There isn't enough heft to the story to pull everything together. Watching it is like trying to assemble a puzzle that's missing pieces.

Kirk Douglas' performance...is so strong and inspiring it's a shame there isn't a better movie around it.

This predictable, uninspired third installment to the endless saga won't win over non-believers.

Standard action fare with a false overlay of social conscience. [3 Apr 1998, p.A]

Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.

A dumb and purposefully cheesy version of the comic strip space hero. Although the film has a few early moments of put-on humor, the story has nowhere to go. Sam Jones is not very bright as Flash. Only Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless brings any style to the adventure. Only for the juvenile set. [19 Dec 1980, p.10]

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

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

A strangely mournful, lugubrious film, staggering under a sense of exhaustion that manages to stifle many of its own best laughs. [10 May 1991, p.C]

A sappy, often absurd disappointment, another would-be inspirational romance that, like Costner's overwrought "Message in a Bottle," is impossible to swallow.

I like Duhamel, and in her first straight-up dramatic role Hough does well enough, though her singing and/dancing career thus far has trained her to oversell, as opposed to sell, as opposed to act naturally.

Kids may love the movie, and even kids who love the books may like it. For me, though, an astonishing percentage of the books' appeal has vanished.

Taylor-Johnson is a solid actor, but on the page and in performance, Kraven’s barely there and too cool to care about what’s happening. Which makes it hard for moviegoers to care.

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

It's one thing for a script to set the framework for an action film -- it's quite another when the script gets in the way.

ROTLD II may be junk, but at least in the hands of director Ken Wiederhorn it's efficient, well-filmed junk. [18 Jan 1988, p.7C]

With his brazen gifts for mimicry, Eddie Murphy may now be the Peter Sellers of blockbuster toilet comedy movies.

All that — and yet, dull. Why?

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good

Its gorgeous black-and-white photography, dirty and matte, will almost convince you that anything this slow, small and bereft of dialogue must be important.

Extremely slow--unbearably so at certain points. And even when there's no action, there's very little dialogue, and we're asked to follow the disjointed and dreamlike story line without the help of anything resembling a narrative.

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

A dreary, needlessly violent and ugly comic thriller about a psychic hustler (Michael J. Fox) who gets more than he bargained for with his latest scam. Fox seems to be trying to get hip in the movies, and he's lost his way here.

If you can simply get lost in the crushing splendor of the waves themselves, the script might not leave you so seasick.

This premise is not a complete loss, and the movie is not badly written. But all of its various elements (Whaley and Connelly's friendship, their battles with the two criminals who come to rob the store, Whaley's quest to make something of himself, etc.) end up being thrown together like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This makes the movie messy and uninteresting. [5 Apr 1991, p.J]

What these men endured is remarkable, and the logistics of the rescue are remarkable as well. The 33 settles for an unremarkable chronicle of that endurance test.

So it’s one of those Hip, Now updates, albeit with jokes riffing on pop-cult artifacts that are already Then. I mean: “Jerry Maguire”? Moratorium!

Clooney's attempt to honor unsung real-life heroes while recapturing the ensemble pleasures of some well-remembered Hollywood war pictures, notably "The Great Escape" and "The Guns of Navarone," comes off as a modestly accomplished forgery at best.

The steady Costner gives a competent enough performance this time out as he dances with foxes, or at least one, while Grammy winner Houston is quite impressive in her feature debut, displaying both hot and cool emotion as well as performing six new songs...Unfortunately, she is assigned to handle lines like, "You're a hard one to figure out, Frank Farmer," and "I've never felt this safe before." Unfortunately, too, the romance gets in the way of the thriller, and when the two principals finally take to their bed, so does the movie. [25 Nov 1992, p.C2]

Good actors and a talented director doing what they can to bring the truth to a script that's mostly bogus.

True Story is a case of a well-crafted film, made by a first-time feature director with an impressive theatrical pedigree, that nonetheless struggles to locate the reasons for telling its story.

The director's lack of restraint and overabundance of ambition makes "Altar Boys" not boring, but troubled.

There's no development of Turner's character. The laughs in the first reel are the same as those in the last. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

Brewster's Millions is a PG film, and the humor is sanitized. Pryor grins, Candy gurgles and we sit there stone-faced noticing all the holes in the plot. Once Pryor figures out a clever way to spend money by using rare stamps on letters, why doesn't he keep on doing it? Yes, that might make for a short movie, but given the way Brewster's Millions turned out, it would be no great loss. [22 May 1985, p.3]

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.

