What are they trying to accomplish and is this really the best way to accomplish it?

Proves a less-than-satisfying examination of the country singer's art, career and demons.

Much of this movie seems a crock.

Burton's never been especially good at finding the internal motor or the rhythmic drive within a scene. This, I think, is why Miss Peregrine stalls, again and again, while the bird woman or Samuel L. Jackson's pointy-toothed, fright-wigged Barron tells us what's up with what we just saw, and what'll happen next.

What worked about the first “Maleficent” was Jolie herself, trying on something softer, even funny, her face, enhanced with prosthetics, half of the visual spectacle. But “Mistress of Evil” crowds Jolie. Maleficent fades to the background, eclipsed by full-camp Pfeiffer as the evil, Trumpian dictator queen.

The best thing about this self-mocking affair, which runs a leisurely two-plus hours and affords plenty of time for an insane body count, is Antonio Banderas' manic gusto in the role of a gabby mercenary.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

It is passable comic book stuff, dumb and loud. Loud. LOUD.

Writer-director Kouf often comes up with seemingly sure-fire ideas and then fails to develop them. "Gang Related" takes some chances. But, while trying to shift the moral center and avoid cliches, it keeps floundering and stumbling back into them. Like the accumulating corpses on Divinci and Rodriguez's beat, it seems a victim of greed, confusion, mistaken identity and a mixed-up system that turns good guys bad. [8 Oct 1997, p.1]

The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.

Why isn’t the film better? Guggenheim doesn’t seem to have prodded his subjects in any interesting directions.

Wendell & Wild may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”

Despite a few high-spirited sequences, School Daze succumbs to preachiness and choppiness. It's a movie with too much to say and not enough style to say it with. [12 Feb 1988, p.0]

Part Oscar bid, part vanity project and all pretty silly. Only Nick Nolte, as Tom Wingo, the psychologically blocked Southern high school teacher who is Conroy's protagonist, transcends the circumstances to deliver a performance of skill and commanding sympathy.

The sequel is a disappointing step down, and backward.

It's not a lousy experience. Taylor Swift shows up in a glorified cameo. Thwaites has promise; Rush has more than that. But for a movie decrying the concept of societal "sameness," The Giver is a hypocritical movie indeed.

Perhaps blackmail isn't an easy subject to warm up to, or robbery the best ground to rebuild a relationship on, but with a little care, some added ingredients and a bit more spice, Getting Even With Dad could have been a satisfying meal and not just an afternoon snack. [17 Jun 1994, p.H]

Isn't likely to satisfy the gamers' appetite for action. It also probably isn't heady enough for the science-fiction crowd, and it's too remote for those who simply wish to be immersed in a head-spinning fantasy world.

Chapter 1 feels like throat-clearing — a serviceable horse opera overture to a curiously dispassionate passion project.

It's no accident that the credits for the movie are a Who's Who of dance movie alumni: Director Anne Fletcher choreographed "Bring It On"; screenwriter Duane Adler penned "Save The Last Dance"; and the movie was photographed by Michael Seresin, who shot "Fame."

It’s a premise for a pitch, not a screenplay, at least not a sharp-witted or interesting one. I’m not fussy. I’m not looking for the most interesting romantic comedy in history with this one. But I do wonder if some writers are so determined to stick to a formula so slavishly, they forget to make the characters funny, or to make characters rather than vaguely delineated personae in the Clooney vein or Roberts vibe.

It’s hard to shake the familiarity of the premise and the set-ups in “Lake of Death The story rhythms wander instead of screw-tighten, and while Robsahm has little interest in Raimi-style pulp or dynamism, the placid surface of Lake of Death rarely gets disturbed, or disturbing.

The character and Qualley’s performance is so beguiling that it would be a delight to watch Honey O’Donahue solve any manner of mysteries of the week, “Columbo”-style. It’s a shame, then, that the particular mystery at hand in Honey Don’t! is so convoluted and nonsensical.

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.

It's not as if Stone is above this sort of pulp. But as rejiggered for the movies, Savages has trouble making us care what happens to the beautiful people - the untouchables - at the center of the sun-baked fairy tale.

The shadow of Gena Rowlands looms over this picture like a cinematic eclipse. [25 January 1999, Tempo, p.5]

Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.

Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.

This debut picture never makes up its mind about what sort of comedy it wants to be. But at least it has one--a mind, that is.

Figgis (Stormy Monday), here making his American debut, doesn't possess the tight control necessary to really charge up the material. The result is a stylish but oddly slack film, which still features a couple of fine performances (from Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalf) and a few effectively perverse moments.

Without a strong narrative engine, Upside Down ends up exactly where it shouldn't go: sideways.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

But writer-director Alan Shapiroisn't content to focus on aquatic mammalian high jinks. Instead, he must pack in virtually every family movie cliche of the '90s. [17 May 1996, p.C]

Lasseter's sequel smooshes the vehicular ensemble of the first "Cars" into a nefarious James Bond universe, heavy on the missiles and ray guns and Gatling guns and electrocutions. Sound peculiar? It is peculiar.

