Seemed kind of stuffy.

There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it's too good-hearted for that.

There’s a glint of a clever idea here, but writer-director Ramin Niami’s reliance on tired rom-com tropes only serve to drag down the film, which plays out like a Harlequin romance.

The Best of Me was a better film than I expected. Much of that is due to the performances delivered by Marsden, Monaghan, Liana Liberato and especially young Australian actor Luke Bracey as the younger version of Marsden’s character.

Batman & Robin, like the first three films in the series, is wonderful to look at, and has nothing authentic at its core.

Simon's not in a lighthearted mood, and so the silliness of the story gets bogged down in all sorts of gloomy neuroses, angry denunciations, and painful self-analysis.

There are scenes here where Breillat deliberately disgusts us, not because we are disgusted by the natural life functions of women, as she implies, but simply because The Woman does things that would make any reasonable Man, or Woman, for that matter, throw up.

The movie's pleasures are scant, apart from its observance of Gene Siskel's Rule of Swimming Pool Adjacency, which states that when well-dressed people are near a swimming pool, they will - yeah, you got it.

Another one of those road comedies where Southern roots are supposed to make boring people seem colorful. If these characters were from Minneapolis or Denver, no way anyone would make a film about them.

The kind of performance Penn delivers in I Am Sam, which may look hard, is easy, compared, say, to his amazing work in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown."

Possibly the funniest movie ever made about Catholicism. It confuses the phenomenon of stigmata with satanic possession.

The plot is just high-tech Swiss Cheese, filled with holes and smelling like last week’s refrigerator contents.

Infinite has some impressive set pieces combining practical effects and CGI, and the terrific cast approaches the material with grim-faced sincerity, but it’s ultimately a big bag of nonsense wrapped in glossy packaging.

Shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find the film offensive.

Return to the Blue Lagoon aspires to the soft-core porn achievements of the earlier film, but succeeds instead of creating a new genre, no-core porn.

Like the Bond movies, the "Die Hard" films thrive on brilliantly wicked villains. In this edition, we barely know which bad guy is the main bad guy. The script is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about parents and their children, framed by well choreographed but generic action sequences.

This is an extra-cheesy and terrible film.

I cringed.

Is the film worth seeing? Depends. It breaks no new ground as horror movies go, but it does introduce an intriguing location, and it's well made technically. It's better than you expect but not as good as you hope.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness.

The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone appearing in this film thought of it as more than a payday.

As screenplays go, this is as idiotic as it gets. There are a couple of marginally funny moments in the movie, like the belching contest, but they don't go anywhere.

By the ending of the film, which is unconvincingly neat, I was distracted by too many questions to care about the answers.

Would it have been that much more difficult to make a movie in which Tom and Sarah were plausible, reasonably articulate newlyweds with the humor on their honeymoon growing out of situations we could believe? Apparently.

The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there. We watch two hours of people being frightened and dismayed, and we ask ourselves... what for? If it's real, let it have happened to them. Too bad, Lutzes! If it's made up, make it more entertaining. If they can't make up their minds... why should we?

As dopey as some of the flashbacks to MacLeod's early days are, they feature some spectacular shots of Scotland. It's best to just gawk at the visuals rather than concentrate on the story, however. The plot barely exists. [29 Jan 1995, p.58]

This isn't a great movie. But it's sincere as an entertainment, it looks good, it's atmospheric, and I will perk up the next time I hear Gianna is in a picture.

Airborne is cursed with a multiple-personality disorder. Part surfing ode, part pacifist lecture and part skating story, "Airborne" wastes plenty of celluloid developing throwaway story lines. By the time some exciting skating scenes show up, the film is two-thirds over. [18 Sept 1993, p.20]

While I clearly cannot recommend this film, I have to admit there were a couple of amusing moments.

The Cannonball Run is an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition. In other words, they didn't even care enough to make a good lousy movie.

A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.

There’s not a bad performance in this movie. De Niro, Keaton and Sarandon are particularly good, what a surprise. But it feels as if all the guests at “The Big Wedding” are wearing ID tags telling us their one Plot Point.

The script must have been a funny read. It's the movie that somehow never achieves takeoff speed.

At times it’s funny as hell. At other times it’s pretty much a disaster. But it never commits the crime of being tedious.

Maybe 7-year-olds will enjoy this PG-rated stuff, but it's not funny. [12 Nov 1993, p.39]

Sometimes we talk about seeing a performance so real, so believable, so authentic, it takes our breath away. Then there’s Shia LaBeouf’s work in Man Down.

What it looks like is warmed-over Tarantino mixed with a third-rate tribute to the Coen brothers with a dose of David Lynch-ian madness, two decades late to the party.

A film is a terrible thing to waste. For Roman Coppola to waste one on A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is a sad sight to behold. I'll go further. For Charlie Sheen to waste a role in it is also a great pity. I stop not: For Bill Murray to occupy his time in this dreck sandwich is a calamity.

Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.

You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.

The comedy bogs down in relentless predictability and the puzzling overuse of naughty words.

The director, Jared Hess, who made "Napoleon Dynamite," a film I admit I didn't get, has made a film I don't even begin to get.

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.

