Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

Just say no.

Soft and predictable -- which might be OK if there were more laughs and insight.

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

Shelley Long stars in a limp copy of "Private Benjamin" with a location switch from the Army to the Girl Scouts. Long plays a Beverly Hills wife who decides to take over the local troop of spoiled brats. A number of tedious jokes about conspicuous consumption fall flat and Long is no Hawn when it comes to comedy. [24 March 1989, p.A]

Pirates is tedious round after tedious round of mutiny and rescue. Screen people are hanged and stabbed and garroted with great care, but there's nothing to put the audience out of its misery. [22 July 1986, p.5C]

Wish Upon isn't over-the-top wacky or campy, and in fact, feels slightly low-energy at times, but it's the kind of simple filmmaking coupled with absolutely insane writing and plot points that make it an ideal candidate for so-bad-it's-good viewing.

Keith -- a consistent hit-maker who wrote the controversial 9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" -- has a future in movies if he wants it. Hopefully, they'll be better ones than this.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

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.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

Stylistically, Acrimony has moments of genius — slow camera movements that push in on Melinda, emphasizing Henson’s performance and the building pressure — but it’s also hilariously cheesy, and slightly chintzy, which adds to its schmaltzy charm.

The whole movie seems designed to point out that there are far better things in life than being a ski instructor in Aspen, Colo.

But in the end everything comes down to Lawrence, who has yet to develop a truly distinct comedic sensibility.

A criminal waste of talent.

99 minutes of excruciating "reality."

Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard has to offer. To those I say, godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences and the filmmakers all deserve better.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.

If the filmmakers wanted to talk so much, they should have just gotten together for a long, anecdote-filled, wine-soaked Spanish dinner party and amused themselves.

It's supposed to be one of those stories of a child's innocence - that means nudity - told in an unfettered way. But the young people in the film who grow up together on a tropical island are dumb-dodo types. As a result all we watch for is the nudity and, it turns out, teen-ager Brooke Shields is doubled in her nude scenes by a 31-year-old model. So much for truth and innocence. [11 July 1980, p.8]

Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster--it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie--is the presence of Mark Wahlberg.

For the most part, the humor in House II is mild and conventional, and the suspense sequences never amount to much, thanks largely to the film's failure to play by any identifiable rules. In a film in which reality can be bent and rebent, following the director's whim of the moment, it is nearly impossible to establish any real sense of danger. Menace requires integrity, and "House II" doesn't have it.

The films are bad, but they are entertaining. Fifty Shades Freed, the final film of the trilogy, just might be the most competently made yet — which is a shame for those expecting the high camp factor of "Fifty Shades Darker."

The movie suffers from a devastating flaw for a comedy: It isn't very funny.

A comedy of bad manners with many punchy moments and many irritatingly glib ones.

More an uninspired letdown than a flabbergasting turkey... One reason for this lack of bite lies in the werewolves themselves. They're a bit too teddy-bearish, even oddly cuddly, and the fright scenes work better when you don't see much of them.

It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.