If the plot and screenplay are juvenile, the production values are first-rate, and the lead performance by newcomer Elizabeth Berkley has a fierce energy that's always interesting.

There's a point at which its enigmatic flashes of incomprehensible action grow annoying, and a point at which we realize that there's no use paying close attention, because we won't be able to figure out the film's secrets until they're explained to us.

Godzilla x King Kong: The New Empire is the definition of an old-fashioned (with new technology) popcorn movie and there’s certainly no harm in that, but at the end of the day, it feels like the stakes have never been more medium.

High School is a pun. Get it? This is one of those stoner comedies that may be funny if you're high - but if not, not.

Beyond the product placement, Marry Me is a high-concept “elevator pitch” movie that is set in present day but feels like a relic of the mid-1990s.

The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

This is a surprisingly and disappointingly tame film, in which Morris is almost deferential to Bannon.

There's plenty of good travelogue in moving among Africa, Spain and the French Riviera. But director Henry King plods again. [18 Feb 1999, p.31]

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

As Hollywood experiments go, the new black comedy by Robert Zemeckis has more than its share of witty lines, sight gags and special effects. But even while you're appreciating its better moments, the cast is numbing them with their Arctic charm. [31 July 1992, p.43]

Faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.

The problem may be that the movie isn’t nearly tough enough. It needs to be more hard-boiled, more merciless in its dissection of egos, more perceptive about the cutthroat nature of show business.

This particular “Blacklight” is pure, overblown, cliché-riddled fiction.

Knight of Cups is a ponderous affair, never taking 30 seconds to make a point when four minutes is available.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

This remake was a bad idea that only got worse.

Movie magic is an elusive thing. A Wrinkle in Time is a bold film that takes big chances from start to finish, in a courageous effort to be something special.... But for all its scenes of characters flying and soaring and zooming here and there, it never really takes off.

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent.

What's strange about Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is that it abandons most of what people liked about the first movie and replaces it with a formula as old as the hills.

This movie just recycles "Grease," without the stars, without the energy, without the freshness and without the grease.

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.

Is this some kind of a test? The Hangover, Part II plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness.

It isn't bad so much as it lacks any ambition to be more than it so obviously is.

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

So many great actors, cast adrift by a script that feels incomplete and a brilliant director delivering one of his lesser works.

The movie unleashes all sorts of considerations it doesn’t really deal with, and the material edges closer to horror than it probably intends.

The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.

There's only one character we can identify with - a San Francisco police detective played by David Caruso - and he doesn't drive the plot so much as get swept along by it.