There isn’t a single original idea to be found here, nor a twist you can’t predict immediately. This film has what Siskel and Ebert used to call “the Idiot Plot.” That is, a plot that doesn’t contain a single credible moment, and would be over if everyone involved wasn’t an idiot.

Simple without being simple-minded, warm without worrying too much about being cool. It's agreeably silly fare for the very small set and not so noisy that parents can't either follow along or take a quick nap.

A documentary about comedy needs to be funny. The old guys, as noted, have definitely lost a lot off their collective fastball.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

Wilson has some fun lampooning ’80s action tropes, but he’s also just doing Dwight Schrute with a twang at times. McBrayer and Garcia barely get to play one-note characters, let alone ones that you’ll remember.

Although it's the first time Hank Ketcham's mischievous kid has been brought to the big screen after a few TV versions, the film has the air of a weak, warmed-over sequel. [25 June 1993, p.51]

Less elliptical and more down-and-dirty than Lang's interesting debut film, ''The Well,'' this one tumbles through Sydney's academic and alternative poetry circles and is built around a lesbian private eye.

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

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]

Mark Felt is a drama about an aggrieved control freak, which would be fine if director Landesman openly acknowledged it. He’s torn, though between offering a heroic celebration of the republic’s underappreciated savior and a more damning character portrait of a man who, for complex reasons, ended up doing the right thing.

Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.

How to Make a Killing should be a lot more fun than it is. The murders are poorly staged and unfunny, and Powell’s performance is so one-note and smug that you can’t root for him even if you think his killing spree is justified.

Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.

It’s a brutal bit of screen poetry that’s matched too infrequently by the aching human stories director Fedor Bondarchuk is so anxious to tell.

What ought to be the pinnacle of the story - the orphans' odds-defying 500-mile march over snow-covered mountains toward the relative safety of the Mongolian desert - is shunted toward the end of the film and compressed to a near-footnote.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

As cartoon rip-offs go, Open Season can be surprisingly entertaining, in a made-for-6-year-olds kind of way.

A well-intentioned indie that tries to be a "real" version of a Hollywood romantic comedy and ends up feeling more ersatz than ever.

Too glossy to truly immerse audiences in the horrors it depicts.

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

These are not the marks of true cinema; they're the makings of a droopy karaoke video.

CB4 succeeds on joke overkill, made possible by a story framework that begs for heavy-handed puns and sophomoric sight gags. It is a cotton-candy comedy, far wispier than its prototype, but equally insightful into the rap world as This Is Spinal Tap was to rock. [12 Mar 1993, p.30]