The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

The best I can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it’s infinitely better than its predecessor. But you don’t need a power-up to clear that bar.

Maybe The Oranges does represent a middle-age male fantasy, but Laurie lets you see its pitfalls as well as its pleasures.

Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

It’s worth remembering that movies can have soul, too, if their filmmakers are willing to do the work to find it.

So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

Just a limp, jokey family film that wants to have its fairy tale magic and its hip irony, too.

Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.

Come on. You want to know if it's funny. And the answer is: kind of.

A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]

After a fast, funny start, the new sequel, Johnny English Reborn, proves to be more of the same.

Despite its good looks and expertly turned performances, it trivializes Kafka and his work. The simplistic optimism behind it is more terrifying than anything we actually see on screen. Sitting through Kafka is like watching somebody staff a suicide hotline by telling callers to just lighten up. [21 Feb. 1992, p.28]

None of these characters provides more than a smattering of laughs, but Def is the one guy we might like to see more of, if only because his role is small and better executed than it deserves.

Unofficially, You, Me and Dupree is a companion piece to last summer's "Wedding Crashers," a movie whose lunacy is desperately needed this summer.

Everyone behaves themselves in this Rebecca, whereas the point of the book and the first movie is that our worst behavior is always floating just below the waterline, ready to bob to the surface at the wrong moment.

It's more of a throwback to one of the first SNL movie spinoffs, Steve Martin's "The Jerk." It's loaded with physical comedy and enlists Farley's SNL foil, David Spade, to serve as Abbott to Farley's Costello. Farley plays the blimp on uppers, Spade plays the pinched little know-it-all nerd with a chip - a computer chip, probably - on his shoulder. What mostly keeps it going is the sheer gusto with which Farley throws himself into the clowning. It's passably entertaining if you don't think about it too much - and to see it is to realize that it works mightily at getting you to not think too much. [31 March 1995, p.59]

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

Although it's more concerned with justifying its title than with making contact with any real subversiveness, criminal or cultural, Airheads is the kind of sweet fluff it's easy to say yes to in August. [5 Aug 1994, p.46]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Book Club: The Next Chapter was not only watchable but occasionally amusing.

Honey Don’t!, the neo-noir by director Ethan Coen and his wife, co-writer Tricia Cooke, is an unsatisfying mishmash of plot threads that neither intrigue nor coalesce.

Seeing the Ghostbusters in the Big Apple where they belong put a smile on my face, at least until I realized I was watching a sitcom about wiseass teens and their dopey parents.

Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.