Space Cadet wraps itself in the trappings of a female empowerment story, but it actually celebrates using deception and taking shortcuts. Rex Simpson is no Elle Woods, and this story is more “Illegal, Need Bond” than “Legally Blonde.”

It's one of the best films of the year.

Has little islands of humor and even perfection, floating in a sea of missed marks and murky intentions.

The adults at the Hotchkiss reunion are played by an assortment of splendid actors.

Sometimes in an imperfect movie there is consolation simply in regarding the actors.

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.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything.

Vlad’s numerous speeches about love, honor and family grow tedious, along with the film’s wooden dialogue in general. And it quickly becomes obvious that Dracula Untold is more interested in being cool than making sense.

Green Lantern does not intend to be plausible. It intends to be a sound-and-light show, assaulting the audience with sensational special effects. If that's what you want, that's what you get.

A surprisingly effective film.

Either you stand back and resist it, or you plunge in. There was something about its innocence and spunk that got to me, and I caved in.

Ninjas triumph over anything -- except stupid cliches. [18 Apr 1995, p.24]

One of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history. It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.

The big action set pieces fizzle. And that’s not good for a fantasy adventure movie, especially when the fantasy component is frequently undercut by sub-standard special effects.

The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing.

You know there's something wrong with a sex movie when the good parts are the dialogue.

Lethal Weapon 4 has all the technical skill of the first three movies in the series, but lacks the secret weapon, which was conviction.

Dark Places does its best to stir a multitude of emotions within us, but in doing so, the film feels contrived and hurried.

A sad reflection of the new Hollywood, where material is sanitized and dumbed down for a hypothetical teen market that is way too sophisticated for it. It plays like a dinner theater version of the original.

[Garai and Luna] must be given credit for their presence and charisma in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and together with the film's general ambiance, they do a lot to make amends for the lockstep plot.

An Innocent Man has all the elements to put us through an emotional wringer, but the movie never works up any enthusiasm for them. It's the most relaxed crime movie of the year.

This is a nice enough fantasy, but the premise of a dream gone sour is stale. And the Hollywood happy ending seems predictable pretty early in the movie. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

In the end, though, its own grasp of morality is pretty tenuous. Its survivors learn from the errors of their ways not to make them again. Period. The film probably would have been better off taking the hijinks approach employed by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in "Neighbors." A food fight might have covered up a lot of those holes. [16 Oct 1992, p.41]

For its intended audience, I suspect this will play as a great entertainment. I enjoyed myself, particularly after they released the Kraken.

It offers certain pleasures, but suffers from an inability to structure events or know when to end a shot. And it has an ending that is simply, perhaps ridiculously, incomprehensible.

A cheerfully energetically and very vulgar comedy.

Not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny.

An almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about.

The movie seems to reinvent itself from moment to moment, darting between styles like a squirrel with too many nuts. There is one performance that works, sort of, and it is by Marisa Tomei,

It's over the top, an exercise in action comedy that cuts loose from logic and enjoys itself.

Here is a movie that ignores the Model Airplane Rule: First, make sure you have taken all of the pieces out of the box, then line them up in the order in which they will be needed. Bringing Down the House is glued together with one of the wings treated like a piece of tail.

Zipper might be entertaining enough in a campy way for you to watch it on demand as long as you’ve got a really big bowl of popcorn and an even bigger glass of wine (or the non-alcoholic elixir of your choice) to get you through. Might. Be.

The blood-soaked potboiler First Kill is Generous Pour through and through, from Bruce Willis playing a cop for the umpteenth time in his career to the old switcheroo we can see coming a mile away to the pounding and overwrought score to some genuinely effective detours and subplots.

Teachers has an interesting central idea, about shell-shocked teachers trying to remember their early idealism, but the movie junks it up with so many sitcom compromises that we can never quite believe the serious scenes.

Intrusion is a derivative, manipulative, convoluted and dopey story that dishes up one scary movie cliché after another before careening out of control with a late plot development so insanely implausible, so far out of left field, it’s as if someone accidentally deleted 20 pages of the script during production and nobody noticed.

The Family Plan exists in a world that defies all logic and reality. Granted, this is an over-the-top comedy, and yes, there are a few dark laughs, but this is basically a live-action cartoon with a deadly premise.

The best parts of Need for Speed are the actual racing and chasing sequences — a true thrill ride for the audience as the story unfolds.

