Such a sour, mindlessly inflated experience that seeing it may temporarily put you off historical movies.

Even overlooking the fundamental inanity of the movie, one is left to contend with some offensive racial stereotyping.

A movie best suited for a lazy afternoon or a languorous night, particularly if you're a Francophile. Charming, glamorous, emotionally suggestive but slight, it's full of beautiful and colorful people.

Macabre, oddly gripping.

Despite an overly broad third act, one can't fault the film's message of family unity, underscored by a memorable use of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love."

The film has a persistent and careful sheen. It looks good. It is, in fact, preoccupied with looking good. If this sounds like faint praise, I'm afraid it is.

Are teenagers really supposed to identify with a clumsy caricature such as Charlie, who, in spite of all his expulsions and school crimes, comes across as a gawping, perpetually surprised infant in an adult body?

An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.

The title of The Hunting Party doesn’t evoke much in particular. “War Correspondents Gone WILD!” would be more like it if the film itself--messy, but fairly stimulating--had more of the scamp in its soul.

Gere and Binoche are both terribly miscast--one far too charismatic, the other far too dowdy, which is something for Juliette Binoche. And the spelling bees? Dull. Dreary.

A grim and fairly effective cross between "The Martian" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"?

So how's this "Thor" sequel? It's fairly entertaining. Same old threats of galaxy annihilation, spiced with fish-out-of-water jokes.

As with so much of this director’s work, I’m in the middle on Beast, though its efficient running time puts it a notch above. Like many of his previous films, this one has the advantage of modest scale and a passing interest in human resourcefulness under extreme duress. It has also the disadvantage of spectacle that is more technical than artistic.

Exceedingly clever and very sharp. [12 Apr 1995, p.7N]

As a director, Buscemi is drier than he is as a performer: more quietly funny, less intense and sometimes weirdly compassionate.

If you require fine writing, sharp plotting and consistently good acting, you will be in for a long 86 minutes.

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

Too full of worship and the culture of celebrity to ever pose the questions that should be asked.

The film's rhythm is sluggish, with gore strategically placed in case the audience nods off. [08 May 1990, p.3C]

The script for Spiderhead makes a rookie mistake: It lets the audience get too far out ahead of the Teller character’s moral and narrative awakening. Hemsworth has some icy, rascally fun with his scenes; when Teller and Smollett get some time together, on their own, the story flickers to something like life. But even at 100 minutes minus end credits, the film’s stretch marks are undeniable.

I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50 percent bad. The other 50 percent is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop not stopping.

There’s a good movie in the story of Joe Bell and Jadin Bell. The good one struggles to emerge from the good try we have here.

Attack of the Clones celebrates a certain youthful spirit in both moviemaking and movie watching; because it's as much phenomenon as movie, audiences will either ride with or reject it. I was happy to take the ride.

Black and Awkwafina and Hoffman do their jobs, but the jokes have a way of arriving like jokes, and sounding like jokes, but not quite being jokes. This is an action movie foremost, which is fine.

A modest but engaging film that mixes hormonal surges with art-house ingenuity.

For all the film’s minor flaws, it is deeply moving and incredibly important to witness the impact of "I Am Woman” as an enduring, uplifting cry for freedom and empowerment.

A wildly expensive movie full of computers, nonsense and violence, a film where wit, romance, elegance -- everything -- is sacrificed on the altar of giganticism, cliche and over-the-top action.

There might have been something in this stew if the screenwriter and directors had stayed in the moment, but to actually explore the tough stuff they bring up might have made this movie less cool and breezy.

Jersey Boys the movie is a different, more sedate animal than "Jersey Boys" the Broadway musical.

It's all pretty dumb, but if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, you won't have a bad time. [9 April 1999, Friday, p.F]

A sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie.

Colleen Atwood's costumes are the best a film adaptation of a popular book can buy. They rustle like nobody's business. The film itself is equal parts silk and polyester.

All in all? A curious preachment yarn for peace, one which makes you wonder if the filmmakers couldn't wait to get to the climactic aerial dogfights.

The Brady Bunch Movie, which was directed and written by at least five people whom we prefer not to embarrass, looks bad, sounds bad and doesn't make any sense. There's even something nightmarish about it. All these bad jokes and vacant sets become almost horrifying, as if the film were on the verge of proving that life itself is a bad joke on a vacant set. [17 Feb 1995, p.J]

One of the few remaining Hollywood filmmakers who can function at this level of pure cinema, Hill delivers here with a renewed force and assurance. After a string of tired films (including the exhausted "Another 48 HRS."), Hill seems revitalized. [25 Dec 1992, p.C]

The movie sputters in its later, darker passages, which by design are less audience-friendly than the earlier, satirically secure ones.

