As a thriller it has its moments, as a romance it's sometimes touching, but as a comedy it's too often a bust.

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

Kuso won’t be for everybody. It’s gross, it’s repetitive, and if it has a point, it’s hard to discern. But it’s not artless. Every densely layered image of oozing pus and gassy orifices is as imaginatively rendered as it is disgusting.

Matthau has the best role, but Robbins and Ryan are finally simply too good for their material, which is not nearly inspired enough to do justice to their talent.

Jigsaw isn’t awful. It’ll do the job for anyone who must see a “Saw” movie in theaters on Halloween weekend. But a trip to a real-world escape room — or rewatching the original “Saw” — might be a better use of time and money.

Despite a few playful flourishes, filmmaker Luc Bondy’s experiment in artifice never takes flight.

While the dramatic underpinnings could have used more work, the labyrinth that’s the focus of Dave Made a Maze is truly an amazingly inventive sight to behold.

The movie has enough of Woods’ flavor to put a memorable spin on a familiar genre — so much so that it’s almost a crime it isn’t better.

For a story about sexual awakening and discovery, Desert Hearts is a taut, fatally careful movie with no looseness--and no abandon--to it and no feeling for detail that would let these characters really live.

Liman, who has a reputation for reviving troubled productions and salvaging films in postproduction, excavates an hour and 48 minutes of relatively engaging action-thriller material. It moves quickly enough to gloss over plot holes but leaves the impression that the novel was stripped for parts.

The story suffers diminishing returns as it unwinds with increasing violence and absurdity. Or maybe it’s just that “68 Kill” puts the best material upfront.

The oddball premise and quirky characters ultimately aren’t enough to lift up Man Underground.

Having succeeded at a persuasive, endearing anthropomorphosis, the film makers have come up with only a so-so picture to go with it. All that was really needed to make Short Circuit a more satisfying experience was to up the script a couple of notches and apply a lighter touch to it. Unfortunately, director John Badham and his fledgling writers have taken a very broad, heavy-handed approach.

While Wolf Warrior 2 is blandly generic more often than not, there’s something bracing about its patriotic fervor, which asserts that the Chinese will act in the best interests of the world’s downtrodden, while the rest of the world just exploits them.

The film tries to mix the two 1930s movie comedy strains: screwball romance and populist fable. But there's something nerveless and thin about it. Hawn and Russell are good, but their scenes together have a calculated spontaneity--overcute, obvious. Director Garry Marshall keeps the lines slamming off each other briskly but with a shallow, hectoring energy. And he doesn't have much visual flair.

Eventually, it loses steam while riding a line between outrageousness and earnestness and never quite comes together.

Fans of outsized genre fare should appreciate how much fun Rapace appears to be having, showing off different skills in different wigs. Her enthusiasm doesn’t make this a good movie, but it does makes it likable.

A tract, a dry rerun of Cry Freedom, with none of that film's visual sweep (whatever else its faults) and with nothing new to tell us. It's filled with obvious, earnest performances--Marlon Brando's ironic and subtle one is the only exception--and unresonant writing.

Despite a soulful turn by Dinklage and some thoughtful themes and emotions, the film, capped by an anti-climactic ending, never coheres into the gripping, mind-bending package that was clearly intended.

Although this unsettlingly sympathetic biopic covering around the last 30 years in the life of famed New York mobster John Gotti is mostly well-acted and frequently entertaining, it bites off more than it can — or even needs to — chew, packing it all into a less-than-epic running time.

The quasi-magical realist film In Search of Fellini has its heart in the right place but wears its studied quirks on its sleeve, leading with influences and references rather than a strong story.

Had the comedy been sharper, this movie-loving movie might have convincingly meshed its Technicolor caricatures and antifascist heroics.

The real gold chasers are the filmmakers, who keep pilfering moments from the first film to garland the sequel in order to repeat their success.

While Harnett’s a real trooper and stuntman-turned-filmmaker Scott Waugh (“Act of Valor”) establishes an effectively bone-chilling milieu heightened by an immersive sound design that keeps those whipping winds and howling wolves in uncomfortably close proximity, the embellishments fail to create crucial suspense.

