A confusing and not very exciting private eye caper.

Burlesque shows Cher and Christina Aguilera being all that they can be, and that's more than enough.

Oh, God! Book II qualifies as a sequel only because of its title and the irreplaceable presence of George Burns in the title role. Otherwise, it seems to have lost faith in the film it's based on.

The shame is that more accessible Iranian directors are being neglected in the overpraise of Kiarostami.

If the stream-of-consciousness, imagery-trumps-everything films of Terrence Malick tend to try your patience, this beautifully, beatifically boring imitation by a Malick protégé might be more than the better angels of your nature can endure.

When bodies are buried in cellars and cats are thrown into lighted ovens, the film reveals itself as unworthy of its subject matter.

The movie contains violence and death, but not really very much. For most of its languorous running time, it listens to conversations between Bella and Edward, Bella and David, Edward and David, and Edward and Bella and David. This would play better if any of them were clever conversationalists, but their ideas are limited to simplistic renderings of their desires.

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.

We’ll eventually see dozens if not hundreds of projects using the pandemic as a plot point. Songbird will be among the least memorable.

The movie's pleasures are scant, apart from its observance of Gene Siskel's Rule of Swimming Pool Adjacency, which states that when well-dressed people are near a swimming pool, they will - yeah, you got it.

Perhaps it is not supposed to be clear; perhaps the movie's air of confusion is part of its paranoid vision. There are individual moments that create sharp images (shock troops drilling through a ceiling, De Niro wrestling with the almost obscene wiring and tubing inside a wall, the movie's obsession with bizarre duct work), but there seems to be no sure hand at the controls.

I wonder who the movie was made for. Smaller kids, I'm afraid, will find it both slow and depressing, especially the parts about why God allows bad things to happen.

The surprise for me is Christina Ricci, who I think of as undernourished and nervous, but who flowers here in warm ripeness.

Despite the sometimes clever and surely deliberately anachronistic dialogue from the terrific screenwriter Beau Willimon (“The Ides of March,” the Netflix series “House of Cards”), capable direction from Josie Rourke and strong performances from Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots often comes across as stultified and stagnant.

This Carrie comes off like a Lifetime film, adding little new and nothing substantial to improve on DePalma’s classic.

Alas, the basketball scenes and the basketball talk in this basketball movie continually bounce the wrong way, and there’s no overcoming that.

Volker Schlondorff’s talky drama...is less than persuasive.

Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment.

A conventional film for an unconventional actor.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke?

There’s a memorable movie to be made about the amazing, inspiration and controversial life of Jesse Owens. This is not a bad film and it’s a decent history lesson for those that don’t know the story of Owens and the ’36 Games, but it’s a long, long way from greatness.

It will keep reminding you of better movies in the same genre.

I confess I felt involved in Unknown until it pulled one too many rabbits out of its hat. At some point, a thriller has to play fair.

Writer-director Victor Levin takes an interesting although ultimately tedious and distracting approach to nearly every scene.

The adults at the Hotchkiss reunion are played by an assortment of splendid actors.

This is the kind of movie that ends up playing on the TV set over the bar in a better movie.

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.

On more than one occasion, this looks and feels like a parody.

The ghouls are a little too ridiculous to quite fulfill their function in the movie. They make all the wrong decisions, are incompetent and ill-coordinated.

A Sound of Thunder may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.

Firth and Stone, appealing as they are as actors, are so disconnected as potential romantic leads it sometimes appears as if they’re barely in the same scene together.

Not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience.

At times, it’s really funny. More often, it’s “shocking” for the sake of shock value, gross for the sake of being gross, and stupid-goofy without much of a payoff.

[A] disappointingly listless thriller, in which at least four of the titular seven days feel like place-holders, with everyone holding their positions and regurgitating the same concerns and regrets and debates.

For all its obvious love of movies and of the shared experience of watching movies, Empire of Light is a decidedly downbeat effort that tries to say too much and ultimately winds up saying very little.

By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.

Seemed kind of stuffy.

The Mean One has a handful of inspired lines, e.g., “Time to roast this beast!” but the production values, editing, score and photography are average at best, and we’re left with a film that will be remembered mostly for a cleverly twisted marketing hook.

It’s almost as if Halloween Kills is an inconsistent, sloppy mess.

America's Sweethearts recycles "Singin' in the Rain" but lacks the sassy genius of that 1952 musical, which is still the best comedy ever made about Hollywood.

Far and Away is a movie that joins astonishing visual splendor with a story so simple-minded it seems intended for adolescents.

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 is rated R, but it's the most watery R I've seen. It's more of a PG-13 playing dress-up.

National Treasure is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

For a movie called The Marksman, we rarely Jim actually demonstrating his marksmanship, as we’re left with Neeson again doing extended, hand-to-hand combat with a much younger, cockier foe who has no idea what he’s up against.

From time to time you’ll laugh and maybe shed a tear But this isn’t the kind of “Grinch” you’ll want to see each year.

If the movie is not original, at least it's a showcase for the actors and writers. It does not speak as well, alas, for director Jordan Melamed and his cinematographer, Nick Hay.

The movie creates such an urgent situation, and fills it with such interesting characters, that when everything goes wrong at the end I felt more than disappointed, I felt cheated.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

The racing is spectacular, especially when you consider director Courtney Solomon’s claim that no CGI was used in the crash scenes... Solomon wanted to put the audience in the middle of events and inside the car; he certainly does pull that off. Believe me, your head will spin. After a while it all becomes mind-numbing.

The Higgins performance owes more than a little to Fred Willard's unforgettable dog show commentary in "Best in Show," but it was clear that Willard was part of a telecast.

