What might have been a slick, smash-mouth, fast-paced piece of entertainment clocking in at 90 or 100 minutes somehow turns into a bloated, half-baked pie that drags on for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Daylight is the cinematic equivalent of a golden oldies station, where you never encounter anything you haven't grown to love over the years.

The result is just a bigger, louder, more special effects-laden extension of a franchise that skated on pretty thin ice the first two times around.

The fine actors onscreen are mere accessories to the computerized puppets thrashing and slashing and stabbing and biting and roaring and breaking stuff all over the place before only one of them is left standing. Sigh.

McKinnon has so much energy and creativity she nearly jumps out of the frame. It’s an uneven performance with mixed results — but we’re left hoping she’ll be matched up with a better film role sometime soon, one that makes full use of her unique talents.

Less lighthearted than one would expect from a film that stars a dog, "Fluke" works on the "aw, how cute" level but fails when it waxes poetic about the way humans don't realize their failures until they experience the animal's point of view. [02 Jun 1995, p.31]

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.

Begins with a thought-provoking idea from Philip K. Dick, exploits it for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it.

Spacey does what can be done with the material, but it never achieves takeoff velocity.

This is a classic example of a well-made, big-budget action movie that is less than the sum of its parts.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

Not realizing that Inkheart is based on a famous fantasy novel, I had the foolish hope the movie might be about books. No luck. Wait till you hear what it's about.

This forgettable film is too rough for younger kids and too stupid for the grown-ups.

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

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

There is a reason to see the movie, and that reason is Piper Perabo.

The Identical evangelizes and entertains with sincere mediocrity. If the style is unremarkably mainstream, the message is theologically murky.

From start to finish, Hunter Killer is all wet.

The movie is too pat and practiced to really be convincing, and the progress of Ariel's relationships with the two grumps seems dictated mostly by the needs of the screenplay. But Matthau and Lemmon are fun to see together, if for no other reason than just for the essence of their beings.

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

Has an intriguing cast, a director who knows how to use his camera and a lot of sly humor. Shame about the story. When you see this many of the right elements in a lame movie, you wonder how close they came to making a better one.

It’s fascinating and boring, intriguing and exasperating, but ultimately it felt like a jambalaya of ideas that didn’t quite mesh into a satisfying experience.

After an initially promising first half-hour, it’s a long and tedious slog to the finish line as we follow a group of paper-thin caricatures who are only mildly interesting and intermittently funny.

Hart delivers a sincere and relatively low-key performance as Dell, but he’s playing an all-too-familiar movie stereotype.

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

Russell Crowe is an A-list star in a B-movie, but to his credit it never feels as if he’s slumming it.

It is admirable and well-made, but unutterably depressing and unredeemed by any glimmer of hope.