The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

An acceptable creature feature at best and a waterlogged “Alien” at worst, Underwater sneaks into town as a true January release: a shelf-sitting production that 20th Century Fox’s new owner, Disney, is putting outside the store like a loaf of stale bread. It’s there if you want it, and you could chew on worse.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

Revenge degenerates into a macho dance between Costner and Quinn, with the film chewing up and spitting out Stowe's character in troubling ways. [16 Feb 1990, p.89]

Although Rush gives the film visual texture, he can't give it credibility or metaphorical dimension. Color of Night is nocturnal, but not much more. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

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]

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

It's lacking in eventfulness and drama, but there's a sweetness in it that places it a cut above most synthetic children's films. As a writer and director, Evans doesn't always know where to go with his material, but at least there's some feeling behind it, and this sometimes rescues it from its becalmed predictability. [7 Apr 1993, p.49]

The Cotton Club does look terrific and has its moments. It’s certainly not an embarrassment. It’s just not . . . very good.

Landis spends too much time in the realm of the cartoony, where he's clearly comfortable, and less time in the area of the suavely insinuating, where any vampire movie really lives. Innocent Blood is pumped-up, but anemic. [25 Sept 1992, p.34]

Essentially, the film's strategy is to fight predictability with bonehead amiability, and on this level it's a crowd-pleaser. [27 Dec 1991, p.28]

It’s refreshing to see Monáe show what she can do as a lead, and her performance as Veronica possesses a wit and savvy that complement the performer’s natural poise.

Anyone much over the age of 15 who saw the earlier movies knew they were silly. That didn’t matter. What mattered is that they didn’t feel silly. “Resurrections” does.

The animation techniques are sophisticated but the story tends to get bogged down in pop philosophy. [01 Mar 2015, p.N]

The best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

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.

Like Purple Rain, the record/film that made Prince a superstar, Graffiti Bridge is a hodgepodge musical that has a few satisfying bits - and a lot of sharp music - but fails as a narrative. [03 Nov 1990, p.22p]

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

A lot of skill and imagination went into making Blonde. It’s just that they’re misplaced. The movie has its own cracked integrity. That long runtime allows Dominik to give it a slow, inexorable rhythm. Everything has a slightly underwater quality. Stardom here has more to do with miasma than glamour.

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

As directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Old Guard is assured and textureless: competence doing the work of inspiration. The movie is like an extended trailer for itself.

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.