An Acceptable Loss is a B-movie with some A-level acting, particularly by Tika Sumpter.

How can you forgive a movie that begins by asking you to care who will win freedom, and ends by asking you to care who will win a fight?

When Chase bothers to actually play a character, he can be very effective (his "Funny Farm" was one of the best comedies of 1988). But sometimes he seems to be covering himself, playing detached so that nobody can blame him if the comedy doesn't work. In this film he seems to have no emotions at all; consider the scene where he discovers that the woman he made love with has died during the night.

Act of Valor is gift-wrapped in patriotism. It was once intended as a recruitment film, and that's how it plays.

Rocky IV is movie-making by the numbers. Even the climactic fight scene isn't as exciting as it should be, maybe because we know with a certainty born of long experience how it will turn out.

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Michelle Darnell was a hilarious onstage comedic creation. On film, she is a flimsy, one-dimensional, tiresome character, surrounded by equally unconvincing and unfunny players.

Tony Hale took neurotic brilliance to the next level on Arrested Development and then Veep, and he’s squarely in his comfort zone playing another cringe-inducing, socially awkward and hilariously tone-deaf character in the offbeat charmer Eat Wheaties!, one of the most endearing movies about light stalking you’ll ever see.

Every once in a while there’s an inspired montage, or a one-liner that made me laugh out loud. But how can you have the great Christoph Waltz playing a villain in a comedy, and you get almost nothing out of it?

Final Analysis is the kind of movie that's a lot more fun to look at than to think about. Maybe that's the point.

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’s arguably the weakest, lamest and least memorable entry in the history of the franchise. It’s also crass and tone-deaf. And played mostly for laughs that are few and far between.

The actors cast themselves adrift on the sinking vessel of this story and go down with the ship.

Derailed has a great setup, a good middle passage and some convincing performances. Then it runs off the tracks.

A movie with an impenetrable plot that nevertheless has its moments.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

Did I care if Largo Winch won his struggle for control of Winch International? Not at all. Did I care about him? No, because all of his action and dialogue were shunted into narrow corridors of movie formulas.

Suicide Squad does have its moments of beautiful comic-book visuals.... Those are just tantalizing hints of a better movie that never materialized.

Now comes the loony, murky and muddled sci-fi action semi-thriller 65, with A-list star Adam Driver and the talented writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who collaborated with John Krasinski on “A Quiet Place”) taking a detour through B-Movie Lane in a film that isn’t compelling enough to make for silly popcorn entertainment but isn’t terrible enough to be labeled a disaster.

The filmmakers must have known they were not making a good movie, but they didn't use that as an excuse to be boring and lazy. Barb Wire has a high energy level, and a sense of deranged fun.

Directed with claustrophobic, docudrama-style intensity by Derrick Borte (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Forte) and featuring a career-best dramatic performance by Gaffigan, American Dreamer is a dark and intense and sometimes brutally violent slice of rotted life.

If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.

It is the kind of movie one enjoys more at 8, or even 12, than at 16 and up.

I am recommending a movie that I do not seem to like very much. But part of the pleasure of moviegoing is pure spectacle -- of just sitting there and looking at great stuff and knowing it looks terrific. There wasn't much Schumacher could have done with the story or the music he was handed, but in the areas over which he held sway, he has triumphed.

It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie (with cinematography by the legendary Roger Deakins) that aims for the fences again and again in the course of 149 minutes — but nearly every one of those mighty cuts is a swing and a miss.

The movie never takes off; it's a bright idea the filmmakers were unable to breathe life into.

The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

Trippy and entertaining mind-bender.

Father Stu breaks no new ground in the biopic game, but it’s a solid and worthy tribute to the real-life Father Stu, who continued to do the Lord’s work until his death in 2014 at the age of 50.