There’s gratuitous nudity, lots of partying, zippy camera moves, plenty of product placement and did we mention all those celebrity cameos? It all feels more like a rerun than a fully formed, stand-alone movie.

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.

For all its next-generation technology, and even with the great Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Brokeback Mountain”) directing, Gemini Man is a mind-numbingly unoriginal international spy thriller.

Comes so close to working that you can see there from here. It has the right approach and the right opening premise, but it lacks the zest and it goes for a plot twist instead of trusting the material.

Thin and unsatisfying.

The movie is so choppy in its nervous editing that a lot of the time we're simply watching senseless kinetic action.

The kind of film you can appreciate as an object, but not as a story. It's a lovingly souped-up incarnation of the film-noir look, contains well-staged and performed musical numbers, and has a lot of cigarettes, tough tootsies, bad guys and shadows. What it doesn't have is a story that pulls us along, or a hero who seems as compelling as some of the supporting characters.

It has been written by people who want to prepare kids for the worst.

Tessa Thompson’s performance is the best thing in the movie, in part because she’s playing a character who genuinely respects the legacy of the Men (and Women) in Black and is thrilled to be part of the team.

All Eyez On Me is enthralling, exhilarating and at times maddening.

The first movie combining Ping-Pong and kung-fu and co-starring Maggie Q. How many could there be?

Preserves the flavor of the original and even improves upon it.

There is no cynicism in Radio, no angle or edge. It's about what it's about, with an open, warm and fond nature. Every once in a while human nature expresses itself in a way we can feel good about, and this is one of those times.

Never Die Alone is [Dickerson's] best work to date, with the complexity of serious fiction and the nerve to start dark and stay dark, to follow the logic of its story right down to its inevitable end.

The basic mistake in the movie isn't in the pacing, but in the storytelling. They've made the movie about its less interesting major character.

There’s no denying director/co-writer John Erick Dowdle’s skill set for creating almost unbearably tense and quite twisted suspense pieces in which you’ll find yourself laughing at the sheer unapologetic insanity of it all.

On the basis of Gigantic, Matt Aselton can make a fine and original film. This isn't quite it, but it has moments so good, all you wish for is a second draft.

It glories in its silliness, and the actors are permitted the sort of goofy acting that distinguished screwball comedy. We get double takes, slow burns, pratfalls, exploding clothes wardrobes, dropped trays, tear-away dresses, missing maids of honor, overnight fame, public disgrace and not, amazingly, a single obnoxious cat or dog.

I admire The Rite because while it delivers what I suppose should be called horror, it is atmospheric, its cinematography is eerie and evocative, and the actors enrich it.

Eight different characters, all played by Murphy, all convincing, each with its own personality. This is not just a stunt. It is some kind of brilliance.

Then they annoy us by trying to deny the attraction while the plot spins its wheels, pretending to be about something.

From beginning to end, we've been there, seen that.

Here is a story hammered together from discards at the Lunacy Factory. Attempting to find something to praise, I am reduced to this: Cage's performance is not boring.

This adaptation of the young adult science fiction novel “The Knife of Never Letting Go” (the first in a trilogy) is sunk by the nearly unwatchable and unlistenable execution of the main premise.

A lazy, crummy-looking, poorly paced, why-bother follow-up that lacks the Christmas bells to go full-out politically incorrect.

Not a conventional documentary about quantum physics. It's more like a collision in the editing room between talking heads, an impenetrable human parable and a hallucinogenic animated cartoon.

The film's edgy, high-density atmosphere and seductive dance tracks can't cover up its flimsy handling of the murder plot, character twists that twist in the wind and other fallout from a troubled production. [24 May 1993, p.21]

Starts promisingly as an attack on modern commercialized sports, and then turns into just one more wheezy assembly-line story about slacker dudes vs. rich old guys.

A bad movie indeed.

The problem — and it’s an insurmountable, deadly, comedy-killing, consistent problem throughout — is a tired, uninspired, derivative screenplay that brings everyone to Vegas for a wedding and incorporates nearly every weekend-in-Vegas cliche explored in dozens of previous films.

