What might have been a slick, smash-mouth, fast-paced piece of entertainment clocking in at 90 or 100 minutes somehow turns into a bloated, half-baked pie that drags on for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

The result is just a bigger, louder, more special effects-laden extension of a franchise that skated on pretty thin ice the first two times around.

The fine actors onscreen are mere accessories to the computerized puppets thrashing and slashing and stabbing and biting and roaring and breaking stuff all over the place before only one of them is left standing. Sigh.

McKinnon has so much energy and creativity she nearly jumps out of the frame. It’s an uneven performance with mixed results — but we’re left hoping she’ll be matched up with a better film role sometime soon, one that makes full use of her unique talents.

Less lighthearted than one would expect from a film that stars a dog, "Fluke" works on the "aw, how cute" level but fails when it waxes poetic about the way humans don't realize their failures until they experience the animal's point of view. [02 Jun 1995, p.31]

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.

Begins with a thought-provoking idea from Philip K. Dick, exploits it for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it.

Spacey does what can be done with the material, but it never achieves takeoff velocity.

This is a classic example of a well-made, big-budget action movie that is less than the sum of its parts.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

Not realizing that Inkheart is based on a famous fantasy novel, I had the foolish hope the movie might be about books. No luck. Wait till you hear what it's about.

This forgettable film is too rough for younger kids and too stupid for the grown-ups.

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

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

The Identical evangelizes and entertains with sincere mediocrity. If the style is unremarkably mainstream, the message is theologically murky.

From start to finish, Hunter Killer is all wet.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

It’s fascinating and boring, intriguing and exasperating, but ultimately it felt like a jambalaya of ideas that didn’t quite mesh into a satisfying experience.

After an initially promising first half-hour, it’s a long and tedious slog to the finish line as we follow a group of paper-thin caricatures who are only mildly interesting and intermittently funny.

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

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

Russell Crowe is an A-list star in a B-movie, but to his credit it never feels as if he’s slumming it.

It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.

Despite some interesting performances and impressive art direction, director Luca Guadagnino’s take on the 1977, cult-favorite, supernatural horror film by Dario Argento is an arduous, overstuffed, convoluted and trashy piece — bloated and graphically blood-soaked, guaranteed to make you cringe at times, but not the least bit chilling or haunting.

Maggie, Eric's mother, and Angie the manager are the most fully realized characters in the movie, which doesn't offer a single positively drawn male homosexual.

While it’s wonderful to see Michelle Yeoh return as Yu Shu-Lien and there are a few moments of soaring majesty, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny is an unnecessary and underwhelming experience that plays like a B-movie knockoff/follow-up of the original.

The screenplay by Kaufman, Crichton and Michael Backes is not about much of anything important, and Connery's deep penetrating wisdom takes away some of the suspense: If he knows everything that's going to happen, why keep us in the dark?

Timecop, a low-rent "Terminator," is the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.

Pee-wee is still a startling and original and strangely endearing creation. He just deserved a funnier, more intriguing holiday.

I won't tell you I didn't enjoy parts of Bad Company, because I did. But the enjoyment came at moments well-separated by autopilot action scenes and stunt sequences that outlived their interest.

You can see the big twist coming an hour in advance. And the big epic showdown is resolved in a manner that defies even the most cursory of examinations. There’s something almost depressing about how often this movie takes the easy, lazy way out.

The stars are Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep -- arguably the two most distinguished American movie actors under fifty. They have a genuine chemistry together on the screen and undeniable charisma. And that's it in this movie, which gives them not one memorable line of dialogue, not one inventive situation, not one moment when we don't groan at the startling array of clichés they have to march through.

The movie feels so plotted, so constructed, so written, that I found myself thinking maybe they shouldn't have filmed the final draft of the screenplay. Maybe there was an earlier draft that was a little disorganized and unpolished, but still had the jumble of life in it.

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.

It looks good, it moves quickly and it is often a jolly good time. As mindless swashbuckling in a well-designed production, it can't be faulted. The less you know about the British Empire and human nature, the more you will like it, but then that can be said of so many movies.

An artfully shot and occasionally provocative but ultimately underwhelming and self-indulgent film.

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.

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.

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.

Musical theater versions often seem dated, so moving the story into the 21st century does make sense (as does the multicultural casting), but in the process Gluck and his all-star cast create a chaotic film that tries too hard and fails to capture the charm and heart of the musical.

The Amazon Prime original movie Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse has to be considered one of the more disappointing films of 2021 so far, given the long and rich history of entertaining adaptations of Clancy’s work and the vibrant star power of its leading man.

All of the cliches are in the right places, most of the gags pay off and there are moments of real amusement as the Australian cowboy wanders around Manhattan as a naive sightseer. The problem is that there's not one moment of chemistry between the two stars.

This is a lightweight, cliché-riddled origins story that veers between inside-joke comedy, ponderous redemption story lines and admittedly nifty CGI sequences that still seem relatively insignificant compared to the high stakes and city-shattering destruction that take place in most of the “Avengers” movies.

This is a good idea for a movie. Unfortunately, in Brainstorm it remains basically an idea. The characters take such a secondary importance to the gadget that we never feel much for them.

