I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again.

Unfortunately, “He Went That Way” never finds a steady tone, veers off into some bizarre subplots and features two surprisingly underwhelming performances from the talented lead duo.

Contains scenes of brilliance, interrupted by scenes that meander. There is too much, too many characters, too many subplots. But there is so much here that is powerful that it should be seen no matter its imperfections.

I won't tell you I didn't enjoy parts of Bad Company, because I did. But the enjoyment came at moments well-separated by autopilot action scenes and stunt sequences that outlived their interest.

The Crew is all contrivance and we don't believe a minute of it.

Sweet and kind of touching, and I liked it. The difference, I think, is that the new one is lower on cynicism and higher on wisdom, and might actually contain some truth about the agonies of high school insecurity.

Tuff Turf is the worst teenage exploitation movie since "Where the Boys Are".

I believe it is as cruel and senseless as the killings in "Elephant," but while that film was chillingly objective, this one seems to be on everybody's side. It's a moral muddle.

Every once in a while Are You Here strikes comedic gold.

One of the worst movies of this or any year.

Had I been attending Fist Fight as a non-critic, any number of scenes might well have catapulted me out of my seat and out the door.

A brave and ambitious but chaotic attempt at political satire.

The screenplay is so clunky, not a single cast member manages to sound believable. Familiar, likable actors from Kate Bosworth to Gina Carano to Morris Chestnut are buried under an avalanche of awful. You’ve been warned.

Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) If a 9-year-old kid can break your code, don't kill the kid, kill the programmers.

What we get in Analyze That are several talented actors delivering their familiar screen personas in the service of an idiotic plot.

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is actually funnier and more charming than the first film.

Not a great film, but you know what? It achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it isn't boring, and it kept me intrigued and involved. As an actor, Eric Gores creates an engaging and convincing character that I liked and cared about -- and believed.

The Samaritan isn't a great noir, but it's true to the tradition and gives Samuel L. Jackson one of his best recent roles.

The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.

There are a lot of moments to remember in The Golden Child, but the one I will treasure the longest happens when Eddie Murphy gets behind the wheel of a beat-up station wagon and is led by a sacred parakeet to the lair of the devil.

This is a nifty little gem in the heist genre, with the familiar message about the perils of greed and always wanting more and more and even more.

The Gumball Rally is an easily forgettable entertainment, but at least it has a certain amount of class. "Cannonball" was straight exploitation.

Honey doesn't have a shred of originality (except for the high-energy choreography), but there's something fundamentally reassuring about a movie that respects ancient formulas; it's like a landmark preservation program.

While the animation is quite good and the filmmakers have brought together an excellent group of actors to provide the voice talent, the storyline leaves us with a tale more reminiscent of Saturday morning kids’ programming.

Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

Problem is, there’s no movie inside this movie. It’s a breezy and intermittently entertaining and super slick work, but it’s filled with so many overly familiar notes and well-worn cliches, and there are so many winking nods to the viewer, it feels as if we’re about two rewrites away from this thing being a flat-out spoof on the level of Airplane! or Hot Shots! or Scary Movie.

[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.

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.

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.

This is one of the most shocking and one of the best movies of the year.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke?

Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle and such lines as, if I remember correctly, "Witch, woman, harlot - I've been called them all!"

It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

A mildly entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking but ultimately ludicrous deep space thriller.

Lipstick is a nasty little item masquerading as a bold statement on the crime of rape. The statement would seem a little bolder if the movie didn't linger in violent and graphic detail over the rape itself, and then handle the vengeance almost as an afterthought.

I’m not sure there’s much more of an appetite for these inward-looking, COVID-set films anymore, but if you’re up for it, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi’s “Life Upside Down” is a slight but wryly effective, upper-class social satire with winning performances from a cast including Bob Odenkirk, Radha Mitchell and Danny Huston.

A sad-sack movie about the misery of a married couple who fight most of the time. Watching it is like taking a long trip in a small car with the Bickersons.

Crush is an Aga romance crossed with modern retro-feminist soft porn, in which liberated women discuss lust as if it were a topic and not a fact.

