The jokes are sodden, relying on tired wordplay and sarcastic delivery to draw the faintest of laughs.

Doom, the film, aspires to be more than just a gory shoot em' up--though it'd still be a stretch to call it a thinking man's action movie.

Jonah may resemble an 83-minute Sunday school lesson, but at least it's a playful, colorful one, with spunky peas and tomatoes, chirpy kids' tune-- and bright animation that may not rival "Monsters, Inc." or "Shrek" but gets its points across.

A movie that keeps reminding you of its antecedents, all the way back to 1984 and the comic adventure “Romancing the Stone.”

Falls into a familiar trap, resembling a neatly wrapped made-for-TV homily. [26 February 1999, Friday, p.A]

By throwing so much weight to the love story and increasingly contrived setups, the movie does what you secretly, guiltily hope it will do: It lets you off the hook.

The Canyons may not work, and the sex (as well as the synthesized glop on the soundtrack) may be tragically unhip, but it was made by a director who still cares.

The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.

Trashy porno pretending to be deep.

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved.

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]

Veteran director Arthur Hiller keeps the vehicle galloping along with a sure hand, careful not to let any of it sink to a fatal level of believability and always on the prowl for whatever wit can be harvested from any gizmo at hand. [17 Aug 1990, p.B]

I like the end-credits sequence best, which has nothing to do with hoary complications or the miseries of stardom or the magical spellbinding powers of a cheap wig.

For the most part, the humor in House II is mild and conventional, and the suspense sequences never amount to much, thanks largely to the film's failure to play by any identifiable rules. In a film in which reality can be bent and rebent, following the director's whim of the moment, it is nearly impossible to establish any real sense of danger. Menace requires integrity, and "House II" doesn't have it.

House Party aims for the mainstream and hits it- perhaps too often.

Unfortunately it’s all a bit dull.

Gyllenhaal certainly holds the screen; at this point in his career, he has found a way to rise above whatever needs rising above. But midway through Demolition, I longed for a sequel to "Nightcrawler" instead.

Shipp nails the energetic, motor-mouthed cadence of the outspoken Shakur. But the film surrounding Shipp is rough going.

Self/less hews closely enough to the premise of the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller "Seconds" to qualify as an unofficial remake. Then again, anyone who remembers that one is not in the target audience for this one.

Certainly no comedic masterpiece, but it does offer a few fine moments of biting satire.

Hellbound offers a consistent, low-level queasiness, an effect more of revulsion than horror. It's nothing that a good shot of Pepto-Bismol wouldn't take care of.

It's a shiny, glib, hollowly good-looking movie that always seems to be cooing at us-coldly. [23 Nov 1994, p.9C]

Gray’s writing lacks the punch and zing that might take your mind off such rickety plotting.

The movie's sole selling point turns out to be its sweetness. Sandler, Segal and writer George Wing obviously like all of the characters despite the constant ribbing, and Sandler and Barrymore are as cuddly as a pair of love-struck walruses. But only a sucker would get too close.

By forcing definition on Flux, the filmmakers rob her of any allure. What do they offer instead? Clumsy exposition, bland PG-13 gunfights and subpar computer animation.

This isn't a particularly good movie, and it's offensive in the way mid-range low-budget slasher shows usually are. But it works better than some, largely because Etheredge-Ouzts has a more original slant and a deeper sense of character than horror movies usually allow.

There's nothing here that's outrageous, startling or daring enough to give your funny bone a jolt.

The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.

Arkansas doesn't break the mold on cheeky, stylish, low-life movies; rather, it worships it.

The finished product feels tonally indistinct and plays as a bit of a grind.

Special-effects wiz Douglas Trumbull made his directorial debut on this flawed movie. Its ecological sensibilities, however noble, emerge as severely dated just 16 years later. Nevertheless, this is nifty robovideo. [21 Apr 1988, p.95]

This is the sort of film where a character says “Here we are, having a high-minded debate ...” and you wonder if countless moviegoers will be rolling their eyes in unison.

The flabbergasting scenes here-written by a team of "Tonight Show" and "David Letterman Show" writers and directed by hot, young TV-commercial and music-video director Michael Bay-are slick, fast, loud, mostly derived from other movies and often senseless.

Compared with Martin's first "Dozen" and the recent mega-family movie "Yours, Mine and Ours," this sequel is Academy Award material.

What remain are a few outrageous sight gags built around an unusual glow-in-the-dark device and a nicely conceived encounter with a shy female body-builder (Raye Hollit) that, in its blend of violence and tenderness, recaptures some of the emotional complexity of the Edwards of old. [3 March 1989, p.M]

The film is finally impersonal, almost anonymous; it's a chilly, lumbering project that carries little of the mark of lived experience. [25 Dec 1992]

If the setup, with its theme of two radically different brothers drawn to the same woman, recalls Moonstruck, the follow-through of The January Man has none of the earlier film's pleasing symmetry or emotional force. Sarandon seems to get lost in the shuffle (in a way that suggests some last-minute trimming of her role), and the picture eventually trails off into a tangle of unresolved plot threads. [13 Jan 1989, p.K]

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

Frame by frame, Crudup is fascinating.

