This chance to warm the hearts of put-upon overweight kids ends up saying next to nothing, and that's a big, fat shame.[18 Feb 1995, p.21]

Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare office.

If The Way West does not wholly succeed as drama, it is at least a well-made and wholly professional Hollywood Western. Western fans, myself included, might enjoy it for that alone. Widmark and Mitchum are excellent in roles unusual for them and Douglas, as always, is a seasoned old hand.

It’s sloppy to the point of distraction — not that the forced hijinks and ridiculous storylines are actually worthy of our attention.

It's a high-gloss version of a Hong Kong action picture, made in America but observing the exuberance of a genre where surfaces are everything.

It’s almost as if Halloween Kills is an inconsistent, sloppy mess.

First-time feature director Dante Ariola (working from a script by Becky Johnson) has a good feel for these characters and keeps things moving along at a brisk pace.

The movie is afraid to be - yes - Politically Incorrect. It isn't really critical of anybody's behavior, and it sketches its campus fringe groups in broad, defanged generalizations. Beneath its facade of contemporary politics, it's another formula film in which the kids want to party and get drunk, and the adults are fuddy-duddies.

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious.

The idea of taking a mid-1980s screenplay by the Coens’ and marrying it to a very different story, penned by Clooney and Heslov, does not work. We might have had two quite good, independent features, if those scripts had been produced into two different movies. Instead, we are presented with quite the sad mishmash of ideas here.

In its finest moments, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is swift and clever and exhilarating. At its low points, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword plays like a cheesy B-movie, with ridiculous monsters and unintentionally laugh-inducing moments.

Lots of sight gags and one-liners are attempted, but few of them succeed. The cast is talented but stranded in weak material.

Princess Kaiulani is much remembered in Hawaii, much forgotten on the mainland, and the subject of this interesting but creaky biopic.

Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.

This is transcendently goofy. It isn't a "good" movie in the usual sense (or most senses), but it is jolly and good-natured, and Michael Caine and Dwayne Johnson are among the most likable of actors.

The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.

For Keeps is an intriguing movie that succeeds in creating believable characters, keeping them alive, and steering them more or less safely past the cliches that are inevitable with this kind of material. It’s a movie with heart, and that compensates for a lot of the predictability.

Neeson never phones in his performances, but he’s particularly invested this time around, playing a guy who can be a pure killing machine one moment, and as lost as a child the next. Pearce and Bellucci headline the terrific supporting cast, and the 78-year-old Campbell proves he can still direct the hell out of a slick and engrossing thriller.

Mad Money is astonishingly casual for a movie about three service workers who steal millions from a Federal Reserve Bank. There is little suspense, no true danger; their plan is simple, the complications are few, and they don't get excited much beyond some high-fives and hugs and giggles.

A cheerful comedy with just enough dark moments to create the illusion it's really about something.

The movie doesn't develop, alas, with the patience and restraint of the earlier film.

The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.

The popular singer-songwriter Camila Cabello makes her acting debut as the titular character, and she’s a revelation, as the camera loves her and she displays not only the expected vocal chops but a real knack for comedy, as this version of Cinderella is particularly charming when she’s floundering about and getting into embarrassing situations of her own making.

So concerned with being a film that it forgets to be a movie.

It's a total miscalculation from beginning to end, inspired by an idiotic decision to increase the average age of the Benji audience by starring him in a movie rated PG.

The harder everyone tries to wring laughs out of the next hail of bullets or the next ridiculous plot twist or the next comedic decapitation, the duller the edge of the humor.

"Clerks" spoke with the sure, clear voice of an original filmmaker. In Mallrats the voice is muffled, and we sense instead advice from the tired, the establishment, the timid and other familiar Hollywood executive types.

Gator is yet another Good Ol' Movie, and not, I fear, the summer's last. If only it had a Good Ol' Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol' movie.