The jokes in The Week Of are big and obvious and sometimes mildly tasteless.

It is depressing to reflect on the wealth of talent that conspired to make this inert and listless movie.

House of Wax is not a good movie but it is an efficient one, and will deliver most of what anyone attending House of Wax could reasonably expect, assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much.

The movie works well on its chosen level. The big action scenes are cleverly staged and Eddie Murphy is back on his game again, with a high-energy performance and crisp dialogue.

As it is, Illegal Tender works as a melodrama, and it benefits enormously from the performance of Wanda DeJesus.

Outlander is interesting as a collision of genres: the monster movie meets the Viking saga. You have to give it credit for carrying that premise to its ultimate (if not logical) conclusion.

I prefer "Life Is Beautiful," which is clearly a fantasy, to Jakob the Liar, which is just as contrived and manipulative but pretends it is not.

Walking in, I thought I knew what to expect, but i didn't anticipate how William Friedkin would jolt me with the immediate urgency of the action. This is not an arm's-length chase picture, but a close physical duel between its two main characters.

The laughs come at a rapid-fire pace, but the comedy sometimes veers into hokey, over-the-top set pieces.

America the Beautiful carries a persuasive message, and is all the more effective because of the level tone that Roberts adopts.

It isn't a great movie, but it looks terrific and makes me look forward to the next film by its director, David Ren. He has a good eye.

When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is about as close as you can get to absolute nothing and still have a product to project on the screen.

To be fair, this tawdry dose of pulp fiction ("inspired by real events") is not a complete waste of time. It offers the marginal pleasure of an all-star cast slumming their way through a thicket of routine plotting, almost laughable dialogue and the constant blaze of tommy guns.

Fatman skids and slides and careens between genres and never finds solid footing in any one place, and ultimately winds up as an interesting failed experiment.

There are elements in the movie that make it worth seeing, and that set it aside from the routine movies in this genre.

It's not good, but it's nowhere near as bad as most recent comedies; it has real laughs, but it misses real opportunities.

The film, written and directed by Michael S. Ojeda, shows a sure sense of noir style and a toughness that lasts right up to the very final scene, which feels contrived and tacked-on.

For the most part, Halloween II is a retread of “Halloween” without that movie's craft, exquisite timing, and thorough understanding of horror.

An Acceptable Loss is a B-movie with some A-level acting, particularly by Tika Sumpter.

How can you forgive a movie that begins by asking you to care who will win freedom, and ends by asking you to care who will win a fight?

When Chase bothers to actually play a character, he can be very effective (his "Funny Farm" was one of the best comedies of 1988). But sometimes he seems to be covering himself, playing detached so that nobody can blame him if the comedy doesn't work. In this film he seems to have no emotions at all; consider the scene where he discovers that the woman he made love with has died during the night.

Act of Valor is gift-wrapped in patriotism. It was once intended as a recruitment film, and that's how it plays.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Michelle Darnell was a hilarious onstage comedic creation. On film, she is a flimsy, one-dimensional, tiresome character, surrounded by equally unconvincing and unfunny players.

Tony Hale took neurotic brilliance to the next level on Arrested Development and then Veep, and he’s squarely in his comfort zone playing another cringe-inducing, socially awkward and hilariously tone-deaf character in the offbeat charmer Eat Wheaties!, one of the most endearing movies about light stalking you’ll ever see.

Every once in a while there’s an inspired montage, or a one-liner that made me laugh out loud. But how can you have the great Christoph Waltz playing a villain in a comedy, and you get almost nothing out of it?

Final Analysis is the kind of movie that's a lot more fun to look at than to think about. Maybe that's the point.

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’s arguably the weakest, lamest and least memorable entry in the history of the franchise. It’s also crass and tone-deaf. And played mostly for laughs that are few and far between.

The actors cast themselves adrift on the sinking vessel of this story and go down with the ship.

Derailed has a great setup, a good middle passage and some convincing performances. Then it runs off the tracks.

A movie with an impenetrable plot that nevertheless has its moments.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

Did I care if Largo Winch won his struggle for control of Winch International? Not at all. Did I care about him? No, because all of his action and dialogue were shunted into narrow corridors of movie formulas.

