Despite the invaluable comedic/dramatic gifts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, who do their best to inject some life and energy into the proceedings, Downhill is a pale, tame, broad and soft-edged remake of the far superior 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure.”

This is a movie that has its commercial concept written all over it; it's so painstakingly crafted as a product that the messy spontaneity of life is rarely allowed to interrupt.

You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.

The problem with Ferrell’s character is he goes from bland to desperate to off the rails — and very little about that transition is genuinely funny. The problem with Wahlberg’s character is he never seems all that dangerous or mysterious.

Clocking in at a bloated and self-indulgent 2 hours and 19 minutes, filled with VFX sequences so cheesy you wonder if they’re supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, and bogged down by a plot so convoluted you’ll be reaching for the aspirin, “Argylle” is a bright shining pile of mediocrity.

Bourdos’ high-minded aspirations are obvious, but his visually satisfying film is dramatically elusive.

Every Secret Thing is a small, well-crafted film with a few chilling moments and some fine performances, but it’s a muddled, pedestrian crime thriller.

All due respect to Lopez’ longevity and acknowledging that some of these films have their diehard fans, J. Lo has never scored with a classic romantic comedy, and though she once again gives it her all and dives into another ludicrous premise, there’s no salvaging this deliberately over-the-top, mixed-genre effort that plays like a slapstick take on “Die Hard” at a wedding.

It’s a morose and slow-paced and off-putting drama, in which even the joyous moments seem brittle and draped in melancholy.

Too much self-pity.

Stick It uses the story of a gymnast's comeback attempt as a backdrop for overwrought visual effects, music videos, sitcom dialogue and general pandering. The movie seems to fear that if it pauses long enough to actually be about gymnastics, the audience will grow restless.

Like many other cultural experiments (minimalist art, "Finnegan's Wake," the Chicago Tribune's new Friday section), it is more amusing to talk about than to experience.

People may go to see Eddie Murphy once, twice, three or even six times in disposable movies like Harlem Nights, but if he wants to realize his potential he needs to work with a better writer and director than himself.

The Choice is classic Sparks, and by that I mean it’s a mediocre, well-photographed, undeniably heart-tugging, annoyingly manipulative and dramatically predictable star-crossed romance.

There’s some first-rate camerawork aboard the sub, that strong lead performance from Law and one nifty plot twist. It’s a shame the script gives us one of the most incompetent and ridiculous submarine crews this side of “Down Periscope.”

The presentation is gorgeous. The actual meal is nothing but empty calories.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

The whole movie is so solemn, so worshipful toward its theme, that it's finally just silly.

The movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.

It’s too much of the same material, spun out into a wearying series of sword fights and romances.

The target audience for "Rugrats" is, I think, kids under 10. Unlike both insect cartoons, the movie makes little effort to appeal to anyone over that age. There is something admirable about that.

It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.

Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from hell.

There are laughs, to be sure, and some gleeful supporting performances, but after a promising start the movie sinks in a bog of sentiment.

After an intriguing setup, “Runner Runner” devolves into a by-the-books thriller.

Is The Lover any good as a serious film? Not really...I wanted to know more. I believe true eroticism resides in the mind; what happens between bodies is more or less the same, but what it means to the occupants of those bodies is another question.

The great and usually fantastically innovative Werner Herzog has turned Bell’s story into a conventional, cliché-riddled, overly talky and plodding biopic where very little happens for long stretches of time, and we have to endure deadly-dull voice-over narration while looking at admittedly gorgeous scenery and, well, camels.

The performances are strong, although undermined a little by Anselmo's peculiar style of dialogue, which sometimes sounds more like experimental poetry or song lyrics than like speech.

The movie is only 84 minutes long, including credit cookies, but that is quite long enough. All the same, it's fitfully amusing and I have the sense that Spanish-speaking audiences will like it more than I did, although whether they'll be laughing with it or at it, I cannot say.

Language of a Broken Heart has the Lifetime Network written all over it. It’s a fitting entry for that venue but as a theatrical feature, it’s simply not up to the task.

The remake bounces all over the place with a convoluted storyline, a number of superfluous characters and two main villains who are sorely lacking — one because he’s a bland nothing, the other because he's so far over the top it’s like he’s in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Alas, you can spend nearly two hours watching the slick, cynical, vapid and brain-numbing actioner “Ghosted” on Apple TV+ and find yourself regretting the decision pretty much every predictable and overblown step of the way.

