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.

Among the better things in the movie, I count Vaughn's well-timed and smart dialogue.

The Forgotten is not a good movie, but at least it supplies a credible victim (Moore).

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.

The movie itself, unfortunately, is not as compelling as the tempest that went into its making.

The Dream Team is essentially a formula picture filled with missed opportunities. The fact that it has several passages that really work, and that the actors create characters we can care about, only underlines the bankruptcy of its imagination.

The performances are all just fine; I wish they'd been at the service of another movie.

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.

Hilary Duff is beautiful and skilled, and I hope she finds something worthwhile to do with her talent before she truly does become the next Britney Spears and has to start worrying about the next Hilary Duff.

If the plot and screenplay are juvenile, the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting.

There's a point at which its enigmatic flashes of incomprehensible action grow annoying, and a point at which we realize that there's no use paying close attention, because we won't be able to figure out the film's secrets until they're explained to us.

Godzilla x King Kong: The New Empire is the definition of an old-fashioned (with new technology) popcorn movie and there’s certainly no harm in that, but at the end of the day, it feels like the stakes have never been more medium.

High School is a pun. Get it? This is one of those stoner comedies that may be funny if you're high - but if not, not.

Beyond the product placement, Marry Me is a high-concept “elevator pitch” movie that is set in present day but feels like a relic of the mid-1990s.

The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

This is a surprisingly and disappointingly tame film, in which Morris is almost deferential to Bannon.

There's plenty of good travelogue in moving among Africa, Spain and the French Riviera. But director Henry King plods again. [18 Feb 1999, p.31]

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

As Hollywood experiments go, the new black comedy by Robert Zemeckis has more than its share of witty lines, sight gags and special effects. But even while you're appreciating its better moments, the cast is numbing them with their Arctic charm. [31 July 1992, p.43]

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

The problem may be that the movie isn’t nearly tough enough. It needs to be more hard-boiled, more merciless in its dissection of egos, more perceptive about the cutthroat nature of show business.

This particular “Blacklight” is pure, overblown, cliché-riddled fiction.

Knight of Cups is a ponderous affair, never taking 30 seconds to make a point when four minutes is available.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

This remake was a bad idea that only got worse.

Movie magic is an elusive thing. A Wrinkle in Time is a bold film that takes big chances from start to finish, in a courageous effort to be something special.... But for all its scenes of characters flying and soaring and zooming here and there, it never really takes off.

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent.

What's strange about Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is that it abandons most of what people liked about the first movie and replaces it with a formula as old as the hills.

This movie just recycles "Grease," without the stars, without the energy, without the freshness and without the grease.

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.

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

It isn't bad so much as it lacks any ambition to be more than it so obviously is.

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

So many great actors, cast adrift by a script that feels incomplete and a brilliant director delivering one of his lesser works.

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.

There's only one character we can identify with - a San Francisco police detective played by David Caruso - and he doesn't drive the plot so much as get swept along by it.

The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

The same material, filmed in America, might seem thin and contrived; the adventures are arbitrary, the cuteness of the men grows wearing, and when Nino has an accident with a chainsaw, we can see contrivance shading off into desperation.

The Guilty wants to make a statement about a man who’s trying to save himself through saving others, but the message is delivered with all the subtlety of a frantic 911 call.

There are more than enough ingredients here to cook up one rousing and thought-provoking sci-fi thriller. Except this time around, they’re just serving up overcooked leftovers.

Spider-Man 3 is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way.

Despite its cast and convincing backdrop, Stonehearst Asylum is a tame entry in today’s roster of horror films.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s stylish and at times fantastically gory Life features an A-list, international and diverse cast, a few grotesque surprises and one very cool and labyrinthine spaceship — but eventually crashes and burns due to multiple failures.

Celtic Pride is a little too lumbering to really take off as a comedy; the director, Tom De Cerchio, doesn't show a light touch. But there is the germ of an idea here, especially in the scenes where the professional star ridicules two grown men for taking a basketball game so seriously. And then there are some nice reversals in the final scenes, as Mike and Jimmy balance between their sports loyalties and their survival instincts. But I wish the movie had been a little more focused, a little quicker on its feet. [19 Apr 1996, p.31]

All of this has a fascination, and yet Red Trousers is a jumbled and unsatisfying documentary.

Occasionally Winterbottom delivers a haunting, effective moment, giving a hint of a different, more compelling film. But then it’s back to the self-righteous, self-indulgent, muddled metaphors.

I think the fault is in the screenplay, which tells a story that can be predicted almost from the opening frames. The people who wrote this movie did not bother, or dare, to give us truly individual Japanese characters; there is only one who is developed with any care.

[A] slightly diverting documentary.

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

A pleasant but inconsequential comedy, awkward for the actors, and contrived from beginning to end.

While the talented and versatile director Paul Feig (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Bridesmaids,” “A Simple Favor”) displays an admirably ambitious reach, and there are some impressive visuals, The School for Good and Evil never quite finds its footing.

The Black Windmill commits the one crime no thriller can be pardoned for. It's not thrilling. It's also terribly passive and static, and Siegel directs Caine almost to a standstill.