The movie is twinkly and antiseptic so that when tragedy hits big in the final half hour, it seems coercive. It's like a pipsqueak Terms of Endearment.

Unfortunately, the movie’s over-dependence on voice-over and its overwritten script interfere with the audience being able to fully engage.

Visually, Ghost House makes good use of its setting, offering Instagram-ready images of its location shot by Pierluigi Malavasi. Unfortunately, Thai people are used in ways that rely on cultural stereotypes, a blemish on an otherwise effective and unsettling film.

Hacking through the jungle of cliche and reservoir of bad acting in Bloodsport are some pretty exciting matches. It all boils down to a confrontation between a clean-cut noble warrior and a snorting, apish, dirty fighter. As usual, it's no contest.

The movie has bounce and bite, but it skitters around too much. Its needle is hip-hopping around between too many grooves.

The movie does what it sets out to do: stranding the viewer in a dark place, surrounded by remorseless predators. It’s an old recipe that can still please a crowd.

Cry Freedom is not a great movie -- it's an earnest, clunky, awkward one without a fluid sense of story and with its most charismatic figure, the martyred black South African activist, Bantu Stephen Biko, gone before the film's 2 hours and 35 minutes are half over. [06 Nov 1987, p.1]

A movie that wants to be hard-hitting and gritty but lacks the stomach for the job, it meanders through what should be a lean and focused narrative and ends up more of a letdown than anything else.

Kaleidoscope is brilliantly crafted and performed, but it’s a bit too taken with its own muddling of facts and form to truly hook into.

Because the actors deliver every line in a breathless rush, their performances are monotone; and because Burrows throws in new characters and ideas every few minutes, the resolution to this story comes out rushed and goofy, and not as poignant as intended.

Had a minimal effort been made to address policing controversies in the context of an honest argument that the job is grueling and perilous, Fallen might have been more powerful.

Embargo plays like a freshman college paper that’s long on reference material but comes up short in establishing an overriding premise.

More than a few times, the film feels choppy, sloppy or paltry. But Wall gives a sympathetic performance as a man facing his final stand. And even at its pulpiest, Happy Hunting has a point to make — about how in modern society we often use the pretense of morality to justify base savagery.

Cinematically and emotionally it’s a mixed bag, a slow-moving visual treatise and occasional vanity piece that requires — but doesn’t always earn — our indulgence.

What’s missing is a more personal directorial imprint.

It’s all too sterile and stilted, distracting from the deeply emotional story of love and loss at its core.

Coltrane displays a range he hasn’t shown before onscreen, dipping into darker realms as the romantically spurned blue collar townie Victor. But Fitzgerald runs away with Blood Money as femme fatale Lynn.

The film clearly comes from a place of deep knowledge about the intricacies of schizophrenia but has an unfortunate tendency to overexplain itself.

At most, Naples ’44 makes a solid case for turning to Lewis’ prose and getting the full effect of his year there that way.

Generational Sins does deserve praise for avoiding the saccharine tone that plagues so many other films about faith, though its script may fail to convert nonbelievers.

Though some of the choicest talent in Hollywood is involved, including stars Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond and director Sydney Pollack, "Sabrina" plays like a standard brand. A mild romantic comedy, undemanding and unobjectionable, it fits the definition of product, a film made not for love but because it was a package that could be sold.

The Legend of 420 captures a zeitgeist, but with so many facets to explore in this survey of contemporary American marijuana culture, it only scratches the surface.

For a movie about so rabble-rousing a figure, it’s an unusually quiet portrait.

Technically, and on a performance level, Prison earns time off for good behavior. However, the story feels as if it was conceived by someone working with an expired artistic license. [24 May 1988, p.8]

As a morality tale, Haze is old news. But as an in-the-moment explanation of how hazing happens, it’s so fresh, it’s raw.

Though it lacks the sophistication and depth its subject merits, Angels Within does suggest the possibility of reconciling some of the cultural divisions that face the nation if we are willing to drop the labels and judgments and see one another as human beings.

What derails Blockers in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.