I'd rather August Rush went the whole way than just be lukewarm about it. Yes, some older viewers will groan, but I think up to a certain age, kids will buy it, and in imagining their response, I enjoyed my own.

The positive messages involving characters searching for love and purpose in life are well thought out, but presented in a way that is just too genial and even-handed. No one ever gets really angry or passionate, and the result is a film that sometimes feels stilted.

While the overall concept of the script is pretty creative and original, at several points along the way the storyline gets a bit muddled.

A forgettable movie with a forgettable title about forgettable characters I’d just as soon as forget.

Even a warmed-over, behind-the-times Woody Allen script is going to contain some choice one-liners, and this is a superb cast that knows how to put the right spin on clever dialogue — even when they’re playing thinly drawn characters in a dated and unnecessary story.

A video game crossed with a buddy movie, a bad cop-good cop movie, a Miami druglord movie, a chase movie and a comedy. It doesn't have a brain in its head, but it's made with skill and style and, boy, is it fast and furious.

Although the movie may appeal to kids in the lower grades, it's pretty slow, flat and dumb.

And So It Goes is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. The pleasure comes from experiencing the fine performances and semi-frequent smile-inducing dialogue, bolstered in no small fashion by the wonderful comedic timing of Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton.

A sweet, entertaining retread of an ancient formula, in which opposites attract despite all the forces arrayed to push them apart.

Scrooged is one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time. It was obviously intended as a comedy, but there is little comic about it, and indeed the movie's overriding emotions seem to be pain and anger.

A disposable entertainment, redeemed by silliness, exaggeration, and Chan's skill and charm. I would not want to see it twice, but I liked seeing it once.

The movie as a whole looks and occasionally plays better than it is.

To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.

My own feeling is that the film is one more assault on the notion that young American audiences might be expected to enjoy films with at least some subtlety and depth and pacing and occasional quietness. The filmmakers apparently believe their audience suffers from ADD, and so they supply breakneck action and screaming sound volumes at all times.

At every moment in the movie, I was aware that Peter Sellers was Clouseau, and Steve Martin was not. I hadn't realized how thoroughly Sellers and Edwards had colonized my memory.

There's not a moment in this story arc that is not predictable.

Wonderful as it is to watch great actors delve deeply into their roles, it’s a shame that the material they are delivering is just so damn confusing.

At times Reitman (adapting Chad Kultgen’s 2011 novel) can be a bit preachy and scolding about the pitfalls of surrendering one’s “RL” (real life) to one’s online existence, but just about any parent or any teenager seeing this film will empathize with any number of the interconnecting plot lines.

It's the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.

The Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment.

Maybe I've lost touch with silly, brainless entertainments like this. Let's hope so: One of the purposes of growing up and getting an education is to learn why movies like Spaced Invaders are a waste of time. And yet, a small, far-away voice inside of me says there once was a time when I would have liked this movie, when I was young and open to wonderments.

Some of these stories are fascinating and some are heartbreaking, but together they seem too contrived.

Ben-Hur struggles to find an identity and never really gets there. The well-intentioned efforts to achieve moving, faith-based awakenings are undercut by the casually violent, PG-13 action sequences.

Midnight Sun is cheesy and implausible and manipulative, but it did chip away at my cynicism through the sheer force of its corny and sincere heart.

This is two hours and 27 minutes of pure dinosaur droppings, and the viewer is as helpless as a boat passing under a bridge on the Chicago River as the Dave Matthews Band unloads a torrent of foul waste from above.

The basic idea of Uncommon Valor is so interesting that it's all they can do to make a routine formula movie out of it. But they do.

Hillbilly Elegy is a beautifully constructed, unforgiving, heart-tugging family epic about three generations of the Vance family.

It portrays an unpleasant situation and then treats it with sitcom tactics. Either the humor should have been angrier and more hard-edged, or the filmmakers should have backed away from the situation altogether.

A mess. It lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes that are chopped into so many cuts that they lack all form or rhythm.

Once in a blue moon a movie escapes the shackles of its genre and does what it really wants to do. Kids in America is a movie like that. It breaks out of Hollywood jail.

Give Shadyac credit: He sells his Pasadena mansion, starts teaching college and moves into a mobile home (in Malibu, it's true). Now he offers us this hopeful if somewhat undigested cut of his findings, in a film as watchable as a really good TV commercial, and just as deep.

