Del Toro does remind you of Brando here; unfortunately, it's the Brando of ''Apocalypse Now,'' the one with the green face and puffy line readings. Jones fares better, even if he wears the same grieving-for-humanity expression throughout the film.

A fatally insubstantial film.

Kids who like the TV episodes will find more of the same here, and larger. [30 June 1995, p.53]

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

One hopes that, for their own good, when any of these actors are offered a script like this again, they’ll have the sense to just say no.

Lethal Weapon 3 is a big, dumb, noisy, comic strip of a movie that begins and ends in flames.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

Kudrow and Robinson are intriguing casting and they get some sharp Bickersons material, but the movie unconvincingly shorthands how they got together. And Revolori’s horndog just feels like the film coasting on his quirky persona from “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Fletch Lives isn't a total zero. Three, or maybe four, of Chevy Chase's wisecracks work. But everything else about the film is feeble and poky. Even its tastelessness lacks the coarse energy of vulgarity. It's hard to believe that the world has had to wait five years for this witless, insipid sequel to "Fletch," an original that's easy to top. [17 Mar 1989, p.45]

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

The loosey-goosey fun might be a bit much at the finish, but it’s still a laugh watching McCarthy try to get back on her feet.

A new misadventure whose negligibly refined formula somehow ends up being more consistently entertaining.

If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]

His Unhinged character is a pill-popping mouth breather with a sweaty beard and big, big gut. He combines the cruelty of a bear-baiter with the appearance of an actual bear. It’s kind of a neat trick, actually: the unbearable bearishness of Russell Crowe. If Disney goes the “Jungle Book” route again, consider him a lock for Baloo.

Cox doesn’t so much chew the scenery as inhale it. Dano looks on in awe.

You can't blame John Cusack for jumping at the chance to play Igor.

Kevin James's latest comedy doesn't promise any bing or bang, only boom. Take it at its word.

A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.

Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

It has a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for romance will find only cardboard lovers. People looking for a resounding musical will find it odd that the camera runs away from the lip-synching cast. And people looking for opera -- well, shame on you.

If you thought the world couldn't get enough of bad spoof movies, you thought wrong.

The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction.

It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.