Underwater breaks no new ground as a sci-fi horror flick — other than as a possible contender for the murkiest movie ever made.

It's is not a great high school movie like "Election," but it's alive and risky and saucy.

Is it funny? Yes, it is.

Tucker's scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant?

Lost for Words is directed with little originality by Stanley J. Orzel.

Caddyshack never finds a consistent comic note of its own, but it plays host to all sorts of approaches from its stars, who sometimes hardly seem to be occupying the same movie.

The callbacks to “Taxi Driver” and, on a lesser level, “Fight Club” are many in South African writer-director John Trengrove’s well-shot but heavy-handed and depressingly obvious Manodrome, a blunt indictment of toxic masculinity that strikes mere glancing blows and packs a relatively soft punch.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is a good improvement over “Planes,” which Disney released last year. The story is stronger, there are some wonderful additions to the voice talent and the 3D cinematography is well-utilized.

As is the case with most of the elements in Emperor, the cliches are relatively few and spaced apart, and the tearjerking and profound moments are authentic and well-earned.

Vikander is in nearly every scene in the movie, and she’s absolutely terrific. Endearing and funny in the early scenes in London, easy to root for as she dives into the cartoon of an adventure. Of course Tomb Raider sets the table for future adventures, but if the future chapters are to be this silly and disposable, one hopes Vikander moves on as quickly from this film as I did as a viewer.

The story is predictable, but the style had me on the edge of my seat.

The movie did make me smile. It didn't make me laugh, and it didn't involve my emotions, or the higher regions of my intellect, for that matter. It's a perfectly acceptable feature cartoon for kids up to a certain age, but it doesn't have the universal appeal of some of the best recent animation.

Over all, Noelle is subpar — but it’s silly, harmless fun. It’s so forgettable it’ll be virtually erased from your memory five minutes after the end credits roll.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a comedy that feeds off the blaxploitation movies, and although, like all good satires, it is cheerfully willing to be offensive, it is almost completely incapable of being funny.

Alas, Gran Turismo ultimately feels like a tribute to marketing campaigns and brand ambassadorships more than “Rocky” on the racetrack.

Strong performances, particularly by Glenn as the hard-bitten climber with a private agenda, Vertical Limit delivers.

The movie is not a special effects extravaganza like "The Grinch," but in a way that's a relief. It's more about charm and silliness than about great hulking multimillion-dollar high-tech effects.

There are several Idiot Plot moments when a simple line of dialogue (''He has Tourette's syndrome'') would work wonders but is never said. And yet the movie has a sweetness and care that is touching.

I have such an unreasonable affection for this movie, indeed, that it is only by slapping myself alongside the head and drinking black coffee that I can restrain myself from recommending it.

It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience.

Plays like it was directed as a do-it-yourself project, following instructions that omitted a few steps, and yet the movie has an undeniable charm.

Burnt Offerings is a mystery, all right. What's mysterious is that the filmmakers were able to sell such a weary collection of ancient cliches for cold hard cash.

War movies used to have dash and color and a certain corny sentimentality; Midway hardly even makes us care.

Even with the uniformly good performances — and the standout work from Ms. Green — 300: Rise of an Empire is foremost a triumph of production design, costumes, brilliantly choreographed battle sequences and stunning CGI.

The idea of the president's daughter being held captive isn't blindingly original (it's an alarmingly dangerous occupation), but placing the story on a space station is a masterstroke, since we're about filled up to here with prison movies set on Earth.

This material is intriguing enough that I wish there had been more of it. Comedy consists of the application of logic to the absurd, and there are many more opportunities here than the screenplay takes advantage of.

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience.

An occasionally entertaining, often incomprehensible and ultimately quite average 1980s-homage mismatched buddy action picture.

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

As a family movie, Operation Dumbo Drop is sort of entertaining. As history, it's shameless.

A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.

It’s shiny trash that begins with promise but quickly gets tripped up by its own screenplay and grows increasingly ludicrous and melodramatic, to the point where I was barely able to suppress a chuckle at some of the final scenes.

This is the second movie Judd and Freeman have made together (after "Kiss the Girls" in 1997). They're both good at projecting a kind of Southern intelligence that knows its way around the frailties of human nature.

Paltrow is truly touching. And Black, in his first big-time starring role, struts through with the blissful confidence of a man who knows he was born for stardom.

The very soul of sophomorism. It is callow, gauche, obvious and awkward, and designed to appeal to those with similar qualities.

This kind of film requires us to be very forgiving, and if we are, it promises to entertain. Angels & Demons succeeds.

At one time or another, Casino Royale undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie.

