America's Sweethearts recycles "Singin' in the Rain" but lacks the sassy genius of that 1952 musical, which is still the best comedy ever made about Hollywood.

Far and Away is a movie that joins astonishing visual splendor with a story so simple-minded it seems intended for adolescents.

Beneath its glossy surface, this is nothing more than a cheap parlor trick, with heavy-handed messaging about female empowerment, and a final act that is neither surprising nor remotely plausible, and not nearly as shocking as it was surely intended to be.

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.

National Treasure is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

For a movie called The Marksman, we rarely Jim actually demonstrating his marksmanship, as we’re left with Neeson again doing extended, hand-to-hand combat with a much younger, cockier foe who has no idea what he’s up against.

From time to time you’ll laugh and maybe shed a tear But this isn’t the kind of “Grinch” you’ll want to see each year.

If the movie is not original, at least it's a showcase for the actors and writers. It does not speak as well, alas, for director Jordan Melamed and his cinematographer, Nick Hay.

The movie creates such an urgent situation, and fills it with such interesting characters, that when everything goes wrong at the end I felt more than disappointed, I felt cheated.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

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 Higgins performance owes more than a little to Fred Willard's unforgettable dog show commentary in "Best in Show," but it was clear that Willard was part of a telecast.

The movie is simply not clear about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. It is heavy on episode and light on insight, and although it takes courage to bring up touchy topics it would have taken more to treat them frankly.

Director Peter MacDonald keeps the action exploding across the screen, building to a climactic game of "chicken" between Rambo in a Russian tank and the Soviet commander in a helicopter. Gung-ho Rambo fans won't be disappointed. [25 May 1988, p.43]

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

Both the lottery scene and the anti-union material seem to be fictionalized versions of material in the powerful documentary "Waiting for Superman," which covered similar material with infinitely greater depth.

At times The Girl in the Spider’s Web almost feels like a superhero movie, with Lisbeth as Bat Girl.

On a few occasions it's very funny, but it never quite goes over the top and gets the big laughs it is obviously aiming for.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

A dim-witted but visually intriguing movie.

Fire Down Below might be dumb, but it's not suicidal. [7 Sept 1997, p.46]

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.

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care.

The more I think about Simon Magus, the less I'm sure what it's trying to say.

Stiller is very good at playing this kind of character. The issue is whether we’re tired of him playing this kind of character.

Over all, Noelle is subpar — but it’s silly, harmless fun. It’s so forgettable it’ll be virtually erased from your memory five minutes after the end credits roll.

With Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx as the lead pups, Strays delivers a handful of solid chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments — but it’s a premise that turns out to be awfully thin for a feature-length film.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.