The movie attempts to jerk tears with one clunky device after another, in a plot that is a perfect storm of cliche and contrivance. In fact, it even contains a storm -- an imperfect one.

So anyway, what happens in Life As We Know It? You'll never guess in a million years. Never.

The great and usually fantastically innovative Werner Herzog has turned Bell’s story into a conventional, cliché-riddled, overly talky and plodding biopic where very little happens for long stretches of time, and we have to endure deadly-dull voice-over narration while looking at admittedly gorgeous scenery and, well, camels.

If Flashdance had spent just a little more effort getting to know the heroine of its story, and a little less time trying to rip off "Saturday Night Fever," it might have been a much better film.

The intentions and performances are irrefutably sincere and noble. The execution almost always feels a little bit forced and a little bit false.

About as good as a movie with these characters can probably be, and I am well aware that I am the wrong audience for this movie.

Everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.

I thought the basic situation in The Bodyguard was intriguing enough to sustain a film all by itself: on the one hand, a star who grows rich through the adulation that fans feel for her, and on the other hand, a working man who, for a salary, agrees to substitute his body as a target instead of hers. Makes you think.

This is a home run swing that results in a strikeout and a long trudge back to the dugout.

What I regret is that all of the expertise lavished on this movie couldn't have been put at the service of a more intelligent story about real firemen, real working conditions, real heroism, and the real craft and art of fire-fighting.

The hypodermic needle, which has been keeping a pretty low profile in the movies, deserves a better comeback than it gets in Dr. Giggles. So does the medical profession: Even those who still believe in it will find little to recoil from in this un-hellacious tale of a mad doctor's mad son returning to his small hometown to make murderous house calls. [26 Oct 1992, p.27]

Who was this movie made for? Not for me, that's sure, but I have a hunch younger kids will find it satisfying.

The Sword and the Sorcerer is so dominated by its special effects, its settings and locations, that it doesn't care much about character. It trots its people onscreen, gives them names and labels, and puts them through their paces. That's not enough.

Nearly 50 years after William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” elevated the horror genre to Oscar-level greatness and produced chills and thrills that resonate with us to this day, the direct sequel The Exorcist: Believer is a tasteless, tacky, uninspired and just plain lousy knockoff that upchucks pea soup-colored porridge all over the legacy of the original, from the crummy-looking and tedious exorcism sequence to the murky cinematography, to the return of an iconic character who is given an absolutely awful and borderline offensive storyline.

This is a cheeky, madcap romp, with exaggerated views of 1960s American stereotypes about Brits and vice versa, featuring terrific performances by Perlman and Grint, a most unlikely and most likable buddy duo.

dot the i is like one of those nests of Chinese boxes within boxes. The outer box is a love story.

It's as slam-bang preposterous as any R-rated comedy you can name. It's just that Paul Blart and the film's other characters don't feel the need to use the f-word as the building block of every sentence.

City Heat is a movie in which people almost obviously don't have a clue.

What redeems Virtuosity a little is that even at the end, even in the midst of the action cliches, it still finds surprises in the paradox of a villain that is also a program.

The Gunman veers dangerously close to camp in the final scenes. If you make it that far without walking out.

Aggressively simple-minded, it's fueled by the delusion that it has a brilliant premise: Eddie Murphy plus cute kids equals success. But a premise should be the starting point for a screenplay, not its finish line.

Campbell's performance is carnal, verbally facile, physically uninhibited and charged with intelligence.

There are moments of sudden truth in the film; Freundlich, who also made "The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997), about an almost heroically depressed family at Thanksgiving, can create and write characters, even if he doesn't always know where to take them.

The intended charms of the down-home period piece/Southern comedy/romance/drama Big Stone Gap were utterly lost on me.

Will no doubt be a hit and inspire the obligatory sequels.

Down Periscope plays so much like a sitcom it may even inspire one, especially since it has two of the key requirements: an easy-going father figure, and action largely confined to one set. It's about a troublesome Navy officer (Kelsey Grammer) who is finally given command of his own submarine, an ancient 1958 diesel model he refers to as the USS Rustoleum. [01 Mar 1996, p.33]

It’s only mid-April, but I’m making an early reservation for The Other Woman to appear on my list of the 10 Worst Films of 2014.

Director Kasper Barfoed defaults to intense replays of surveillance audio recordings, frantic strokes on computer keyboards, and standard-issue chases.

