Likable but relentlessly trivial.

It may entertain you if you don't mind senseless stories and screaming soundtracks.

Were it not for young star Amanda Bynes' energetic good nature in the face of drab dialogue and wooden stereotypes, What a Girl Wants might have been a career-ending movie violation rather than just an embarrassing fender-bender.

Home Again" is pure fantasy, all softly-lit, perfectly styled, looking like the cover of Sunset magazine. A world where a 40-year-old single mom is pursued by no fewer than four handsome men. But within that fantasy is also a wonderfully deft demonstration of feminine autonomy in matters of sex, love and marriage.

This “Last Dance” may be shaggy, silly and even a little bit stupid — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially when it’s winking so hard at its own genre play.

The jokes seem lame and the rivalry fraudulent, as the two boys play with their big guns.

It's hard to imagine what prompted Eastwood to direct and star in such a creaky vehicle unless this was his commercial payback to Warner Bros. for letting him make his excellent, financially disastrous White Hunter, Black Heart this year. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

Arkin in particular can barely hide his lack of enthusiasm for the material. Some of the looks he shoots his co-stars appear to contain a secret code of some kind, deciphered as: 'Well, at least I'm in 'Argo.'"

More of a physical achievement in moviemaking than a piece of storytelling, but I do recommend it on that basis. [15 January 1999, Friday, p.A]

There are some cute visuals now and then, but overall Good Burger may raise your blood pressure and, if you suffer through the entire 94 minutes, perhaps even lower your IQ.

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 has moments of Guest-like faux earnestness that instantly mark it as one of the smartest and most insightful comedies of the year. But imitation only takes you so far, and by the film's sagging final 30 minutes, it's evident "NBT" isn't quite up to the master's standards.

Let's say you find yourself at the multiplex, and the first 20 minutes of Mr. Woodcock happen to correspond with the 20 minutes you need to waste before your movie of choice begins. Those are the ideal 20 minutes to spend with this marginally promising--but ultimately unfunny--comedy.

Despite a few interesting moments, Iron Eagle looks and sounds like an extended televison commercial that encourages young people to be all they can be . . . in a supersonic fighting machine. [20 Jan 1986, p.3C]

The most interesting story about this movie would be the amount of money Hawn and Sylbert got paid for ripping off ''Private Benjamin,'' and how they managed to lure the usually talented director Michael Ritchie (''The Candidate,'' ''Smile'') into joining their caper. Their story of wheeling and dealing would make a more exciting movie than ''Wildcats,'' which concludes with--you`ll never guess--a championship game between Goldie`s dirty two-dozen and the seemingly invincible crosstown rivals....Believe me: The tension will send you immediately to the candy counter.

Thanks to the director, what they do makes for painless “avoidance viewing” — something to kill 100 minutes or so while you’re avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner.

A dish that's pretty easy to swallow, but if it could have borrowed some of Isabella's more potent spices, it might have boasted a more lasting flavor.

A somewhat bewildering and unsatisfying film that nevertheless contains more inspired moments and brilliant scenes than many movies we call successes.

Less a pure documentary than it is a fact-finding mission, with the real story waiting to be presented somewhere down the line.

With her low voice, jumpsuits, cleavage and Segway, Miles (Harmon) is all satire all the time, and we love her for that.

Though it's hard not to play it, the expectations game is a dangerous one, especially for sequels. And Roach's original, just like his overexposed star, set us up good.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

Some movies sell and you don't know why. With La Mujer de mi Hermano, a big-screen romantic drama with the aura of a nicely steamed telenovela, you know why: because the three stars look good in plush white bathrobes, that's why.

The movie’s total lack of focus and its unimpressive script should render it totally unwatchable. Weirdly, that doesn’t quite happen. There’s something endearing about these characters.

It's no better, no worse and essentially no different from the jocular, clodhopping brutality of the first one.

Wretchedly unfunny. [14 Aug 1992, p.18]

Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.

The Curse of La Llorona is middling B-movie schlock that goes for the low-hanging fruit: sequences you know will end with some kind of jump, bump or scream, and jokes that cut the tension and indicate everyone here knows what's up.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

Makes you want to run home and shower, but Rourke's performance gets under your skin.

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]

"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.

