Performances are rather beside the point in a movie where dogs carry the acting burden, but Perabo is especially bland.

Inside this film, a poignant and personal story is struggling to get out. But it's couched in such awkward sentiments that it can't emerge.

Everyone in the cast treads water, acting-wise -- there's nothing else to do -- except for Latifah, who brings passion to her work.

It took four years to come up with this? Someone needed that long to assemble this patchy, recycled collection of gags about stinky butts, superfreaks, finger-wide blunts and racial cliches?

This film might have been daringly funny 10 years ago, even with its broadest elements intact. Now it's comfortable as old slippers and unthreatening as a sleeping kitten.

So here I am, trying to like The Purge because I’m drawn to its simple and horrific premise, and it’s treating me (and you) as if we have the IQs of lawn ornaments.

A pleasant, snappy, by-the-numbers buddy comedy.

Atmosphere goes only so far in a story where the major characters fade from memory.

Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.

The script by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen and the direction by Steven Brill have a careless, never-gave-a-damn feel that's as insulting to viewers as the film is dull.

The movie, first preposterously entertaining and then just preposterous, makes James Bond films look as logical as Euclidean geometry.

The final failure comes in a climax that defies science, good taste and common sense.

On a simplistic level, the movie works as a revenge fantasy...Yet anybody who thought about the movie for two minutes would have to conclude it couldn't happen.

Director Michael Bay surrounds them with action scenes cut as rapidly and irritatingly as a Gap commercial. At points, we can't tell one darting car from another, a drug triggerman from a cop. [7 April 1995, p.1F]

Vaughn delivers every line with his usual deadpan glibness, which suits the part. But I smiled as I watched the big-bellied, multi-chinned actor connecting with the porcelain, model-thin Witherspoon.

The film's filled with inconsequential scenes and supporting characters who add useless atmosphere or by-the-book diversity.

Weak, obligatory stabs at humor make it more generic than it might've been.

Few modern thrillers aspire to look this striking.

It begins as energetic, clichéd nonsense and ends as irritating, clichéd nonsense.

Director Ivan Reitman used to know how to tell a silly story, back around the time of "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters."

Three-fourths of a terrific thriller, which in this dreary run of winter movies seemed like clear spring water to this parched traveler. The setup is so riveting, the suspense so carefully prolonged, that I didn't mind when it unraveled into lunacy near the end.

Fear not. It’s as silly as the first, a shade faster and nastier (though also sloppier) and features a new psycho more dangerous than anyone in the original.

Most painfully, the semi-alert Owen and the leaden Aniston go together like sausages and syrup.

“The Dirty Dozen,” one of my favorite war movies, will no doubt get a 50th-anniversary boxed set next year. Those of us who wait for it can mark time with Suicide Squad, which borrows the same concept and executes it with more lunacy and far less flair.

If you've been seduced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version of "The Phantom of the Opera," you'll fall in love with the gorgeous, splendidly cast film.

Emotionally stultifying and brain-dead.

This movie is an act of hubris so huge that, in Alexander's time, it would draw lightning bolts from contemptuous gods. Today it will get sniggers from stunned critics and a collective yawn from a public unlikely to share Stone's egomania.

The film whirls by in a satisfying torrent of chases, escapes and discoveries.