But even with the great good efforts of Wallis, the results, to some of us, betray a distrustworthy slickness reminiscent of a British Petroleum oil spill clean-up commercial.

Juvenile viewers may well benefit from the movie. But, for the adult, it’s ultimately a film that arrives too early for the season in its title and too late in terms of style and impact.

The sense that the movie serves mostly to showcase a slew of purchasable cartoon figures loses nothing in the translation.

There’s no question about the talent on display. Coel is one of our most hypnotic screen performers, and had Hathaway decided to put her prodigious talents toward pop stardom instead of an Oscar-winning acting career, she’d be one of our top icons. Her Mother Mary performances are so fantastic it leaves you wanting more — of her, but not necessarily this plodding movie.

Like Ice Cube's "Friday," How High probably will survive as an underground classic, until it's pushed further underground and forgotten by the next disposable "cult classic" to hit video.

There's nothing classic about Surviving Eden, even if it is better than reality TV.

Ruthlessly skilled as Atkinson is, the Bean persona of generic, maniacally grinning ineptitude owes most of its appeal to seeing just how far an actor can pull a face without pulling a muscle.

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

Ultimately, what's revealed in the new biopic of young Salinger, written and directed by Danny Strong, poses some interesting questions, but doesn't live up to the power of the mystery around the man itself.

Has to explain itself through so much of the film that there's just not much film left.

The plot, though of the made-for-TV ilk, makes for good discussion fodder if you're trying to impress life's lessons on children or others you love. That said, be prepared to be hit over the head by the message, edifying as it is.

There's still enough hardcore Williams-when he's sitting by himself in his studio-to make Good Morning, Vietnam worthwhile, but the alarm bells are sounding. Heres another comic who wants to play Hamlet.

We're snowed by a great deal of intersecting and crisscrossing information in The Fifth Estate, and Singer's script lacks organizational skills. I can relate. But that doesn't make parsing this busy film, or — crucially — its true, contradictory feelings about Assange any easier.

Any serious message has been sacrificed on the altar of excess, making us realize why the stylish story probably worked better as a graphic comic book than as a film.

An insubstantial addition to the cycle. It looks cheap and feels slapped together.

Jeong and Schaal are quite funny in the limited time they're given, but one can't help but think the story would have worked so much better as a drama, or some kind of "Man on Fire" actioner, with Coleman's chops and Bautista's brooding presence. Hopefully a director can figure out what best to do with him as a leading man, and soon.

Plays so flat, so to close its "movie message" formula, that it seems as if we've seen this movie before.

For anyone who knew and loved the 1950s TV series The Phil Silvers Show -- in which Silvers played the peerless motormouth Army con artist, Master Sgt. Ernie Bilko -- Sgt. Bilko, starring Steve Martin, will probably be a disappointment. [29 Mar 1996, p.C]

The satire is finally too thin and familiar (and not just from The Player - most of the observations here have been staples of the Hollywood comedy since the early '30s) to support the movie's pervasive tone of sourness and disgust. [21 Aug 1992, p.J]

If Steve Martin (“Cheaper by the Dozen”) and Eddie Murphy (“Daddy Day Care”) can’t make these PG-rated assembly-line comedies any fun, what chance does The Rock have?

Reeves is immediately on the run after the explosion, one of at least a dozen images of him running from danger in "Chain Reaction." He runs so much, sometimes with a boring female scientist in tow, that you think he's been cast in the role of the bus in "Speed." He's shot at, bombed and chased by fireballs...But no amount of speed can distract us from an unfulfilling story about just who wants to destroy this breakthrough experiment. Only Freeman's rich voice holds any interest; it's a powerful instrument, highlighted by pauses and economy of speech, that is captivating in roles as diverse as this one and the veteran con in "The Shawshank Redemption."

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.

Michael O'Keefe, a likable enough presence, seems wildly miscast as the young slugger. O'Keefe is so likable that we can't really accept him as a heavy in this role. [29 March 1985, p.A]

Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.

Boys N the Hood wants to be “The Learning Tree'' and “Super Fly'' at once, an ambition that doesn't seem quite honest. [12 July 1991]

Watching actors this good handle material this dopey is like waiting for Itzhak Perlman to pick up his violin and start playing variations on My Baby Does the Hanky Panky. It's funny. But it's also sad. The movie suggests we get the government we deserve, but do we really deserve this movie?

The problem is that one can't help but think of better, more interesting movies based on this premise.

An adequate horror movie for the Halloween season, but it too easily sinks into haunted-house-film conventions, even if the haunted house is decked out as an Italian luxury liner.

Though The Ninth Day longs for a grander scope, it never lifts much beyond Kremer's personal dilemma.

You can find this clever, or you can find it lazy, and this is why MacFarlane is the biggest mixed blessing in contemporary TV comedy: He is both.

Hunter Killer needs its radar calibrated, because while it bounces between serious and silly, it never quite finds a suitable place to land.