It's perhaps best suited for genre vets who can be satisfied with spot-the-reference games and Chan and Li's chemistry, or for undiscriminating kids who'll enjoy the "Karate Kid" vibe. But it's less a culmination of Li and Chan's careers than a passable footnote to better things.

When classy, pedigreed British actors go hog-wild under the flowering dogwood trees of a Southern Gothic setting, often the results are good. Just as often they're so bad they're good. And sometimes, as is the case with Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson in Beautiful Creatures, they're simply doing the best they can under the circumstances.

This one's worth the ticket price only if you are a showbiz-aholic.

Fortunately, this loud, hectic movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it wouldn’t have the material to last a second longer. It’s bright, busy, inoffensive and exactly the opposite of the weird, dark, edgy 1993 movie adaptation. That may be better for the business of Mario, but it’s not exactly terribly interesting either.

Follows a common horror flick recipe (people under siege from hungry monsters--so much for Greenlight's search for originality), adding a dash of humor to keep things from becoming too much of a checklist.

I wish the results were better, and a lot stranger. Cahill’s world-building has its moments, though. And the filmmaker did determine — correctly — that it’d be fun to have Bill Nye, the science guy, in a bow tie, portraying a sniffy scientific researcher.

Not a picture that makes you think very much -- except to wonder why the studios keep making movies like this.

By imitating the gestures and outlines of a vanished cinema, Berri can only provide a cold simulation. The surface is smooth and refined; the insides aren't there. [23 Dec 1987, p.A]

Not bad, not good, Ice Age 3 may be OK enough to do what it was engineered to do, i.e., baby-sit your kid for a while and rake in the dough.

I wish Tenet exploited its own ideas more dynamically. Nolan’s a prodigious talent. But no major director, I suppose, can avoid going sideways from time to time.

Vulgarity, of course, has its honored place in comedy, but in She-Devil such moments merely seem grim and desperate - substitutes for the real laughs the film has failed to discover.

Has the potential to be much more than it is, especially with the collection of able actors on hand.

Quickly and fatally, the overlooked form peels away from the slight, frail content, and the film starts to look like an episode of "Hee Haw" directed by an amphetamine-crazed Orson Welles. [20 March 1987]

A toothless, pointless remake of King Vidor's searing, epic melodrama of 1937. [2 Feb 1990, p.G2]

A dumb movie, but it's also a knowing one: a cheap castle of lewd trivia and corny excitement built on The Rock.

All of the film`s female characters are shrill, manipulative and irrational-their only appeal is masochistic.

I fear Spielberg and Jackson hitched their wagon to the wrong technological star here.

The overall picture doesn't have the kind of true wow factor that would make this one stand out from the rest of the pack.

It is less a film than a puny trampoline -- an occasion, though a grim one, for this most fervently movie-mad of American directors to show off his love for the various pulp genres mooshed together by the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel.

First-time director Paul Hunter delivers a quick-cut, loud movie that betrays his MTV roots -- but then again, the script never demands that he do much more than exactly that.

It's difficult to see, too, what exactly all of this has to do with the twilight of the '60s. With his frequent sentimental allusions to the end of an era, Robinson seems to be grasping for a profundity that his anecdotal reminiscences don't merit or really need. Marwood, the film implies, will leave this life behind and go on to great things, while Withnail will be mired in it forever, a forgotten Falstaff to Marwood's striding Prince Hal. Self- dramatization is one thing; self-Shakespearization is something else. [10 July 1987, p.C]

Gavras’ ending makes it clear where her sympathies lie. In the process of building to that conclusion, she overplays her metaphor a bit, but still, political tracts rarely come this sweet and sympathetic.

At the moment, far too many true crime documentaries function as little more than an episode of “Dateline.” They report information but lack analysis or even thoughtful ideas about how to use the medium of film to tell a story at once shocking and infuriating. Such is the case with Our Father on Netflix.

The Door in the Floor feels more about a situation than actual people. It's sensitively rendered, filled with those necessary evocative details, and it never rings true.

There's something both moving and crass in how directors Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab film these tiny paper fasteners.

It's secondhand, vaguely resigned material. And while Sudeikis has some talent, he's not yet ready to co-anchor a feature comedy. He's no Ed Helms, in other words.

It's not very funny, but your kids might like it.

Finally, a film to unite movie-mad members of Al Qaeda with your neighbor's kid, the one with the crush on Natalie Portman.