Cutthroat Island is everything a movie named Cutthroat Island should be, and no more. It is a pirate picture, pure and simple, and doesn't transcend its genre except perhaps in the luxurious production. Leaner and meaner pirate movies have worked more or less as well, but this one gets the job done.

There is little human interest or excitement. It isn't written that way. The music and the dialogue seem curiously even and muted, and there aren't the kinds of drama we expect in a biopic. Everyone is too restrained and discreet to expose themselves that way.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Adam DeVine’s work, he’s played variations on this same guy for nearly two decades now (he’s 39) and the man-child act is getting tiresome.

Some people will find it emotionally manipulative. Some people like to be emotionally manipulated. I do, when it's done well.

The movie’s a big, slick entertainment, relentlessly ridiculous and therefore never boring for long.

Mired in a plot of such stupidity.

One of the things I like best about Poolhall Junkies is its lack of grim desperation.

Provides an untidy and frustrating but never boring look at his life and times.

Has the same mixture of dumb puns, corny sight gags and sly, even sophisticated in-jokes. It's a lot of fun.

The long closing sequence is virtuoso, redefining what went before and requiring Murphy to become a more complex character than she gave any hint of in the opening scenes.

This movie is pure cotton candy — sweet and brightly colored and a bit of a guilty pleasure, but it’s not intended to be something you can sink your teeth into, and five minutes after consuming it, it’s like it never happened.

I can't recommend the movie, except to younger viewers, but I don't dislike it. It's "Coach Carter" Lite, and it does what it does.

We can enjoy the suspense of the opening scenes, and some of the drama. The performances are in keeping with the material. But toward the end, when we realize that the entire reality of the film is problematical, there is a certain impatience. It's as if our chain is being yanked.

Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination. Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.

There's no way I can recommend this movie to anyone much beyond the Tooth Fairy Believement Age, but I must testify it's pleasant and inoffensive, although the violence in the hockey games seems out of place.

A fairly close remake of the great 1981 Dudley Moore movie, with pleasures of its own.

Against the Ropes meanders until it gets to the final third of its running time, and then it catches fire.

In Bird on a Wire, director John Badham doesn't pay the dues before he brings in the exotic locations. We don't believe the characters, and so the elaborate chases and escapes and stunts and special effects are all affectations.

A moody, effective thriller for about 80 percent of the way, and then our hands close on air. If you walk out before the ending, you'll think it's better than it is.

Supplies us with a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker.

The plot was an arbitrary concoction.

All of this is intriguing material, but the movie doesn't do much with it.

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.

The mystery is muddled, the romance is tepid and scenes that should be electric with tension are almost dull.

The best acting in The Canyons is done by the porn star. That might be all you need to know about this film, which is the kind of vapid, self-consciously artsy, waste-of-time movie that might never have seen the light of day (or the dark of theater) and would have gone straight to VOD were it not for the triple-threat name-recognition trio of the actress Lindsay Lohan, the director Paul Schrader and the writer Bret Easton Ellis.

Throughout the game, during the action sequences and especially during the timeouts and strategy sessions, the “celebrity” fans are a huge distraction — and making things even more bizarre, their numbers include Pennywise the Clown from “It” and the murderous, rapist gang known as the Droogs from “A Clockwork Orange.” Who in the name of Bugs Bunny thought this was a good idea?

A surprisingly entertaining movie -- one of those good-hearted comedies like "Spy Kids" where reality is put on hold while bright teenagers outsmart the best and worst the adult world has to offer. It's ideal for younger kids, and not painful for their parents.

One of those movies that never convince you its stories are really happening.

A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment, it will send the kids tiptoeing through the multiplex to sneak into "Spider-Man 2."

An utterly meaningless waste of time...It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects.

Given the lurid, stupid, loony and unintentionally laughable nature of this espionage thriller, I found some measure of entertainment studying the vastly different approaches taken by Costner, Jones and Oldman — three of our finest actors over the last 30 years.

The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.