Why does this film, with so many first-rate artists in its corner, not quite work? Partly it's a matter of style, but mostly it's because the script is made of tin.

But if Brooks doesn't get the sting of reality he's looking for in Life Stinks, he does succeed with the film's fantasy elements-most memorably, a dance sequence set to Cole Porter's Easy to Love and performed by Warren and Brooks in a colorful used-clothing warehouse.

There are two comic storylines here, and I liked only one of them...The relationship between Travis and Myers is boring; too bad the whole film wasn't about the Scottish family. They deserve their own picture. [30 July 1993, p.C2]

Most of the stuff that's new in the new Sparkle, written by Mara Brock Akil (who is married to the director), is shrewd and cleverly considered. The stuff that's old is what people responded to back in '76.

Evil isn't this boring.

No matter how you look at it, "The Name of the Rose" is a film best summarized by lists. It's a collection of elements, some well chosen and some less so, that never comes together into a coherent whole. For everything the movie has--which is, by and large, the best that money can buy--it doesn't have a director, someone who can take all the pieces and put them together into a vision. [24 Oct 1986, p.AC]

Moves at an agreeable, meandering pace but never loses its verve or its sharp humor.

With Hands of Stone, Robert De Niro officially enters his Burgess Meredith-in-"Rocky" phase, bringing the ringside grizzle and rumpled gravitas by the pound.

A lovely, sprawling romance that turns out to be as much a success story for Keanu Reeves, as he matures into stardom, as it is for Mexican director Alfonso Arau, who proves equal to his first big Hollywood budget. [11 Aug 1995, p.B2]

12 Strong sticks to the basics, without much interest in the differentiating specifics of the men involved, or anything on a geopolitical scale beyond the impulse these Special Forces veterans shared in the wake of 9/11. It seems to me a qualified, limited success.

Allen gives us at least half a classic comedy - more than we usually get at the movies these days - while having some elegant fun with an idea that has intrigued poets and smart alecks through the ages: the interchangeability of comedy and tragedy.

It's a screen adaptation of Busch's stage play of the same name, which never really went anywhere after its 1999 Los Angeles debut -- and doesn't go anywhere here.

A dull and lethargic comedy. [19 June 1981, p.2-8]

Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person.

Technically, "No Mercy" is a smooth, assured piece of work, with a sense of movement and color far superior to Pearce's previous outings. But it is in technique that American action movies have taken their last refuge. The commitment to character is gone, the effort to create credible, vivid situations has been forgotten. What remains is empty know-how, and it is difficult to see the difference between this kind of filmmaking and the impersonal style-for-hire that goes into a typical TV commercial.

The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.

Here and there, in the father/son scenes, you see a glimmer of an honest interaction. All in all, I'd rather watch a "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" rerun.

Brighton Beah, curiously, still doesn`t work on film, perhaps because movies have no use for stagecraft, no matter how brilliant it may be. Once there`s no practical reason to keep the action restricted to a single set --movies, of course, can go anywhere--Simon`s strategic skills come to seem superfluous, if not an actual liability.

Solemn, inchoate and close to complete enervation, Francis Coppola`s ”Gardens of Stone” seems less a movie than a depressive symptom–a mass of feelings that Coppola has been unable to transform into art.

Extraordinarily raunchy, occasionally funny.

If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

So what’s missing? The usual scarcities in modern screen comedy: visual finesse and some wit to go with the gross-out stuff. Little things start adding up against Strays.

Considering how good "Puccini's" middle often is, it's a shame it falls down fore and aft. But Maggenti, who loves Carole Lombard and William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," is tapping a likable vein here. She should open it up again.

Missed it by that much. Actually, the new version of Get Smart misses by a fair-size margin.

By no means a typical concert movie; the selections are played mostly in short takes and snippets. It's more a road movie with music, its war topic treated with earnest seriousness.

These characters deserve more than storybook plotting, as do we. The movie has won our hearts. It shouldn't be so timid about challenging our minds.

Lacks the energy and urgency of its source material.

Exactly the sort of personalized, non-assembly line treat some audiences are always trying, in vain, to find.

Limps along on a squirm-inducing fish-out-of-water formula that goes nowhere and goes there very, very slowly.

It wouldn’t raise questions about Harrelson’s prostheses and makeup, for starters, if the drama carried more urgency.

The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel.

O'Neal and Hardaway are likable enough in limited roles; Cousy seems a little ill at ease. But forget all that. Blue Chips is only a triumph of marketing. Its casting suggests an official basketball picture, but its script belongs on the bench. [18 Feb 1994, p.C2]

The idea that rich people are an alien tribe is just one of many that get lost in Wittenborn’s distracted script. Instead of exploring the concept, he throws out random incidents until he hits one that sends the film into a dark, grotesque spiral.

