The cinematography has a washed-out, dull tone. The special effects are mediocre. With a few exceptions, the dialogue is stilted and filled with expository passages so obviously intended to explain things to us, I half-expected characters to turn to the camera and say, “Here’s what you need to know so you can understand what’s happening.”

It’s just deadly and dreadful, loud and obnoxious, convoluted and irritating, horrible and dumb.

Let's say Roller Boogie is no better and no worse than the beach blanket/bikini/bingo/bongo movies, and from there you're going to have to take it by yourself.

A cynical, savage satire about violence, the media and depravity. It doesn't have the polish of "Natural Born Killers" or the wit of "Wag the Dog," but it's a real movie, rough edges and all, and not another link from the sausage factory.

What I got was a fairly intriguing story and an actual plot that is actually resolved. That doesn't make the movie good enough to recommend, but it makes it better than the ads suggest.

Payne is played in the movie by Damon Wayans, in the best work he's done since the inspired "In Living Color" TV series.

To its credit, Street Fighter does have a sense of humor about itself. [26 Dec 1994, p.25]

From its juvenile double entendre title to its fascination with prison rape and homophobic humor, “Get Hard” practically announces itself as an offensive, tired and unimaginative comedy in nearly every scene. And yet I didn’t hate it because Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart had such terrific comedic chemistry.

In its minor-key way, "Ghost" is a clever, intelligent and visually compelling thriller. Its gimmick more than carries its weight. [31 Dec 1993, p.39]

One of those movies you like more at the time than in retrospect.

Alas, you can spend nearly two hours watching the slick, cynical, vapid and brain-numbing actioner “Ghosted” on Apple TV+ and find yourself regretting the decision pretty much every predictable and overblown step of the way.

Spade, clearly bored with his petulant-pipsqueak persona, does the kind of sleepwalking that gets ridiculed on TV by David Spade. Make no mistake: He's over this. [2 Feb 1996, p.31]

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

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]

It’s always a shame when a group of talented humans get together and deliver something that comes across as a halfhearted effort, even if they poured their blood, sweat and tears into it.

A dreary experience.

The screenplay shows signs of being inspired by personal memories that still hurt and are still piling up in Michael's mind. Fair enough, but the film doesn't sort this out clearly, and we experience vignettes in search of a story arc.

It’s awful, but disposable and easily forgotten.

What I felt as I watched Scooby-Doo 2 was not the intense dislike I had for the first film, but a kind of benign indifference.

Watching Doom is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel room.

The Smurfs 2 probably isn’t any worse than you might expect. On the other hand, it’s almost certainly not any better. It’s just a matter of figuring out how much punishment you’re willing to endure for the sake of the small child you’re taking to the movies.

The sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 mega-hit “Alice in Wonderland” is loud, frantic, stunningly unfunny, off-putting and riddled with mediocre, out-of-tune work from normally outstanding actors. It’s one of the great movie disasters of 2016.

This is the kind of movie that keeps the great Ellen Barkin literally in the shadows as a criminal mastermind, and relegates the wonderful Kaley Cuoco to an embarrassing supporting role as a man-hungry best girlfriend who might as well have stepped out of a cheesy 1970s rom-com. Is anybody even trying here?

I liked a lot of the movie, which is genial and has a lot of energy, but I was sort of depressed by its relentlessly materialistic view of Christmas, and by the choice to go with action and (mild) violence over dialogue and plot.

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary like "Paranormal Activity" and "The Blair Witch Project." But unlike those two, which just forge ahead with their home video cameras, this one encumbers its flow with ceaseless reminders that it is a dramatization of real events.

There are some good performances here, by Jack Magner and Olson in particular, and some good technical credits, especially Sam O'Steen's editing. It's just that this whole Amityville saga is such absolute horse manure.

Patton lightens the aggravation, for the most part, by combining a likable presence with a knack for physical comedy and a willingness to hop into dumpsters, etc., as needed, making the most of the script’s meager opportunities for comedy.

There are forces here you couldn't possibly comprehend...You can say that again.

What I liked the most about the second "Dozen," was another performance, the one by Alyson Stoner as their daughter Sarah. As a girl poised on the first scary steps of adolescence, she finds the kind of vulnerability and shy hope that Reese Witherspoon projected in "The Man in the Moon."

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

The performances are often good, including Reno's; he has an interesting, poker-faced way of underplaying scenes that keeps him from being a stereotyped kid.

For all its predictability and averageness, Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have two fantastically executed shock scenes.

In the spirit of so many films created for the small screen, My All American works way too hard to make sure our heartstrings are pulled — and actually yanked hard from start to finish.

Movies like this do not grab you by the throat. You have to be receptive.

With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.

A flat and peculiar film.

