For all its glitz and gadgets, is markedly inferior in everything but teen appeal.

Zucker gives the movie an ebullient spirit, but he also keeps everything at the same loud pitch throughout.

This Australian production pairs two always-watchable actors, Guy Pearce and Rachel Griffiths, yet never compels us to feel a thing.

A sleekly fashioned true-crime story without much on its mind.

It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.

One of the problems with the new comedy Run, Fat Boy, Run is that it’s not English enough, even though its antagonist is a thoroughly detestable American go-getter.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

Contains too little of the original's campy spirit and too many whistles, bells, explosions and screams.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

A movie just begging to go up in the flames of camp. If only somebody had brought a match.

Envy is a shaggy dog-poop story that'll make you wish you could spray something at the screen to make it disappear.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

Sniggery sex, adolescent male-bonding, casual drug use, the agonies of growing up, mistrust [to put it mildly] of the adult world, a yearning for material success and a corresponding distaste for anything that smacks of the "committed" 1960s - it's all here, supporting a plot so lunatic that it could have been assembled only in the backwards fashion outlined above. [22 July 1983, p.3-3]

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

Instead of an escape from Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it’s a retreat back into them, only the sexes have been changed.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

Even if the movie's only goal is to preach to the choir, its fondness for hyperbole and lack of discernment is more insult than rallying cry.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

Leans on just as many stereotypes as it tweaks.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

It stars Tom Hanks in his first genuinely dull screen performance.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.