Too cluttered and busy, but as a glimpse into the affluent culture of a country with economic extremes, it's intriguing. Occasionally it's funny and moving, too.

All of this is intriguing material, but the movie doesn't do much with it.

Proves to be unsatisfactory because it establishes a well-defined group of characters and shows them disrupted by the careless behavior of a tiresome young woman and two adults who allow themselves to be motivated in one way or another by her infectious libido.

This is a well-made thriller traveling over awfully familiar turf.

What they came out with is the most complete collection of cop-movie clichés since John Wayne played a Chicago cop in “McQ”.

In the real world, Elle Woods would be chewed up faster than one of little Bruiser's Milk-Bones.

This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting, but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration.

For all the outlandish style and heaps of energy in Nowhere, Araki's most expensive and mainstream film, it can be reduced to one big pessimistic shriek. How do you spell Life is a bummer? Apparently, by never shutting up. [06 June 1997, p.32]

Somewhere in the laundry list of clichés, there is a movie here that we have already seen and forgotten.

A depressingly uninspired superhero adventure sequel that leans heavily on plot points and battle sequences we’ve seen in at least a dozen other films in the genre — and almost always done better.

The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.

There is no entry portal in The Rules of Attraction, and I spent most of the movie feeling depressed by the shallow, selfish, greedy characters. I wanted to be at another party.

As amiable and formfitting as Ghostbusters II can be, it's a thin, dimly conceived affair. For all its rave-up special effects, it adds little to director Ivan Reitman's original, which itself was no fountain of wit but at least had a fresh gimmick going for it. [16 Jun 1989, p.37]

Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are just fine, but there’s no huge onscreen spark between them. Most of the supporting roles are thinly drawn and forgettable.

Arriving in theaters nearly three decades after Will Smith and Martin Lawrence proved to be a hilariously likable duo in the original “Bad Boys” and four years after the entertaining, midlife-crisis threequel, the bombastic and cartoonishly over-the-top “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is one loud misfire.

It's a long, shapeless, undisciplined mess, and every once in awhile it generates a big laugh.

It’s like a strange and misguided takeoff on “All That Jazz” as funneled through “Rock of Ages,” and while there’s no denying the heart and effort behind the presentation, that finale is representative of the movie itself in that it has an uncanny way of hitting the wrong notes.

A terrific opening. But, alas, the moment The Final Conflict turns to dialogue and a plot, it loses its inspiration.

Malice is one of the busiest movies I've ever seen, a film jampacked with characters and incidents and blind alleys and red herrings. Offhand, this is the only movie I can recall in which an entire subplot about a serial killer is thrown in simply for atmosphere.

Unfortunately, not even Gordon-Levitt’s stellar work can sustain a well-made but ultimately underwhelming docudrama from first-time German writer-director Patrick Vollrath.

From its juvenile double entendre title to its fascination with prison rape and homophobic humor, “Get Hard” practically announces itself as an offensive, tired and unimaginative comedy in nearly every scene. And yet I didn’t hate it because Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart had such terrific comedic chemistry.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is a murky, unfocused, violent and depressing version of the classic story, with little of the lightheartedness and romance we expect from Robin Hood.

The Shack is a well-acted and sometimes moving but far too often slow-paced and unconvincing spiritual journey.

They had a great idea here. It's too bad they didn't follow it through on a human level, instead of making it feel made up and artificial and twice-removed, from the everyday experience it pretends to be about.

As an idea, the film is fascinating, but as an experience it grows tedious; the concerts lack closeups, the sex lacks context, and Antarctica could use a few penguins.

That the new Casanova lacks such wit is fatal. Heath Ledger is a good actor but Hallstrom's film is busy and unfocused, giving us the view of Casanova's ceaseless activity but not the excitement. It's a sitcom when what is wanted is comic opera.

One of the nice things about the movie is the way it provides chills and thrills and still tones down the violence.

This sort of stuff is magnificently silly, and Lee, to give him credit, never tried to rise above it. If a movie like this were directed seriously, it would be a disaster.