The English-language debut from the brilliant talent behind best foreign film picture nominee “Mustang” is a terribly uneven, borderline absurdist jumble that undercuts its own message again and again.

The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then.

Everything about “Uglies” is average. Not terrible enough to be campy, not deep or provocative or visually impressive enough to merit further chapters in the story.

Despite the elements I could have done without, the movie is often very funny, and a lot of the credit goes to Del Toro, who creates a slow-talking, lumbering character who's quite unlike his image in "Usual Suspects."

It walks and talks like a big budget horror film, heavy on special effects and pitched at the teenage audience, and maybe that's how it will be received. But it's more impressive if you ignore the genre and just look at what's on the screen.

Stiller the director does a fine job of making Zoolander 2 look like an actual spy movie, but we’ve seen far better takeoffs, including “Spy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” in just the last couple of years. As for the jabs at the transient nature of popular culture and the ridiculousness of high fashion world — easy, tired targets.

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

An uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another.

This is one of those 93-minute movies that seem about 88 minutes too long. Or not worth making in the first place.

If it can be said movies have personalities, I give you three words to sum up the basic core identity of Safe Haven: Bat. Bleep. Crazy.

A terrific opening. But, alas, the moment The Final Conflict turns to dialogue and a plot, it loses its inspiration.

It's not fair to say Steven Spielberg's 1941 lacks "pacing." It's got it, all right, but all at the same pace: The movie relentlessly throws gags at us until we're dizzy. It's an attempt at that most tricky of genres, the blockbuster comedy, and it tries so hard to dazzle us that we want a break.

They're so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs.

The kind of movie that would be so bad it's good, except it's not bad enough to be good enough.

In a world already corrupted with Amy and Joey, and Woody Allen and Soon Yi, the last thing we need is a movie like "The Crush" masquerading as entertainment. [6 Apr 1993, p.29]

Plays like a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories. It can't decide what tone to strike.

As someone who believes most movies have too much music, I was surprised to find myself noticing how little is in Mr. Destiny. In the quiet, an innocent little fable grows, blossoms and is harvested, to no great moment.

The Mummy is so wall-to-wall awful, so cheesy, so ridiculous, so convoluted, so uninvolving and so, so stupid.

I’m all for bawdy, politically incorrect, wildly inappropriate humor — when there are consistent and genuine laughs to be mined from the material. This stuff just sits there like a steaming pile of stuff you walk around.

The dreary, derivative and punchless action comedy “Love Hurts” is proof that a movie can have an 83-minute running time and still seem like a slow-motion slog.

To call this a Netflix Original movie is only half-correct. True, it’s on Netflix, but no, there’s nothing original about this uninspired knockoff of “Fatal Attraction” (even the title and the poster borrow from that 1987 classic of the genre), which is marred by stilted dialogue, predictable plot turns and surprisingly halfhearted performances from a talented cast that acts as if they know this is slick garbage and they’re just trying to make it through the shoot so they can call their respective agents and say, “We need to talk.”

The Bubble is ultimately a mediocre movie about the making of an even worse movie.

Kids 6 to 9 years old will probably enjoy this fare, but as a Hollywoodized classic, it doesn't quite wear the crown. [11 Aug 1995, p.41]

It's based on some DC Comics characters, which may explain the way the plot jumps around. We hear a lot about graphic novels, but this is more of a graphic anthology of strange occult ideas.

My guess is that the average firefighter, like the average American moviegoer, might sort of enjoy the movie, which is a skillfully made example of your typical Schwarzenegger action film.

A very bad movie and a genuinely moving experience.

So monumentally silly, yet so wondrous to look at, that only a churl could find fault.

Her dad was right about one thing. Something terrible did happen to her (Duff) in Los Angeles. She made this movie.

Would be a mindless action picture, except that it has a mind. It doesn't do a lot of deep thinking, but unlike many futuristic combos of sf and f/x, it does make a statement:

New Year's Evil is an endangered species - a plain, old-fashioned, gory thriller. It is not very good. It is sometimes unpleasantly bloody. The plot is dumb and the twist at the end has been borrowed from hundreds if not thousands of other movies. But as thrillers go these days, "New Year's Evil" is a throwback to an older and simpler tradition, one that flourished way back in the dimly remembered past, before 1978.

This is a genuinely interesting idea, filled with dramatic possibilities, but the movie approaches it on the level of a dim-witted sit-com. Thoughtful scenes are followed by slapstick, emotional moments lead right into farce, and the movie doesn't have an ounce of true moral courage; it sidesteps every single big issue that it raises.

Aside from some fancy handiwork with a combination credit card/switchblade, Seagal appears stiff and arthritic during his karate scenes, lending worrisome credence to the notion that Seagal couldn't fight his way out of the Wrigley Field bleachers. [08 Oct 1996, p.34]

The true story of Freddy Heineken’s kidnapping is fascinating, but Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a disappointingly superficial film in which neither the kidnappers nor their captives are particularly interesting.

