The harder this assault weapon went at my tear ducts, the more duct tape I wrapped around them as a defensive measure.

Everything not right with Don’t Worry Darling wasn’t right from the beginning. Even a good director — and Wilde is that, though her hand in developing this material clearly wasn’t without some wrong turns — must deal with script problems if they’re there, in the story, lurking and waiting to mess everything up and send audiences out muttering, wait what?

O'Rourke acts way over the top; Dunaway is more effective because she seems more desperate. Both characters are the kind of people who want to be left alone. That's what you may feel like after you spend a few minutes with them in one long brawl after one long argument after one long soliloquy.

Predictably cute. The only surprise about 3 Men and a Cradle is that it is the hit in Paris, winning three French Oscars, being nominated for an American Oscar, and, unbelievably, outgrossing E.T. and Rambo at the French box office. But then the French have loved the last few Jerry Lewis movies, too.

The film is half rutting goat, half preacher.

Every time Charlize Theron is on screen, the movie gets crazy campy, and therefore at least somewhat interesting.

I truly wish Dear John were a better, less shamelessly manipulative movie, but a couple of the actors got me through it alive. One is Amanda Seyfried.

Sizzles for a half-hour, then fizzles.

Madden honors the play's roots; he has not made the mistake of opening it up with a lot of obvious visual expansions. But the story's genial unpretentiousness has been darkened and weighed down, and what's left is less than prime.

A bizarre, bloody adventure movie.

The Living End is not a movie even vaguely interested in attracting a wide public. It's a movie meant to please its own niche audience, and at that it seems likely to succeed.

The performances are honest and true and that gives things a considerable boost.

It's not naughty. It's nice. Naughty is funnier.

The sentiments expressed are really no more noble or refined than those of a Chuck Norris picture, though Joano's style tries to stamp art all over the sequence. It sure isn't that, but it isn't good action either. [14 Sep 1990, p.B]

Yet the movie's no stinker. Like their video-game counterparts, co-stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo somehow manage to weave their way past threatening obstacles and escape with their dignity.

It took J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter-adjacent franchise exactly one film for the shrugs to set in, even with all those fine actors up there amid expensive digital blue flames.

Like Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," Stonehearst Asylum starts with the hysteria knob set at 11 and goes up from there.

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.

The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi gives you next to nothing for narrative complication and surprise, and a meager amount of verbal jokes.

The Keanes' story is one of eventual triumph over adversity for Margaret, but Big Eyes struggles on the page to make much of her as a character. Adams struggles as well; she's acting in one movie, a sincere, often anguished one, while Waltz (mugging up a storm) works in an entirely different key.

Lacks both mystery and urgency.

This rich, gorgeous music and the wistful pastoral scenes create a rhapsodic mood that the rest of the film doesn't really sustain.

While the sentiments feel authentic, the ludicrous plot, filled with holes, doesn’t do the emotional aspects of the story any service.

The film is not badly made. It is, however, weirdly flat, given the stakes and the wild screaming matches.

I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.

John Carter isn't much - or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations - but it is a curious sort of blur.

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.

I'll describe the central characters in Disney's new ice-skating flick, Ice Princess, and you guess the plot.

A feast of bad taste, a demonic hog-wallow.

A business-as-usual blockbuster blueprint that rarely surprises you.

Drawing purely on his technical skills, Reynolds is finally able to get some momentum going in the picture's final half-hour, when a defeated Robin musters the remains of his band and makes a last-ditch attempt on the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle. It seems to be enough to erase memories of the movie's painfully slow start and send the audience out reasonably happy and stimulated. But Robin Hood does not seem to be the defining blockbuster this summer still needs.

It has a few good laughs in it thanks to Murphy, but mainly depends for its appeal on an uncomfortable manipulation of racial stereotypes. [04 Dec 1992]

It's not exactly a good time at the movies, and even as pure education, it's a rather dull film with very little dialogue, but Glawogger does succeed in capturing the images, sounds and even imagined scents (oh, those burning goats) of contemporary hard labor, work that has become nearly invisible to us cubicle jockeys.