It's a depressing story made even more of a downer by the absence of any Stones-performed music from their prime '60s years.

Action films can't be this consistently absurd, can't paint their heroes into such dangerous corners, from which only cocktails of luck and divine intervention can save them, over and over. It's a bad-faith bargain with the audience and bad storytelling.

The belief here is that Landis simply has overstuffed what might have been a somewhat tender action picture with all manner of movie trivia and action scenes. After a while, the principal characters in the chase begin to move so fast that they become a blur and ultimately disappear.

Carelessly digressive and stylistically muddled. [22 Mar 2016, p.C3]

Shandling and Nichols strain to reach a mainstream audience and wind up sounding like they, too, have been trained to tell us what we want to hear. Sorry, guys, but you don't score.

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

Sacrificing content for style, Caruso gives us a lot to look at but little to ponder.

This new version is quite faithful to Conrad's novel, not only in content but also in tone. [13 Dec 1996]

So nonsensical you don't understand why anyone would actually make it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Running Scared could become a cult classic.

The movie wants it both ways: bloodthirsty revenge and some finger-wagging about the tactics.

Toward the end, G-Force starts making no sense at all, neither tonally or narratively. It may not matter to the target audience, though the look on my son's face when it was over was pure Buster Keaton. He says he liked it well enough. Me, a little less.

Hardwicke is a talented director who brings an addictive verve and visual dynamism to this bombastic take, and Rodriguez has a charm so appealing it could be weaponized.

What is remarkable, though, is just how unbelievably unbelievable this inspired-by-true-life tale is.

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.

As Vaughn's therapist mother, Sissy Spacek comes off best. But she's a rare bird of whom it truly can be said: She's always good. No matter how grim the material.

The inconsistencies of Nowhere to Run make it finally unsatisfying, but the film leaves little doubt that Robert Harmon is a major talent, though one still waiting for a project equal to his abilities.

The folks on the screen are the whole show, and this genial showcase for standup comic Jo Koy has the advantage of showing off a wealth of Asian/Pacific American talent, pretty badly undervalued by establishment Hollywood.

Some film premises are so outlandish, so thinly worked out and so deep-down ridiculous that they wind up sinking the show -- and White Chicks collapses under a real doozy.

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

The most excellent and lamentable tragedy Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a film that is lamentable without the "excellent" part.

Carr made her long-gestating Netflix documentary with journalist Jenny Eliscu and the pair never comes across as anything less than serious-minded. But their efforts feel limp and plodding by comparison, and sometimes confusing.

As the film turns toward black comedy, mystery and horror, away from social mocking, it becomes far more compelling.

Gratuitous gore and young, nubile flesh bind together a cardboard plot.

Between the two Murphys, "Metro" is no waste of time. But it's no life-enhancing experience either -- unless you're into trolley-hopping, perp-snuffing and vows of vengeance. "The Nutty Professor" proved Eddie Murphy still has it, 10 times over.

Illegal Tender echoes "A History of Violence," another gritty film that explores escaping a criminal past. But the vast vapidity behind Illegal Tender's ill-conceived story line is far harder to overcome.

The nuttiest hunk of junk in many months.

I never lost awareness that I was watching actors speaking lines, not real people --a problem I didn't have in the more unreal "Life Is Beautiful."

Could be the most overblown and confusing example of anime yet, as it piles one pretentious story element on top of another.

Engrossing as it is, The Hunted is more a showcase for formidable talent than anything else. It's a brainy, exciting but shallow show -- an expert's action movie that almost runs out of breath.

Bennett also co-wrote the script, based loosely on her own experiences, and is the best thing about the film. A physical cross between Holly Hunter and Christine Lahti, she's quite convincing as she tries to figure out what has gone wrong in her personal life - and how she can fix it before it is too late.

It’s hard to pick apart a film that is as well-intentioned as Here Today, which earnestly wants to celebrate life, and every beautiful, tragic, poignant and surprising moment. But for a film that seeks to be so humanist, there’s only one truly human character in it. As likable as he is, that oversight is impossible to ignore.

When a movie is structured around the unveiling of secrets, you ought to care what the answers are. But writer-director Adam Brooks (Almost You), never offers any compelling reason to do so.