The film capably, if expectedly, proceeds down this standard procedural path, progressing from investigation to trial, with flourishes of genius every now and again from Pearce, having some campy fun as van Meegeren. But even with a few courtroom theatrics and some profound ethical issues to chew on, The Last Vermeer is ultimately a dreadfully milquetoast outing.

Though based on a graphic novel, both movies have the feel of a first person shooter video game. Hemsworth’s physical stature does a lot of the heavy lifting, literally and otherwise, but Tyler is not a character so much as an avatar.

Depardieu has so much life on screen, so much bounding energy and insistent physicality, that he almost brings it off.

Still Life is a very different story, small and quiet and, unfortunately, airless.

Disappointingly hollow.

Unfortunately, the home-run performances of Cube and Epps are handicapped by inept and illogical action sequences.

Sorkin’s approach is to focus on the things that are happening rather than to inquire as to the contours of Lucy or Desi’s internal monologues, and so they remain unknowable, moving through a biopic that offers little more than an exercise in re-enactment.

Fuller demonstrates a strong command over his visual domain, but the pat allegory he presents about the monsters with whom we have to learn to live feels a bit muddled.

If frenetic pacing alone made a movie interesting, Queens would be cinematic solid gold.

Too much of Nobody’s Fool makes do with well-worn exchanges and contrived, overheard conversations.

What we have here is the cinematic equivalent of a dead shark.

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.

Kidnap probably could’ve played into its feverish, violent, trashy side more aggressively. As is, something seems to be holding it back from its own monstrously exploitative premise.

The leading actors labor valiantly and to little effect.

Ragged as some of it might have been, that old "Out-of-Towners" had a unified and surprisingly dark comic vision to go with its nifty one-liners. This big, glossy picture is set in movie-movie land, that shiny, peachy place where a celebrity -- like Mayor Rudy -- waits around every corner. [2 April 1999, Friday, p.A]

Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.

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.

The comedic actor makes his directorial debut with a politically charged comedy that's sort of a satire, designed to wring wry laughs out of our deeply divided political state. But in this climate, it's just frustrating and unpleasant to watch.

Here’s all you really need to know before the opening credits roll in Hitman: There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. And that’s a good thing, considering there isn’t much dialogue to carry the film.

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.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

Unfortunately, No Escape can't stay 10 steps ahead of its misguided politics and overly dramatic storytelling and crumbles under its own preposterous climactic denouement.

Something about baseball seems to bring out the silly side in moviemakers -- even in a movie like The Fan, which starts out well-crafted and deadly serious and seems to have good enough actors and a savvy enough director to stay that way. But halfway through this thriller things go haywire. [16 Aug 1996, p.D]

As a film, "Consenting Adults" has little to distinguish itself from the other entries in the genre, apart from an entertainingly hammy performance from Spacey and the clever production design of Carol Spier, with its emphasis on bold color effects (the interior of the Otis house is painted an infernal red) and complicated architectural spaces. But this, of course, is the kind of filmmaking that defines success by its adherence to the norm, not in dangerous departures from it. [16 Oct 1992, p.C]

The last third of the film descends straight into a combination of "Dynasty" with shades of cult classic "The Room." It's fantastic because it's complete and utter silly madness. Helicopter crashes! Slaps! Drinks thrown in faces! Fully clothed shower sex! A framed "Chronicles of Riddick" poster! All the makings of an instant cult classic.

The movie's benumbed by its own parade of bad behavior. Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged. It's diverting, sort of, to see DiCaprio doing lines off a stripper's posterior, but after the 90th time it's like, enough already with heinous capitalistic extremes.

Like too many sports-related movies, this one falls back on that One Big Game, the final score that will set everything right.

Doesn't have much plot. It just sort of meanders around like a wildebeest playing Blind Man's Bluff.

The sum of all snores until the moviemakers start blowing up Baltimore halfway through. Then the special-effects people take over for about 20 breathless minutes.

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]

Purports to be literate film noir but comes off more like the overwritten project of a film school kid who just memorized his textbook on the style.

Now and then the movie rouses itself to deliver. If you go to American Reunion - and many will, if they harbor fond memories of the first one, and if they can find a sitter - you should stay through the end credits.

Though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate.

Some road pictures take you somewhere. Breakfast on Pluto, from its archly poetic title on down, promises a lulu. Yes, well. Promises, promises.

The large number of video jokes in Amazon Women suggests a product principally designed with the home screen in mind, and perhaps it will look sharper there. [18 Sept 1987, p.E]