Fortress doesn't dig enough beneath its own surface, or create the tension it should. But its originality and taut muscularity make up for those limitations, and a winning supporting cast makes up for the granite-headed Lambert (already lined up for a sequel), who is only marginally less robotic than anything he's fighting. Locklin is bright and appealing. And "Re-Animator" star Jeffrey Combs keeps the party hopping as an explosives expert in the nerdy Bud Cort/wasted hippie mold. "This is highly sensitive," he says, examining a potent device. "We are talking TNT on PMS!" [6 Sept 1993, p.21]

The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it's a fair example of what it is.

It tries to be the best bad movie that it can be.

In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.

The result is a well-acted, competently made, utterly tedious bore of a film lacking in creative spark, unwilling to take chances and determined to grind Tolkien through the muck and the blood of war and death at the expense of providing much insight into his creative process.

Aric Avelino shows an almost tender restraint in his story-telling, not pounding us with a message but simply looking steadily at how guns have made these lives difficult.

This is a small film and knows exactly how to be a small film. Like many New Yorker short stories, its purpose is to strike a particular note and allow it to reverberate.

Hoffman has countless characters inside of him, and this is one of his nicest.

Admission has some sublime moments, most of them involving Fey and Rudd dancing around their inevitable romance. The problem is in the foundation.

But what the movie lacks is a story arc to pull us through.

Rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you've ever met, and are, in general, insufferable.

Clocking in a relatively breezy 125 minutes and featuring a dazzling array of VFX and CGI, “Quantumania” manages to tell an intimate family story against an enormously expansive yet subatomic background.

Catherine Hardwicke’s sharply drawn, slow-simmer domestic drama Prisoner’s Daughter has the cool vibe of an indie film from a generation ago, from the lived-in look of the Vegas sets to the authentic performances of the terrific cast.

A lot of Murder at 1600 is well -done. Characters are introduced vividly,; there's a sense of realism in the White House scenes, and some of the dialogue by Wayne Beach and David Hodgin hits a nice ironic note. But then the movie kicks into auto - pilot. The last third of the film is a ready-made action movie plug-in.

The first five or 10 minutes of Airplane II -- The Sequel are genuinely funny -- so funny I thought maybe this movie was going to work. That turned out to be a premature hope. The new inspirations quickly run out, and Airplane II turns into a retread, plundering the same situations and characters that made the original Airplane so funny.

This is the kind of movie where the filmmaker hopes to shock you with sickening carnage and violent amorality, while at the same time holding himself carefully aloof from it with his style. He would be more honest and probably make a better movie if he got down in the trenches with the rest of us.

There are good lines of Wayne dialog and good exchanges with Ben Johnson (as the cook) and some scenes in which you can see that even Wayne thinks Gabriel looks ridiculous as an Indian. And these scenes help pass the time and help you forget how wooden and uninteresting Hudson is. Which is pretty wooden and uninteresting indeed.

Ford gives a grounded, quietly powerful performance as a reclusive, regret-filled, self-pitying old-timer who crawls out of a bottle and finds a renewed sense of purpose when he sees the world through Buck’s eyes. If only those eyes weren’t so distractingly incongruous.

Beneath its glossy surface, this is nothing more than a cheap parlor trick, with heavy-handed messaging about female empowerment, and a final act that is neither surprising nor remotely plausible, and not nearly as shocking as it was surely intended to be.

The movie leaves no heartstring untugged. It even has a beloved old dog, and you know what happens to beloved old dogs in movies like this. Or if you don't, I don't have the heart to tell you.

No God, No Master has an authentic period feel. But Green is focused on so many historical figures and potential storylines that the film feels rushed and, at times, confusing.

Overall it’s a lovely and refreshingly breezy adventure with an adorably plucky lead, an infectious soundtrack and arresting visuals.

Schumer is doing another slightly tweaked but virtually indistinguishable variation on the same wisecracking, self-deprecating, insecure, if-only-she-could-see-her-wonderfulness underdog she’s played before. She’s clearly in her comfort zone and she eventually wins us over in this uneven, hit-and-miss, broad comedy — but here’s hoping the next time around, she tries something new.

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

For the first hour or so, The Mountain Between Us is a tedious and corny survival story, but at least it’s bearable, thanks mainly to the all-in performances from Kate Winslet and Idris Elba.

The film is lame comedy surrounded by high-energy blues (and some pop, rock and country music).

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.

Lemmons and her cast, aided by some great music, have created an interlude sure to lift the spirit during the holiday season.

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.

Pleasant, harmless PG-13 entertainment, with a plot a little more surprising and acting a little better than I expected.

Any professional film editor watching this movie is going to suffer through one moment after another that begs to be ripped from the film and cut up into ukulele picks. Never mind the film editor: A lot of audiences, with all the best will in the world, are going to feel the same way.

There should be a special category for movies that are neither good nor bad, but simply excessive.

