Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

The heart of the film is in the performances of Danes and Beckinsale after they're sent to prison.

A sweet film, mildly pleasant to watch, but it's not worth the trip or even a detour.

Might be fun for younger teenagers who want to be reassured that people in their 30s still behave like younger teenagers.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

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.

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

If you liked the original, the best way to preserve that memory is to stay away from this sequel.

Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.

There is something not quite right about the film itself.

Anything is possible in the world of “The Union.” I mean, anything.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead.

Still, in large part due to the stellar work from Depp and Whitaker, this is a valuable and somewhat illuminating look back at the senseless, stunning killings of two rap icons just six months apart.

There’s always been something a bit ridiculous about the whole Tarzan premise, and while the talented cast and a solid director make for a serviceable and intermittently entertaining adventure, there’s very little about this film that screams, YOU GOTTA SEE THIS.

As Karla turns into Super Mom, brushing off multiple car accidents and more than one attempt on her life, Kidnap provides some easy applause-getting moments but grows increasingly over-the-top.

Achieves something that is uncommonly difficult. It is a spiritual movie with the power to emotionally touch believers, agnostics and atheists -- in that descending order, I suspect.

An excruciatingly cheesy, hopelessly dated, profoundly unfunny and tone-deaf romantic comedy about an intelligent, hard-working, likable and lovely woman.

Whenever Pacific Rim Uprising gives itself the chance to do something fresh or unique or original, it passes up that opportunity to embrace the cliché.

Directed with action-movie aplomb by Tom Harper (“The Aeronauts,” “Peaky Blinders”) and featuring great-looking visuals from settings including London; Lisbon, Portugal; South Tyrol, Italy; Morocco, and Reykjavik, Iceland, “Heart of Stone” is clearly intended to jump-start an action franchise for Gadot, and it’s off to a promising start.

It’s bigger, louder and dumber than the original—filled with cartoon violence, only occasionally funny dialogue and a group of suspects/victims not nearly as intriguing as the bunch from the first film.

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]

Clever trappings aside, Brightburn is filmed mostly as a horror movie, with the monster lurking just around the corner or pounding on the door as the dopey victims behave just like all the other dopey victims in forgettable slasher films.

Innocent Blood is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities. More's the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.

No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.

On the stage, it could be a powerful and moving work. As a movie, it’s a sometimes effective but more often tedious history lesson.

Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, Pain Hustlers aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.

The mechanics of the final showdown are unexpected and yet show an undeniable logic, and are sold by the acting skills of Willis and Pollak.

The movie works so hard at juggling its cliches that it fails to generate interest in its story.

Johnny Knoxville, famous for "Jackass,"...is, in fact, completely convincing and probably has a legitimate movie career ahead of him and doesn't have to stuff his underpants with dead chickens and hang upside down over alligator ponds any more.

The baseball action isn't very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing.

Berenger, McNamara and Eleniak perform what was demanded from them within the confines of the flimsy script. The story, though, is painfully short on laughs, never building a foundation for the attachments forged by film's end. [26 Apr 1994, p.30]

Careening wildly from the black comedy tone of the aforementioned sequences to deadly serious World War I battle scenes, from somber spy thriller to broad comedy, The King’s Man has little of the wickedly outrageous and subversive style of the original film as it flies this way and that and never sticks the landing.

I could not for a moment believe that this movie was intended as a plausible portrait of how casinos work, how gamblers work, and especially of how casino managers work. To enjoy this movie, you need more than a willing suspension of disbelief. You need a faith in disbelief.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

Now comes Foe, which is set primarily in the year 2065 and envisions a dystopian world in which the delicate and dangerous balance between humans and sentient AI creations is the basis for a pretentious and empty cautionary tales with some interesting ideas — but it’s mostly a pile of hokey claptrap.

Bronson is a first-rate action star with a catlike grace and a nice air of menace. But here, trying to land a helicopter after only a few lessons on how to fly it, or staging a phony rape scene to distract prison guards, Bronson is given a sort of incompetency he doesn't wear well. We believe him more easily when he's strong, silent and infallible.

Directed by Peter Farrelly from a story/screenplay credited to a total of eight writers (rarely a hopeful sign), “Ricky Stanicky” has the cheerfully offensive and goofy offbeat flavor of 1990s Farrelly Brothers comedies such as “Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary,” only with most of the laughs and much of the charm MIA.

Reprising his writing/directing chores from the original, Ken Scott gives us an uneven mishmash that alternates between easy gags, shameless sentimentality and some just plain bizarre choices.

A pure thriller, all blood, no frills, in which a lot of people get shot, mostly in the head.

For all of its sensational stunts and flashes of wit, however, Last Action Hero plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself.

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

If the movie finally doesn't work as well as it should, it may be because the material isn't a good fit for Kitano's hard-edged underlying style.

A film overgrown with so many directorial flourishes that the heroes need machetes to hack their way to within view of the audience.

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.

This is a shoddy-looking, superficial and cliché-embracing effort that misses the mark at every turn.

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!"

