Beloved evokes some of the fine moments in the careers of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, but it doesn't re-create them.

Sure, it’s fun to see the Governator and the Italian Stallion he-manning it up together feature-length for the first time — the screen is barely big enough to contain the two of them — but the prison-break movie Escape Plan is unworthy of the momentous occasion.

The movie's problem is that it loads the casting in a way that tilts the movie in the direction of a Harlequin romance.

Sure, we get the obligatory slapstick dog-shtick in the form of overturned food carts and disastrous dinner scenes and wacky chases, and there are some uplifting moments — but the overall mood of Lasse Hallstrom’s pup-point-of-view film is … melancholy, sometimes even grim.

It's nice enough, it's sweet, I loved LaPaglia's work, but there's nothing compelling here.

A mushy and limp musical fantasy, so insubstantial it keeps evaporating before our eyes. It's one of those rare movies in which every scene seems to be the final scene; it's all ends and no beginnings, right up to its actual end, which is a cheat.

An ordinary film with ordinary characters in a story too big for it. Life has been reduced to a Lifetime movie.

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

So determined to be clever and whimsical that it neglects to be anything else.

My problem with Borstal Boy isn't so much with the facts as with the tone.

Whenever Pacific Rim Uprising gives itself the chance to do something fresh or unique or original, it passes up that opportunity to embrace the cliché.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is as violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises -- a real Grand Guignol of a movie. It’s also without any apparent purpose, unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose. And yet in its own way, the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it’s well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

Watching this film was a cheerless exercise for me. The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.

Instant Family has heart and good intentions. It’s a shame the journey is such a bumpy ride as it takes us all over the map.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it's disgusting.

There's a way to make a movie like The Tourist, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't find that way.

Despite the best efforts of McGovern et al., The Chaperone is lightweight trifle.

It wants to be a movie in search of a truth, but it's more like a movie in search of itself.

The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.

A Burning Hot Summer failed to persuade me of any reason for its existence.

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

The movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.

If you’re a Chiefs fan, you’ll probably get a kick of out the whole thing.

Clocking in at a slow-jog time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, filled with howlingly bad CGI creations, green-screen scenes that would have looked rudimentary in the early 2000s and clunky dialogue, “Kraven” doesn’t even provide much in the way of camp value. It’s just an undercooked pile of steaming mediocrity.

I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own.

The numerous sex scenes are so uninteresting and devoid of creativity or plot advancement, even the actors participating in said encounters seem bored.

Overcrowded and overwritten, with too many shrill denunciations and dramatic surprises; we don't like the characters and, worse, they don't interest us.