In Uptown Girls Murphy is like a puppy in traffic; you're confident she'll reach the curb but only because the cars are swerving, not because her moves are so deft.

I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.

The villainous creatures are less yucky than their counterparts in the original (the meanest dudes look like overfed lobsters with an epidermal problem), the sets are cheesy and the special effects (supervised by Derek Meddings of Batman) are humdrum. [11 Feb 1991, p.7C]

Awakenings is a film that unquestionably succeeds on its own terms, though those terms are deeply suspect. It is a canny piece of false art, one that consistently swaps meaning for superficial effect. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]

Let It Ride looks like it was vastly overshot and overwritten, then whittled down to something which resembles a movie but is really a long commercial for the joys of the racetrack. [22 Aug 1989]

They might make a nice couple in a movie about them. But Quicksilver, a product of the music video influence, has been edited at such a rapid pace that there`s more time given over to bicycle racing and car chases than to love.

The Bedroom Window is not at all an unskillful film, but that, in some ways, is what is most discouraging about it: Hanson is more than good enough to do something of his own. In its drive to imitate the past, Hollywood is leaving itself without a present. [16 Jan 1987, p.L]

A smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast.

Unleashed is like an old dog: No new tricks.

Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does.

The script never quite feels itself; it feels like contradictory impulses playing out in shuffle mode. And the scale of the movie does the putative romance no favors.

This is a picture in which the barf scenes standard in the usual crude youth comedies aren't gratuitous. They're logical climaxes.

What good is a movie that can’t stop moving, or screaming, long enough to pace itself?

Does not know when to quit. Nor does it extract much fun from a cockamamie story provided by George Lucas.

On the whole, I’d go with the 2018 basketball comedy “Uncle Drew” over either “Jams.” One-joke movies, all three. But it helps when the gags don’t stop at the reference point and dribble in place while the clock runs out.

Anyone But You isn’t terrible, or a travesty. It’s eh-notherthing ehltogether.

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.

To sum it up, you should see this movie if you have a burning need to waste money to find out an obscure fact about a has-been villain committing an everyday crime - namely, taking that money you just wasted. [20 Sept 1991, p.K]

The problem with the movie is that all this improvisational verisimilitude never finds its way into fully developed stories.

Despite a blue-chip cast, Aloha is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein.

Russell offers a relatively restrained, Gary Cooper-ish performance, though most of the laughs are left to the four kids-Brian Price, Jared Rushton, Jamie Wild and Jeffrey Wiseman-who crack wise with arch sitcom precociousness. And Hawn, batting her baby blues, does make you want to hug her-at times very tightly, right around the throat.

Its pace is oddly arrhythmic and the tone is every which way but assured.

Too cute, too transparent, too precious and ultimately too much.

The horrors of apartheid deserve a better treatment than this.

Who would have believed a film with this much skin and reckless, life-threatening excess could end up a rather dull muddle?

For most of its length, Revenge of the Nerds II is pleasantly stupid summer fun, though it does have a nasty way of turning inspirational on you.

Unambitious and transparent, but that doesn't mean it won't warm the hearts of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

The beautifully shot but dramatically strained I Am David falls prey to the defect of all poor road movies: In gluing together unbelievable but convenient episodes with sugary sentimentality, it loses most of its credibility.

At times playful and inventive, at others simplistic and silly. Ultimately, Werner Herzog's free-form, idiosyncratic devolution of the documentary is beautiful but dull.

The results take neither the high road nor the low road, settling instead for an oddly bland middle course.

Director Joseph Ruben would have done much better to limit the physical horror and make it more of a psychological terror game.

Seems a little lightweight, even for a kids' movie.

Thanks to Grande’s emotional performance, what does shine through is Glinda’s personal story about embracing change, stepping into her own power and defining what it means to be “good,” on her own terms — not because it’s her brand. This is decidedly Glinda’s movie, and that is the one good thing.

