[Lillard's] performance dominates the film, and he does a subtle, tricky job of being both an obnoxious punk and a kid in search of his direction in life. He's very good.

The most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is.

Compared with the sensational stunts and special effects in the Bond series, The Saint seems positively leisurely. The fight scenes go on too long and are not interesting, the villains aren't single-minded enough, and the Saint seems more like a disguise fetishist than a formidable international operative.

This is a stupid, silly, freewheeling mix of music, comedy and blood that kills.

Life with Mikey is a good-hearted retread of many other movies about friendship between a hapless adult and a wise child.

Just as Whannell breathed new life into the story of “The Invisible Man” in 2020, he offers a fresh and grotesquely chilling take on the well-trodden storyline of the man who becomes ... something else.

Nothing at all is surprising about Next Generation except how enjoyable it is. It won't become a classic, but is quite a hoot, like the cockamamie Motel Hell, as funny as it is frightening. [29 Aug 1997, p.32]

A movie that doesn't buy into all the tenets of our national sports religion; the subtext is that winning isn't everything.

Not an extraordinary movie. In its workmanship it aspires not to be remarkable but to be well made, dependable, moving us because of the hurt in the hero's eyes.

Duke and his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, don't make Hoodlum into a violent action film, though it has its bloody shoot-outs, but into more of a character study.

While Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, an earnest account of the world’s worst industrial accident, certainly has its heart in the right place, it’s not good that the closing titles about the cold, brutal facts of the aftermath stir more outrage than the preceding docudrama.

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen.

The courtroom scenes are unapologetically over-the-top and sometimes excruciatingly exact in the details of the murder, but you won’t soon forget Franco’s expertly nuanced performance. It’s as good as any work I’ve seen in a film in 2015, and True Story is one of the better movies to come along this year.

I found Road Hard to be a low-key gem, a consistently funny albeit conventional story about a guy who’s almost always the funniest person in the room, and is almost always his own worst enemy.

For me, Happy Feet Two is pretty thin soup. The animation is bright and attractive, the music gives the characters something to do, but the movie has too much dialogue in the areas of philosophy and analysis.

Even on my most Ebenezer of days, I wouldn’t have been able to resist this sentimental journey.

If you respond to film noir, if you like dark streets and women with scarlet lips and big fast cars with running boards, the look of this movie will work some kind of magic. The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.

A first-rate post-World War I drama with a heavy dose of sentiment and a gripping storyline.

They (fans) know what they enjoy. They don't want no damn movies with damn surprises. I am always pleased when moviegoers have a good time; perhaps they will return to a theater and someday see a good movie by accident, and it will start them thinking.

The Marvels has a kind of 1990s B-movie vibe throughout and is neither as funny nor as engaging and warm as it tries to be, despite the best efforts of the talented director Nia DaCosta (2021’s “Candyman”) and a trio of gifted and enormously likable leads in Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani.

The movie is rated R, but it's the most watery R I've seen. It's more of a PG-13 playing dress-up.

Considering how tidy and self-aware most such Hollywood projects are, any movie that can give Phillips' Mexican-Indian a monologue in which he painfully recounts the massacre only he survived and then blithely rejoices in idiot gunfire is a movie you have to respect. [12 Aug 1988, p.35]

This is a well-made, topical thriller with a top-notch cast — but the script and the directorial/editing choices undercut nearly every pivotal scene, and every plot twist we can see coming two scenes in advance.

Despite an excellent ensemble cast of comedic treasures as well as veterans of drama taking a walk down a lighter aisle, A.C.O.D (i.e. Adult Children of Divorce) delivers only a few sporadic chuckles amidst a slew of clunky scenes.

The only true horror about Clive Barker's Hellraiser III is that this movie was ever made. It is the worst of the series, offering nothing but cheap scare scenes, a weird message about healing the wounds of the Vietnam War and sex scenes too explicit for kids. The acting is soap-opera shallow. [22 Sep 1992, p.33]

The movie exudes a sense of authenticity, of a subject researched well. The major difference, however, between "Network" and "Power" is that "Network" had a plot and "Power" does not.

The Black Windmill commits the one crime no thriller can be pardoned for. It's not thrilling. It's also terribly passive and static, and Siegel directs Caine almost to a standstill.

Perry tries to be faithful to the play and also to his own boldly and simply told stories, and the two styles don't fit together.