The baseball action isn't very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing.

Berenger, McNamara and Eleniak perform what was demanded from them within the confines of the flimsy script. The story, though, is painfully short on laughs, never building a foundation for the attachments forged by film's end. [26 Apr 1994, p.30]

Careening wildly from the black comedy tone of the aforementioned sequences to deadly serious World War I battle scenes, from somber spy thriller to broad comedy, The King’s Man has little of the wickedly outrageous and subversive style of the original film as it flies this way and that and never sticks the landing.

I could not for a moment believe that this movie was intended as a plausible portrait of how casinos work, how gamblers work, and especially of how casino managers work. To enjoy this movie, you need more than a willing suspension of disbelief. You need a faith in disbelief.

Renaissance Man is a labored, unconvincing comedy that seems cobbled together out of the half-understood remnants of its betters.

Now comes Foe, which is set primarily in the year 2065 and envisions a dystopian world in which the delicate and dangerous balance between humans and sentient AI creations is the basis for a pretentious and empty cautionary tales with some interesting ideas — but it’s mostly a pile of hokey claptrap.

Bronson is a first-rate action star with a catlike grace and a nice air of menace. But here, trying to land a helicopter after only a few lessons on how to fly it, or staging a phony rape scene to distract prison guards, Bronson is given a sort of incompetency he doesn't wear well. We believe him more easily when he's strong, silent and infallible.

Directed by Peter Farrelly from a story/screenplay credited to a total of eight writers (rarely a hopeful sign), “Ricky Stanicky” has the cheerfully offensive and goofy offbeat flavor of 1990s Farrelly Brothers comedies such as “Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary,” only with most of the laughs and much of the charm MIA.

Reprising his writing/directing chores from the original, Ken Scott gives us an uneven mishmash that alternates between easy gags, shameless sentimentality and some just plain bizarre choices.

A pure thriller, all blood, no frills, in which a lot of people get shot, mostly in the head.

For all of its sensational stunts and flashes of wit, however, Last Action Hero plays more like a bright idea than like a movie that was thought through. It doesn't evoke the mystery of the barrier between audience and screen the way Woody Allen did, and a lot of the time it simply seems to be standing around commenting on itself.

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

If the movie finally doesn't work as well as it should, it may be because the material isn't a good fit for Kitano's hard-edged underlying style.

A film overgrown with so many directorial flourishes that the heroes need machetes to hack their way to within view of the audience.

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.

This is a shoddy-looking, superficial and cliché-embracing effort that misses the mark at every turn.

The beauty of Twilight Zone -- The Movie is the same as the secret of the TV series: It takes ordinary people in ordinary situations and then (can you hear Rod Serling?) zaps them with "next stop -- the Twilight Zone!"

For at least half a movie, it’s a wildly entertaining concept with some pretty good payoffs and there was a chance we’d have the best B-movie in recent memory, but then the story takes the easy way out and we’re left wondering why they didn’t ride the original idea all the way to the finish line.

The good idea: Richard Pryor plays a character who is blind, and Gene Wilder plays a character who is deaf, and once they become friends they make a great team. The possibilities for visual comedy with this idea are seemingly endless, but the movie chooses instead to plug the characters into a dumb plot about industrial espionage.

Funny Games represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to.

As earnest and heartfelt as a movie can be, Walking With the Enemy is, unfortunately, a plodding and clunky drama that never misses an opportunity to embrace a cliché.

A family movie that some will find wholesome and heartwarming and others will find cornball and tiresome. You know who you are. I know who I am. This is not my kind of movie.

An imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence.

If we don’t care a whit about the characters and their respective dilemmas, a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot is just a multiple-vortex tornado ripping through a used car lot.

And Dennis Rodman? He does a splendid job of playing a character who seems in every respect to be Dennis Rodman. He seems at home on the screen. He's confident, and in action scenes he'll occasionally do a version of the high-spirited hop-skip-and- jump he sometimes does on the court. He looks like he's having fun, and that's crucial for a movie actor. His agent should have told him, though, that if you can't be the hero, be the villain. That's always a better role than the best friend.

When I heard that John Cusack had been cast for this film, it sounded like good news: I could imagine him as Poe, tortured and brilliant, lashing out at a cruel world. But that isn't the historical Poe the movie has in mind. It is a melodramatic Poe, calling for the gifts of Nicolas Cage.

How this smart and funny man, he of the convulsive Tonight Show performances and the great Young Frankenstein, could end up putting his name on lame comedies like this one remains one of the great mysteries of the day. [28 July 1993, p.37]

The writers never solved the problem of incorporating the top-heavy special effects into their thin little plot.