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]