I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences.

The dry, drab and disappointing would-be crime thriller Heist 88 is a prime example of a movie that has all the right ingredients on the table but fails to create an appetizing entrée at nearly every turn. It’s a film that initially intrigues but quickly loses its way — and ends so abruptly it almost feels like everyone lost interest and decided it was time to go home.

The occasionally clever dialogue and the peppy voice performances are the best things about Scoob!, but not nearly enough to overcome the loud and convoluted overall tone.

Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It's like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn't accomplish anything.

The movie makes its point early and often: That its characters are hung up on food, and eat for unhealthy and obsessive reasons. It's true. We know it's true. We wait in vain for additional insights.

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad.

A mostly underwhelming film, with underdeveloped characters and supercharged fight scenes that drag on forever and offer nothing new in the way of special-effects creativity.

It's so neat, so formula, so contrived, I was thinking about "The Graduate" instead of about characters I had spent two hours with. So, I suspect, was Nichols.

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air.

If it does nothing else, Another 48 HRS reminds us that Murphy is a big, genuine talent. Now it's time for him to make a good movie.

The movie is simply a failure of imagination. Nobody looked at the screenplay and observed that it didn’t try hard enough, that it had no surprises, that it didn’t attempt to delight its audiences with twists and turns on the phoned-in plotline.

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.

The movie was directed by Michael Brandt, who co-wrote the script with Derek Haas. Together they wrote a much better movie, "3:10 to Yuma." The Double doesn't approach it in terms of quality. None of it is particularly compelling.

Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: "Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext."

Jet Lag is sort of a grown-up version of "Before Sunrise"...The difference between the two films is sort of depressing.

Alas, with the notable exception of the empathetic Boutella, the cast of “Climax” consists primarily of dancers who are not actors. And as actors, they’re really good dancers.

I enjoyed Ashes of Time Redux, up to a point. It's great-looking, and the characters all know what they would, although we do not.

The actors are better than the material.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

Rogen does a remarkably fine job in creating two distinct characters.

The Tax Collector is an underachieving, exceedingly violent urban gangster film with a meandering storyline and a contrived final twist.

Unfortunately, the film’s more moving and memorable moments are mixed in with a king-size (if not quite K2-size) jumble of too much information.

Here is a great story born to be creepy, and the movie churns through it like a road company production. If the first three movies served as parables for their times, this one keeps shooting off parable rockets that fizzle out.

Consider for a moment how this movie might play if it took itself seriously. Would it be better than as a comedy? I suspect so.

The movie itself is good and shows promise, except for the ending, when Trier shouldn't have been so poetic. Not only does Reprise generate itself, it contains its own review.

The plot, in short, is underwhelming. It merely follows the reporters as the screenplay serves them the solution to their case on a silver platter. Yet curiously, Deadline flows right along.

The screenplay tries to paper over too many story elements that needed a lot more thought. This movie has been filmed and released, but it has not been finished.

Ted 2 feels like far too many other sequels: born of box office expectations more than a bona fide reason to return to the characters we loved the first time around.

Essentially an interlacing of irony and gotcha! Scenes.

This is not the sort of movie you make it your business to see in a theater. But if you're ever surfing cable TV and come across it, you'll linger.

The main story keeps stalling out in favor of these drive-by interludes that take center stage for a few minutes and then fade into the background, usually never to be heard from again.

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.

Here's a bad movie with hardly a bad scene. How can that be? The construction doesn't flow. The story doesn't engage. The insistent flashbacks are distracting. The plot has problems it sidesteps. Yet here is a gifted cast doing what it's asked to do. The failure is in the writing and editing.

The movie is focused on two kinds of chemistry: of the kitchen, and of the heart. The kitchen works better.

The Humbling is a jumbled collection of scenes in which fantasy and reality intertwine in a manner I found more maddening than intriguing.

Now this is a terrific premise for a thriller, and director George Romero (The Night of the Living Dead) sets it up with skill and style. Unfortunately, the film's biggest disappointment is that it doesn't develop its preternatural opening theme.

The past traps the present, fate smothers spontaneity, and all of the dialog sounds like Dialog - not what people would say, but what characters would say. The film is depressing for some of the right reasons, and all of the wrong ones.

The best thing in the movie is Schwarzenegger, who delivers the Guardian’s lines with perfect timing and creates an empathetic character, because as we know, nearly all the best movie robots somehow become just a little bit human as time goes on.

Pixels has a few inspired action sequences and a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, but overall the special effects are surprisingly average — and the lazy acting by Adam Sandler, the shameless mugging by Kevin James and the hammy performance by Brian Cox don’t help. Not even Peter Dinklage in a mullet can save the day.

I think Bloch and Rosenberg should get organized and take on the cabbage. If nothing else, a horror movie about cabbages could help Rosenberg work through his obsession and save a lot of analyst's fees.

It is a touching story, and the musicians (some over 90 years old) still have fire and grace onstage, but, man, does the style of this documentary get in the way.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness gets off to an intriguing start. But then the movie loses its way.

The screenplay, by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, has a good feel for female best-friend relationships, and the dialogue has life and edge to it.

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.