The movie is simply not clear about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. It is heavy on episode and light on insight, and although it takes courage to bring up touchy topics it would have taken more to treat them frankly.

Director Peter MacDonald keeps the action exploding across the screen, building to a climactic game of "chicken" between Rambo in a Russian tank and the Soviet commander in a helicopter. Gung-ho Rambo fans won't be disappointed. [25 May 1988, p.43]

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

Both the lottery scene and the anti-union material seem to be fictionalized versions of material in the powerful documentary "Waiting for Superman," which covered similar material with infinitely greater depth.

At times The Girl in the Spider’s Web almost feels like a superhero movie, with Lisbeth as Bat Girl.

On a few occasions it's very funny, but it never quite goes over the top and gets the big laughs it is obviously aiming for.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

Fire Down Below might be dumb, but it's not suicidal. [7 Sept 1997, p.46]

This movie is pure cotton candy — sweet and brightly colored and a bit of a guilty pleasure, but it’s not intended to be something you can sink your teeth into, and five minutes after consuming it, it’s like it never happened.

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care.

The more I think about Simon Magus, the less I'm sure what it's trying to say.

Stiller is very good at playing this kind of character. The issue is whether we’re tired of him playing this kind of character.

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.

With Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx as the lead pups, Strays delivers a handful of solid chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments — but it’s a premise that turns out to be awfully thin for a feature-length film.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

The Good Dinosaur is wildly uneven, but you have to give it points for trying to be something different.

Writer-director Kerem Sanga has a knack for delivering arresting, noir-like visuals, especially from medium- and long-shot distance, and the talented cast gamely tries to sell the material, but The Violent Heart is so muddled there are times we have to remind ourselves of the connection between certain characters, and the histrionics so over the top we’re hoping everyone will just take a deep breath and CALM THE HECK DOWN.

Again and again, Death Wish feels anything but real.

Rather than trusting in the verbal powers of this master storyteller, who requires only a desk to sit behind, Soderbergh subjects him to light-show effects, tilted camera angles and projected backdrops -- urban setting, forest, eyeball blowup. [1 August 1997, p.27]

Director Kasper Barfoed defaults to intense replays of surveillance audio recordings, frantic strokes on computer keyboards, and standard-issue chases.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie.

The mystery is muddled, the romance is tepid and scenes that should be electric with tension are almost dull.

A technically proficient horror movie and well acted.

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

The acting, practical and special effects and production design are all superb. The script is repetitive, tedious and a whole lot of ho-hum.

The film is bold and passionate, but not subtle, and that is its downfall.

The movie’s a big, slick entertainment, relentlessly ridiculous and therefore never boring for long.

A family movie that some will find wholesome and heartwarming and others will find cornball and tiresome. You know who you are. I know who I am. This is not my kind of movie.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. has pockets of intrigue, and writer-director Gilroy and Washington have teamed up to create a promising dramatic character. We just never get full delivery on that promise.

I guess there's an audience for it, and Ice Cube has paid dues in better and more positive movies ("Barbershop" among them). But surely laughs can be found in something other than this worked-over material.

The movie is pretty cornball. Little kids would probably enjoy it, but their older brothers and sisters will be rolling their eyes, and their parents will be using their iPods.

The plot is easily summarized: "Dumb and Dumber Meet Dumbbell."

Sweet Dreams begins with more energy than it is able to sustain.

It wants to be "Midnight Run" meets "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," but it carries little of the dramatic heft and real-world semi-plausibility of those much superior efforts.

Unfortunately, I was also convinced that trapped within this 98-minute film is a good 30-minute news report struggling to get out. Shearer, who is bright and funny, comes across here as a solemn lecturer.

We're left with a promising idea for a comedy, which arrives at some laughs but never finds its destination.

When it’s time to answer the question of Who ya gonna call, Ghostbusters: Afterlife comes across as a well-intentioned and sincere but unfortunate misdial.

The plot becomes a juggling act just when it should be a sprint. And there's another problem: Is it intended as a comedy, or not?

The Warriors is a real peculiarity, a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism. There's hardly a moment when we believe that the movie's gangs are real or that their members are real people or that they inhabit a real city. That's where the peculiarity comes in: I don't think we're supposed to. No matter what impression the ads give, this isn't even remotely intended as an action film. It's a set piece. It's a ballet of stylized male violence.

She's the One plays like an overhaul of “The Brothers McMullen” with a larger budget, and it's time for him to move on.

But, lord, the characters are tireless in their peculiarities; it's as if the movie took the most colorful folks in Lake Wobegon, dehydrated them, concentrated the granules, shipped them to Newfoundland, reconstituted them with Molson's and issued them Canadian passports.

Peter Sellers was a genius who somehow made Inspector Clouseau seem as if he really were helplessly incapable of functioning in the real world and somehow incapable of knowing that. Steve Martin is a genius, too, but not at being Clouseau. It seems more like an exercise.

A film that depends on deceiving us has got to play by its own rules. If we are going to be deceived in general, fine, but then we can't be cheated on particulars.

A film that little kids might find perfectly acceptable. Little, little, little kids. My best guess is, above fourth-grade level, you'd be pushing it.

I have never seen anything remotely approaching the mess that the new punk version of "Romeo & Juliet" makes of Shakespeare's tragedy.

Super Mario Bros. is not without its charms. Chief among them is its army of giant, overcoat-draped Goombas: cheerfully stupid creatures with tiny reptile heads - and a soft spot for schmaltzy waltzes. And any chance to see Hopper get down with his bad reptilian self is not one to dismiss out of hand. He has a fine time with his dino-furrowed hair, flashing an exceptionally long forked tongue and instructing the pizza delivery man to hold the worms...But otherwise, King Koopa seems bored. [31 May 1993, p.21]