All of the characters are treated sincerely and played in a straightforward style. It's just that we don't love them enough.

Director Peter MacDonald keeps the action exploding across the screen, building to a climactic game of "chicken" between Rambo in a Russian tank and the Soviet commander in a helicopter. Gung-ho Rambo fans won't be disappointed. [25 May 1988, p.43]

No Such Thing is inexplicable, shapeless, dull. It doesn't even rise to entertaining badness.

The film's redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.

A delightful surprise because despite all the backstage drama, this is a movie that tells stories that work -- is charming, is moving, is funny and looks professional.

But genre fans likely will enjoy Bordello of Blood, which delivers lots of dazzling special effects by Available Light Ltd., including exploding bodies galore.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.

The first half of License to Drive, which is mostly concerned with taking the lessons and passing the test and getting the license, is very funny. The second half, which is mostly an extended chase scene in which a hapless teenager's grandfather's Cadillac is wrecked by a drunk, is much more predictable.

Can't Buy Me Love makes American teenagers look like stupid and materialistic twits. That would be all right if the movie were aware of itself and knew what it was doing - if it were a satirical comment on our society. But this movie is as naive as the day is long. It doesn't have a thought in its head and probably no notion of the corruption at its core.

Why Stop Now takes large themes much manhandled as movie cliches, and treats them with care and respect. It likes the characters. So did I.

Maybe after years of banging his head against the system Friedkin decided with The Guardian to make a frankly commercial exploitation film. On the level of special effects and photography, The Guardian is indeed well made. But give us a break.

It’s almost astonishing how unfunny this movie is, given the talents of primary cast members Ed Helms, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin and David Alan Grier. They’re all troupers and they dive headfirst into the material, but the dialogue they’re delivering and the situations they’re mired in make it impossible to wring even a smile, let alone a legitimate laugh, from the material.

There's not a song I wouldn't hear again with pleasure, or a clip that might not make me smile, but as a whole, it's not much. Like cotton candy, it's better as a concept than as an experience.

I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences.

Clouseau is Alan Arkin this time, instead of Peter Sellers, and it's hard to say whether we gain or lose. Arkin flounders a little in the stiff French accent he inherited from Sellers. But in his movements and timing, he's Sellers' equal.

Oh, God! Book II qualifies as a sequel only because of its title and the irreplaceable presence of George Burns in the title role. Otherwise, it seems to have lost faith in the film it's based on.

The mishmash of filmmaking makes it clear this was a movie made by committee — and clearly that committee was composed of folks who were not all on the same page when it came to spinning what could have been a much more engaging piece of fantasy storytelling.

Grudge Match does not work on any level. The story is unconvincing. The comedy elements are weak... And, worst of all, the acting in most scenes — particularly those involving Sylvester Stallone and Kim Basinger — is atrocious.

In the case of the awkwardly titled, swing-and-a-big-miss workplace comedy A Happening of Monumental Proportions, there are numerous scenes so tone-deaf, so off-putting and fundamentally unsound in structure and dialogue, the execution of those sequences is doomed from the get-go.

Possibly the best movie that could be made about Toby Young that isn't rated NC-17.

The movie is "Dawn of the Dead" crossed with "John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars," with zombies not as ghoulish as the first and trains not as big as the second. The movie does however have Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez.

There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

My Blue Heaven: a funny, sometimes insightful look at what life might be like when a hardened criminal is plunked down in middle-class suburbia. [20 Aug 1990, p.23]

Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code -- a dumbed-down "Top Gun" crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from "2001."

Basically just a 98-minute trailer for the autumn launch of a new series on the Cartoon Network.

In its use of locations and sets, it's an impressive achievement by director Dean Wright, whose credits include some of the effects on the "Lord of the Rings" films. If it had not hewed so singlemindedly to the Catholic view and included all religions under the banner of religious liberty, I believe it would have been more effective.

Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world, but as he flounders his way through Venom, we’re reminded even the finest talents can sink under the weight of a terrible movie.

This is not a great movie, but it's very watchable and has some good laughs. The casting of Aniston is crucial, because she's the heroine of this story, and the way it's put together there's danger of her becoming the shuttlecock. Aniston has the presence to pull it off.