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.

A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.

They once again trot out the same cynical, numbing formula: bullets, bonding and bravado tempered with self-congratulatory humor.

This is "Ghostbusters" meets "Men in Black" meets a whole lot of butt humor.

This genuinely ambitious and accomplished Chicago production does have strong points, not the least of which is Lana herself. When the fiery, emotionally transparent Orlenko lets her talent and presence pour down on Lana's Rain, the movie springs to life.

An independent American art film that seems to be masquerading as Victorian-era pornography--and it's not quite as interesting or provocative as that description might make it sound.

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

The film with the year's funniest title turns out to be a basketball comedy about the Pittsburgh Pisces team transformed onto a winner by a young boy and an astrologer. Real-life basketball star Julius Erving stars in a trivial but entertaining picture filled with rhythm and blues pop music.

With last week's elections in South Africa finally pointing the way toward a dismantlement of apartheid, it can't be said that the timing of "The Power of One" is particularly astute. But this is a film with no particular relationship to the real world in any case. [27 March 1992, p.M]

A complete disaster, almost certain to kill any more sequels. Chase waltzes through a series of boring costumes and cliches as he journeys to the South to claim a mansion as an inheritance only to find it's a hot property. The script here is anything but a hot property. [24 March 1989, p.A]

The action beats come straight out of the video game "Call of Duty." And when you have real SEALs placed in a picture that lives and dies on the same old first-person-shooter aesthetic, you have a film divided against itself.

Whereas Stallone with "Rambo" is messing around with real places and real events, in Rocky IV we all know that this is pure Hollywood, pure fantasy. And very well made Hollywood fantasy, indeed.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

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.

In the sadistic yet middling road-rage thriller Unhinged, Crowe literally steers the vehicle delivering the big box of acting, over- and under-. While there’s barely a movie there, a year from now, when the multiplexes of the world will either largely be back, be gone or be something in between, we’ll have forgotten Unhinged.

Cool New York City detective John Shaft is back again in, you guessed it, Shaft, with a modern update that goes completely sideways in all the wrong ways. This Shaft is a bad mother all right, and it'd be better if he just shut his mouth.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

With an uneven and overstuffed script you appreciate the corner-of-the-mouth comments as delivered by Steve Buscemi.

Once it gets going and commits to its time-worn inspirational formula, it's not half-bad.

It's a cheap thrill, with twists that later seem evident and foreshadowing that often seems obvious, with a B-movie look and vibe reminiscent of the much tighter "Jagged Edge."

It wisely lets us hear Pinero's words for ourselves, and in the end, they echo louder than the images that accompany them.

Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]

Clifford can muster no interest in the cardboard characters or absurd plot developments, which leaves Gleaming the Cube to limp along listlessly between indifferently filmed skateboard demonstrations.

But folks, this is a lousy script, blobby like the endlessly beheaded minions of the squad's chief adversary. It's not satisfying storytelling; the flashbacks roll in and out, explaining either too much or too little, and the action may be violent but it's not interesting.

Whatever is lost in translation can't keep Appleseed from feeling a decade late--and its animation from looking like a relic on arrival.

Barker unleashes the full force of his special effects crew and the movie implodes in a cataclysm of jelly-fleshed creepy-crawlies. It simply loses its grip. [17 Feb 1990, p.3C]

The film is not exactly a documentary, and not quite a period horror movie either. But it has elements of both. At its best, it's hypnotic and provocative.

Depending on your predilection, the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera is about as good - or as bad - as its phenomenally successful stage original.

It's the pre-teen set who will revel in the adolescent angst and anarchic high jinks of Max Keeble.

He's endearing and affable when finding humor and even introspective life lessons after arrests, drug use and a near-death experience.

The Goldfinch is both too long and too short; dull to watch but scanty on the details about logistics, character, and just how anything of note actually occurs. The mystery of the film is something to be endured, rather than solved. But the real mystery is our leading man. We never know who Theo is as an adult, or if we’re on his side, or why we should care.

Over the Top is pretty much like all of the other successful Stallone films, which probably means that it will be a success, too. In fact, it`s considerably better than the ragged, recycled Rocky IV, though it lacks the wild excesses that made Rambo and Cobra campily entertaining.