It lacks all of the style and sense of fun of the original Critters (1986) and has no reason for existence - aside, of course, from the fact that Critters is a brand name and this is the current model.

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]

The movie is sort of a sideways version of "Sideways," even down to a scene where the two men join two women for dinner. The difference is, in "Sideways" the guys desperately want to impress the women, and in The Thing About My Folks, they want to impress each other.

Jessica Lange plays Frances Farmer in a performance that is so driven, that contains so many different facets of a complex personality, that we feel she has an intuitive understanding of this tragic woman.

Neither funny nor scary, Buffy ends up as little more than a bunch of stereotypes (Reubens excepted) squaring off with each other as true love triumphs. Maybe it should have been called "Pee-wee's Big Denture," and given people something to sink their teeth into. But for now, Buffy remains lifeless. [31 Jul 1992, p.43]

The darkly entertaining but derivative crime comedy/drama “Riff Raff” features an amazing cast — some of them playing the kinds of roles we’ve come to expect from them, others out of their go-to comfort zone but reminding us of their range and versatility.

Recycles a plot that was already old when Tracy and Hepburn were trying it out. You see it coming from a great distance away. As it draws closer, you don't duck out of the way, because it is so cheerfully done, you don't mind being hit by it.

Director Johannes Roberts is clearly a fan of films such as “Christine” and “Halloween.” The production elements are first-rate, including the expansive setting that includes multiple cabins, a playground and a swimming pool.

There are some nice things in "Slamdance." Hulce has a certain dogged charm as the hero who draws cartoons in the spirit, if not the style, of Gary Larson, and who is extremely upset that there is a dead body in his apartment. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a sound, three-dimensional performance as the ex-wife who has to decide if this guy is worth the trust - and the trouble. And Harry Dean Stanton remains quintessentially himself.

The movie has terrific if completely unbelievable special effects. The actors had fun, I guess. You might, too, if you like goofiness like this.

This is a noble effort, but ultimately Mary Magdalene isn’t much less of a mystery than she was at the start of the journey.

Even with all its pyrotechnics, and even with arguably the finest and deepest team of actors ever to appear in any of the three dozen movies about the big guy, King of the Monsters careens about all over the place in search of an identity, never really finding its footing as a campy treat, an exciting popcorn adventure or a monster movie with humans we actually care about.

A threat to the Bond franchise? Not a threat so much as a salute. I don't want James Bond to turn crude and muscular on me; I like the suave style. But I like Xander, too, especially since he seems to have studied Bond so very carefully.

The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.

It drifts above the surface of its natural subjects, content to be a genre picture. We're always aware of the formula--and in a picture based on real life, we shouldn't be.

A movie with a lot of funny one-liners, but no place to go with them.

The movie lacks a port of entry for young viewers -- a character they can identify with. All of the major characters are adults with adult problems like debt, romance, and running (or swimming away from) the mob.

The movie tries for tragedy and reaches only pathos, but then Bobby lost his chance to be a tragic hero by living this long in the first place.

A moody, brooding and sl-o-o-o-o-owly meandering tale that works its way, almost reluctantly, toward the violent finale — which also manages to be remarkably passive and anti-climactic.

The only thing worse than the first three-quarters of Morgan is the supposed payoff, which veers from the dumb to the really dumb to the so-dumb-you’ll-hardly-believe-it. This is one of the worst movies of 2016.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

Director Chris Columbus has fun with this goofy premise, but as always I am distracted by the practical aspects of the story. Does it bother the Greek gods that no one any longer knows or cares that they rule the world? What are the genetic implications of human/god interbreeding?

An energetic, sprawling, sometimes aimless but ultimately entertaining old-fashioned blend of comedy and horror that’s overflowing with Easter Eggs and insider winks to the theme ride attraction, and benefits greatly from an ensemble cast that works overtime to make sure we enjoy ourselves.

Its pacing is too deliberate, and it doesn’t have a light heart. That’s revealed in the handling of some characters named the Brownies, represented by a couple of men who are about 9 inches tall and fight all the time. Maybe Lucas thought these guys would work like R2-D2 and C-3PO did in “Star Wars.” But they have no depth, no personalities, no dimension; they’re simply an irritant at the edge of the frame.

John Waters' Pink Flamingos has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years. If I haven't retired by then, I will.

Recycles the 1977 comedy right down to repeating the same mistakes.

The movie is a little more lightweight than the usual People's Choice Award winner at Toronto, but why not? It was the best-liked film at the 2006 festival, and I can understand that.

Steve Martin is good at that aspect of the Bilko persona, and good, too, at suggesting that there's not a mean bone in the sergeant's body.

If the movie is imperfect, it's not boring and is often very funny, as in a solo dance that Nick does in his apartment, to Frank Sinatra singing "I Won't Dance."