Tries hard to be sweet but plays like "Pollyanna" with fleas.

Depending on the speed of your gag reflex, "+batteries not included" is either a 21st Century "Lassie" or the worst piece of smarm to come along since "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

It's a sordid but expert shocker.

The one true amazement in “Dark Fate”? That’s easy: the magical transference of biceps from Hamilton to Mackenzie Davis’s tank-topped, genetically enhanced soldier of the future. In a heavily digitized enterprise, they’re the most conspicuous human camera subject.

Black and Blue feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.

It's a baffling, unconvincing experience, though it has a few moments of mild charm.

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a visual splendor, from the fun way the creatures are portrayed to the pacing. Keeping Tartakovsky as director of all three films creates a fluid sense of comedy and look.

You may not want to join in their activities but you're happy to have tagged along.

Slender but surprisingly smart and pleasing.

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

Although the film presents plenty of compelling material, it suffers from the same weakness of "Fahrenheit 9/11": an utter lack of dot connection.

Breaks through as a delightful, surprisingly fresh comedy.

Demons of mediocrity, be gone! Here we have a shrewd sequel a touch better than the original.

Starts strong but eventually collapses under its weighty sense of responsibility.

I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation.

The movie won't be for everyone -- it's a little rough for preteens, and it doesn't throw many laughs the audience's way -- but along with "Sweeney Todd," this is Burton's most interesting project in a decade

It has flashes of inspiration and raw emotion, and beyond the famous faces in the cast, Disney’s Wrinkle in Time is graced with a wonderful, natural Meg courtesy of the young actress Storm Reid. Now 14, she’s easy and versatile screen company. The movie around her is a little frustrating and rhythmically stodgy, however, partly for reasons inherent in bringing tricky, elusive material to a different medium.

This is a gentle, diffident concoction. But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.

This movie is either in your wheelhouse or it's not, but for those looking forward to Book Club, it delivers. For what it is — a breezy bit of Nancy Meyers-like fantasy, featuring four beloved actresses talking about sex, baby — it's exceedingly enjoyable.

Blackbird is a simple tale, well-told, but it’s also the tale of all tales, of life, death and everything in between.

While cinema may be a visual medium foremost it's also an aural one, and the cacaphony of dialects sounds not so much "universal" or interestingly multicultural as simply all over the map.

Around the midpoint Alpha Dog becomes less sociological and more personal, developing a real sense of suspense.

This one is a winner. [27 Oct 1989, p.F]

Like so many lovely cinematic dreams, Mister Lonely inevitably descends into nightmare, with an unsettlingly grim conclusion that, again, seems more imagistic than idea-driven.

This is only a movie. But a good one. May Roddy Doyle give us many more.

Hobbled with pedestrian direction, a dull visual style and a last act awash in obvious bang-bang melodrama.

A gentle film, not very controversial despite its gay content, Chop Sue is valuable as a record of beauty and obsession, much less interesting as a human document.

Sure, you've seen some of these moves before, but Save the Last Dance triumphantly passes the audition.

The movie's computer-generated castles, magic visuals and sloppy effects echo a low-budget fantasy movie on cable. It's glossy, shiny candy that tastes oddly familiar yet lacks sugary punch.

It's too smoothly controlled to be funny, which is Big Business's problem as a whole. [10 Jun 1988, p.A]

Veers perilously close to the concept of poverty tourism.

The biggest factor working against Mouse Hunt may be its chilliness. Like some of the Coen brothers' work, it's so stylized that it often keeps you at an arm's length instead of sucking you into its whirlwind.

The best material in the film is the loosest, capturing the perpetually insecure and overcompensating Pineda in his early concerts, leaping, bouncing, careening around as if every moment in every song were an audition for the next moment in the next song.

With tonal inconsistencies and poorly written characters, any awe inspired by Alita: Battle Angel is replaced with a profound sense of confusion.

It relays an uplifting story that, ill-advisedly, is not so much Holocaust-era as Holocaust-adjacent, determined to steer clear of too much discomfort.

