While White plays it supercool, Tommy Davidson and Arsenio Hall (as Cream Corn and Tasty Freeze, respectively) swing for the fences, without much in the way of a bat.

Is the movie good enough to do what it’s designed to do? Not really. It’s designed as a launching pad for a “Dark Tower” television series, scheduled to star Elba and Taylor. So this is an hour-and-a-half TV pilot; it just happens to be a big summer movie too.

Television sitcom-style directing and writing.

The result is passable stupidity leaning hard on its wily leading men. The movie’s also pretty galling in its unceasing brutality for laughs.

Shot in Chicago, this is a picture that looks better than it sounds and is made much better than it deserves to be.

Cry-Baby doesn`t have a subject, but only a format-a rickety framework erected to suport a few broad gags and a few indifferently filmed production numbers.

"The Bourne Identity." "The Bourne Supremacy." "The Bourne Ultimatum." And now, "The Pointless, Confused and Then, For the Last Half-Hour, Exciting Bourne Sequel, After a Fashion," more commonly known as The Bourne Legacy.

Painfully blasé coming-of-age story.

A screwy assassination thriller for these murky times, it takes half its pages from Soldier of Fortune and the other half from links provided by conspiracytheories-zapoppin.org.

Allen`s over-reliance on narration to create his emotional effects reminds us that his art is primarily, if not exclusively, a verbal one. He has never engaged the visual side of movies, never grasped film`s capacity to express emotions and ideas in images. Allen is a teller, not a shower.

Like many horror films, it loses steam as it gets more graphic.

When Serving Sara reaches beyond its grasp and dreams big, Perry and Hurley float the movie on aplomb and wit. When the film gears down for slower-paced set pieces and disposable villains, its stars find themselves knee-deep in a giant comedy cow pie.

Blanks, in a sense, are what M:I-2 is firing. You see the flash, you hear the bang, but the impact never comes.

"La Femme Nikita" is worth renting at your local video store. You will see a new face, actress Anne Parillaud, in a story that seems plugged into a fresh, subterranean Parisian world. By comparison, Point of No Return is a series of fashion ads and standard Hollywood explosion scenes. [19 March 1993, p.C]

Should have worked on our emotions like a scalpel, made us cry and bleed. But, though it's an affecting, polished film, it's not satisfying. [12 March 1999, Friday, p.A]

While not autobiographical, The Kite Runner feels authentic in its ethnic tensions, even when the narrative itself, with its handily reappearing and easily avenged villain, undermines that authenticity.

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

Has the worst happy ending I've seen in a while.

The movie wouldn’t feel human at all, really, if not for the convincing emotion bond established between Mackie and Carl Lumbly as Isaiah.

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

The movie has no sense of temptation and no real taste for revolt-it's a good little film that knows its place. Van Peebles' direction has a by-the-numbers competence but no discernible personality.

If it's a necessary piece of history, it's a paltry piece of drama, with intentions so grand, they're absolutely deadening. [20 Dec 1996, p.C]

Linda Cardellini can play just about anything, with honesty and delicacy, so it's no surprise she makes even a semi-sweet nothing like Austin Found worth a look.

What's missing most conspicuously from Great Balls of Fire is an interest in the historical and cultural context that made Lewis' career possible - that moment when a dying rural tradition intersected with a booming urban economy to create a whole new kind of music and with it, a whole new America. McBride treats the '50s as a joke - a montage of "Leave It to Beaver" complacency and H-bomb panic. The truth is more complex than that, and a better story. [30 June 1989, p.A]

This movie is more risk-prone than the majority of Marvel titles. Yet it frustrates, even beyond a screenplay full of self-competing interests. And as far as MCU fatigue goes — well, at this point, it goes pretty far.

A documentary that will likely leave Phish diehards hankering for more, and everybody else still wondering what all the fuss is about.

Good, bad or middling, very little of Shyamalan’s works can be described as tightly plotted, well-sprung suspense.

The main problem is the director-star's choice to play so far beneath his intelligence for so long. Stiller lacks the physical gifts and projected sweetness of, say, Jim Carrey in "Dumb and Dumber," and unlike Peter Sellers in the "Pink Panther" movies, he can't keep a straight face.