For such a rich visual movie, "Reloaded" tells far more than it shows; the pivotal scenes involve people explaining things to Neo. Too many plot turns resemble detours, and even the ever-amusing Smith feels like a red herring in the scheme of things.

A facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

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.

The look and feel here is classic Hardwicke: gritty and dark, so as to fool you into thinking this film is serious business.

Midway isn’t bad, really. Certainly, it gets a lot more done than the cinematic cinder block that was the 1976 historical drama also titled “Midway.”

Playing a pair of complementary trailblazers that start off on the wrong foot, the duo hand-in-hand elevates Harper’s 1862-set, based-on-a-true-story film, from a flimsy action-adventure to something worth watching on the biggest possible screen, even if it operates on a handful of clichés with little character-based substance to speak of.

His first confrontation with Berenger allows Poitier to display the overwhelming, nearly palpable moral force that was his great strength as a performer, but the balance of the film makes very little use of his special skills. [12 Feb 1988, p.A]

A mildly diverting, mostly forgettable variation on themes the writer-director has treated with more depth and vigor on several past occasions. It's a tentative, tiny film, every bit as inconspicuous as its recessive, occasionally invisible heroine. [25 Dec 1990, p.10C]

"Superbad” got a deserved R rating for its unmitigated and gleeful raunch. Drillbit Taylor is cleaner in mouth but far uglier in spirit. Wilson and Mann do what they can to tone it up, but their scenes belong to a different film, and a fresher one.

Bone Lake offers up an appealing surface, but it’s just too shallow to get very far.

In The Sandlot's nostalgia for simpler times, a single-sex world seems to be a key component.

With most of the action confined to the body of the plane (though there is a brief stopover at a Louisiana airfield), the screenplay poses some significant challenges in staging, none of which Hooks seems to recognize or accept. [06 Nov 1992, p.B]

A light, breezy, often charming little film, with a good cast playing mostly shallow characters.

It's funny what you buy completely onstage and resist completely, or nearly, on-screen. Case in point: Mamma Mia!

Clarke, among others, deserves so much better. If you watch her amid the suds of “Me Before You” (2016) and now Last Christmas, you see an actor of sound comic and dramatic instincts at the mercy of pushy material. This encourages actors to over-exert themselves in the name of delivering the goods with a smile that threatens to turn into something more like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”

You leave feeling like you've endured a long workout without your pulse ever racing. The exercise ultimately is product placement, with Bond the biggest product of them all.

Plays like a drawn-out outline of a better movie; no one got around to fleshing out the details or providing some soul.

Every character is merely a stereotype or symbol, not a fully-fleshed out person. Indeed, one has to wonder what every actor, including Monaghan, is doing in this flimsily written psychological thriller, but perhaps, that question isn’t even worth the speculation.

However you look at it, K-9, a crime comedy starring Jim Belushi, Mel Harris and a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, barks up a few of the right trees. Its moments of hilarity are due entirely to the dog, whose orchestrated growls and grimaces could start a whole new school of dog acting. [28 Apr 1989, p.N]

It's to Robinson's personal credit - though probably to the film's commercial debit - that he doesn't emphasize the exploitation elements of the story. By current standards, the violence is relatively sparse and discreet, though there does come a moment when the blind and vulnerable Thurman - or at least, her body double - must strip down and stretch out in a bathtub as a mysterious figure hops around, silently (!) taking flash pictures. [6 Nov 1992, p.C]

It’s a movie about a movie star taking out the trash, leaving behind a lower body count than usual, but executing his duties faithfully, and with a predictable dash — the right kind of predictable — of world-weary charisma.

The filmmakers' instincts may be sound, but Permanent Midnight is no killer. Stahl hated most of what he wrote in his TV heyday. So one really wonders why he, and maybe Stiller, didn't write this script. Surely, it's one script Stahl could have delivered.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

Seeing what may be Coppola’s least compelling film has a way of reminding you of all her better ones, especially in the seriocomic vein. Those include the aforementioned “Lost in Translation,” along with “The Bling Ring,” “Somewhere,” even the playfully anachronistic “Marie Antoinette.” If they’re new to you, have at them.

It's more of a pastiche, a montage of brutality, a slow descent into Dante's Inferno until we reach the subbasement of a boy's soul. [21 Apr 1995]

I've had the unique pleasure of reviewing almost all of Duff's movies, and if there's one thing to say about the girl, she's consistent: nice, sweet, blond, inoffensive and uninspiring.