It’s essentially a stand-alone film, though it doesn’t really stand so much as it wobbles and careens all over the place before exploding in an overwrought orgy of grotesque images, religious psychobabble and second-rate CGI nonsense.

The modern sequences lack realism or credibility. The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story. The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose “The Last Emperor” was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things.

The movie is pleasant enough, but never quite reaches critical mass as a comedy.

They are, in fact, likable. That's why their comedy is so sad.

Run is stopped dead in its tracks by a howler of a screenplay that regularly calls for various characters to behave as stupidly as the dumbest victim in a splatter movie.

The big action set pieces fizzle. And that’s not good for a fantasy adventure movie, especially when the fantasy component is frequently undercut by sub-standard special effects.

Author! Author! is never even able to establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos, between heart-rending family conferences and a ridiculous final scene.

Nymphomaniac Part 1 grows flat and monotonous, and comes across as just what it is: half a film.

Strives hard to replicate the screwball comedy but ends up being a lot more screwball than comedy.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.

My own feeling is that the film is one more assault on the notion that young American audiences might be expected to enjoy films with at least some subtlety and depth and pacing and occasional quietness. The filmmakers apparently believe their audience suffers from ADD, and so they supply breakneck action and screaming sound volumes at all times.

A sometimes wickedly funny but ultimately sour, loud, draining tale of one of the most dysfunctional families in modern American drama. And that’s saying a lot.

My Stepmother Is an Alien is a great idea for a movie, but it seems to have stalled at the idea stage.

Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer, Paul Harris Boardman, deliver a routine procedural with unremarkable frights.

The movie's big and expensive and filled with stars, but it's not an epic. It's the longest B-grade war movie ever made.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

The Fog is encouraging because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish. This isn't a great movie but it does show great promise from Carpenter.

A few loopholes I can forgive. But when a plot is riddled with them -- I get distracted.

Soppy and sentimental, it evokes "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" without improving on it.

On a technical level, there's a lot to be said for Die Hard. It's when we get to some of the unnecessary adornments of the script that the movie shoots itself in the foot.

House of Wax is not a good movie but it is an efficient one, and will deliver most of what anyone attending House of Wax could reasonably expect, assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much.

A big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.

The animation isn't vivid, the characters aren't very interesting, and the songs are routine.

The Tomorrow War is an earnest effort to bring something new to the time-travel action genre, but this movie is a 2021 vehicle made of parts from the 2010s and the 1990s and 1980s.

All very nice, sometimes we smile, but there's nothing compelling.

In the stylishly directed but gratuitously nasty and cliché-riddled Peppermint, Garner plays essentially two characters cut from the same person.

The kind of movie where you walk in, watch the first 10 minutes, know exactly where it's going, and hope devoutly that you're wrong.

This is a very far from perfect movie, and it ends on an unsatisfactory note.

Ridiculous -- yes. Comical at times -- yes. Silliest film seen in some time by the Animals Movies Critics' Team. BUT -- great special effects as men BECOME werewolves. WOMEN, too. Before your eyes. Done with -- says here -- HYDRAULICS! Sensational!

Black somehow feels reigned in; shaved and barbered, he's lost his anarchic passion and is merely playing a comic role instead of transforming it into a personal mission.

The story is so interesting, and Bacon and the other actors are so capable, that if this movie had been two hours out of their lives, I would have found it compelling. What we get, though, is 35 minutes of their lives and a lot of recycled visual cliches.

Because the film is well-acted and written with intelligence, it might be worth seeing, despite my objections. I suspect my own feelings.

It's an overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

How could they take this material and make it really original? Maybe by refusing to be seduced by the Screenwriter's stock Hollywood "originality" and probing more deeply into the real human lives of the characters. The people in Back Roads are so heavily laden with schtick that they never have a chance to develop personalities.

Until the plot becomes intolerably cornball, there's charm in the story.

The movie wants to be good-hearted but is somehow sort of grudging. It should have gone all the way. I think Fred Claus should have been meaner if he was going to be funnier, and Santa should have been up to something nefarious, instead of the jolly old ho-ho-ho routine.