Opens with 15 funny minutes and then goes dead in the water.

The Perfect Man crawls hand over bloody hand up the stony face of this plot, while we in the audience do not laugh because it is not nice to laugh at those less fortunate than ourselves, and the people in this movie are less fortunate than the people in just about any other movie I can think of, simply because they are in it.

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

An ideal first movie for infants, who can enjoy the bright colors on the screen and wave their tiny hands to the music.

The filmmakers obviously understand and love Garfield, and their movie lacks that sense of smarmy slumming you sometimes get when Hollywood brings comic strips to the screen.

Nina never decides what it wants to say or where it wants to take us.

The beauty of the Wolfe book was the way it saw through its time and place, dissecting motives and reading minds. The movie sees much, but it doesn't see through.

Hope began to die about five minutes into this off-putting, cheap-looking, virtually laugh-free disaster. Hope was dead at the 10-minute mark.

This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency.

The movie is unpleasant to look at. It's darker than "Seven," but without sufficient purpose, and my overall memory of it is of people screaming in the shadows. To call this a comedy is a sign of optimism; to call it a comeback for Murphy is a sign of blind faith.

I would have loved to see a genuine love story involving Ice Cube, Nia Long, and the challenge of a lifelong bachelor dating a woman with children. Sad that a story like that couldn't get made, but this shrill "comedy" could.

While the talented cast...do as well as can be expected with the (excuse the weak pun) pretty flat script, this remake likely will be all but forgotten shortly after it hits multiplexes this weekend.

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.

What possible reason was there for anyone to make Did You Hear About the Morgans? Or should I say "remake," because this movie has been made and over and over again, and oh, so much better.

I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest. Britney Spears' feature debut is curiously low-key and even sad.

It tells a full story with three acts, it introduces characters we get to know and care about, and it has something it passionately wants to say.

The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.

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

My two-star rating represents a compromise between admiration and horror.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

As a well-crafted, well-written and well-acted entertainment, it drew me in and got its job done.

Jessica Biel all but steals the show as Stacie.

Cool World is a seriously troubled film, so ragged I doubt if even the director can explain the story line.

In a film that is wall-to-wall idiocy, the most tiresome delusion is that car chases are funny.

The Perfect Sleep puts me in mind of a flywheel spinning in the void. It is all burnished brass and shining steel, perfectly balanced as it hums in its orbit; yet, because it occupies a void, it satisfies only itself and touches nothing else. Here is a movie that goes about its business without regard for an audience.

I cannot in strict accuracy recommend this film. It's such a jumble of action and motivation, ill-defined characters and action howlers.

An innocuous family feature that's too little/too late in the fast-moving world of feature animation.

Adult audiences may be underwhelmed. Not younger teenage girls, who will be completely fascinated.

Old-fashioned and obvious, yes, like a featherweight comedy from the 1950s. But that's the charm.

Even when it doesn’t work, Terminal is a film with never a dull moment.

We’ll eventually see dozens if not hundreds of projects using the pandemic as a plot point. Songbird will be among the least memorable.

A lightweight and basically unnecessary attempt to once again bring some cinematic life to one of the lesser teams in the Marvel Universe.

Walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.

The poster art for A Thousand Words shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

We have the first serious contender for Wasted Opportunity of the Decade.

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 first film had maybe a shred of realism to flavor its romantic comedy. This one looks like it was chucked up by an automatic screenwriting machine.

The Choice is classic Sparks, and by that I mean it’s a mediocre, well-photographed, undeniably heart-tugging, annoyingly manipulative and dramatically predictable star-crossed romance.

A couple of action sequences are well staged. That’s about it for the plus side.

Everything about it seems flat and artificial and contrived, from the limp dialogue to the annoying special effects to some surprisingly uninspired performances, given the talent level of the cast.

Laughter for me was such a physical impossibility during National Lampoon's Van Wilder that had I not been pledged to sit through the film, I would have lifted myself up by my bootstraps and fled.

It's a lot of things, but boring is not one of them. I cannot recommend the movie, but ... why the hell can't I? Just because it's godawful? What kind of reason is that for staying away from a movie? Godawful and boring, that would be a reason.

Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.

This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one.

It's too unfunny to be comedy, too ordinary to be sci-fi and too flat to be action. But give the cinematographers credit: All that dark mood lighting does make it much easier for moviegoers to snooze. [5 May 1992, p.31]

The sad thing about A Night at the Roxbury is that the characters are in a one-joke movie, and they're the joke.

This plays like a live-action cartoon where you root for nobody. Everyone seems to think that yelling their lines will make the dialogue funnier. It doesn’t.

A movie, based on the popular Dean Koontz novel, that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.

A pointless exercise in "shocking" behavior.

Most horror movies are exercises in unrelieved vulgarity, occasionally interrupted by perfunctory murders. This movie, to borrow an immortal comment by Mel Brooks, "rises below vulgarity." If you are sick up to here of horror movies in general and Steven King in particular, this is the movie for you.

​I’ll tell you what got Taken. A hundred and twelve minutes of my life got Taken.

There is not a single scene in this movie that I found amusing, original or interesting. What we really have here is a documentary of the actors wasting their lives.