Suicide Squad does have its moments of beautiful comic-book visuals.... Those are just tantalizing hints of a better movie that never materialized.

Now comes the loony, murky and muddled sci-fi action semi-thriller 65, with A-list star Adam Driver and the talented writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who collaborated with John Krasinski on “A Quiet Place”) taking a detour through B-Movie Lane in a film that isn’t compelling enough to make for silly popcorn entertainment but isn’t terrible enough to be labeled a disaster.

The filmmakers must have known they were not making a good movie, but they didn't use that as an excuse to be boring and lazy. Barb Wire has a high energy level, and a sense of deranged fun.

Directed with claustrophobic, docudrama-style intensity by Derrick Borte (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Forte) and featuring a career-best dramatic performance by Gaffigan, American Dreamer is a dark and intense and sometimes brutally violent slice of rotted life.

If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.

It is the kind of movie one enjoys more at 8, or even 12, than at 16 and up.

I am recommending a movie that I do not seem to like very much. But part of the pleasure of moviegoing is pure spectacle -- of just sitting there and looking at great stuff and knowing it looks terrific. There wasn't much Schumacher could have done with the story or the music he was handed, but in the areas over which he held sway, he has triumphed.

It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie (with cinematography by the legendary Roger Deakins) that aims for the fences again and again in the course of 149 minutes — but nearly every one of those mighty cuts is a swing and a miss.

The movie never takes off; it's a bright idea the filmmakers were unable to breathe life into.

The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

Trippy and entertaining mind-bender.

Father Stu breaks no new ground in the biopic game, but it’s a solid and worthy tribute to the real-life Father Stu, who continued to do the Lord’s work until his death in 2014 at the age of 50.

As faithful readers will know, I have a few cult followers who enjoy my reviews of bad movies. These have been collected in the books "I Hated, Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie"; "Your Movie Sucks," and "A Horrible Experience of Unendurable Length." This movie is so bad, it couldn't even inspire a review worthy of one of those books. I have my standards.

Without Costner’s movie star equity, this thing could have fallen apart in the first 30 minutes. He keeps us involved, even as we’re thinking: Wait, WHAT just happened?

If they ever give Dolly her freedom and stop packaging her so antiseptically, she could be terrific. But Dolly and Burt and Whorehouse never get beyond the concept stage in this movie.

One of the many graceful touches in Welcome to Marwen is the total lack of pity or condescension in either world.

Diane Kruger, whose Lisa is subjected to logical whiplash by the plot, always seems to know when it is and how she should feel. Now that's acting.

It's pleasant and amusing. If I had seen it before I was born, I would have loved it.

Shirley MacLaine is still a big-screen force. With a quick dismissive glance or a sharp-edged delivery of a one-liner, she creates a handful of genuine and genuinely funny moments.

A well-made movie. I cared about the characters. I felt for them. Liberate them from the plot's destiny, which is an anvil around their necks, and you might have something.

An awesomely silly, tasteless and half-witted movie.

Ed Harris in Phantom is like Steve Carlton with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1972 — delivering a wall-to-wall, amazing performance that's lost in a sea of dreadfulness.

The really good superhero movies, like "Superman," "SpiderMan 2" and "Batman Begins," leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in the same theaters.

Director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer, Paul Harris Boardman, deliver a routine procedural with unremarkable frights.

With The Comedian arriving in theaters, it’s safe to say I now have only nine spaces left on my list of the 10 Worst Movies of 2017.

Despite its considerable flaws, Salinger is a valuable and engrossing biography of the author.

The whole point of a Turtles movie is superhero power through ninja fighting. And no matter how it is dressed up, or what century it's set in, that's all there is inside the shell. [22 Mar 1993, p.24]

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

[Stone] gives us provocative notes and sketches but not a final draft. The film doesn't feel at ease with itself. It says too much, and yet leaves too much unsaid.

The movie never really comes together, and I think the fault for that begins with Williams. When the star of a movie seems desperate enough to depend on one-liners, can the rest of the cast be blamed for losing confidence in the script?

The fight scenes in Bulletproof Monk are not as inventive as some I've seen (although the opening fight on a rope bridge is so well done that it raises expectations it cannot fulfill).