Language of a Broken Heart has the Lifetime Network written all over it. It’s a fitting entry for that venue but as a theatrical feature, it’s simply not up to the task.

The director of the film is Tim Hunter, whose feature career goes back to such 1980s gems as “Tex” and “River’s Edge,” and whose TV credits include everything from episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” to “Mad Men.” That explains why it’s such a good-looking film. Nicolas Cage’s starring presence explains why it’s such a compelling and offbeat little thriller.

As light as a feather, as fresh as spring, and as lubricious as a centerfold... There is something extroverted and refreshing in the way these women enjoy their beauty and their sexiness.

Despite some fine production values, lovely photography and smart casting of a range of British stage and screen actors, The Christmas Candle can’t quite move beyond the weary metaphors. It has the feel of a slick television movie.

The special effects are among the more positive aspects of “Allegiant,” but those alone cannot rescue this highly flawed sequel.

It's not often you find this voluntary dimwittedness in a movie, but "If Lucy Fell" offers a depressing example in the case of Joe MacGonaughgill (Eric Schaeffer), one of the least appealing characters ever offered for the public's entertainment.

This is a harmless and pleasant Disney comedy and one of only three family movies playing over the holidays.

House of D is the kind of movie that particularly makes me cringe, because it has such a shameless desire to please; like Uriah Heep, it bows and scrapes and wipes its sweaty palm on its trouser leg, and also like Uriah Heep, it privately thinks it is superior.

Hackman could charm the chrome off a trailer hitch. Romano is more of the earnest, aw-shucks, sincere, well-meaning kind of guy whose charm is inner and only peeks out occasionally. They work well together here.

The movie's problem is a fundamental lack of substance.

My Favorite Martian is slapstick and silliness, wild sight gags and a hyped-up acting style. The Marx Brothers would have been at home here. The movie is clever in its visuals, labored in its audios, and noisy enough to entertain kids.

Class is a prep-school retread of "The Graduate" that knows some of its scenes are funny and some are serious, but never figures out quite how they should go together. The result is an uncomfortable, inconsistent movie that doesn't really pay off -- a movie in which everything points to two absolutely key scenes that are, inexplicably, the two most awkward scenes in the film.

There are a lot of logical gaps in this movie.

The best thing about The Hero of Color City is its good voice talent — and its running time of only 77 minutes. Other than that, this is a pretty lame computer-generated animated movie that will likely not engage kids much past the first grade.

You may be imagining this is an animated film, and that Jack Black is voicing Lemuel Gulliver. Not at all. This is live action, and despite the 3-D, it's sorta old-fashioned, not that that's a bad thing.

A surprisingly effective thriller.

Seagal has been quoted as saying he isn't proud of the films he's done, that he wanted to move onto more serious fare. In that light, it's possible to see the wretched excesses of On Deadly Ground as self-punishment. To each his own, but when the audience is punished, we're standing on the wrong ground. [21 Feb 1994, p.25]

Catch That Kid respects all of the requirements of the genre, and the heist itself is worthy of "Ocean's Eleven" (either one; take your pick).

North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.

There is nothing I much disliked but little to really recommend. At least the movie was not nonstop slapstick, and there were a few moments of relative gravity, in which Robin Williams demonstrated once again that he's more effective on the screen when he's serious than when he's trying to be funny.

I like Miley Cyrus. I like her in spite of the fact that she's been packaged within an inch of her life. I look forward to the day when she squirms loose from her handlers and records an album of classic songs, performed with the same sincerity as her godmother, Dolly Parton. I think it'll be a long, long time until she plays a movie character like the free-standing, engaging heroines of Ashley Judd, but I can wait.

Musical theater versions often seem dated, so moving the story into the 21st century does make sense (as does the multicultural casting), but in the process Gluck and his all-star cast create a chaotic film that tries too hard and fails to capture the charm and heart of the musical.

The movie is not intended to be subtle. It is sweaty, candle-lit melodrama, joyously trashy, and its photography wallows in sumptuous decadence.

Murphy has a kind of divine ineptitude that moves beyond Marilyn's helplessness into Lucy's dizzy lovability. She is like a magnet for whoops! moments.

Isn't bad so much as jumbled...You get the sense of too much input, too many bright ideas, too many scenes that don't belong in the same movie.

Is the film worth seeing? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it is exactly what it is, and no, for the same reason.

The movie might have had a chance if it had abandoned all the false sentiment and simply acknowledged Crawl as the cretin he is. John Belushi would have known how to play this part.

This is one good-looking, occasionally titillating, mostly soapy and dull snooze-fest.

The people in this movie are dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.