If I found it creepy beyond all reason, that is no doubt because I have been hopelessly corrupted by the decadent society I inhabit.

The actors cannot be faulted. They bring more to the story than it really deserves.

But when you think of the "Babe" pictures, and indeed even an animated cartoon like "Home on the Range," you realize Stripes is on autopilot with all of the usual elements: a heroine missing one parent, an animal missing both, an underdog (or underzebra), cute animals, the big race.

The movie was more of a revue than a narrative, more about moments than an organizing purpose, and cute to the point that I yearned for some corrosive wit from its second cousin, the Monty Python universe.

The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful?

Romeo is Bleeding is an exercise in overwrought style and overwritten melodrama, and proof that a great cast cannot save a film from self-destruction.

Dear John exists only to coddle the sentiments of undemanding dreamers, and plunge us into a world where the only evil is the interruption of the good.

The movie is fun until they set sail.

This is dicey material for a screwball comedy, even one with dark undertones, and despite the best efforts of the ensemble, She Came to Me drifts further and further away from anything approaching reality or relatability. Nearly every major character in this film is exhausting to be around and/or thinly drawn.

It spirals downward into a ludicrous, dumbed-down horror story more concerned with grossing out the audience than in providing any compelling reason for this long-running franchise to keep chugging along, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

Unremarkable and disposable.

The movie itself is genial and unfocused and tired.

The whole point of a Turtles movie is superhero power through ninja fighting. And no matter how it is dressed up, or what century it's set in, that's all there is inside the shell. [22 Mar 1993, p.24]

The movie sinks into contrived plot manipulation.

The Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment.

Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.

The movie gives people a piece of the AIDS nightmare - a view of HIV-infected men struggling to retain romance - but the piece is sharp and brittle, with little humor truly working. And despite the somewhat serene ending, it is really shot through more with the characters' rage than anything. [14 Aug 1992, p.42]

More times than not, The Benefactor takes the less interesting fork in the road.

What am I looking for in a thriller? I think maybe a movie where people get into a situation, instead of one where an artificial and manipulative situation is imposed on people. "Fatal Attraction" convinced me it was about people who were in a believable situation. I cared about them. White Sands is all arbitrary melodrama, and so the considerable skills that went into it are essentially wasted. [24 Apr 1992, p.38]

Pfeiffer looks, acts and sounds wonderful throughout all of this, and George Clooney is perfectly serviceable as a romantic lead, sort of a Mel Gibson lite. I liked them. I wanted them to get together. I wanted them to live happily ever after. The sooner the better.

But in the absence of prime-time thrills, and more than a snip or two of the TV series' cutting wit, 95 minutes is a long time to stretch this simple-minded stuff. [13 Jan 1995, p.33]

First Kid wouldn't be my first movie choice this weekend, but my 9-year-old consultant thoroughly enjoyed Sinbad's antics, personality and style. [30 Aug 1996, p.32]

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

Davis (who was an executive producer on the film) gives a strong performance, as if she were acting in one of those many prestige projects lighting up her resume. It’s a noble try, but this dreck is beyond saving.

Frantically overcooked, bursting with headache-inducing, rapid-cut action sequences and only half as clever as it fancies itself, Bloodshot is an ambitious and intermittently entertaining minor-league superhero film.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything.

Entertaining if you understand exactly what it is: if you see it as a film made by friends out of the materials presented by their lives and with the freedom to not push too hard.

Despite the fine performance by Witherspoon and a number of the supporting players, Devil’s Knot comes across as a cinematic, slightly dramatized Cliffs Notes edition of a story that’s been told often, and almost always more effectively, in other formats.

City Slickers II, subtitled The Legend of Curly's Gold, makes the mistake of thinking we care more about the gold than about the city slickers. Like too many sequels, it has forgotten what the first film was really about. Slickers II is about the MacGuffin instead of the characters.

To its credit, Street Fighter does have a sense of humor about itself. [26 Dec 1994, p.25]

It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.

This movie doesn't contain "offensive language." The offensive language contains the movie.

Brannigan isn't great, but it's a wellcrafted action movie and, besides, it's got John Wayne in it.

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.