The movie doesn't work. It meanders and drifts and riffs.

What makes the movie work, to the degree that it does, are the performances by Turman, Lou Gossett and Joan Pringle.

Nanjiani and Bautista are terrific together, but Stuber also benefits from a quartet of wonderful actresses who are all effective despite limited screen time.

It's a simple, wholesome parable, crashingly obvious, and we sit patiently while the characters and the screenplay slowly arrive at the inevitable conclusion. It needs to take some chances and surprise us.

For those looking for non-stop action, pretty dazzling special effects and solid acting by the young protagonists, Insurgent will not disappoint.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

Empty at its core, Raising Cain is a deeply cynical, spiteful effort by a director who seems to be both punishing himself for Bonfiregate and sticking his tongue out at those who turned on him when it threatened to become his last train to Hollywood. [07 Aug 1992, p.33]

[Harris and Franco] bring out the finest in each other as they punch and counter-punch vastly different memories of horrific incidents from the past. It’s great stuff. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the The Adderall Diaries is overwrought, convoluted and irritating.

Force Ten honors all the obligatory clichés, and then there's a nice twist involving the explosion inside the dam, and then we get the special effects, and then it's over. It doesn't leave much of an impression; a director like Guy Hamilton, a graduate of four of the Bond pictures, can turn out action movies like this in his sleep. This time, alas, that's apparently what he did.

As the plot twists grow increasingly ridiculous and some of the main characters have to act like complete idiots just to keep the story rambling along, “Fatale” commits the crime of somehow becoming tedious and dull even as the body count piles up.

The target audience for Phantasm II obviously is teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.

Every frame of the film is bursting with sensory overload information, from the shaky, hand-held camera angles to the constant scrolling of viewer messages to the occasional use of split screens.

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.

Finally, a sci-fi action mega-movie filled with CGI battles in which barely distinguishable foes hurl each other about while delivering unspeakably corny lines, as we hear hip-hop hits on the soundtrack.

Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.

The movie is, in short, your money's worth, better than we expect, more fun than we deserve.

Big Top Pee-wee is as guileless and cheerful as Pee-wee’s first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s not as magical. It has too much plot, somehow, and not enough wide-eyed discovery in which everything is new to Pee-wee every moment of his life. He seems almost from Earth in this movie.

Transcendence is a bold, beautiful, sometimes confounding flight of futuristic speculation firmly rooted in the potential of today’s technology.

South of Heaven devolves into a rote thriller, with henchmen upon henchmen upon henchmen falling by the wayside until the inevitable showdown — which plays out in underwhelming fashion.

Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.

There’s not much difference between this nudity-packed yet remarkably dull crime drama and the ’90s-vintage, sleazy pay-cable erotic thrillers it’s referencing, if not emulating.

The Internship is the movie version of a goofy dog that knows only a few tricks but keeps on looking at you and wagging his tail, daring you not to like him. Down, boy. You win.

Run, don’t walk, away from any temptation you might have to see the off-putting, unfunny, clunky and cartoonishly terrible would-be mob comedy “Mafia Mamma,” which is so lacking in subtlety, cohesion and humor, it makes “Murder Mystery 2” seem like a Rian Johnson thriller.

A depressingly uninspired superhero adventure sequel that leans heavily on plot points and battle sequences we’ve seen in at least a dozen other films in the genre — and almost always done better.

The Ice Road is what we used to call a B-movie, but there’s no shame in a B-movie that carries out its mission with such competence and star power.

The poems can be read. The film must stand on its own, apart from the poems, and I'm afraid it doesn't. One admires the energy and inventiveness that Holland, Thewlis and DiCaprio put into the film, but one would prefer to be admiring it from afar.

Inferno delivers as an engaging thriller that I frankly enjoyed far more than Howard’s last Brown outing.

An unconvincing, harmless action movie that at its best moments is a pale echo of "Raiders."