In this bizarre tale of man among the apes and a psychiatrist among madmen -- an over-emotional hybrid of "Gorillas in the Mist" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- style buries substance.

A bad, bad movie...It's loud and dumb and it wastes a good cast on a ludicrous script.

But folks, this is a lousy script, blobby like the endlessly beheaded minions of the squad's chief adversary. It's not satisfying storytelling; the flashbacks roll in and out, explaining either too much or too little, and the action may be violent but it's not interesting.

Her Alibi, the disappointing pairing of two fine physical specimens, model Paulina Porizkova and Tom Selleck. Neither is a major acting talent, but both are eager to please and easy on the eyes. Yet, they have chosen a script that is so light that it fails my basic test for evaluating a movie: Would it be more interesting to listen to the actors talk at lunch than to hear them run through this script? Yes, it would.

I found Violent Night to be a joyless slay ride, not to mention verbally witless. There’s not much kick in seeing an R-rated version of “Home Alone,” and even that owed its home-invasion nastiness to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

This is the kind of movie that nice people call ambitious. Let's just leave it at that.

Sex Tape settles for violence when violent slapstick, a lot harder to finesse, was the implicit goal of the picture.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

A thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing.

The poster’s the funniest thing about the project: Johnson, sporting a pair of fairy wings larger than his forearms, glaring at the camera.

Despite valiant efforts from Czerny and from the fine stage actress Vilma Silva, who plays one of Walsch's many saviors, the result would qualify as a blandly inspirational amateur hour if the running time weren't closer to two.

This ultimately disappointing comedy starts reasonably strong, delivers a few good laughs, then rolls over and plays dead.

It's reductive, insanely violent slapstick, but that's the phenomenon in a nutshell.

A cutesy, heavy-handed morality tale that contains nary a believable moment.

Illegal Tender echoes "A History of Violence," another gritty film that explores escaping a criminal past. But the vast vapidity behind Illegal Tender's ill-conceived story line is far harder to overcome.

What’s so maddening about A Quiet Place Part II is the unused potential. Krasinski opens up the world and timeline of the film, but doesn’t utilize it in any meaningful way, introducing new ideas but then jettisoning the opportunity. Again and again he falls back on more of the same old tricks from “A Quiet Place,” which was a bore to begin with.

This was a mission that should have been aborted long ago.

Williams' grimace is starting to look desperate. Then again, no one comes off well in director Ken Kwapis' handling of this greasy screenplay.

John Waters is back with this awfully bawdy, never sexy, rarely funny, actually boring, one-note sex comedy.

The real problem is that there isn't enough whimsy in the world to save this unengaging story.

In the end you don't believe what you're watching, and you don't care. This party is a drag.

The Ten changes tone every few minutes, ranging from lowbrow gross-out gags to elevated language to a big, sloppy musical number.

The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of "27 Dresses") devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that's what male screenwriters are for--to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

All the obligatory plot elements are there. Love and loss, anger and forgiveness, illness and death. But they never flow together to make a coherent story. Instead, they just pop up whenever the script is in trouble. Which is all the time.

This new Friday the 13th, unquestionably savvier and snappier than the original "Friday the 13th," though just as useless, is a needed return to simplicity.

Not so much character-driven as character-dragged--against its will.

The Nome King looks like a moveable Mt. St. Helens and he alone is magical. In fact, he blows Dorothy and her tacky-looking friends off the screen. So we end up liking the Nome King and hating Dorothy and her crowd, which I doubt was the intention of the L. Frank Baum series. [21 Jun 1985, p.1]