The movie has been produced by Nickelodeon, and will no doubt satisfy its intended audience enormously. It does not cross over into the post-Nickelodeon universe.

Fire Down Below might be dumb, but it's not suicidal. [7 Sept 1997, p.46]

National Treasure is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

Kevin Spacey brings another of his cynical, bitter characters to life -- very smart, and fresh out of hope -- but the movie doesn't give him much of anywhere to take it.

Projects like this bring out the best in actors, who take salary cuts to work in Chekhov (even at one remove). What we can guess, watching the film, is that the same players would make a good job of "Three Sisters" but are undermined by the faculty club, which works like a hotel lobby. There's no way to sustain dramatic momentum here.

There ARE times when Aloha doesn’t work — and yet I’m recommending it for its sometimes loony sense of wonder, its trippy spirituality, its brilliant cast and because I seem to be a sap for even the Cameron Crowe movies almost nobody else likes.

It offers a good dose of non-gory scares, tells a story of supernatural time travel that recalls elements of “Inception,” and pays homage to the genre Wan and Whannell love.

This sequel is a good improvement over the 2014 adventure that rebooted the franchise. The effects are better, the pacing is tighter and the overall impact is much more entertaining.

Pitch Perfect 3 feels like an encore nobody asked for.

There is some dark humor in the movie, of the kind where you laugh that you may not gag.

With a cleaner story line, the basic idea could have been free to deliver. As it is, we get a better movie than we might have, because the performances are so good.

Charlize Theron is one of the few actresses equal to the role, bringing to it beauty, steel-edged repose, and mystery.

It’s no secret that Jason Statham demonstrates remarkable flair when it comes to bone-crunching action-movie mayhem, but he deserves special props for making some of the more outrageous flights of macho fantasy in Wild Card seem credible.

Battle looks like the last gap of a dying series, a movie made simply to wring the dollars out of any remaining ape fans.

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.

The production design deserves Academy recognition. But at the most fundamental level, Toys is a film not quite sure what it's about.

There’s no defending Jupiter Ascending. There’s no explaining Jupiter Ascending. There’s no way Jupiter Ascending isn’t making an appearance on my list of the Worst Films of 2015.

This is a well-made thriller traveling over awfully familiar turf.

The entire movie comes across as if the screenwriters had gathered the scripts for dozens of similar films in the genre, dropped them into some sort of software blender — and whipped up one big bland smoothie of a story.

More times than not, The Benefactor takes the less interesting fork in the road.

The great looming presence all through this movie is the memory of the Challenger destroying itself in a clear, blue sky. Our thoughts about the space shuttle will never be the same again, and our memories are so painful that SpaceCamp is doomed even before it begins.

Why do they persist in making these retreads? Because RoboCop is a brand name, I guess, and this is this year's new model. It's an old tradition in Detroit to take an old design and slap on some fresh chrome.

This is an amazingly ambitious movie, not so much because of the time and space it covers (a lot), but because Potter trusts us to follow her heroine through one damn thing after another.

Competent formula entertainment, but doesn't make that leap into pure barminess that inspired "Anaconda."

The movie cuts back and forth between two preposterous plot lines and uses the man on the ledge as a device to pump up the tension.

Jack Frost is the kind of movie that makes you want to take the temperature, if not feel for the pulse, of the filmmakers.

This is Matt Dillon's first film since Drugstore Cowboy, and demonstrates again that he is one of the best actors working in movies. He possesses the secret of not giving too much, of not trying so hard that we're distracted by his performance.

You can enjoy the way they create little flashes of wit in the dialogue, which enlivens what is, after all, a formula disaster movie.

White Men Can’t Jump 2023 is the second remake for director Calmatic this year, following the disastrous “House Party” from last January, and while it’s not as clumsy or weirdly tone-deaf as that bomb, the screenplay by Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) and Doug Hall misses a couple of major opportunities, including the decision to have the most dramatic development of the entire movie take place offscreen.

Porky's is another raunchy teenage sex-and-food-fight movie.

All concept and no content.

All this is presented in an expensive, good-looking film that is well-made by Scott Derrickson, but to no avail.