The modern retelling retains little of the charm and whimsy of the source material, in favor of a cloying story, a most unwelcome new character and some pretty cheesy special effects.

Unfrosted is one of the worst films of the decade so far.

A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to.

The problem with G is not merely that the ending doesn't work and feels hopelessly contrived. It's also that the plot adds too many unnecessary characters and subplots, so that the main line gets misplaced.

If Depardieu seems right at home in My Father the Hero, perhaps that is because only two years ago he made a French film called "Mon Pere, Ce Heros," with exactly the same plot. I saw it, and would say it was more or less exactly as appealing as this English version.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

Sweet, light entertainment, but could have been more.

Slight and sweet, not a great high school movie but kinda nice, with appealing performances by Hart and Grenier.

I want to escape, Oh, Muddah Faddah -- Life's too short for cinematic torture.

The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.

What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle.

Nanjiani and Bautista are terrific together, but Stuber also benefits from a quartet of wonderful actresses who are all effective despite limited screen time.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

For those looking for non-stop action, pretty dazzling special effects and solid acting by the young protagonists, Insurgent will not disappoint.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

Empty at its core, Raising Cain is a deeply cynical, spiteful effort by a director who seems to be both punishing himself for Bonfiregate and sticking his tongue out at those who turned on him when it threatened to become his last train to Hollywood. [07 Aug 1992, p.33]

[Harris and Franco] bring out the finest in each other as they punch and counter-punch vastly different memories of horrific incidents from the past. It’s great stuff. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the The Adderall Diaries is overwrought, convoluted and irritating.

Force Ten honors all the obligatory clichés, and then there's a nice twist involving the explosion inside the dam, and then we get the special effects, and then it's over. It doesn't leave much of an impression; a director like Guy Hamilton, a graduate of four of the Bond pictures, can turn out action movies like this in his sleep. This time, alas, that's apparently what he did.

As the plot twists grow increasingly ridiculous and some of the main characters have to act like complete idiots just to keep the story rambling along, “Fatale” commits the crime of somehow becoming tedious and dull even as the body count piles up.

The target audience for Phantasm II obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.

Every frame of the film is bursting with sensory overload information, from the shaky, hand-held camera angles to the constant scrolling of viewer messages to the occasional use of split screens.

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.

Finally, a sci-fi action mega-movie filled with CGI battles in which barely distinguishable foes hurl each other about while delivering unspeakably corny lines, as we hear hip-hop hits on the soundtrack.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.

Big Top Pee-wee is as guileless and cheerful as Pee-wee’s first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s not as magical. It has too much plot, somehow, and not enough wide-eyed discovery in which everything is new to Pee-wee every moment of his life. He seems almost from Earth in this movie.

Transcendence is a bold, beautiful, sometimes confounding flight of futuristic speculation firmly rooted in the potential of today’s technology.

South of Heaven devolves into a rote thriller, with henchmen upon henchmen upon henchmen falling by the wayside until the inevitable showdown — which plays out in underwhelming fashion.

Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.

There’s not much difference between this nudity-packed yet remarkably dull crime drama and the ’90s-vintage, sleazy pay-cable erotic thrillers it’s referencing, if not emulating.

The Internship is the movie version of a goofy dog that knows only a few tricks but keeps on looking at you and wagging his tail, daring you not to like him. Down, boy. You win.

Run, don’t walk, away from any temptation you might have to see the off-putting, unfunny, clunky and cartoonishly terrible would-be mob comedy “Mafia Mamma,” which is so lacking in subtlety, cohesion and humor, it makes “Murder Mystery 2” seem like a Rian Johnson thriller.

A depressingly uninspired superhero adventure sequel that leans heavily on plot points and battle sequences we’ve seen in at least a dozen other films in the genre — and almost always done better.

The Ice Road is what we used to call a B-movie, but there’s no shame in a B-movie that carries out its mission with such competence and star power.

The poems can be read. The film must stand on its own, apart from the poems, and I'm afraid it doesn't. One admires the energy and inventiveness that Holland, Thewlis and DiCaprio put into the film, but one would prefer to be admiring it from afar.

