Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.

If The Way West does not wholly succeed as drama, it is at least a well-made and wholly professional Hollywood Western. Western fans, myself included, might enjoy it for that alone. Widmark and Mitchum are excellent in roles unusual for them and Douglas, as always, is a seasoned old hand.

It’s sloppy to the point of distraction — not that the forced hijinks and ridiculous storylines are actually worthy of our attention.

It's a high-gloss version of a Hong Kong action picture, made in America but observing the exuberance of a genre where surfaces are everything.

It’s almost as if Halloween Kills is an inconsistent, sloppy mess.

First-time feature director Dante Ariola (working from a script by Becky Johnson) has a good feel for these characters and keeps things moving along at a brisk pace.

The movie is afraid to be - yes - Politically Incorrect. It isn't really critical of anybody's behavior, and it sketches its campus fringe groups in broad, defanged generalizations. Beneath its facade of contemporary politics, it's another formula film in which the kids want to party and get drunk, and the adults are fuddy-duddies.

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

The idea of taking a mid-1980s screenplay by the Coens’ and marrying it to a very different story, penned by Clooney and Heslov, does not work. We might have had two quite good, independent features, if those scripts had been produced into two different movies. Instead, we are presented with quite the sad mishmash of ideas here.

In its finest moments, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is swift and clever and exhilarating. At its low points, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword plays like a cheesy B-movie, with ridiculous monsters and unintentionally laugh-inducing moments.

Lots of sight gags and one-liners are attempted, but few of them succeed. The cast is talented but stranded in weak material.

Princess Kaiulani is much remembered in Hawaii, much forgotten on the mainland, and the subject of this interesting but creaky biopic.

Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.

This is transcendently goofy. It isn't a "good" movie in the usual sense (or most senses), but it is jolly and good-natured, and Michael Caine and Dwayne Johnson are among the most likable of actors.

The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.

For Keeps is an intriguing movie that succeeds in creating believable characters, keeping them alive, and steering them more or less safely past the cliches that are inevitable with this kind of material. It’s a movie with heart, and that compensates for a lot of the predictability.

Neeson never phones in his performances, but he’s particularly invested this time around, playing a guy who can be a pure killing machine one moment, and as lost as a child the next. Pearce and Bellucci headline the terrific supporting cast, and the 78-year-old Campbell proves he can still direct the hell out of a slick and engrossing thriller.

Mad Money is astonishingly casual for a movie about three service workers who steal millions from a Federal Reserve Bank. There is little suspense, no true danger; their plan is simple, the complications are few, and they don't get excited much beyond some high-fives and hugs and giggles.

A cheerful comedy with just enough dark moments to create the illusion it's really about something.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.

The popular singer-songwriter Camila Cabello makes her acting debut as the titular character, and she’s a revelation, as the camera loves her and she displays not only the expected vocal chops but a real knack for comedy, as this version of Cinderella is particularly charming when she’s floundering about and getting into embarrassing situations of her own making.

So concerned with being a film that it forgets to be a movie.

It's a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG.

The harder everyone tries to wring laughs out of the next hail of bullets or the next ridiculous plot twist or the next comedic decapitation, the duller the edge of the humor.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

Gator is yet another Good Ol' Movie, and not, I fear, the summer's last. If only it had a Good Ol' Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol' movie.

She’s Having a Baby begins with the simplest and most moving of stories and interrupts it with an amazing assortment of gimmicks. It is some kind of tribute to the strength of the story, and the warmth of the performances by Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, that the movie somehow manages almost to work, in spite of the adornments.

The nicest touch is that Battleship has an honest-to-God third act, instead of just settling for nonstop fireballs and explosions, as Bay likes to do. I don't want to spoil it for you. Let's say the Greatest Generation still has the right stuff and leave it at that.

The movie is clearly intended for girls between the ages of 9 and 15, and for the more civilized of their brothers, and isn't of much use to anyone else.

There are laughs in the movie, and a lot of good feeling, but it seems more interested in its Italian stereotypes than its gay insights.

The first three minutes convince us we're are looking at a commercial before the feature begins. Then we realize the whole movie will look like this.