Even when John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are slumming it, they’re good fun. Not enough to save the movie, but enough to keep you interested when you click across this thing sometime in your future.

Sandler, at the center, is a distraction; he steals scenes, and we want him to give them back.

The fundamental problem is the point of view.

Perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.

In trash as in art there is no accounting for taste, and reader, I cherished this movie in all of its lurid glory.

Because the real world scenes are in 2-D and the dream and fantasy scenes are in 3-D, we get an idea of what the movie would have looked like without the unnecessary dimension. Signs flash on the screen to tell us when to put on and take off our polarizing glasses, and I felt regret every time I had to shut out those colorful images and return to the dim and dreary 3-D world. On DVD, this is going to be a great-looking movie.

The flat and uninspired Addams Family 2 is the wrong kind of “twofer,” in that it’s often too dark and grotesque and bizarre for children, but also profoundly unfunny when it tries to appeal to the grown-ups.

Watching the movie, I enjoyed the settings, the periods and the acting. I can't go so far as to say I cared about the story, particularly after it became clear that its structure was too clever by half.

The first All Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another.

A perfectly sound biopic, well directed and acted, about an admirable woman. It confirmed for me Earhart's courage -- not only in flying, but in insisting on living her life outside the conventions of her time for well-behaved females. The next generation of American women grew up in her slipstream.

I found the movie a long, unfunny slog through an impenetrable plot. Kids might like it.

The movie's fatal flaw is to treat her [Moore] like a plucky Sally Field heroine. That throws a wet blanket over the rest of the party.

A home invasion thriller that may set a record for the number of times the characters point loaded pistols at one another's heads. First we're afraid somebody will get shot. Then we're afraid nobody will be.

The Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list. Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least 20 years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.

A film that is beautiful to look at but lacks clear vision.

The numerous sex scenes are so uninteresting and devoid of creativity or plot advancement, even the actors participating in said encounters seem bored.

A serviceable if sometimes overwrought biography, with solid performances and the courage to spotlight not only the heroics but the appalling misdeeds committed by the iconic Ms. Mandela.

It is the anti-Sundance film, an exhausted wheeze of bankrupt cliches and cardboard characters, the kind of film that has no visible reason for existing, except that everybody got paid.

Sean Hayes is a droll delight as Susan, who uses cynicism and snappy put-downs as a defense mechanism but has a real heart.

When you make films from junk TV, more often than not you’re going to wind up with a junk movie.

I thought this was going to be another hilarious disaster movie, but I was wrong. The Delta Force settles down into a well-made action film that tantalizes us with its parallels to real life.

A slick, scary, funny Creature Feature, beautifully photographed and splendidly acted in high adventure style.

A sequel that’s never subtle, rarely surprising — and as rich, syrupy, sweet and satisfying as a tray of homemade baklava.

The only real problem with Black Out, which plays like a cross between “The Hangover” and “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels”-era Guy Ritchie, is that it’s naggingly over-familiar.

A classic species of bore: a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image, or whatever.

Writer-director Krauss embraces the spiritual elements of this story without turning it into a heavy-handed religious lecture.

A film that little kids might find perfectly acceptable. Little, little, little kids. My best guess is, above fourth-grade level, you'd be pushing it.

It is the story of the faith in which I was raised, and it is a story told here with great reverence and extremely faithful renditions of scenes from the New Testament. But, alas, it’s not a good movie.

The spiritual angle in Serenity is just one of the many elements making this one of the most ambitious, one of the most challenging — and one of the most entertaining thrillers in recent years.

There's a way to make a movie like The Tourist, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't find that way.

Too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars' acting styles.

It may not be brilliant, but who would you rather your kids took as a role model: Crocodile Dundee, David Spade or Tom Green?

It’s never a good thing when a film about a dying man sometimes has us wondering if some of the people in his life will be better off without him.

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

It's fractured and maddening, but it's alive.

Theater of the absurd, masquerading as an action thriller.

Wrath of the Titans relentlessly wore me down with special effects so overscale compared to the characters in the film that at times the only thing to do was grin.