This is a big-hearted film with admirable ambitions, and the ending is appropriately bittersweet, with victory and comeuppance occupying the same time and frame.

A bright and zippy, but alarmingly over-campy and lighter-than-fluff cartoon feature.

The biggest problem with the muddled mea culpa that is "Tupac" is that it is a kiss-up rather than a real examination of the rapper's life, so that anyone can speculate about what he might have become.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

The movie lacks wit.

Jack Bender's direction, with the help of a driving score by Cory Lerios and John D'Andrea, manages to keep the level of suspense high even in the film's least convincing moments. [03 Sep 1991, p.5C]

All of it is plausible, if one were to break the narrative into its component parts; together, though, those parts resemble "Babel" or "Crash" or other determinedly topical mosaics that end up falsifying their own concerns.

A Swiss movie that flirts back and forth between the French and German sensibilities at play in that nation.

Director Caton-Jones has given the film a few moments of charm and gentleness, though the movie would be a lot more beguiling if it weren't so sure of itself. Its charm has the practiced, impersonal touch of the professional salesman.

Like its title heroine, it's sparkly, pretty and flirty--but often all wet.

Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.

A large amount of dope is smoked in The Pick of Destiny, perhaps the most since the salad days of Cheech & Chong. This may be the problem. Pot rarely helped anybody's comic timing.

Strikes me as a pure, unadulterated crock. [12 February 1999, Friday, p.A]

Schumacher's work in The Lost Boys consists of turning undertones into overtones--of taking the latent, the implied and the mysterious, and turning them into the loud and the obvious. He takes a story and turns it into a bunch of scenes, each of which contains its own payoff and none of which seems to draw on what has come before. And in these days of concept films, a story is a terrible thing to waste. [31 Jul 1987, p.D]

Coscarelli, the man behind the long-running "Phantasm" splatter series, can't quite conjure a complete movie out the concept and stretches the material until its humorous conceits repeat ad nauseum.

Rio 2 offers roughly the same approach to story and to story clutter as did the first movie.

The naval equivalent of "Top Gun," focusing on the elite corps of warriors who in this tale must destroy American missiles that have fallen into the hands of Arab terrorists. The boys play together and then fight together. It's all a party. Some of the sequences play like music videos.

Director Ridley Scott's Black Rain belongs to the blunt instrument school of filmmaking. This cop thriller, set largely in Osaka, Japan, is so full of screeching tires, flashing neon and extravagant violence that it's almost physically painful to watch, yet that seems to be the effect the director had in mind. If you smack the audience around enough, you'll be respected for your power.

The biggest problem with Why Him? though, isn't him, it's her. Stephanie is so underwritten, that though these men are competing ruthlessly over her, she drops out of the story completely. She's the center of attention, but she's a void.

There are a couple of potentially interesting movies lurking inside Heaven Help Us, a film that, sadly, doesn`t have the guts to push any one of its elements to the hilt. The result is a picture that is sort of a comedy, sort of a romance and sort of a condemnation of parochial schools, all wrapped up in a nostalgia piece about the mid-`60s.

The film flies away in 50 directions, leaving only a vague, unctuous impression behind. [22 Jun 1990, p.C]

Brightly colored, spiffily designed and easy to sit through in a harmless Disney sort of way, but the comedy never accumulates any momentum.

Adapted from the Goodrich-Hackett play, it just misses the spiritual and emotional majesty it reaches for.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

A movie whose satire proves as lame as its clunky title.

Beeman and Tolkin drain every trace of real life friction from the story line, pumping it up instead with the standard Hughes synthetics: kids who are preternaturally smart, sophisticated and poised (Haim's best friend, played by Corey Feldman, has a swagger that suggests Robert Mitchum at his cockiest); adults who are monstrous, cretinous and ultimately pathetic. [07 July 1988, p.3C]

Tucker has done a bang-up job, distancing and hypnotizing us with his frenzied, fragmented, sexy images. But war isn't a video game.

It's worth seeing, on balance, simply for what Mark Ruffalo does in a hundred different, discrete, telling ways as he creates a character who was a capital-A Character, outlandish one minute, scarily unpredictable the next.

Wacky and heartless, bloody and silly -- and it ends in a flourish of grotesque sentimentality.

Here Seidelman's more interested in warm and fuzzy than in carbonation. That's fine, as far as this modest picture goes. But the actors deserve more, and better.

An idealized, dreamy fantasy of life in the business world-harmless as airplane reading, a bit dull on the big screen. [2 Mar 1990, Friday, p.C]

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

Cars 3, a reasonably diverting account of middle-aged pity, humiliation and suffering as experienced by Rust-eze-sponsored race car Lightning McQueen, is not the weakest of the Disney/Pixar sequels (I’d vote “Cars 2” or “Monsters University,” those sour, desperate things). But it’s by far the most guilt-ridden.