The Grandma is not merely wrong for the movie, but fatal to it -- a writing and casting disaster... I've been reviewing movies for a long time, and I can't think of one that more dramatically shoots itself in the foot.

Delightful from beginning to end.

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.

Pleasant and well-acted and easy to watch.

At the time, I was never interested in getting into a fight with the toughest kid in high school. And now that I'm not in high school, I am even less interested in seeing a movie on the subject, particularly a bad one.

Sex Tape feels like the halves of two different movies. There is a fun, believable comedy about family life... that is upended by the overly broad, barely funny attempts at reclaiming the sex tape.

Suffers from a fatal misapprehension. It thinks it is about date rape, when actually it is about alcoholism.

Pure Luck is a bad movie, all right - with leaden timing, a disorganized screenplay, and stretches where nothing much of interest seems to be happening.

Despite the obvious rip-offs of other films, the cartoony, slapstick humor does generate enough charm to pull chuckles from a young audience. But too much of the action - the sword-fighting and basketball stunt scenes, especially - looks distractingly fake. [08 Aug 1992, p.26]

Full of non-stop action, an intriguing new take on J.M. Barrie’s classic “Peter Pan” tale and some old-fashioned, swashbuckling mischief led by Hugh Jackman, director Joe Wright’s Pan is one heck of a charming romp.

The Secret of My Success seems trapped in some kind of time warp, as if the screenplay had been in a drawer since the 1950s and nobody bothered to update it.

One possible approach to 8 1/2 Women, I think, is to view it as a slowed-down, mannered, tongue-in-cheek silent comedy, skewed by Greenaway's anger and desire to manipulate.

The film itself is on autopilot and overdrive at the same time: It does nothing original, but does it very rapidly.

If you don't already know who Bruce Campbell is, it will set you searching for other Bruce Campbell films on the theory that they can't all be like this. Start with "Evil Dead II," is my advice. Not to forget "Bubba Ho-Tep." In fact, start with them before My Name Is Bruce, which is low midrange in the Master's oeuvre.

This feature film debut by Williams is an ambitious, gritty and at times downright scary urban drama with a message of hope and redemption. [04 Nov 1998, p.44]

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

This material is wearing out its welcome. I have mastered all of the lessons The Karate Kid movies have to teach and all of the surprises they have to spring. I am also intimately familiar with the plot formula, so that nothing in this third film comes as the faintest surprise. Perhaps it is time, as Mr. Miyagi might say, to study something else.

That Awkward Moment strives to straddle the line between breezy, bromantic comedy and “Hangover”-esque guy humor. It fails miserably on both counts.

Wan's movie is very efficient. Bacon, skilled pro that he is, provides the character the movie needs, just as he has in such radically different films as "Where the Truth Lies," "The Woodsman" and "Mystic River."

Baldwin and Moore generate genuine heat and chemistry together, even in some ridiculous moments.

Lawrence, obviously a talented actress, is monumentally bad here. There’s no nuance to her performance as Serena, no gradual descent for the character. She’s a conniving, criminal nutball, and Lawrence overplays her as if she’s a villainess in a mediocre silent film.

Culkin plays Alig as clueless to the end, living so firmly in his fantasy world that nothing can penetrate his chirpy persona. Whether this is accurate--whether indeed any of the facts in the film are accurate--is not for me to say, but it works.

In this film there is a scene where something is said in English pronounced with one accent, and a character asks, ''What did he say?'' and he is told -- in English pronounced with another accent.

There was a lot I liked in Cletis Tout, including the performances and the very audacity of details like the magic tricks and the carrier pigeons. But it seemed a shame that the writer and director, Chris Ver Wiel, took a perfectly sound story idea and complicated it into an exercise in style. Less is more.

After an intriguing setup, “Runner Runner” devolves into a by-the-books thriller.

Action Jackson is a movie where some of the parts are good, but none of them fit and a lot of them stink. The movie tries for so many different effects in the course of its endless 94 minutes that I walked out feeling dizzy.

Road House exists right on the edge between the "good-bad movie" and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie. But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.