Jersey Girl is an oddity, hard to dislike but impossible to buy.

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.

This film, which tries to use chaos creatively-by shaping it and sculpting it-finally seems little more than a well-filmed mess. [4 Dec 1987, p.B]

It's just another Williams and Crystal movie. But let's see a few more.

Ingenious with his use of music and hypnotic pacing, Winterbottom keeps us in his world as usual. But this time that world feels ever more gratuitous, meandering and puzzling, with sex that's less and less authentic even though it's real.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin'-headed but it's not soul-crushing.

All worldwide musical phenomena carry with them some enigmatic quality that encourages, deliberately or not, a kind of adoring guesswork on behalf of fans. In Bob Marley: One Love, both as written and acted, Marley himself remains more cipher than enigma.

Sure, it's funny, mainly because it's utterly absurd and meandering.

Proves to be more than just a gimmick, and it doesn't skimp on any of the quirky wackiness that you might expect from a film about blob-shaped, flightless birds battling pigs.

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."

Uruguayan-born Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the recent “Evil Dead” reboot) handles the action breathlessly and well enough. The movie’s acted with serious conviction. But I kind of hate it.

A preposterous screwball psychological drama.

In movies as in life, superior technology doesn't necessarily trump humor, magic or really shaggy dogs.

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.

This is a good-hearted movie that unfortunately is wildly implausible and makes no sense.

American Pie 2, which brings back the same cast for more of the same, is just another by-the-numbers, money-hungry sequel with a lot of recycled shaggy-sex jokes and gross-out gags.

Tries to take us from heaven to hell but winds up leaving us in limbo: exasperated and dumfounded.

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

Refreshingly resistant to predictability.

Medicine Man is a sympathetic project that gets done in by an excessively aggressive screenplay - one that keeps manufacturing artificial conflicts and false climaxes where some more relaxed character work would have gracefully done the trick. [07 Feb 1992, p.3]

The actors aren’t the problem with Night School; the material is.

The movie marches in predictable formations as well. But when Biel's rebel pulls over in her hover car and asks Farrell if he'd like a ride, your heart may sing as mine did.

An outrageously unlikely prison action movie made with lots of eye-catching pizzazz and undeserved expertise.

It's just another case of mourning over what might have been.

This film should have clocked in at 90 minutes, tops, rather than almost two hours. A good, healthy scissor-snipping might have allowed some of its quirkier aspects (like the use of a stun gun and a jaw-dropping lab result) to stand out more.

Unfortunately, after watching Paycheck, you may wish you had the picture's gimmickry at your disposal, so you could erase your own memory of it.

A dreadful witches' comedy with the only tolerable moment coming when Bette Midler presents a single song.

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

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.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

The whole schtick of these movies is the treat-motivated, not-quite-getting-it doggie voice-over, performed by Josh Gad, and it lightens the film. But going dark and emotional makes the film work better than the prior two.

Its message is that if we get to know each other, everything will be okay. Admirable, that. But the way in which it is delivered is so hampered by stereotypes and lathered in cute that one is never able to trust its intentions or swallow its story. [06 Nov 1987, p.56C]

This peek into a famous love story makes the audience a participant in the affair, inspiring questions of perspective and truth in love and art, where the only truth worth anything is one deeply felt.

The new Walt Disney version of "The Three Musketeers"-plushly mounted, but ineptly written and cast-gallops along like a gargantuan tutti-frutti wagon running amok. [12 Nov 1993, p.C]

First-rate actors bail out second-rate directors all the time, and Freedomland serves as the latest example.

Final Destination 3 is a gorefest that should either slake your worst appetites or drive you to the exits.

A dull, amateurish mixture of the sentimental and the obvious.

The heartbreaking thing about Meet Dave...is its occasional funniness amid a sea of pablum. If it were completely rank, it'd be less frustrating.

Slow-paced and repetitive, Needful Things is overlong and overwrought, and the whole thing should be promptly exorcised. [27 Aug 1993, p.A]

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.

Viewers who don’t flee the intrusively uplifting soundtrack and choking sentiment get just what that opening promised: a by-the-numbers, based-in-reality inspirational sports movie, thick with overwhelming pride and nostalgia for small-town farmland America.

Much of this movie seems a crock.

There is nothing to redeem this movie, and no real reason to see it.

The crass sentimentality of American Wedding increasingly fits Norman Mailer's definition: "the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional." The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.

Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.

There are some affecting inner child healing moments here, but without details and specifics, this is a big, bold swing, but a beautiful miss.

There is one hilarious sight gag involving prophylactics, and one can't argue with the film's sobering message, but otherwise Ritter's character is mostly a bore. [3 March 1989, p.A]

The setup is so startlingly unlike the rest of True Colors, so moody and visually ambiguous, that it hits you both with the force of the moment and with regret for what this movie might have been. [05 Apr 1991, p.D]

Fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it. The film rubs your face in glamour and filth. But in the midst of the blood and hysteria, Kilmer plays Holmes with the dirty-angelic looks and wheedling charm of a seedy golden boy on the brink of doom.

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.

The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.

The events of the movie may be a little bit true, or a lot, but hardly any of it plays that way.

In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

The gay sex in Second Skin is vividly displayed and erotically charged, while the heterosexual material is presented discreetly.

The stylish and imaginative imagery in director Joseph Ruben's film, not to mention the parapsychological twists and mysteries, evoke the work of director M. Night Shyamalan.

Atits gooey center, I Do ... Until I Don't is like vanilla cake. It is sweet, but generally there's nothing that memorable about it.

Trust the Man could easily carry the following subtitle: "Men Who Behave Like Petulant, Spoiled Children and the Women Who Decide It's Easier to Love Them As-Is Than To Try to Turn Them Into Grownups."

Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.

I mean, whatever with the “X-Men” movies. It’s hard to even rent an opinion on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of a franchise that has devolved to the point of Dark Phoenix, a lavishly brutal chore nearly as violent as the Wolverine movie “Logan,” and a movie featuring more death by impalement and whirling metal than all the “Saw” movies put together.

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.

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

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

Aaron Russo's America: Freedom to Fascism can't even think straight, it's so mad.

Way back in “Unbreakable,” Jackson’s Mr. Glass bemoaned how comics superheroes “got chewed up in the commercial machine.” Glass proves it.

An amusing and entertaining animated feature, and it's harmless enough for the elementary-school set.

Superior to 2001's "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" in almost every way. It's better directed, more consistently acted, and its writing, while at times ridiculous, at least has a modicum of logic at its core. I still had to slap myself to stay awake.

Fairly well done but deadly dull futuristic thriller.

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.

Ends strong, in an ultimately smoother, smarter sequel.

As corporate directives go, Scoob! has a lighter spirit (until the obligatory protracted action climax) and swifter throwaway gags than either of the live-action “Scooby-Doo” remakes offered. (Thank God for Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini, though. I start each day with that prayer.) The animated “Scoob!” aims younger, and mostly is better for it.

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]

This isn't a particularly great flick, but Pacino's performance is first-rate. [24 May 2002, p.C1]

So what started as a female "Agent Cody Banks" happily and seamlessly becomes so much more, with style and substance existing in unusual harmony for a spy spoof.

Office Christmas Party, which delights in a grotesque carnival of the worst behavior, and still has its heart firmly in the right place.

The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.

Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.

Cherot shot G on a tight schedule, but instead of this age-old indie predicament generating a certain scrappy passion, the film just looks cheap.

My Father, the Hero isn't just a one-joke movie, but believe it or not, that's by far the best joke. [4 Feb 1994, p.K]

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

I didn't believe it, and I don't think the people who made The Family Man did either.