Inferno delivers as an engaging thriller that I frankly enjoyed far more than Howard’s last Brown outing.

An unconvincing, harmless action movie that at its best moments is a pale echo of "Raiders."

What elevates “Dirty Angels” to the status of a solid slice of R-rated action entertainment is the stellar cast led by Eva Green and the surehanded direction from 81-year-old veteran Martin Campbell, director of the Bond films “GoldenEye” and “Casino Royale” (which co-starred Green as Vesper Lynd) and most recently, the Liam Neeson-starring “Memory.”

Granted, the pleasures offered in “Captain America: Brave New World” are neither grand nor groundbreaking, but they’re consistent and earned.

Too bad the Catholic League is so busy attacking good films, like "Dogma," that it can't spare the time to picket bad ones.

Brosnan is convincing as the workaholic doctor who must stop his monster and Fahey is good illustrating the rise from cretin to creator. There is little more to this movie, but still, not bad future shock stuff. [10 Mar 1992, p.2-29]

It's about change, acceptance and love, and it rounds those three bases very nicely, even if it never quite gets to home.

A love story about two people with no apparent chemistry, whose lives are changed by a stranger who remains an uninteresting enigma. No wonder it just sits there on the screen.

As an often cliché-riddled tale of redemption on the big screen, Burnt is the equivalent of a sleek, well-lit, trendy restaurant serving up a mildly creative dishes on an otherwise predictable menu.

Lumbering from one expensive set piece to the next without taking the time to tell us a story that might make us care.

I WANTED it to be a typical romantic comedy starring those two lovable people, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. And it was. And some of the dialogue has a real zing to it. There were wicked little one-liners that slipped in under the radar and nudged the audience in the ribs.

Not as awe-inspiring as the first film or as elaborate as the second, but in its own B-movie way, it's a nice little thrill machine.

There was perhaps a time, 20 years ago, when the sophomorism of Amazon Women on the Moon might have seemed faintly daring. But even Mad magazine has moved on from simple satire to a more off-center view of its subjects.

Wild Mountain Thyme comes close to winning our hearts based on the performances and the lush County Mayo scenery and the sheer romanticism of it all, but writer-director Shanley keeps us at arm’s distance in the climactic sequences, when we should be swept up in the story of Rosemary and Anthony but we’re left exasperated at the forced eccentricity of it all.

There is a lot of plot in this movie - probably too much. The best thing to do is to accept the plot, and then disregard it, and pay attention to the scenes of passion. They really work.

Stargate is like a film school exercise. Assignment: Conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches.

The best things about Parker are the two lead actors. Although working with material that is lackluster even by his standards, Statham manages to demonstrate a commanding screen presence that cannot be dismissed.

The movie's shot in black and white; Allen is one of the rare and valuable directors who sometimes insists in working in the format that is the soul of cinema.

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.

The storytelling is hopelessly compromised by the movie's decision to sympathize with Jeanne. We can admire someone for daring to do the audacious, or pity someone for recklessly doing something stupid, but when a character commits an act of stupid audacity, the admiration and pity cancel each other, and we are left only with the possibility of farce.

Begins with promise, proceeds in fits and starts, and finally sinks into a cornball drone of greeting-card sentiment.

The 1975 movie tilted toward horror instead of comedy. Now here's a version that tilts the other way, and I like it a little better.

The movie has a certain mordant humor, and some macho dialogue that's funny. Woods manfully keeps a straight face through goofy situations where many another actor would have signaled us with a wink. But the movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.

The original "Carrie'' worked because it was a skillful teenage drama grafted onto a horror ending. Also, of course, because De Palma and his star, Sissy Spacek, made the story convincing. The Rage: Carrie 2 is more like a shadow.

Servillo charms in his dual turn, then takes it up a notch when one brother shows off his childhood knack for impersonating his look-alike.

It’s pulp, but it has real actors doing real acting in a gritty story — which is a lot more than can be said for some of the much more high-profile buddy cop movies of the last couple of years.

It’s a romantic comedy with all sorts of possibilities that instead relies on heavy-handed sight gags and over-the-top performances.

An assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.

