This is the kind of movie where you can anticipate the next big shock and it usually arrives right on cue, and yet it still gets you right in the gut.

It's not the romcom that's so entertaining, anyway; it's the slapstick.

It is exciting to watch this movie. It is never boring. Lee is like a juggler who starts out with balls and gradually adds baseball bats, top hats and chainsaws. It's not an intellectual experience, but an emotional one.

This is a would-be comedy that's not as funny (nor as satirical) as the movies that inspired it.

The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture.

Much of the “humor” in Daddy’s Home 2 is of questionable taste at best.

The movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.

I've seen comedies with fewer laughs than Body of Evidence, and this is a movie that isn't even trying to be funny. It's an excruciatingly incompetent entry in the Basic Instinct genre, filled with lines that only a screenwriter could love, and burdened with a plot that confuses mystery with confusion.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

There's a point at which the plot crosses an invisible line, becoming so preposterous that it's no longer moving and is just plain weird.

Through superhuman effort of the will, I did not walk out of The Hot Chick, but reader, I confess I could not sit through the credits.

The movie is a paid holiday for its director, Harold Becker. I say this because I know what Becker is capable of.

The movie itself is genial and unfocused and tired.

The Condemned is nothing but a creaky façade.

In the stylishly directed but gratuitously nasty and cliché-riddled Peppermint, Garner plays essentially two characters cut from the same person.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.

I felt too much of the movie consisted of groups of characters I didn't care about, running down passageways and fighting off enemies and trying to get back to the present before the window of time slams shut.

The movie is so filled with action that dramatic conflict would be more than we could handle, so all of the characters are nice.

The interlocking stories are theoretically about people whose lives are associated; that worked in "Crash." Here the connections seem less immediate and significant, and so the movie sometimes seems based on a group of separate short stories.

A fast-paced sequel with some appeal for young video gamers, but without the eye-opening qualities of the first "Lawnmower Man." [17 Jan 1996, p.38]

Given the considerable comedic talents of Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Adam Scott et al., and the ragged, what-the-hell charms of the original “Hot Tub Time Machine,” it’s surprising how rotten this movie is from start to finish.

It's not that I don't like it. It's that I don't care.

The whole movie is so solemn, so worshipful toward its theme, that it's finally just silly.

Invasion U.S.A. is a brain-damaged, idiotic thriller, not even bad enough to be laughable.

The Mean One has a handful of inspired lines, e.g., “Time to roast this beast!” but the production values, editing, score and photography are average at best, and we’re left with a film that will be remembered mostly for a cleverly twisted marketing hook.

Has the added inconvenience of being dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python.

This is an unholy mess — a jumbled, tone-deaf satire in which seemingly vital characters are introduced and then inexplicably disappear, never to return; superb actors disappoint by relying on old tricks they’ve used to much better effect in much better films, and every attempt at political commentary comes across as ham-handed and naïve.

It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not nearly as self-deprecating and funny as it needed to be.