It’s an intermittently entertaining endeavor thanks mostly to the effortlessly suave lead performance by Pierce Brosnan as a career thief who looks like he wakes up wearing a jacket with a pocket square and with his hair perfectly coiffed, but the action sequences are ho-hum, the editing is stunningly clumsy, and the main heist is so cartoonishly ridiculous we don’t even believe the actors believe it’s possible.

Slides too easily into its sentimentality; the characters should have put up more of a struggle.

The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture.

The movie was executive produced by Quentin Tarantino. Shame on him. He intends it no doubt as another homage to grindhouse pictures, but I've seen a lot of them, and they were nowhere near this bad. "Hell's Angels on Wheels," for example: pretty good.

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

For years there have been reports of the death of the Western. Now comes American Outlaws, proof that even the B Western is dead.

The Identical evangelizes and entertains with sincere mediocrity. If the style is unremarkably mainstream, the message is theologically murky.

One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the title. Pause by the poster on the way into the theater. That will be your high point.

A genuine guilty pleasure. [17 Jan 1994, p.29]

Maybe this is unreasonable, but I can’t help thinking that if you’re going to make a movie with “Oz” in the title, you’d better be prepared to kick in at least a little inspiration. Yet that’s precisely what’s missing — so utterly absent it’s almost impressive in a way — in the painfully uninspired Legends of Oz.

The life lessons about morals and values are soft-pedaled pretty well and packaged in a mostly funny romp as the trio of mothers’ night-on-the-town turns in all sorts of bizarre and wacky ways.

The movie's not without charm. There's a fresh, sweet relationship between one of the girls (Phoebe Cates) and her boyfriend, in which she is permitted to have the normal fears, doubts and reservations of anyone her age. I'm not sure how that plot got into this smarmy-minded movie, but it was like a breath of fresh air.

A garage sale of gay issues, harnessed to a plot as exhausted as a junkman's horse.

A terrible movie, sappy and dead in the water.

Arsenal is garbage. The cast includes familiar faces...but it’s still a trashy, blood-spattered, sadistic thriller with a goes-nowhere plot, overwrought dialogue and a throbbing soundtrack that’ll leave your ears ringing.

It has no edge, no hunger to be better than it is. It ambles pleasantly through its inanity, like a guest happy to be at a boring party.

Jason X sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought. Only its title works.

Writer-director John Hamburg (writer of “Meet the Parents,” director of “Along Came Polly” and “I Love You, Man”) has the ability to wring big laughs out of absurdist situations, but in Me Time, nearly everybody delivers their lines in the forced manner of 1980s sitcoms, the situations bear little resemblance to anything that would occur in the real world.

Perhaps if Encino Man boasted a looser cannon than block-jawed newcomer Fraser or gave more focus to the sleepily funny Shore, who comes across like Mork from Woodstock by way of the Valley, it would overcome first-time feature director Les Mayfield's timid, by-the-numbers approach. [22 May 1992, p.52]

This movie is sick. It pretends to be a warning against compulsive gambling, but it falls for the oldest dodge in the gambler's book: "I only gambled enough to win back my losses." Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more from an MGM movie that was shot on location at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

Movies like Eye for an Eye cheapen our character by encouraging us to indulge simplistic emotions - to react instead of analyzing. It provides a one-in-a-million situation and tries to teach us a lesson from it; thoughtful audience members will be aware they're not being treated fairly. This is filmmaking at the level of three-card monte. If you don't believe me, see "Dead Man Walking."

It is a "thriller" without thrills, constructed in a meaningless jumble of flashbacks and flash-forwards and subtitles and mottos and messages and scenes that are deconstructed, reconstructed and self-destructed. I wanted to signal the projectionist to put a gun to it.

If the plot and screenplay are juvenile, the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting.

I realized there was no hope for the movie because the plot and characters had alienated me beyond repair. If an audience is going to be entertained by a film, first they have to be able to stand it.