The story ceases to make sense. It sounds clever on paper, but on screen it degenerates into a series of random scenes that don't connect until, by the end, there are more questions than answers, and more goo than resolution. [03 Feb 1995, p.J]

Nice. The film itself is more nice than good, but nice isn't the worst trait.

Ultimately the film functions as an elbow to the ribs: “Remember this? Remember how fun it was?”

It's one of those fast, slick, half-smart shows that can't decide whether to pay its debts to action or reality -- and winds up cheating both.

Nearly two hours long, 30 Days of Night makes you feel the cold (though it was shot in New Zealand) and feel the fangs, but it also makes you feel like 30 days is a pretty long time.

Irrational Man is full of holes. Abe's supposed to be a disillusioned activist, yet that side of him is so half-assedly developed, it's as if Allen himself didn't believe it.

Shyer's direction of actors rises instantly to a level of cartoonish hysteria and descends only for occasional wet bursts of sentimentality. But as an exercise in ideological persuasion it works appallingly well, playing on deep-seated guilts and insecurities with a sureness of touch that may make it a hit with the audience it caricatures.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

Michael Patrick King's screenplay hits all the right notes, building on the warmth and familiarity of the series (which King also wrote).

Most sports films are also fish-out-of-water stories, and this one qualifies as both.

It gussies up the tale with so many random subplots that by the time we cut through the morass, the film is over.

I'm not sure the director should return to this particular genre, whatever you'd call it. But he is, in fact, a real director.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the job. It wraps up the trio of trilogies begun in 1977 in a confident, soothingly predictable way, doing all that cinematically possible to avoid poking the bear otherwise known as tradition-minded quadrants of the “Star Wars” fan base.

The film is madly, compulsively overcontrolled, from its funereal pacing to its pristine red, white and blue color scheme; those moments when it loses its dignity are irresistibly comic, and in this grim context, infinitely precious.[16 Mar 1990, p.B]

The results are distressingly flat, frequently patronizing and, for a topical comedy, strangely out of it.

The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.

Lazy, predictable and even dumb about what happens away from the tables. [11 Sept 1998]

Perhaps it's no fun because it's just too real. There's never a moment of wondering what is going on.

A screwy assassination thriller for these murky times, it takes half its pages from Soldier of Fortune and the other half from links provided by conspiracytheories-zapoppin.org.

Set in 1973, amid a forest of shag carpeting, Annabelle Comes Home is a nice little summer surprise, and quite unexpectedly the freshest of the three “Annabelle” movies spun off from the larger “Conjuring” galaxy of horror films.

What strikes me about the new Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott, is how its preoccupations and sensibilities lie almost precisely halfway between the derring-do of the 1938 film and the harsh revisionism of the '70s edition

Highway Courtesans carries a feeling of truth, of bravely facing problems that are pressing and real. It's a good, informative piece on the oldest profession--and on how the world differs from what we usually see in the movies.

Disney has reinvigorated the Milne series while staying true both to his and illustrator E.H. Shepherd's original artistic visions.

A thriller of passive virtues, the steely intensity of Jodie Foster notwithstanding. It's not too violent. It's not assaultive. Even James Horner's music plays it cool.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

An oft-told tale.

Two old people doing old people things, talking about old people stuff, and eating old people food. Sound interesting? Grumpy Old Men is a film that manages to be one of the scariest things I have ever seen. [28 Jan 1994, p.L]

Good in many ways, full of talent and intelligence, and marks the debut of a promising young American writer-director, Dan Harris.

As stand-alones, some of these work better than others. Director Jon Favreau’s “The Jungle Book” came off as a real movie unto itself, as did Kenneth Branagh’s sincere, well-acted “Cinderella” (I was in the minority on that one). Aladdin, though, feels pointless. It’s cinematic karaoke. It’s an ice show without the ice.

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

A scintillating thriller in which writer/director Gary Sherman takes some familiar sitcom elements and force-marches them in an unexpected and terrifying direction. [11 May 1990, p.D]

This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.

Emancipation is never dull, but it’s rarely without its box office instincts for falsification front and center, alongside its star. And while it has been built on the scarred back of a real man, the movie is too busy with the business of entertainment to focus on the “real” part for long.