While Lynch has experience delivering breezy action, “breezy” can shade into “frivolous” — or even “forgettable.” As good as Yeun and Weaving are, there’s not a lot here that hasn’t been done

Winkler is so interested in making Merrill admirable that he neglects to make him interesting. That's true of the movie too. In the ethics department, it's commendable. In the drama department, it's bland. [15 Mar 1991, p.F1]

It’s a well-intentioned film that wants to help people live healthier lives, but it sometimes appears closer to a feature-length infomercial than a legitimate documentary.

Olin could not be more commanding. It's a powerful performance in the service of a movie that's by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

It’s the glimmers of penetrating observation that make the overload of clichés so frustrating in Onah’s first feature, and suggest better things for his second.

Director Alison Eastwood ("Rails & Ties"), despite an evident affinity for the material, takes an overly stagy approach to the scenes, when a more lyrical, atmospheric style was in order.

Though the sequences of the actual heroism on the Paris-bound train are fully as crisp and involving as you'd expect, the other sections of the film, intent on demonstrating how undeniably everyday the three participants were up to that crucial moment, fall regrettably flat.

This fantasy, about a miniature horse aching to join Santa’s team of reindeer, works hard but underwhelms.

Captain Ron is a movie about trapped suburbanites who break out into romantic seas, but it never really leaves suburbia. Its spiritual home is in the shopping mall. Like the Cap'n himself, this movie guzzles up its dreams and ignores the busted engine.

Ballard has infused Wind with an old-fashioned romantic sentimentality that is affecting from time to time. But this and everything else that is good about the picture fights an ultimately losing battle against an inept story that feels like it was constructed from bits and pieces of other, presumably more involving films. It's a shame that director Ballard, who has gone many years between features, has had to set out this time in such a leaky and unsound vessel.

A routine, mildly funny service comedy. [01 Mar 1996, p.F6]

Horror movie characters aren't generally known for their brains, but these ones make enough bad choices that audiences won't be able to help yelling at the screen (at least ours couldn't). It's a frustrating experience at times, but the script from Ben Ketai and "The Strangers" filmmaker Bryan Bertino eventually allows the family to take some satisfying actions in the second half of the film.

There are individual moments to remember with affection, but the plot has miles to go before we sleep. [26 June 1987, p.1]

The colorful animated comedy Monster Family relies so heavily on pratfalls, slapstick and other bits of rude or raucous action that it undercuts whatever good intentions its workable story may have had.

It's all a tad too serious for a movie that's essentially a tawdry pulp thriller. Still, anyone who comes to Acts of Violence looking for colorfully sleazy characters and shootouts — as opposed to nuanced public policy briefs — should find enough reasons to stick around.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

Adapted by Jesse Andrews, the movie speaks toward the truth that appearances — including one's race and gender — shouldn't matter in love and relationships. It's a thought-provoking concept that makes "Every Day" more ambitious than your average teen romance, which only makes it all the more disappointing that it simply remains an average teen romance.

Somewhere along the way -- 'round about the Ghost of Christmas Past stuff -- the magic has fallen out of the story. The treacly score by Miles Goodman, with songs by Paul Williams, doesn't help. The Muppets are at their best when they're anarchic, without all this soggy whimsy. [11 Dec 1992, p.F12]

The documentary is at its strongest when it leans into its variety of subjects, rather than when the director centers on his own history and training. However, he skims over both, and the lack of depth and focus hurts his argument.

The Miracle Season moves with a brisk energy and pace, pausing only to draw a few tears hear and there. It's peppered with girl power bangers, training montages and inspirational speeches. But it relies on storytelling that tells rather than shows.

Mortal Engines is bursting with everything you’d want except compelling emotional intelligence.

Permanent Midnight's Hollywood segments are clever and amusing, but the more Stahl's life unravels in his demeaning search for drugs, the more the film inevitably goes down along with it. Watching Stahl searching frantically for an unused vein in his neck with a baby fussing next to him (don't ask) may be unnerving, but it is far from irresistible.

As the writer-director's sly gaze shifts into an insistently upbeat appeal for female empowerment, the movie loses its comic steam.

A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make. 

Wry, head-shaking smiles at bad behavior are many — open laughter is lacking. Wain maintains a frenetic, near-vaudevillian pace, but this is a tribute flick that rejoices in anarchy and tastelessness without being exhilaratingly either thing itself.

