You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty big movie about a mighty big gorilla. And a lot of it is mighty bad -- unless you're a devotee of high tech and low camp, elephantine effects and mouse-sized stories, politically correct nostalgia and/or Charlize Theron and Bill Paxton in jungle outfits.

A micro-indie passport party that, while well-intentioned, evokes the same feelings that have been known to arise from being subjected to your friends' vacation movies.

Compared to many movies of this kind, this Beaver is an enjoyable but mixed bag. [22 Aug 1997, p.C]

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]

Regrettably, director Jeff Kanew has no use for touches like these. His film is broad, flat and superficial. The first half is devoted to quick, sketch-like scenes in which Douglas and Lancaster encounter various bizarre phenomena of '80s life (punks, frozen yogurt, aerobic exercise) and look surprised. The second half wanders into the standard "go for it" territory, as the two stars decide to take another crack at the train they failed to rob 30 years ago. [3 Oct 1986, p.D]

Isn't good satire or good slapstick. It does have those lyrical, catchy Menken tunes, and the film perks up whenever Raitt or lang sing one of them. But much of this movie is deadly.

Plodding, literal and completely lacking in the erotic tension that seems to be essential to the genre. Not much passes between Matt Dillon and Sean Young that could be defined as frisson - there is no ambiguity, no risk, no charge. [26 Apr 1991, p.C2]

While Reyes seeks his own ambitious style, he can't quite step out from under De Palma's shadow and thematic choices. Everything from the voiceover narration to the final frame in Empire looks and feels like a low-budget hybrid of "Scarface" or "Carlito's Way."

Irwin Winkler's The Net, which should have worked a lot better than it does, is a glossy, intricately plotted, mostly implausible suspense movie about a woman on the run.

The sad thing is, even for NASA/space fans, a snooze isn't out of the question despite the film's scant 40-minute running time.

G.I. Joe may not be beefier, but it’s cheesier and less aggravating than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the summer ’09 headbanger it most resembles.

The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.

Neat and tidy and well-mannered and dull, and not even Colin Firth and Jude Law and Laura Linney and Nicole Kidman and some very sharp fedoras can enliven it.

Suit #3: But what will we call the sequel? Suit #1: "XXXX"? Suit #2: Brilliant!

Patronizing and predictable where E.B. White's episodic 1945 book...is odd and open-ended.

But for all the pondering The Possession of Hannah Grace inspires, it’s also true that at 85 minutes, it still manages to feel tedious at times. The dour environment doesn’t help, the humor doesn’t pop, and disappointingly, the scares just don’t land.

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.

Until it jumps the tracks into self-righteousness, though, Knowing, directed by Alex Proyas, can also be as unnerving as the best episodes of "The Twilight Zone."

Hawke and McGregor are the kind of actors who hold your attention as the story evaporates around them. Even so, they deserve far more to play with than they get here.

Crowe's feature directorial debut, The Water Diviner, stems from an honest impulse to dramatize ordinary people who honor their dead. Yet the results are narratively dishonest and emotionally a little cheap.

It`s a lamebrained movie, without much sense in its construction.

Much like the "new age" music of its Philip Glass score, "Powaqqatsi" occupies an uncomfortable space somewhere between the aggressively avant-garde and the lullingly banal. [13 May 1988, p.J]

It's a two-hour lesson in how to act like a frenemy to your alleged friends. And it's not funny enough.

Besson's commercial instincts for sleek, violent fantasy are often sound, but "Valerian" is more sedative than show.

Shallow though it may be, is a breakthrough.

It's all pretty dumb, but if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, you won't have a bad time. [9 April 1999, Friday, p.F]

A ravishing crock. Like its title character, a computer-generated movie star programmed to resemble a cross between Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Kim Basinger, it's beautiful but empty, gorgeous but spurious.