The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.

There are a lot of moments to remember in The Golden Child, but the one I will treasure the longest happens when Eddie Murphy gets behind the wheel of a beat-up station wagon and is led by a sacred parakeet to the lair of the devil.

This is a nifty little gem in the heist genre, with the familiar message about the perils of greed and always wanting more and more and even more.

The Gumball Rally is an easily forgettable entertainment, but at least it has a certain amount of class. "Cannonball" was straight exploitation.

Honey doesn't have a shred of originality (except for the high-energy choreography), but there's something fundamentally reassuring about a movie that respects ancient formulas; it's like a landmark preservation program.

While the animation is quite good and the filmmakers have brought together an excellent group of actors to provide the voice talent, the storyline leaves us with a tale more reminiscent of Saturday morning kids’ programming.

Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

Problem is, there’s no movie inside this movie. It’s a breezy and intermittently entertaining and super slick work, but it’s filled with so many overly familiar notes and well-worn cliches, and there are so many winking nods to the viewer, it feels as if we’re about two rewrites away from this thing being a flat-out spoof on the level of Airplane! or Hot Shots! or Scary Movie.

[Figgis] has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience.

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.

The movie was directed by Michael Brandt, who co-wrote the script with Derek Haas. Together they wrote a much better movie, "3:10 to Yuma." The Double doesn't approach it in terms of quality. None of it is particularly compelling.

This is one of the most shocking and one of the best movies of the year.

It's hard to figure who the movie is intended for. In shape and purpose, it's like a G-rated version of "This Is Spinal Tap," but will its wee target audience understand the joke?

Firewalker is a free-form anthology of familiar images from the works of Steven Spielberg, subjected to a new process that we could call discolorization. All of the style and magic are gone, leaving only the booby-trapped temples, the steaming jungle and such lines as, if I remember correctly, "Witch, woman, harlot - I've been called them all!"

It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

A mildly entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking but ultimately ludicrous deep space thriller.

Lipstick is a nasty little item masquerading as a bold statement on the crime of rape. The statement would seem a little bolder if the movie didn't linger in violent and graphic detail over the rape itself, and then handle the vengeance almost as an afterthought.

I’m not sure there’s much more of an appetite for these inward-looking, COVID-set films anymore, but if you’re up for it, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi’s “Life Upside Down” is a slight but wryly effective, upper-class social satire with winning performances from a cast including Bob Odenkirk, Radha Mitchell and Danny Huston.

A sad-sack movie about the misery of a married couple who fight most of the time. Watching it is like taking a long trip in a small car with the Bickersons.

Crush is an Aga romance crossed with modern retro-feminist soft porn, in which liberated women discuss lust as if it were a topic and not a fact.

Cutthroat Island is everything a movie named Cutthroat Island should be, and no more. It is a pirate picture, pure and simple, and doesn't transcend its genre except perhaps in the luxurious production. Leaner and meaner pirate movies have worked more or less as well, but this one gets the job done.

There is little human interest or excitement. It isn't written that way. The music and the dialogue seem curiously even and muted, and there aren't the kinds of drama we expect in a biopic. Everyone is too restrained and discreet to expose themselves that way.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Adam DeVine’s work, he’s played variations on this same guy for nearly two decades now (he’s 39) and the man-child act is getting tiresome.

Some people will find it emotionally manipulative. Some people like to be emotionally manipulated. I do, when it's done well.

The movie’s a big, slick entertainment, relentlessly ridiculous and therefore never boring for long.

Mired in a plot of such stupidity.

One of the things I like best about Poolhall Junkies is its lack of grim desperation.

Provides an untidy and frustrating but never boring look at his life and times.