Meryl Streep is indeed poised and imperious as Miranda, and Anne Hathaway is a great beauty who makes a convincing career girl. I liked Stanley Tucci, too, as Nigel... But I thought the movie should have reversed the roles played by Grenier and Baker. Grenier comes across not like the old boyfriend but like the slick New York writer, and Baker seems the embodiment of Midwestern sincerity.

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.

Writer/director Carey clearly has some talent, and she and Plaza deserve credit for never pulling their comedic punches. They’re all in. Problem is, it’s mostly a bluff.

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Parables are stories about other people that help us live our own lives. The problem with the French film Ricky is that the lesson of the parable is far from clear, and nobody is likely to encounter this situation in his own life.

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

I don't think Fat Albert is up to speed; in its meandering, low-key way, it seems destined more for a future on de-ved, returning to the video world where the characters say they feel more at home.

Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a great-looking, old-fashioned, at times soaring adventure ultimately brought down by a needlessly convoluted plot, some surprisingly casual violence and heavy-handed lectures about how we’re our own worst enemy and we’re going to destroy the planet if we don’t get it together.

The ruling on the field is this is an incomplete pass.

Isn't bad so much as jumbled...You get the sense of too much input, too many bright ideas, too many scenes that don't belong in the same movie.

The dialogue in As They Made Us rings authentic and the performances are universally strong, but there’s a dour air to the proceedings, and we wind up thinking Abigail would have been better off if she, too, had left home the moment it was possible and had never looked back.

A clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

The movie has slick production values and a few clever lines, and is an invaluable illustration of the Principle of Evil Marksmanship. This principle, you will recall from my Glossary of Movie Terms, teaches us that in the movies the bad guys can never hit anything with a gun, and the good guys can hardly miss.

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.

My attention was held for the first act or so. Then any attempt at realism was abandoned, and it became clear that the house, and the movie containing it, were devices to manufacture methodical thrills. The explanation, if that's what it was, seemed contrived and unconvincing.

All heart and has the best intentions in the world, but what a bore. It's a beat slower than it should be, it makes its points laboriously, and the plot surprise would be obvious even if I hadn't seen the same device used in exactly the same way earlier this year in "Chasing Liberty."

If you haven't already guessed, Ed is not a great movie. What it is is a fun way to spend 1 1/2 hours not thinking. [15 Mar 1996, p.33]

Blockers becomes less interesting and less funny as the onscreen hijinks grow more outlandish and stupid and demeaning and crotch-oriented.

As the plot grows increasingly convoluted and borderline laughable, Chastain is steady as she goes, playing a character who’s worthy of a film franchise in a movie nowhere near deserving a sequel. Odds are we’ll never see Ava again, and that’s a shame because, with a better script and more inspired direction, she could have been a contender.

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.

All of this material, written by Seinfeld and writers associated with his television series, tries hard, but never really takes off.

The special effects are among the more positive aspects of “Allegiant,” but those alone cannot rescue this highly flawed sequel.

There’s a glint of a clever idea here, but writer-director Ramin Niami’s reliance on tired rom-com tropes only serve to drag down the film, which plays out like a Harlequin romance.

This is a murky-looking, CGI-heavy dud.

A typical Horatio Alger story, with rats playing more prominent supporting roles than they customarily did in Horatio Alger.

Final Portrait has the feel of a work that might be quite effective on a modest stage in a small theater. As a film, it’s well-made and the performances are fine, but it feels slight and thin and inconsequential — quite the opposite of the work Alberto Giacometti left behind.

My thoughts turn to the Giant CGI Anacondas in “Snake Eyes” and what their lives are like in between meals — and if that sounds ridiculous and outlandish and weird, welcome to this bombastic, slick, convoluted and unnecessary second-tier action franchise reboot.

It's a shame the plot is so contrived, because parts of this movie are really pretty good.

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

Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot is a well-made but overly conventional and borderline corny (pardon the pun) biopic chronicling the rags-to-riches tale of one Richard Montañez, a maintenance worker at Frito-Lay who invented the globally popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, forever changing the snack-food game.

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

Dolls remains only an idea, a concept. It doesn't become an engine to shock and involve us.

There are two basic weaknesses. One is that the boy supplies the point of view, and yet the story is not about him, so instead of identifying with him, we are simply frustrated in our wish to see more than he can see. The other problem is that Gong Li's character is thoroughly unlikable.

Nothing here about human nature. No personalities beyond those hauled in via typecasting. No lessons to learn. No joy to be experienced. Just mayhem, noise and pretty pictures.

The film is lame comedy surrounded by high-energy blues (and some pop, rock and country music).

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

Individual scenes feel authentic, but the story tries to build bridges between loose ends.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

A seriously confused film that makes three or four passes at being a better one and doesn't complete any of them.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is a film of rough edges and jagged twists, at times beautiful to behold but more often shot in jarring close-ups that make Christopher Robin’s parents look like the villains in a gothic horror film.

Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours is an attempt to take a 1950s crime classic and remake it by turning up the heat, but Cimino has set the heat too high, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with dialogue even a True Detective editor would question.

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.

Working within the limitations of the star rating system, I give four stars to the subjects of this movie, and two stars to the way they have been boiled down into cute pictures and sound bites.

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.

The Finest Hours feels stitched together. None of the three main plot lines is particularly powerful or moving.

But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get.

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