After seeing Gere and Roberts play much smarter people (even in romantic comedies), it is painful to see them dumbed down here. The screenplay is so sluggish, they're like Derby winners made to carry extra weight.

Not a great, breakout comedy, but more the kind of movie that might eventually become a regular on the midnight cult circuit.

I am so very, very tired of movies like this. Does the story line strike you as original? It sounds to me like another slice off the cheesecake of dreck.

When you’re balancing ridiculous slapstick right out of a live-action cartoon with well-written, well-acted scenes that feel completely of this world, that’s a tough balancing act, and “Tammy” isn’t quite up to the task on a consistent basis.

The screenplay has so many characters, and they're in so many different places, that the only way to keep them halfway straight is for them to be calling each other all the time. There are even several scenes in which the phone rings and no one's at home. No one of this Earth, anyway.

I enjoyed the energy that was visible on the screen, and the sumptuousness of the production numbers, and the good humor of several of the performances.

"Dead Men” works well enough as a stand-alone, swashbuckling comedic spectacle, thanks to the terrific performances, some ingenious practical effects, impressive CGI and a steady diet of PG-13 dialogue peppered with not particularly sophisticated but (I have to admit) fairly funny sexual innuendo.

The adaptation is a curiously strange effort, as director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) films the story like an indie drama, with straightforward, realistic, dialogue-driven scenes — and then every 10 minutes or so, a character breaks into song, and it seems much more contrived and jolting than something like La La Land.

There simply isn’t a whole lot of excitement being generated in this lackluster family adventure, though it tries oh so very hard.

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.

One regards Reign of Fire with awe. What a vast enterprise has been marshaled in the service of such a minute idea. Incredulity is our companion, and it is twofold: We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made.

The Intruder is next-level dopey. Every single character in this film, including the villain, is irritatingly, maddeningly dumb. Nearly every scene is practically an invitation for the audience to talk back to the screen and ask these people if they’ve lost their minds.

Woodshock is its own worst enemy. The more the filmmakers play around with what’s real and what’s a dream or an element of Theresa’s delusions, the less we’re invested in what’s actually happening with Theresa.

Although not bowling me over, Planet 51 is a jolly and good-looking animated feature in glorious 2-D.

Planes moves along quickly at a running time of 92 minutes, occasionally taking flight with some pretty nifty flight sequences. The animation is first-rate, and the Corningware colors are soothing eye candy.

There must still be a kind of moony young adolescent girl for which this film would be enormously appealing, if television has not already exterminated the domestic example of that species.

The Lucky One is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling.

In the lurid and cheesy and sometimes unintentionally funny political thriller Runner, one of the most intriguing and eclectic casts of the year is wasted in a murky cesspool that comes across as a third-rate version of “House of Cards” with a little bit of “Scandal” thrown in for bad measure.

Despite its provocative title, How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town isn’t particularly sexy. More troubling, it’s not very funny either.

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.

There's a funny line or two, a fetching performance by Stacey Nelkin as a young wench, some nonsense about a buried treasure, and then Yellowbeard is soon over and soon forgotten.

Skillfully made, but it's not necessary...On the other hand, should you see it, the time will pass pleasantly.

The story is such a compilation of cliches that I hesitate to describe it, for fear of being taken for a satirist.

Every frame of “Pinocchio” is filled with rich and lush detail — at times this almost looks like a 3-D film — and the performances, whether live action or voiced, are universally excellent.

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.

I’m all for pushing the limits of taste in the name of edgy laughs and portrayals of teen life that don’t sugarcoat the realities of teen life, but while Incoming easily earns its R rating, it has a bit of foul odor about it and features far too many cheap gross-out gags and the inclusion of some genuinely creepy characters whose actions range from the morally questionable to flat-out criminal.

The movie is all the more artificial because it has been made with great, almost painful, earnestness.

This is a great-looking movie, a triumph of set design and special effects, creating a fantasy world halfway between suburbia and a prehistoric cartoon.

Though it crackles with energy and has some impressive albeit gratuitously bloody kill sequences, the Big Picture plot is a dud, up to and including the preposterous final scenes.

This is not great comedy, and Wayans doesn't find ways to build and improvise, as Carrey does.

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

A contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it.

A certain genre of thriller depends more upon style and tone than upon plot; it doesn't matter if you believe it walking out, as long as you were intrigued while it was happening.