What could have been a great B-movie winds up being merely solid.

Last Man Standing is such a desperately cheerless film, so dry and laconic and wrung out, that you wonder if the filmmakers ever thought that in any way it could be ... fun.

The heart of the film is in the performances of Danes and Beckinsale after they're sent to prison.

A sweet film, mildly pleasant to watch, but it's not worth the trip or even a detour.

Might be fun for younger teenagers who want to be reassured that people in their 30s still behave like younger teenagers.

Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.

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.

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

If you liked the original, the best way to preserve that memory is to stay away from this sequel.

Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.

There is something not quite right about the film itself.

Anything is possible in the world of “The Union.” I mean, anything.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon takes the tepid achievement of "Twilight" (1988), guts it, and leaves it for undead.

Still, in large part due to the stellar work from Depp and Whitaker, this is a valuable and somewhat illuminating look back at the senseless, stunning killings of two rap icons just six months apart.

There’s always been something a bit ridiculous about the whole Tarzan premise, and while the talented cast and a solid director make for a serviceable and intermittently entertaining adventure, there’s very little about this film that screams, YOU GOTTA SEE THIS.

As Karla turns into Super Mom, brushing off multiple car accidents and more than one attempt on her life, Kidnap provides some easy applause-getting moments but grows increasingly over-the-top.

Achieves something that is uncommonly difficult. It is a spiritual movie with the power to emotionally touch believers, agnostics and atheists -- in that descending order, I suspect.

An excruciatingly cheesy, hopelessly dated, profoundly unfunny and tone-deaf romantic comedy about an intelligent, hard-working, likable and lovely woman.

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.

Directed with action-movie aplomb by Tom Harper (“The Aeronauts,” “Peaky Blinders”) and featuring great-looking visuals from settings including London; Lisbon, Portugal; South Tyrol, Italy; Morocco, and Reykjavik, Iceland, “Heart of Stone” is clearly intended to jump-start an action franchise for Gadot, and it’s off to a promising start.

It’s bigger, louder and dumber than the original—filled with cartoon violence, only occasionally funny dialogue and a group of suspects/victims not nearly as intriguing as the bunch from the first film.

For all the outlandish style and heaps of energy in Nowhere, Araki's most expensive and mainstream film, it can be reduced to one big pessimistic shriek. How do you spell Life is a bummer? Apparently, by never shutting up. [06 June 1997, p.32]

Clever trappings aside, Brightburn is filmed mostly as a horror movie, with the monster lurking just around the corner or pounding on the door as the dopey victims behave just like all the other dopey victims in forgettable slasher films.

Innocent Blood is an uncomfortable marriage of vampires and mobsters; it doesn't work on either the supernatural or the criminal level. The payoff, in which the gangsters find that they've become vampires, is an exercise in missed opportunities. More's the pity, then, that the movie contains an intriguing character in Marie, a vampire who is woman enough to spare at least one man from her fangs.

No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.

On the stage, it could be a powerful and moving work. As a movie, it’s a sometimes effective but more often tedious history lesson.

Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, Pain Hustlers aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.

The mechanics of the final showdown are unexpected and yet show an undeniable logic, and are sold by the acting skills of Willis and Pollak.