Home Again has a certain charm and polish. It’s hard not to like people who are so … likable. But it’s also hard not to feel a constant sense of disconnect from these characters and their so-called “crises.”

Venom: The Last Dance is dopey and silly and filled with familiar stock characters and well-worn tropes, but it’s almost never ponderous.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

Nobody’s ever going to match Bogart’s iconic work opposite Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’ 1946 classic, but Neeson delivers a reliably powerful, world-weary, “I’m too old for this s---!” performance in Neil Jordan’s exquisitely photographed and sometimes convoluted but thoroughly enjoyable period piece.

Little Ashes is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward.

Sometimes it's all about the casting. The notice of a screening came around, I read the names Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin, and it didn't matter in a way what the movie was about - although it didn't hurt that it was a crime movie.

Its moments of fascination and its good performances are mired in the morass of romance and melodrama that surrounds it.

It's a kid movie, plain and simple. It didn't do much for me, but I am prepared to predict that its target audience will have a good time. I'm giving it two stars. If I were 8, I might give it more.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II is like some kind of avant-garde film strip in which there is no beginning, no middle, no end, but simply a series of gruesome images that can be watched in any order.

Shatner and Smart have a comfortable chemistry, and it IS nice to see a movie romance between two people who remember the 1960s. It’s just too bad they’re in a vehicle that isn’t nearly as impressive as that vintage Porsche.

Time and again, Ride Along comes up with a clichéd setup — and then blows the payoff.

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.

To laugh at parts of this film would indicate one has a streak of Woodcockism in oneself. But to gaze in stupefied fascination is perfectly understandable. That's what makes Thornton such a complex actor.

It’s an ambitious reach, and the talented cast of mostly familiar names is game for the challenge, but Crisis goes over the top with too many key plot developments. The end result is a serious case of Messaging Exhaustion.

The story is sometimes overwritten, often overwrought, includes an overheard conversation on the "Nancy Drew" level, and yet holds our attention and contains surprises right until the end.

Wildcats is clearly an attempt by Hawn to repeat a formula that was wonderfully successful in "Private Benjamin": Wide-eyed Goldie copes with the real world. It was less successful in "Protocol," and now it's worn out altogether.

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.

Sandler is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.

This is the kind of movie you sort of like, and yet even while you're liking it, you're thinking how much better these characters and this situation could have been with a little more imagination and daring.

A long slog through perplexities and complexities.

A high-speed, high-tech kiddie thriller that's kinda cute but sorta relentless.

The movie is pleasant enough, but never quite reaches critical mass as a comedy.

Moonfall is the kind of film that doesn’t take itself seriously and yet really doesn’t have a sense of humor about the ludicrous nature of its very existence.

The movie is astonishingly simple-minded, depicting characters who obediently perform their assigned roles as adulterers, cuckolds, etc.

While Olympus Has Fallen breaks no major new ground in the political thriller genre, Fuqua has directed a sharp, very taut adventure that keeps you engrossed from start to finish.

Kick-Ass 2 is an uninspired retread. All too often it plays like a Comic-Con gone insane, with costumed do-gooders taking on costumed criminals in gratuitously vicious battles.

I am so very tired of this movie. I see it at least once a month. The title changes, the actors change, and the superficial details of the story change, but it is always about exactly the same thing: heavily armed men shooting at one another.

The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.

Cruz is a deadpan treasure, never cracking the hint of a smile even as he delivers some well-timed one-liners. Wish we could have had an entire movie about this guy. Instead, we were cursed with the annoying and shrieking but not even close to terrifying La Llorona.

A quirky and entertaining deadpan comedy/drama.

The movie is like the low-rent, road show version of those serious drug movies where everybody is macho and deadly.

If there's anything worse than a punch line that doesn't work, it's a movie that doesn't even bother to put the punch lines in.

The plot is lame, but that doesn't matter, because Dumb and Dumber is essentially pitched at the level of an "Airplane!"-style movie, with rapid-fire sight gags.