The Great Wall is so fantastically misguided and so wonderfully bad, I could see some coming for the action and staying for the camp laughs.

Take away the basic human appeal of Fox and his love interest, Gabrielle Anwar, and what you have left wouldn't fuel 22 minutes of a sitcom.

Reincarnated seems more interested in showing us countless scenes of people smoking herb than in giving us details about the making of the album it purports to be documenting. Granted, Snoop is immersing himself in a culture where this is a customary process, but it gets old and tired very quickly.

Terror Train is a curious hybrid that doesn't seem to know just what it wants to be. It has, I guess, few artistic pretensions, and yet it's not a rock-bottom-budget, schlock exploitation film.

You wouldn't think Hope and Jonathan Winters, those masters of timing, could possibly make a dull and sloppy comedy, but they did, and their method is instructive.

It’s like a strange and misguided takeoff on “All That Jazz” as funneled through “Rock of Ages,” and while there’s no denying the heart and effort behind the presentation, that finale is representative of the movie itself in that it has an uncanny way of hitting the wrong notes.

A movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.

This is a deliberately off-kilter, cheerfully violent, hit-and-miss effort with just enough moments of inspiration to warrant a recommendation — especially if you know what you’re getting into.

The movie wants to be good-hearted but is somehow sort of grudging. It should have gone all the way. I think Fred Claus should have been meaner if he was going to be funnier, and Santa should have been up to something nefarious, instead of the jolly old ho-ho-ho routine.

The running time is 104 minutes, but it felt longer than “The Brutalist.”

I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own.

It's so impossible to care about the characters in the movie that I didn't care if the vampires or werewolves won. I might not have cared in a better movie, either, but I might have been willing to pretend.

Slocombe may not carve up his kin for Cold Turkey, but he serves a wry repast.

Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about.

A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.

Maybe the dingo ate their screenplay.

There is nothing really wrong with the scenes in the institution, except that they're in the wrong movie.

I was surprised to find myself seduced by the film’s simple, sweet story, and amused by the sly indications that the Cleavers don’t live in the 1950s anymore.

On some dumb fundamental level, Airport kept me interested for a couple of hours. I can't quite remember why. The plot has few surprises (you know and I know that no airplane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed). The gags are painfully simpleminded (a priest, pretending to cross himself, whacks a wise guy across the face). And the characters talk in regulation B-movie clichés like no B-movie you've seen in ten years.

The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City received zero stars is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve zero stars. It doesn't achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness.

Despite the fine performance by Witherspoon and a number of the supporting players, Devil’s Knot comes across as a cinematic, slightly dramatized Cliffs Notes edition of a story that’s been told often, and almost always more effectively, in other formats.

The story is a mess, but for long periods of time that hardly matters. It's beside the point, as we enter one of the most striking spaces I've ever seen in a film.

It’s not a game anymore. In 1957, these kids were playing. And it was a perfect game.

A few loopholes I can forgive. But when a plot is riddled with them -- I get distracted.

Oh, did I dislike this film. It made me squirm. Its premise is lame, its plot relentlessly predictable, its characters with personalities that would distinguish picture books.

Without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.

You want a good horror film about a child from hell, you got one. Do not, under any circumstances, take children to see it. Take my word on this.

I didn't much like RoboCop 2 (the use of that killer child is beneath contempt), but I've gotta hand it to them: It's strange how funny it is, for a movie so bad. Or how bad, for a movie so funny.

Author! Author! is never even able to establish a consistent attitude toward its characters. It veers uneasily between slapstick and pathos, between heart-rending family conferences and a ridiculous final scene.

Look at the performances. They're surprisingly good, and I especially admired the work of Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn as the parents of one of two girls who go walking in the woods.

Does it come across as a bit precious at times? Yes. Is it particularly groundbreaking? No. Am I going to ask and answer one more question here and tell you if this is a light and breezy confection with delightful performances? You betcha.

The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven't seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator's daydreams. Science-fiction and special effects fans may find these scenes worth the ticket price. But the movie's flaw is that there's not enough detail about the aliens, and the movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes tells us life can be "poor, nasty, brutish and short." So is this movie.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

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