While entertaining and often genuinely frightening, thanks to a remorsefully blue cast to the cinematography, this thick stew can be tough to swallow under Tony Maylam's bumpy direction. [3 May 1992, p.C7]

The script of Shrink, written by Thomas Moffett, plays like "Crash" without the angst or the perpetual racial conflagrations.

Martin is joyful; Chase seems depressed, and Short comes off as merely happy to be in his first movie.

The Equalizer 2 just doesn't deliver the thrills.

Stick It reels from its own frenetic pace. The music is loud, the camera cuts are incessant and everything seems geared toward distracting us from what's going on onscreen. Which is not much.

A rash and prurient tale, full of the sort of stylish venom that could almost elevate it to artful kitsch. Almost. [29 May 1992, p.C]

Flockhart, as an actress desperate to show the world her talent but lethally unsure if she has any, embodies the obsessively driven personality it must take to make it, or to try to make it, in pictures. She's the personification of what The Last Shot could have been.

Takes us to familiar lands but without any of the original's magic.

More happens in Eclipse than in the previous "Twilight" zone, "New Moon," and yet it's duller

The movie, directed by veteran Jonathan Kaplan, has enough in common with such American-in-foreign-jail movies as "Midnight Express" and the recent "Return to Paradise" to make you wonder why it ever got made.

As Cruel Intentions progresses, you may come to realize that if a bomb suddenly blew up everyone on screen, you wouldn't particularly miss anyone.

Most of this doc is content to wander through Franken's recent show-biz resume, to no particular end.

Bad Boys for Life may be a frantic visual blur but it’s razor-sharp thematically. Its mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a jaded 2020 audience glad to see these guys again. The movie’s not the point. The boys are the point.

The movie doesn't deserve any of the talent bestowed on it, from Reiner's amiable direction to the occasional grace notes in the performances of Hudson, Marceau and David Paymer.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

Despite the obvious talents of the stars-McCarthy is especially arresting-there is an empty feeling that we're taking a tour of a garish ghetto without a tour guide. [6 Nov 1987, p.55]

It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.

My favorite thing in the movie is the way co-star and Korean action icon Byung Hun Lee uses his feet of fury to hoist a paint can and send it flying.

Despite all the rich elements — the fantastic cast, the wonderfully detailed production and costume design, an oddball family story of black sheep finding each other — there's something missing from The House with a Clock in Its Walls. It's weightless, hop-skipping over necessary story-building, glossing over Lewis' warlock training as well as the personal histories of his guardians.

Making her feature-film directorial debut, Grant is going for an everyday conversational texture and a sense of life's curveballs. But the results wander and you never really believe them.

An interesting misfire. It's also the victim of lousy timing.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come feels behind the ball, not ahead of the game, and unfortunately, this is no escapist, or even cathartic, horror romp. Read the news instead if you’d like a real scare.

What Levinson has created here is a generic memory film, so vague in its particulars that virtually anyone's family experiences can be plugged into it. [19 Oct 1990, p.B]

The action is perpetual, and perpetually in need of a better director, and editing that heightens and sharpens our pleasurable excitement instead of dulling it. The appeal, I suppose, of the far-flung, constantly roving storyline this time around is its latitude for different sorts of mayhem and different genre shout-outs. But all too soon Jurassic World: Dominion made me long for the best bits of Spielberg’s “Lost World” or J.A. Bayona’s “Fallen Kingdom.” Those folks know how to set up a shot, vary the rhythm and deliver the payoff.

Warming up this material, as Johnson tries to do, doesn't make it warmer; it just makes it seem warmed-over.

Thinner has its meaty moments, but overall, it's Stephen King lite. Less taste, less filling, less fun.

Overall, Wide Awake is a sound concept that fell considerably short of its goals. [27 Mar 1998, p.B]

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

This seems to be a movie made by people who love the old classic movie swashbucklers but don't have a clue how to make or modernize them.

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.