Known for her lovable roles in "The Help" and "Hidden Figures," Spencer goes dark and sadistic with an enthusiastic glee, her signature smile (and those bangs!), and she creates one of the most memorable horror villains in recent history. She makes "Ma" worth it.

The more familiar you are with Menace II Society, Poetic Justice, and Boyz N the Hood, the more you will enjoy this picture, which has a lot of big laughs. [19 Jan 1996, p.B]

Kline, though, does give one of the great movie performances of the year so far.

Graced with Nair's loving direction, Witherspoon's radiance and that great cast, it is a treat, if somewhat less so than the novel.

Boldly goes where Hollywood rarely treads: into the passionate, intense and complex world of girls at the point in their lives when self-discovery is tempered by enormous vulnerability.

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

Indivisible is surprisingly engaging. With a host of characters, there's plenty to hook into, even if the multiple storylines are all a bit shallow, and the actors are appealing, especially Skye P. Marshall, an Air Force vet who plays the hard-charging Sgt. Shonda Peterson.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors.

Hyams' script may lack emotional thrust, but it's economical, and it tweaks the genre's traditional heroism, if only faintly. [21 Sep 1990, p.H]

A sweet, if dramatically overlong trifle.

If Zeffirelli's Hamlet does resemble an actual movie at several points, it's thanks almost entirely to the inventive and atmospheric lighting of veteran cinematographer David Watkin, whose somber, gray-green palette gives the film a dignity and substance it would otherwise lack. [18 Jan 1991]

The movie lacks wit.

Surprisingly restrained and undeniably entertaining.

The Dawn Treader doesn't so much reinvent the "Narnia" franchise as do what's needed, and expected, with a little more zip than the previous voyages.

In The Hudsucker Proxy, the filmmaking Coen brothers make dark, startling, wittily extravagant sport of the American Dream. The movie is opulent and wry, a bitingly intelligent fable about business and romance. [25 Mar 1994, p.A]

Folks, I confess: I'm coping with a mild case of arachno-apatha-phobia, defined as the fear of another so-so "Spider-Man" sequel.

A physically gorgeous production with a strong, clear conflict at its center. It's grueling but also exhilarating. Perhaps its ambitiousness is the film's biggest problem. Trying for dramatic sensitivity, historical scope, touching romance and shocking violence and suspense, it gets stretched too thin.

It's a good film but an over-obvious one. I wish I'd liked it more.

It's a good small film for intelligent audiences who like to watch the movie camera explore other regions and other communities -- something all our movies should do more often.

Black Moon Rising utilizes every cheap thriller trick in the book. If a lackluster script is going to rely on gadgetry and chase scenes to satisfy its audience, it had better pulse with more suspense and originality than a TV rerun. This one doesn't. [10 Jan 1986, p.34]

Johnson's latest effort, Finding Steve McQueen, isn't perfect. Or halfway perfect. Or even one-quarter perfect. But he does take what would have been a rather bland heist story and mix it with a mediocre love story to create an enjoyable final product.

The film looks terrific and offers one spectacular chase, but its story and characters are less substantial than even a weak episode of "Miami Vice."

It's a pretty good version of a pretty great stage phenomenon.

Even before the witness-protection/trial angle has been conveniently jettisoned, it's clear that the plot is no more than a compulsory ingredient in a previously tested formula. Workmanlike in its execution, reliably predictable throughout, the movie might as well have been called "Another Paycheck."

Mainly, Cage keeps finding the damnedest ways to topspin his line readings so that you never know where a sentence is going. May the next outing with Renfield and Dracula, should the public and Universal decree it, be a little funnier and little less too much.

Suspect smothers in misapplied seriousness-it's the thriller as civics lesson. [23 Oct 1987, p.A]

Ross' smooth, steady film is just interesting enough to make you wish it were a lot grittier, and better.

For some reason I was under the impression Jim Carrey already made his penguin movie. Doesn't it seem like it?

The only performance worth mentioning is Jeong, who brings his energetic weirdness to a rather small role.

A tedious picture, redeemed in part by Tom Wilkinson's performance as Tuppy--he's the sole cast member who doesn't give birth to every epigram--and by the hats.