The plot, in short, is underwhelming. It merely follows the reporters as the screenplay serves them the solution to their case on a silver platter. Yet curiously, Deadline flows right along.

This is a disappointing waste of good acting talent, coupled with a very pedantic and not very intriguing story from first-time screenwriter Christina Hodson.

It's surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material.

If you haven't already guessed, Ed is not a great movie. What it is is a fun way to spend 1 1/2 hours not thinking. [15 Mar 1996, p.33]

Of course it's completely ridiculous, but at the same time it has a certain disarming charm.

It makes little sense, fails as often as it succeeds, and yet is not hateful and is sometimes quite cheerfully original.

Bad movie. Ugly movie.

I kind of like the idea: A cheesy '80s band called the Suburbans reunites for a tribute album. I kind of like the cast: Everyone from Jennifer Love Hewitt to Robert Loggia pops up. I even kind of liked their "hit song," and probably would have bought their album in my teens. But it's impossible to like this movie, and there's no kind way to say it. [29 Oct 1999, p.30]

A Sound of Thunder may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.

A fog of gloom lowers over The Whole Ten Yards, as actors who know they're in a turkey try their best to prevail.

So ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur.

Movies like this work if they're able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.

In the stunningly tone-deaf and horrifically unfunny The Very Excellent Mister Dundee, Hogan plays himself in a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque conceit gone terribly wrong.

Depp is one of the very best of America's young actors, but "The Brave" is a lightweight and unbelievable story that takes itself with terminal seriousness. [14 May 1997, p.45]

The long-delayed biopic Gotti is an entertaining and well-acted but uneven B-movie.

The result is not a movie that is very good, exactly, but it's entertaining and funny.

There's no chemistry between Deeds and Babe, but then how could there be, considering that their characters have no existence, except as the puppets in scenes of plot manipulation.

If he wants a future in the movies, Andrew Dice Clay is going to have to play somebody other than himself.

Bride Wars is pretty thin soup. The characters have no depth or personality, no quirks or complications, no conversation.

A slick production of a lame script, which kills time for most of its middle half-hour. If anyone in the plot had the slightest intelligence, the story would implode.

The joy of Dirty Work is in Macdonald's observational writing and sardonic delivery. Because he and director Bob Saget never take the film too seriously, nearly every scene transcends the ordinariness of the movie's plot line by giving way to Macdonald's charisma. [15 Jun 1998, p.32]

Predictable to its very core, and in a funny way the predictability is part of the fun. The movie is in on the joke of its own recycling.

This movie owes so much to the "Road Warrior" pictures that I doubt if it could have been made without them. Since the movie so clearly required great dedication, especially in its visual effects and the use of its desert locations, I can only wonder why they didn't spend equal effort on finding an original story to tell.

Movies like this demonstrate that when it comes to stupidity and vulgarity, only the best will do for our children.

As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director and an interesting character.

Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure.

This is a well-made, well-acted and sometimes intriguing but also coldly cynical and manipulative murder mystery.

Staying Alive is a big disappointment.

Hollow Man can think of nothing more interesting to do than spy on his girlfriend and assault his neighbor.Too bad. Really too bad, because the movie is supported by some of the most intriguing special effects I've seen.

It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.

Endless, pointless and ridiculous, right up to the final shot of the knife going through the cockroach. This movie is desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit, and Tom Selleck looks adrift in it.

Myers has made some funny movies, but this film could have been written on toilet walls by callow adolescents.

An idiotic ode to macho horseshite (to employ an ancient Irish word). It is however distinguished by superb cinematography.

The Wizard is finally just a cynical exploitation film with a lot of commercial plugs in it, and it is so insanely overwritten and ineptly directed that it will disappoint just about everybody and serve them right for going in the first place.

If it does nothing else, Another 48 HRS reminds us that Murphy is a big, genuine talent. Now it's time for him to make a good movie.

Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

Collateral Beauty is a fraud. It is built on a foundation so contrived, so off-putting, so treacly, the most miraculous thing about this movie is this movie was actually made.

Among the better things in the movie, I count Vaughn's well-timed and smart dialogue.

The plot is easily summarized: "Dumb and Dumber Meet Dumbbell."

The sad thing about Turk 182! is that, the whole project sounds like a High Concept movie, in which the idea of the Turk was allowed to substitute for a story about him. Sure, it would be neat to see a movie about a guy like this. But not this movie.

A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.

It's a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

Heaven help the unsuspecting families who wander into Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights expecting a jolly animated holiday funfest.

It goes through the motions of an action thriller, but there is a deadness at its center, a feeling that no one connected with it loved what they were doing.

The dialogue in places leans toward the banal, but a couple of plot twists help hold interest.

The Cobbler goes from bad to you-have-to-be-kidding in that final act, when we’re given a big reveal that makes no sense, even in the context of a bat-bleep crazy fable.

Why, oh, why, was this movie necessary?

This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting, but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration.

I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they're cartoons or Muppets, but not if they're real.

Desperately unfunny.

So bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve.

Many scenes are bathed in a sickly green, as if we’re watching everything through cheap night-vision goggles; others are tinted blood-red. No matter what filters are used, there’s no disguising this is garbage wrapped in a glossy package.

What did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Karl Malden plays a character named 'Wilbur,' and Slim Pickens plays a character named 'Tex'?

New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?

The racing is spectacular, especially when you consider director Courtney Solomon’s claim that no CGI was used in the crash scenes... Solomon wanted to put the audience in the middle of events and inside the car; he certainly does pull that off. Believe me, your head will spin. After a while it all becomes mind-numbing.

The Tax Collector is an underachieving, exceedingly violent urban gangster film with a meandering storyline and a contrived final twist.

While the actors do a yeoman’s job in presenting their characters with aplomb (especially Jesse Metcalfe, as Wesley’s lawyer), the entire film simply comes off as a two-hour, jazzed-up movie version of a sermon.

You wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with these insufferably juvenile jerks, let alone an entire movie.

Blame It On Rio has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze.

Doesn't have anything wrong with it that couldn't be fixed by adding Ebenezer Scrooge and Bad Santa to the cast. It's a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end.

The actors cannot be faulted. They bring more to the story than it really deserves.

It's a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.

The only thing more insane and contrived than the Big Reveal is the epilogue, which contains not one but two maddeningly bizarre developments that are beyond strange and inconsistent, even for a movie that’s been strange and inconsistent all along.

Well, you can't fault the actors. That must mean it's the fault of the writer and director. Take is a monotonous slog through dirgeland, telling a story that seems strung out beyond all reason, with flashbacks upon flashbacks delaying interminably the underwhelming climax.

This whole movie is crazy, with all sorts of well-known folks stumbling and bumbling about in search of a character. At times Reach Me is undeniably intriguing, mostly because it’s just so weird and disconnected. Eventually, though, it just becomes tiresome.

The movie doesn't understand that embarrassment comes in a sudden painful flush of realization; drag it out, and it's not embarrassment anymore, but public humiliation, which is a different condition, and not funny.

Gun Shy is a loud bang signifying nothing, a tired and second-rate actioner — and an embarrassing resume entry for the likes of Antonio Banderas (“Desperado,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and Olga Kurylenko (“Oblivion,” “Quantum of Solace”).

This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater.

House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.

This one's several cabins down from the original Bill Murray crowd-pleaser, with gross-out and make-out gags misfiring in tedious succession. [26 Jul 1992, p.6]

Assembles the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

If Dirty Grandpa isn’t the worst movie of 2016, I have some serious cinematic torture in my near future.

It’s just a muddled, overcrowded, trigger-happy heist movie brimming with clichés while constantly trying our patience.