This movie, in fact, is almost the story of his metamorphosis, from likeable young actor to faceless action hero.

Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

Director Jose Padilha (the “Elite Squad” movies) knows how to create slick, sometimes clever fast-moving battle sequences... But other than Keaton’s Sellars, the bad guys are mostly generic nitwits.

The film indulges in sentimental and sensational tropes. The manipulative touches do more than dis­­­­­­tract, they irk. This story could have been retold without resorting to all the unfortunate formulas used in prime-time and cable fare.

Did I care if Largo Winch won his struggle for control of Winch International? Not at all. Did I care about him? No, because all of his action and dialogue were shunted into narrow corridors of movie formulas.

The film is competently made, and the attractive cast emotes and screams energetically.

That incredible cast is utterly wasted, with major talents such as Perlman, Jones, Molina, Rhames and Hauser stuck in small supporting roles, playing underwritten, clichéd characters who drift in and out of the movie for a scene or two and then are forgotten.

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

That it works as well as it does is because the stars, Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler, have an easy rapport and some good one-liners, and the film is short and manic.

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.

The most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is.

Has slick production credits and performances that are quite adequate given the (narrow) opportunities of the genre.

This is a well-made, topical thriller with a top-notch cast — but the script and the directorial/editing choices undercut nearly every pivotal scene, and every plot twist we can see coming two scenes in advance.

True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.

I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don't think it's a bad movie; it's more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story.

Repo Men makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care.

The Giver doesn’t seem entirely consistent about its own rules and races far too quickly to a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion that raises three questions for each answer it provides.

Carrey and Daniels throw themselves into the characters they inhabited 20 years ago, whether it means allowing their crotches to be doused, using their rear ends as comedic weapons, or just saying really stupid things. Sometimes it’s pretty damn funny. Almost always, it feels just a little bit desperate.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

Midnight Sun is cheesy and implausible and manipulative, but it did chip away at my cynicism through the sheer force of its corny and sincere heart.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (best known for the Liam Neeson actioners Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter) is far too enamored with the CGI possibilities of an epic fantasy adventure, while the team of writers sacrifice character development in favor of banter heavy on groan-inducing puns and recurring punchlines that actually don’t pack much of a punch.

To spend 82 minutes watching Not Another Teen Movie would be a reckless waste of your time, no matter how many decades you may have to burn.

From beginning to end, we've been there, seen that.

A middling sitcom.

Patton lightens the aggravation, for the most part, by combining a likable presence with a knack for physical comedy and a willingness to hop into dumpsters, etc., as needed, making the most of the script’s meager opportunities for comedy.

My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.

It fulfills every one of our expectations with a deadening safeness. It is about a man who wants a child so that he will leave something after himself, but it never convinces us that he has a self to leave.

I can't recommend the movie, except to younger viewers, but I don't dislike it. It's "Coach Carter" Lite, and it does what it does.

The problem — and it’s an insurmountable, deadly, comedy-killing, consistent problem throughout — is a tired, uninspired, derivative screenplay that brings everyone to Vegas for a wedding and incorporates nearly every weekend-in-Vegas cliche explored in dozens of previous films.

One wonders how In the Mouth of Madness might have turned out if the script had contained even a little more wit and ambition.

By the time we reach the insanely dubious final twist of The Voyeurs, we’d rather just look the other way.

For one of the few times in Eastwood’s career as a director, he seems indecisive about what kind of movie he wanted to make.

The exploration of gender politics grows tedious as the gender dynamic between the two leads reverses, and the same points are hammered home again and again.

Iron Will is an Identikit plot, put together out of standard pieces. Even the scenery looks generic; there's none of the majesty of Disney's genuinely inspired dog movie, "White Fang."

The film's failure is to get from A to B. We buy both good Sam and bad Sam, but we don't see him making the transition.

There are moments of sudden truth in the film; Freundlich, who also made "The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997), about an almost heroically depressed family at Thanksgiving, can create and write characters, even if he doesn't always know where to take them.

Watching this movie is like having a particularly unsatisfying Wordle session. You start off in promising fashion but in a few quick moves, nothing is in the right place.

