get a listless avenger drama.

Bummer theater.

West’s film differs from the “Blair Witch” template in that the footage is never actually “found.”

Flat-footed and far too broad, it’s a reminder why “Saturday Night Live” skits don’t run two hours and 18 minutes.