Andres Veiel's documentary Beuys, plays like a fan's flip book divorced from meaningful resonance.

For those already jaded by the onslaught of YA fantasy universes, The Darkest Minds is on the forgettably “safe” end of the genre’s coded spectrum.

Allure is powered by Wood's intense charisma. Laura deploys her magnetic gaze as a weapon, though the destruction she wreaks is most often directed at herself. The character's situation is always untenable, and as it collides with inevitability, the co-writer-director Sanchez brothers lose the tight grip of control they've maintained over the story.

There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.

While the always affable Rudd is up to the more serious task at hand, the overly studied direction by Australian Ben Lewin frustratingly keeps the audience at arm’s length from both its lead and that surprising chain of events, which feel as palpably pieced together as the stitching on Berg’s baseballs.

What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.

The confluence of rebellion, personal responsibility and genre violence never quite gels, perhaps because the realities of a zombie movie ultimately dictate where these things are headed.

As a bunch, the film makers have created the sort of mystery story that might well puzzle a 12-year-old who had never read a mystery story before and wasn't paying attention anyway, and the sort of love story that 12-year-olds might throw away to read the mystery story, along with the sort of dog story many dogs would actually enjoy--if the pages were edible...Luckily the team of Hanks and Beasley are around to save the show, tell a few snappy stories, dance a few licks, chase a few crooks, make you laugh, make you cry. Who needs writers?

So clearly derived from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that you might begin to wonder when Jack Nicholson will show up. The Dream Team isn't unusual, but it's funnier than, say, Twins or Fletch Lives. It can't really hit any classic highs, perhaps because it regards rebellion as cute and paranoia as a running gag. The jokes, to stick, need grittier, sawtooth edges.

The two halves of Hiding Out--thriller and teen sex comedy--never meld, working against each other rather than together. Hiding Out never escapes its absurd hook, this mechanical collision of genres. After all, if someone really needs to hide out, isn't the best plan to simply . . . hide out?

Ben Parker's feature directorial debut never takes full advantage of its small setting, resulting in a grim thriller that isn't as compelling as it might have been in stronger hands.

Doc Hollywood draws its energy almost exclusively from cliche. The cornball rowdiness is partially redeemed by the good cast.

There are some premises that absolutely aren't going to work--no matter how much intelligence, talent or craft the film makers bring to them. And Marshall Brickman may have stumbled onto such a premise in The Manhattan Project.

Material like this might have worked if the moviemakers had played it completely crazy and over-the-top, if they'd made it a true satire of the American upper class facing its worst nightmare. But the tone of Toy Soldiers suggests its makers might have tried to turn Animal House into a triumph of the spirit story, too. [26 Apr 1991, p.F10]

Tutu and Blomfeld's confrontations have vigor and commitment but don't build to the requisite catharsis.

Christie’s story, one of her finest, is hard to screw up, even when Branagh and his returning screenwriter, Michael Green, seem bent on proving otherwise. Their movie is an often fussy, hectic confusion of old-timey pleasures and 21st century sensibilities, a mash-up that makes for some especially incongruous visual choices.

DiMarco's noir-inflected family drama is confident and mature, but less involving than it could be, because the filmmaker and his star make their anti-hero stubbornly unappealing.

It's a pity such memorable characters are stuck in a story so middling.

The film feels like it doesn't hit its stride until two-thirds of the way through, when Davis unleashes Kendrick. It's a clever premise, and there are some great performances, including Kendrick's, but a few story elements are fumbled to the film's detriment.

Although director Giorgio Serafini keeps the action apace in what's largely a one-location setting (the movie was shot in Texas), Garry Charles' script at times lacks clarity and credibility, as well as sufficient back story about the showy Steve. Still, Flanery and Balfour keep us watching.

The best things about The Last Boy Scout are the editing, Bill Medley's singing, a few moments of Noble Willingham villainy and Willis--whose weary, exasperated style exactly suits this kind of material. But the worst things about Scout are its slickness and self-confidence. A story about lonely heroism in a sick age should be a little hipper to what's really heroic and what's really sick.