The skillful quartet at the center of Drinking Buddies reveals the weaknesses in the material.

The film wants to speak to some kind of old school, lone-ranger American hero type (as portrayed by a man from Northern Ireland), but it’s too vague, shying away from any controversy, to say much at all.

Greenaway's regard is certainly unblinking, though it's hard to see where the seriousness and compassion come in. The thematic oppositions are primitive and are not fleshed out by the characters, who remain flat and puppetlike. [6 Apr 1990, p.G2]

Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.

Directed by Tom George from a screenplay by Mark Chappell, “See How They Run” is a throwback with a smirk. Or put more diplomatically: An old school whodunit reconceived as a farce. It’s self-referential (the characters end up snowed in at a country estate, just like in “The Mousetrap”) and simultaneously poking fun at the murder mystery form while also paying homage. If only it were actually funny!

The remake is just like the original, but there’s more of it. And less.

Freed from the respectful restraints of non-fiction, Berg goes completely hog-wild, cinematically, and it doesn't exactly work. The film is a riot of nearly incomprehensible editing, a violent melee of intertwining scenes, shots, characters, formats and timelines, straining the limits of coherence and cogency.

The surface pleasures of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights may be plenty, but the story itself, well, it never achieves climax.

Hiddleston, his eyes full of fire and melancholy longing, was an inspired choice. Everything not-quite-right with most movies, however, goes wrong long before the actors arrive on set.

Assuming your psycho-pigtailed-killer memories extend back as far as "The Bad Seed," Maxwell Anderson's play filmed by director Mervyn LeRoy in 1956, Orphan may remind you of the icon made famous by Patty McCormack.

A wild, wanton and wasteful western farce that's so overblown and underwritten it almost makes you cringe to watch it.

In Richie Rich, the cliches are generic, and the film runs out of gas early on. [21 Dec 1994, p.7C]

It isn't hard to take, but Harry and the Hendersons seems a bit familiar.

A hit and mostly miss parody. [5 Feb 1993, p.C]

In Pieces of a Woman Kirby never seems to be building up artificial climaxes or big reveals; she works on a quieter, truer level. Too much going on around her ends up working against her.

An odd mix itself, of contemporary sexual realism and unabashed romantic fantasy. If "Days" works, it's mostly on a sheer fantasy level.

More than anything Minkoff's project feels like a protracted episode of "Jimmy Neutron," a show with characters for whom I don't have the same affection.

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.