For at least half a movie, it’s a wildly entertaining concept with some pretty good payoffs and there was a chance we’d have the best B-movie in recent memory, but then the story takes the easy way out and we’re left wondering why they didn’t ride the original idea all the way to the finish line.

The good idea: Richard Pryor plays a character who is blind, and Gene Wilder plays a character who is deaf, and once they become friends they make a great team. The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.

Funny Games represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to.

As earnest and heartfelt as a movie can be, Walking With the Enemy is, unfortunately, a plodding and clunky drama that never misses an opportunity to embrace a cliché.

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.

An imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence.

If we don’t care a whit about the characters and their respective dilemmas, a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot is just a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

When I heard that John Cusack had been cast for this film, it sounded like good news: I could imagine him as Poe, tortured and brilliant, lashing out at a cruel world. But that isn't the historical Poe the movie has in mind. It is a melodramatic Poe, calling for the gifts of Nicolas Cage.

How this smart and funny man, he of the convulsive Tonight Show performances and the great Young Frankenstein, could end up putting his name on lame comedies like this one remains one of the great mysteries of the day. [28 July 1993, p.37]

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.

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.

We’re the Millers is just good enough to keep you entertained, but not good enough to keep your mind from wandering from time to time. This is an aggressively funny comedy that takes a lot of chances, and connects just often enough.

The movie sinks into contrived plot manipulation.

Is this some kind of a test? The Hangover, Part II plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness.

There isn't a lot in the movie that is funny.

End of the Road was produced for maybe 10% of the budget allotted for the big, bloated, star-studded Netflix thrillers “The Gray Man” and “Red Notice” (both reportedly cost some $200 million to make), and it doesn’t come close to approaching the glamour value, breathtaking location shots and epic action sequences of those two films — but it’s better at executing its mission, which is to immerse us in 90 minutes of old-fashioned bloody vigilante satisfaction.

Works as Gothic melodrama because it understands the genre so well.

The charm of The Ring Two, while limited, is real enough; it is based on the film's ability to make absolutely no sense, while nevertheless generating a real enough feeling of tension a good deal of the time.

To watch Samuel L. Jackson in the role is to realize again what a gifted actor he is, how skilled at finding the right way to play a character who, in other hands, might be unplayable.

Has a freshness and charm, a winning way with its not terrifically original material.

So breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver.

If you like him on TV, you'll like him here, too, because it's more of the same stuff, only outdoors and with animals and shooting stars and the kinds of balloons people can go up in.

Clint Eastwood's Firefox is a slick, muscular thriller that combines espionage with science fiction. The movie works like a well-crafted machine, and it's about a well-crafted machine.

When it sings, “Dawn of Justice” is a wonder. When it drags, it still looks good and offers hints of a better scene just around the corner.

What a wasted opportunity.

Plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you'd like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem.

A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland.

A jolly movie and I smiled pretty much all the way through, but it doesn't shift into high with a solid thunk the way "Bridget Jones' Diary" did.

It will appeal to the large Indian audiences in North America and to Bollywood fans in general, who will come out wondering why this movie, of all movies, was chosen as Hollywood's first foray into commercial Indian cinema.

How much more interesting is a film like "(500) Days of Summer," which is about the complexities of life, in comparison with this one, which cheerfully cycles through the cliches.

This is an unapologetically violent video-game-turned-movie, filled with gore and also brimming with flat dialogue, whether it’s big-picture speechifying or mostly lame attempts at snappy, action-movie banter. One might reasonably surmise longtime fans of Mortal Kombat would have a better time playing the latest version of the game than watching this origins story.

This is one of those comedies that could have been a brilliant short film on “Funny or Die” or “Saturday Night Live,” but wears out its welcome as a feature-length film.

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.

You want to see guys with muscles shooting machineguns at guys without muscles? These are the movies for you. You have more than muscles between your ears? Try something else.

It’s a competently made, traditional biopic about a man who disdained those terms.

Depp accepts the character and all of its baggage, and works without a net.

The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It's fun.

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

Superman III is the kind of movie I feared the original "Superman" would be. It's a cinematic comic book, shallow, silly, filled with stunts and action, without much human interest.

Here are people who do not allow the use of their last names, yet they cheerfully have sex in front of the camera -- and even willingly participate in scenes that make them look cruel, twisted, reckless and perhaps deranged.

Uusually satisfying in the way it unfolds.

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.

There’s nothing offensive in the relentlessly upbeat Tio Papi. It’s just all so polite and saccharine. Life lessons are learned every few minutes, and the ending is telegraphed from the beginning.

This is actually a pretty good thriller, based more on character and plot than on action for its own sake. The need to construct killings that look like accidents adds to the interest.

I enjoyed the film more than I expected to. It's harmless, simple-minded.

Flashes of inspiration illuminate stretches of routine sitcom material; it's the kind of movie where the audience laughs loudly and then falls silent for the next five minutes.

The movie has elements of the genre and lacks only pacing and plausibility. You wait through scenes that unfold with maddening deliberation, hoping for a payoff--and when it comes, you feel cheated.

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 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.

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.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.