The movie is slick, good-looking, nicely edited and empty. [09 Sep 1994, p.F]

The film isn't terrible; Vaughn, Pratt and, as David's frustrated girlfriend, Cobie Smulders know what they're doing in terms of finessing the material for laughs as well as the h-word. But it's all sort of unseemly.

It's to Belushi's credit that, under such severely strained circumstances, he manages to come off as both likable and plausible - qualities that the venal Mr. Destiny otherwise lacks. [12 Oct 1990, p.B]

Piven's performance basically made the series, and to the degree the new film works, which is a little, he makes that too.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

Meant to be appreciated solely for its gleaming surfaces.

What is genuinely chilling about Final Analysis lies not in the foolish plotting but in the completely callous attitude of the director and writer, who are interested in their characters only as compositional elements or, at best, game pieces to be pushed around a board. It`s a cold, distant work of no compassion and, finally, no importance.

The real problem here, though, is that it's painfully cheesy pablum, relying on hokey burger joint and Friday night football game stereotypes to take the place of character development.

Fessenden cooks up a likably offbeat horror movie. But somehow, it never jells, never really scares us.

Pet Sematary finesses some of the bumpy narrative moments from the original, but where it forges its own path is in rewriting Ellie's story. This is initially intriguing, but it ultimately reveals itself to be the less original choice, relying on horror archetypes and tropes we've seen before.

The movie moves predictably to its feel-good finale.

With a smooth overlay of LA sights and sounds, and a side of blueprints stolen from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Meet the Fockers,” “You People” ends up a lot less insightfully funny than “Black-ish.”

Van Damme is compelling only when he takes his clothes off, which he doesn't do often enough here.

It's hard to get riled up one way or the other by a film about an exorcist who is forced, cruelly and relentlessly, to introduce one flashback after another.

This pretty but witless movie is well-produced, slickly directed -- full of jokes about hot dudes and hot babes pitched right at the "American Pie" crowd.

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

The films are bad, but they are entertaining. Fifty Shades Freed, the final film of the trilogy, just might be the most competently made yet — which is a shame for those expecting the high camp factor of "Fifty Shades Darker."

It's nice to see a movie in love with New York City, but That Awkward Moment sets such a low bar for Jason's redemption it becomes a drag.

Criminal is an exercise where viewers are likely to ponder not "How did the characters do it?" but "Who cares?"

The movie, like Hitch, tries to be cool, funny and sweet but falls on its face without generating any real sympathy, smarts or humor.

The special effects are surprisingly good. And the too-numerous fight scenes have a certain flavor, since Ivan's henchmen always explode in ooze when they are destroyed, which brings out the eeewww in the audience.

The always wonderful Martindale nails the tone in her warm and nuanced performance, combining sly humor and a soulful presence, while the men orbiting around her range from complete goofs (Copley and Jenkins) to self-involved and dour (Krasinski).

If Rodriguez had any selectivity as an action director and a purveyor of garish thrills, the violence might have an impact beyond benumbing the spectator. "Sin City 2" keeps piling on, flipping the visual pages and selling the same ancient lessons in misogyny that real noir, or neo-noir, exploited yet transcended.

There's something vanilla about the whole enterprise, from the one-size-fits-all spiritualism to Phil Collins' generic world-music songs.

A lame, overstuffed, yuppie romantic farce about a boorish Wall Streeter who sublets his rent-controlled apartment for two nights each week to two different broken souls, saving three nights for himself and his drunken pals. The strangers (Annabella Sciorra and Matthew Broderick) are drawn to each other, but a misunderstanding occurs and she has an affair with the boor. Strip away the comic material, and this might have been a touching portrait of a woman trapped in a bad marriage. [30 Apr 1993, p.C]

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

It's a refreshing theme for a kids' movie, one that incorporates history and urban flavor, not to mention a preservationists' perspective, into the usual mix.

More than anything Casa de mi Padre is an exercise - and to those who find it more clever than I do, a valid one - in tone-funny, as opposed to joke-funny.

DePietro struggles to reconcile the perceived demands of the romantic comedy genre (though his film is more bittersweet than most) and the tang and hustle and detail of real life.

The main problem here is less a lack of competence than a lack of conviction. No one involved in the film believes for a second in the story that's being told, and so there is no real sense of danger, no suspense, and no warmth in the romantic interludes. Shanghai Surprise must have been meant to be a light-hearted romp, but even a romp requires a touch of substance. [31 Aug 1986, p.8]

A chaotic headbanger, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is saved from pure flat-footed blockbuster franchise adequacy by six things, three of them on Hugh Jackman's left hand, three on his right.

Skyscraper — a sort of reverse "Die Hard," where a family man breaks into an imposing structure to save his family — scoots by on the thinnest of premises, and an even thinner script.

Roughly the same as the first in terms of quality and style. It delivers without much visual dynamism, and with a determined emphasis on combat. In the 1951 novel the climactic battle between the good Narnians and the bad Telmarines lasted a few pages. The film version of the same battle feels like "The Longest Day."