Though the broad outlines of the plot are the same - a disparate group of human survivors takes desperate refuge in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while waves of flesh-eating zombies roll up from the surrounding countryside - the characters have been deepened and the thematic emphasis shifted. [19 Oct 1990, p.C]

An erratic but enjoyable sci-fi action movie with an extremely bent sense of humor. [09 Aug 1996, p.F]

Stuart Heisler's fascinating (but not biographical) backstage Hollywood drama about a fading Oscar-winning actress, co-starring Sterling Hayden and Natalie Wood. [19 Jul 2005, p.C3]

The end result is a movie that comes across as disappointingly vacant, a jumbled collection of good intentions gone wrong.

Regrettably, director Jeff Kanew has no use for touches like these. His film is broad, flat and superficial. The first half is devoted to quick, sketch-like scenes in which Douglas and Lancaster encounter various bizarre phenomena of '80s life (punks, frozen yogurt, aerobic exercise) and look surprised. The second half wanders into the standard "go for it" territory, as the two stars decide to take another crack at the train they failed to rob 30 years ago. [3 Oct 1986, p.D]

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

The whole movie plays like an improbable blend of "Repulsion," "High Noon" and the archetypal low-budget rape/revenge shocker "I Spit on Your Grave." Queasy audiences beware, but midnight-movie bookers take note.

No period of Italian history has produced more great movies than the WWII years . But, Malena romanticizes and even sentimentalizes those years.

Using a style heavily indebted to music videos - lots of fast cutting, odd angles and gratuitous camera movements - Hopkins keeps the energy level up, though his manner is a bit too choppy to keep all of the diverse elements together. [11 Aug 1989, p.B]

Oblivion is odder and less conventional than your average forgettable star vehicle; at times it feels like a five-character play taking place in a digital-effects lab. But there's not much energy to it.

A strange tonal mashup that turns the hypermasculine and hyperviolent world of glamorous spies, in the vein of James Bond or “Mission: Impossible,” and turns it into kid-friendly family entertainment.

The script by Jordan and Ray Wright, from Wright’s story, wastes little time in getting to what “Fatal Attraction” enthusiasts might call the bunny-boiling bits. But the movie frustrates. And it squanders Huppert, which really is a waste.

A Little Help settles for familiar and modest payoffs. It's not much. Yet Fischer clearly relishes the chance to play someone who's a demurely reckless mess.

The TV episodes invariably embed a character or a bit of dialogue in your brain that you continuously describe or repeat to your friends. No such find in the movie, though the offbeat soundtrack is very gettable.

Draft Day feels like a play, and I don't mean a football play. It feels like a play-play at its sporadic best, in the same way J.C. Chandor's 2011 "Margin Call" felt that way.

Young audiences will enjoy her journey from surly to empowered, and as countless visitors to Brookfield Zoo can attest, there's nothing like watching dolphins. So a star for Schroeder and a star for the title players.

Written by Nick Moore, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, the script just doesn't give us enough material to care about the story, which is devoid of subtext and keeps everything on the surface.

The sole curiosity in Blue Steel is the sight of Jamie Lee Curtis in cop`s uniform. There is nothing more to it than that-no tension, no character.

Wonderful spirit, humanity and humor.

Casual moviegoers may enjoy it, too, if they follow a simple rule: Stop looking for the way out and let yourself get lost.

The film doesn't move to a satisfactory conclusion as much as it fizzles out in a series of protracted anti-climaxes. [15 Dec 1989, p.A]

Ultraviolence is a funny thing, unless it’s not: Here, watching Martindale’s ranger character getting her face ripped off while being dragged along a gravel road isn’t a sight gag, and it isn’t an effective shock bit. It’s just sour. Composer Mark Mothersbaugh’s consciously ‘80s-vibe score has more personality than what’s on screen.

Director Mike Barker’s slick, vaguely pernicious take on the material is a blend of dead-serious anguish and feel-good vindication. While many will find the results effective, others will not simply resist the guessing games and pulp instincts at odds with the trauma, but actively resent them.

There's about 10 good minutes out of 85.

This movie's all over the place, trying too hard to be all Westerns to all sensibilities.

Unlike Richard Pryor, whose rough language adds an important rhythmic punctuation to his monologues, Murphy uses vulgarity to shock and divide his audience.

"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.

The movie can't quite embrace its characters or their scene; Wahlberg even cracks a joke over the end credits that heralds the late-'80s ascendance of hip-hop, which, of course, spawned Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Much of this wordplay is clever, though there’s something off with the plotting.