Perhaps if Encino Man boasted a looser cannon than block-jawed newcomer Fraser or gave more focus to the sleepily funny Shore, who comes across like Mork from Woodstock by way of the Valley, it would overcome first-time feature director Les Mayfield's timid, by-the-numbers approach. [22 May 1992, p.52]

The screenplay feels unfinished, the direction is ambling, but the performances are interesting.

The special effects are first-rate and the performances are way over the top yet entertaining, but The Witches is far too disturbing for young children and not edgy enough to captivate adults.

Everyone in The Other Side of the Bed, alas, has the depth of a character in a TV commercial: They're all surface, clothes, hair and attitude, and the men have the obligatory three-day beards.

The beauty of Twilight Zone -- The Movie is the same as the secret of the TV series: It takes ordinary people in ordinary situations and then (can you hear Rod Serling?) zaps them with "next stop -- the Twilight Zone!"

They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of Antitrust if they'd kept one eye on the Goofy Meter.

Steven Spielberg, a gifted filmmaker, should have reimagined the material, should have seen it through the eyes of someone looking at dinosaurs, rather than through the eyes of someone looking at a box-office sequel.

The action and the scale of the acting are often more befitting an elaborate stage play than a film.

Now comes the loony, murky and muddled sci-fi action semi-thriller 65, with A-list star Adam Driver and the talented writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who collaborated with John Krasinski on “A Quiet Place”) taking a detour through B-Movie Lane in a film that isn’t compelling enough to make for silly popcorn entertainment but isn’t terrible enough to be labeled a disaster.

The actors are splendid, especially Sarah Polley and Sean Penn, but we never feel confident that these two plots fit together, belong together, or work together.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

Despite an intriguing premise, it ultimately falls apart as the gimmick wears thin and the plot veers into ludicrous territory, with the heroine making a series of increasingly rash and idiotic decisions.

It’s an intermittently entertaining endeavor thanks mostly to the effortlessly suave lead performance by Pierce Brosnan as a career thief who looks like he wakes up wearing a jacket with a pocket square and with his hair perfectly coiffed, but the action sequences are ho-hum, the editing is stunningly clumsy, and the main heist is so cartoonishly ridiculous we don’t even believe the actors believe it’s possible.

The performances and the production design are first-rate, but even at 74 minutes, Guest Artist is an overly talky, at times outdated and cliché-riddled two-hander that wears out its welcome by the halfway mark.

It must be said that this movie is sweet and innocent, and that at a certain level it might appeal to younger kids. I doubt if its ambitions reach much beyond that.

In a rare weak performance for Cate Blanchett, she plays an aggravating, off-putting wife and mother in Richard Linklater’s disappointing book adaptation.

Seems conventional in its ideas about where it can go and what it can accomplish. You don't get the idea anyone laughed out loud while writing the screenplay. It lacks a strange light in its eyes. It is too easily satisfied.

Individual moments and lines and events in I Heart Huckabees are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement.

This question, which will instinctively occur to many viewers, is never quite dealt with in the film. The photographers sometimes drive into the middle of violent situations, hold up a camera, and say "press!" - as if that will solve everything.

It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.

The movie is mostly about our nasty heroes being attacked by terrifying antagonists in incomprehensible muddles of lightning-fast special effects. It lacks the quiet suspense of the first “Predator,” and please don't even mention the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures, which lacked the subtlety of “Mothra vs. Godzilla.”

The movie might have had a chance if it had abandoned all the false sentiment and simply acknowledged Crawl as the cretin he is. John Belushi would have known how to play this part.

Youngblood is not a bad movie, and indeed has moments of real conviction. But it is doomed by its plot, which is yet another example of what I like to call the Climb from Despair to Victory (CLIDVIC, rhymes with Kid Pic).

The movie is entertaining enough in its own way, and Sean Connery makes a splendid King Arthur, but compared with the earlier films this one seems thin and unconvincing.

Once you get past the amazement this thing was made at all, the movie itself is an intermittently clever but mostly tedious, convoluted David Lynch knockoff that wanders all over the place.

The word preposterous is too moderate to describe Eagle Eye. This film contains not a single plausible moment after the opening sequence, and that's borderline. It's not an assault on intelligence. It's an assault on consciousness.

The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies.