When actors grin as much as they do in "Undercover Blues," you know that something is seriously the matter. [10 Sept 1993, p.40]

“The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it's funny. It's just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment.

It’s potentially fresh and unique material, but from the first scenes through the tone-deaf conclusion, Capone is a noxious film about a noxious man — a gruesome and grotesque viewing experience that tells us nothing new about Capone while rubbing our noses in one detestable scene after another. By the time we get to a typically overblown scene in which a diaper-wearing Capone wields a gold-plated Tommy Gun while on a shooting spree, we surrender.

Dan Brown's novel is utterly preposterous; Ron Howard's movie is preposterously entertaining.

The movie is unconvincing. At the end, Jim is seen going in through a "stage door," and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie.

I am not a mind-reader and cannot be sure, but I think a lot of children are going to look at this movie with perplexity and distaste. It's just not much fun.

Aniston, as a sweet kindergarten teacher and fiancee, shows again (after "The Good Girl") that she really will have a movie career.

I liked the movie without loving it. It's not great Woody Allen, like "Sweet and Lowdown" or "Bullets Over Broadway," but it's smart and sly, and the blindness is an audacious idea.

An efficiently made thriller, cheerfully gruesome, and finally not quite worth the ordeal it puts us through.

Her Majesty is the kind of movie where you start out smiling, and then smile more broadly, and then really smile, and then realize with a sinking heart that the filmmakers are losing it.

I don't believe New Jerusalem takes a position in favor of either character. It's more of an intense study of these two men and their barren work in a shabby store by the side of a highway.

Ultimately, though, the sequel has very little new to say about Arthur Fleck and his place in this world, and the musical interludes start to feel like gratuitous self-indulgence rather than insightful and illuminating passages that advance or enhance the material.

You know a movie's got problems when you find yourself wishing the heroes would agree with the villain.

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.

This modest, low-budget sci-fi thriller is fatally lacking in entertainment value. It’s not original enough to be interesting, despite the presence of a pretty impressive cast, or awful enough to be campy fun. It’s serious enough to be depressing, though, if that’s your idea of a good time.

Diaz has one of the most winning grins in the movies. Basically, what I wanted was more of it. Some of that Cary Grant dialog. More flirtation. More of a feeling the characters, not the production, were the foreground. More of the stars.

Hart delivers a sincere and relatively low-key performance as Dell, but he’s playing an all-too-familiar movie stereotype.

Somehow the movie really never takes off into the riveting fascination we expect in the opening scenes. Maybe it cannot; maybe it is too faithful to the issues it raises to exploit them.

The movie is pleasant, sedate, subdued and sweet, but there is not a moment of suspense in it.

Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it.

Director Seth Gordon (“Four Christmases,” “Horrible Bosses”) knows how to film fast-moving comedies with star appeal, and Diaz (who hasn’t lost an ounce of onscreen charisma) and Foxx are terrific together, but wouldn’t it have been lovely if they had tackled more creative and challenging material?

IF never quite soars, never fully grabs our hearts, never fully captivates our imagination.

What is good about this film is very good, but there are too many side trips, in both the plot and the emotions, for the film to draw us in fully.

I was not bored during A Good Man in Africa. Just uncomfortable, as the characters thrashed about in search of a purpose.

It comes to life in the dance sequences, and then drifts away again.

The movie's dialogue is constructed out of funny names, puns and old jokes. Sometimes it's painfully juvenile. But there are some great visual gags in the movie, and the best is Pizza the Hutt, a creature who roars and cajoles while cheese melts off its forehead and big hunks of pepperoni slide down its jowls.

A first draft for a movie that could have been extraordinary.

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.

David Klass, the screenwriter, gives Freeman and Judd more specific dialogue than is usual in thrillers; they sound as if they might actually be talking with each other and not simply advancing plot points.

This is a film that provides more questions than answers but leaves plenty of food for thought.

Alas, though Ishana Night Shyamalan demonstrates promise as a filmmaker and delivers some arresting visuals and a few good jump-scares, “The Watchers” feels like a cover band’s take on familiar scary movie themes, with little in the way of original ideas or surprises.

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.

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.

But so much of the humor and so many of the situations in Second Act feel like warmed-over Second Helpings of a dinner from long ago...A dinner that wasn’t all that memorable in the first place.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made.

If you're a fan of Hector Lavoe and Latin music, or Lopez and Anthony, you'll want to see El Cantante for what's good in it. Otherwise, you may be disappointed. The director (Leon Ichaso) and his co-writers haven't licked a crucial question: Why do we need to see this movie and not just listen to the music?

As a director, Logan knows how to put us through the horror genre paces, from jump scares and mysterious sounds in the woods, to the obligatory gruesome kills. Time and again, though, we’re reminded that real monster in “They/Them” is bigotry and intolerance.

Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly.

The center of the film is the simple, almost elementary insight that fantasies can be hazardous: You've got to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

D. C. Cab is not an entirely bad movie -- it has its moments -- but if it had used more actual taxi-riding incidents and more recognizable driver types, it could have been a little masterpiece.

Here is a movie so absorbing, so atmospheric, so suspenseful and so dumb, that it proves my point: The subject matter doesn't matter in a movie nearly as much as mood, tone and style.

This is one of the most intelligent and compelling movie musicals in a long time - and the most grown up.

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

Lighthearted fun.

There are small moments of real humor.

A Martin Lawrence performance that deserves comparison with Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, with a touch of Mel Gibson's zaniness in the midst of action.

Is alive, and takes chances, and uses the wicked blade of satire in order to show up the complacent political correctness of other movies in its campus genre.

Surprisingly good in areas where it doesn't need to be good at all, and pretty awful in areas where it has to succeed.

Griffiths is one of the most intensely interesting actresses at work today.

Amusing enough to watch and passes the time, but it's the kind of movie you're content to wait for on your friendly indie cable channel.

I’m giving Life of the Party three stars — a solid B, if you will — on the strength of at least a half-dozen laugh-out-loud moments, some truly sharp dialogue, a tremendously likable cast, and the sheer force of its cheerful goofiness.

From the opening scene right until the wholly expected finale, Lonely Planet is pure romantic-drama escapism. It’s so thin that if the original material had been in book form, that book would have been a pamphlet.

It lands just this side of camp, with a perfectly cast Kevin Kline hamming it up as the aging bounder Flynn, and Susan Sarandon really hamming it up.

This is an entertaining B-movie bolstered by performances from a cast that often rises above the predictable material.

Of Amanda Bynes let us say that she is sunny and plucky and somehow finds a way to play her impossible role without clearing her throat more than six or eight times.

Maybe what makesFlipped" such a warm entertainment is how it re-creates a life we wish we'd had when we were 14.

Mad City might have been more fun if it had added that extra spin--if it had attacked the audience as well as the perpetrators. As it is, it's too predictable.

The 'Burbs tries to position itself somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Twilight Zone, but it lacks the dementia of the first and the wicked intelligence of the second and turns instead into a long shaggy dog story.

Even though Pain & Gain does indeed mine laughs from some very violent acts, there is nothing in this movie that glamorizes those three meatheads. Kudos to Bay and his screenwriters for making sure we’re laughing at them, not with them.

Rod Lurie has made a first-rate film of psychological warfare, and yes, I thought it was better than Peckinpah's. Marsden, Bosworth and Skarsgard are all persuasive, and although James Woods has played a lot of evil men during his career, this one may be the scariest.

Costner’s performance is filled with memorable moments.

Yelchin is agreeably offbeat and convincingly two-fisted in the role, and Sommers, who’s always had a knack for fast-paced action with a light, comic touch, provides a few entertaining scenes here and there. Unfortunately, the horrific stuff in Odd Thomas seems gorily incompatible with the film’s otherwise breezy screenplay.

It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. And the dialogue in it is actually worth listening to, because it is written with wit and romance.

By the end of Children of the Corn, the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits.

Little Darlings really wants to be two movies at once: A fairly serious film about teenagers and sex, but also a box-office winner like "National Lampoon's Animal House" or "Meatballs." That's why we get awkwardly forced comedy like the food-fight scene. The movie also suffers from uncertain direction.

An ungainly fit of three stories that have no business being shoehorned into the same movie.

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.

The movie does not propose to be a comedy, a musical, a film noir story or a medical account. It proposes to be a subjective view of suffering, and the ways this character tries to cope with it. Understand that, and the pieces fall into place.

The quality of the acting is so much better than the material deserves.

Larry Clark's Bully calls the bluff of movies that pretend to be about murder but are really about entertainment. His film has all the sadness and shabbiness, all the mess and cruelty and thoughtless stupidity of the real thing.

The characters involve us, we sympathize with their dreams and despair of their matrimonial tunnel vision, and at the end we are relieved that we listened to Miss Watson and became the wonderful people who we are today.

There will be better movies playing in the same theater, even if it is a duplex, but on the other hand there is something to be said for goofiness without apology by broken lizards who just wanna have fun.

Unwise casting choices in two key roles. Increasingly ludicrous plot developments — even for a slick, escapist thriller. Dubious science about the potency of a nuclear warhead. Intellectually lazy pop psychology, much of it heavy on the daddy issues, as character motivation.

But Parker's visuals enliven the music, and Madonna and Banderas bring it passion. By the end of the film we feel like we've had our money's worth, and we're sure Evita has.

There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep.

Back in the day, Gigi & Nate would have been a prime-time network “Movie of the Week” or an “ABC Afterschool Special,” in that it has a pleasant but not particularly striking look; endearing performances from a familiar cast of esteemed veterans and earnest newcomers, and a storyline designed to provide a few initial chuckles, some light romance, a devastating family setback and finally, a happy ending.

Given that director and co-writer Florian Zeller’s “The Father” was a powerful and nuanced and creatively presented original work with Anthony Hopkins winning an Oscar for his moving portrayal of a man with advancing dementia, it’s truly shocking how Zeller’s “The Son” is such a tone-deaf, emotionally manipulative, leaden stumble into the abyss.

So the movie is daring, and well-acted. Yet it isn't very satisfying, because the serious content keeps breaking through the soggy plot intended to contain it.

Yellnikoff, played with perfect pitch by Larry David.

An ordinary film with ordinary characters in a story too big for it. Life has been reduced to a Lifetime movie.

Ansiedad is a smart charmer, and well-played by Cierra Ramirez, she should really be above this sort of thing - above the whole movie, really.

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.

The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.

Offers modest pleasures. It is not an essential film, but if you go to see it, it will not insult your intelligence, and there's genuine suspense toward the end.

I was interested all through the movie--interested, but not riveted. I cared, but not quite enough.

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

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.

I watched the movie with interest, yes, but not emotional involvement, and my appreciation of Moore was based more on her essence than on her character.

The movie turns cruel and ugly, and hasn't paid the dues to earn its last scenes. Parigi had me there for a while, but when he lost me, it was big time.

The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing.

The real surprise of the movie is Eddie Murphy, who finds his character and stays with him.

Here is a great story born to be creepy, and the movie churns through it like a road company production. If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out.

An undemanding formula picture that's a lot of superficial fun and not much more.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

It’s a putting-the-band-together origins movie, executed with great fun and energy.

Absorbing, if somewhat slow-paced, and has without doubt the most blood-curdling scene of live childbirth in a PG-13 movie.

A film with a rich and convincing texture, a drama with power and anger.

An ingenious attempt to update an old plot with new technology, and it is made with competence, skillful acting, and the ability to make us feel cleverer about digital stuff than we really are.