The Woman in the Window is filled with dramatic touches such as a dizzying overhead shot of a staircase, a skylight just begging for someone to come crashing through, pieces of evidence conveniently left lying about and visual references to far superior noir thrillers, including the aforementioned “Rear Window.” It’s also filled with cheap scares, false alarms, dumb cops, loud storms and tricky camera angles designed to make us feel as disoriented as Anna. The only thing those elements really succeed in doing is giving us a headache.

It’s interesting that When the Game Stands Tall is essentially a movie about losing.

Jiminy Glick needs definition if he's to work as a character. We have to sense a consistent comic personality, and we don't; Short changes gears and redefines the character whenever he needs a laugh.

I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level.

A relatively breezy and slick slice of entertainment, with a fast-pace style befitting the material and expertly calibrated performances from the ensemble cast.

Corny? Absolutely. Sincere and spiritual? Yes.

A fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.

Jarmusch is making some kind of a point. I think the point is that if you strip a story down to its bare essentials, you will have very little left. I wonder how he pitched this idea to his investors.

The putatively provocative and wannabe-controversial erotic thriller “Miller’s Girl” is a sordid little tale that isn’t nearly as clever and literary as it tries to be, nor is it as deliberately campy as 20th century entries in the genre such as “Wild Things” or even “Poison Ivy.”

Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut.

The gift of Christopher Reeve, in his best scenes and when the filmmakers allow it, is to play Superman without laughing, to take him seriously so that we can have some innocent escapist fun. Helen Slater has the same gift, but is given even less chance to exercise it in Supergirl, and the result is an unhappy, unfunny, unexciting movie.

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.

At the end, I know, Trevor has come unhinged. I accept that and believe it. But it feels like the movie lost the nerve of its original story impulse and sought safety in elements borrowed from thrillers. Its destination doesn't have much to do with how it got there.

This is a well-designed, initially intriguing, visually interesting sci-fi romance torpedoed by a premise — and a payoff — so creepy and misogynistic, it’s amazing nobody who read the script or green-lit the film (or chose to star in it) raised concerns about how it would play with an audience of, you know, people with working minds.

It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream."

This project is dead in the water. Read the book. Better still, read "Victory."

Not a successful thriller, but with some nice dramatic scenes along with the dumb mystery and contrived conclusion.

One of the unique things about the original “House Party” from 1990 is while there was an abundance of energetic and exhilarating dancing, the party itself was almost secondary to all the action that took place OUTSIDE the party...Not so much with the massive, bloated, epic, over-the-top bash in the “House Party” reboot, which marks the second time LeBron James has put his enormous clout behind a new take on a beloved 1990s film (after the “Space Jam” reboot) — and the second time the results were underwhelming.

Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.

This brutal, bloody, dark and at times gruesomely funny thriller isn’t some David Fincher-esque mood piece where all the clues come together at the end. It’s more like a modern-day, Georgia version of a spaghetti Western.

A pleasant, inoffensive 3-D animated farce about a team of superspy gophers.

Ice-T's streetwise humor saves this from an exercise in silliness. [16 Apr 1994, p.24]

A horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke.

Gina Rodriguez: You deserve much better than this.

This is one of the worst movies of the year.

In the bland and outdated and curiously tame would-be sex rom-com “A Nice Girl Like You,” Hale once again tries her gosh-darndest to sell the material — but even though this toothless yawner is based on a real-life memoir, every single frame feels artificial and forced.

Whom do they make these movies for? What exercise in self-deception inspires them to go to such effort and expense for what is obviously going to be a lame exercise in retreadmanship?

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

While the members of the Broken Lizard comedy group retain their likability, and there’s something kind of endearing about the disjointed, throw-everything-at-the-wall, “Caddyshack” type chaos behind the comedy, there are simply too many dead spots and cheap jokes and flat gags to carry a full-length feature.

This movie soars on the strength of the screenplay. Monahan gives Hedlund and in particular Isaac dozens upon dozens of rich, intricate lines, and they’re both up to the task and then some. Isaac is an actor who is not afraid to go big or go home, but in Mojave, his finest moments are relatively quiet and sublime. Every inch of his performance is pure excellence.

This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.

Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of the will to keep me in the theater.

This is a well-meaning film with a good idea that unfortunately stumbles on its way to its less-than-satisfying end.