Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.

It's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' with all the emotions and half the artistry.

Provoke us into examining whether the onus is on the man for turning it into a commercial proposition or the woman for agreeing to his offer.

Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.

(Duffy) navigates the twisted collision of religious faith and the thrill of the kill, altruism and brutality, with an ingenious mix of humor, horror, mysticism, and just plain hipness.

This film’s comic antics are relentless, exhausting, and devastatingly unfunny. Waititi’s script (co-written with Iain Morris) can’t go 30 seconds without attempting a laugh — and failing most of the time.

The original tv series was sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightening, and sometimes a bit too allegorical, but it was almost always entertaining. Serling gave us more in 25 minutes than Spielberg & Co. give us in nearly two hours. [24 Jun 1983, p.1]

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

Does not sink to the bathos of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film (“Life Is Beautiful”), but it does reduce a period of irredeemable horror to the heroics of a single person.

When the two veteran actors team up in Vermont writer-director Jay Craven’s wry, uneven Northern Borders, adapted from Howard Frank Mosher’s novel, they mesh so well they almost hold the rest of the movie together. But their nuanced performances underscore the weakness of the rest of the cast, and Craven’s erratic tonal shifts from the whimsical to the sentimental trip up the episodic plot.

An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.

Gets better -- more rambunctiously astute -- as it goes, and its comic engine sputters into fitful life when Bernie Mac arrives on the scene.

Bring on the bread and circuses. Into the Storm features laughable dialogue, far-fetched situations, and generic characters played by actors who almost look like more famous stars. I still had a blast; and if you lower your resistance, you may too.

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a sturdily crafted but only mildly amusing goof on Kevin Costner's 1991 Sherwood Forest outing. It further confirms that Mel Brooks has lost something off his fastball since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. [28 July 1993, p.22]

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

It’s an August dog-day special, in other words: a few easy laughs, one or two flashes of inspiration, and enough sentimentality to ensure that no one actually gets hurt.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.

There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.

Scares up few chills.