The outlook of The Happys is reflected in its title — even when things are dark, Tracy maintains her sunny outlook. It might be a bit too spit-varnished shiny, but her happiness is hard-won.

The movie is choppily constructed, with a preference for jarring region-hopping and touristy positivity over vivid mini-portraits or informative dives into the process/taste details of Georgian wine.

A vintage Clint Eastwood performance--in a film so uninvolving that you barely wake up for the big battle finale.

An initially clever exercise winds up feeling like the wrong kind of hackwork.

The gimmicky structure and style is more distracting than effective, and it mostly fails to compensate for an underdeveloped plot.

Augie's challenges and efforts are moving, as is Lynne's devotion to him. Unfortunately, the film lacks consistency in its structure, and it glosses over some moments and people without explanation.The treacly score doesn't merely nudge viewers toward emotion, it shoves them.

Feste...has been known to elicit strong performances even from thuddingly obvious, maudlin material. But her attempts to establish an atmosphere of drab, low-key realism — evident in the dim lighting, wobbly framing and Laura’s penchant for rumpled plaid shirts — can scarcely conceal the essential phoniness of the material.

Despite the juicy details and fascinating topic, it’s disappointing that the stilted tone makes it so difficult to connect emotionally with this important story.

Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.

This is a long, miserable wallow, making audiences feel every dark minute of its title.

What makes Miami Blues unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we're witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford's smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn't provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior's sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-'em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones.

Gould's admiration for the genre is affecting and sincere. The problem is that his and screenwriter Greg Tucker's love of horse operas both boilerplate and ruminative a la Peckinpah doesn't mesh well enough into a smooth ride.

The overall tone is light and breezy, and while the jokes aren't exactly side-splitting, they do add some welcome eccentricity.

The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.

For all her improvisational skill and that of her top-billed costar, the much-vaunted Hart-and-Haddish pairing never pays dividends. It feels more like Half-and-Half.

The movie is all over the place and there is no attempt to weave it into a coherent whole — which is regrettable as scene for scene it often works.

It's too thin to be satisfying. It consistently sparkles and moves along gracefully, but at a mere 81 minutes it leaves you unsatisfied. Although trimmed from an R to a PG-13, reportedly in light of the AIDS scare, you're nevertheless left with the feeling that more than sex ended up on the cutting-room floor. [19 Sept 1987, p.9]

By the time their jaw-dropping story is over, you may feel you have traveled every inch of their journey with them, a downward spiral all the way. What you still may not understand is what really made Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Andrew Daulton Lee (Sean Penn) do what they did, or, more importantly, what made director John Schlesinger feel their story was worth telling.

Nastiness in a movie can sometimes be liberating and fun, but the nastiness in RoboCop 2 is no more authentic than its heart.

Everything that might have set Sleeping With the Enemy apart and made it memorable--textured central characters, psychological depth or a shred of believability--has been swept aside in the rush to make the movie a luxury item, sleekly gorgeous, blankly watchable, not unlike its star Julia Roberts.

The Con Is On takes off like a shot: a stylish caper with enjoyably wry, martini-soaked dialogue and a terrific comedic turn by Uma Thurman as a glamorous British scam artist. Then there's the film's second half — which sinks like a stone.

The scenery's pleasant and the actors are mostly likable. If "Baja" had been made in the '60s, it would have some kitsch appeal. It's easy watching, for anyone who needs a little mind-vacation. Everyone else should consider burying it in a hole for the next 50 years.

While the film features strong performances and good direction, it's still way too rote. A bunch of kids head into the forest and meet a monster. What happens next is just a matter of connecting the dots.

At its best, Another Kind of Wedding understands how hard it can be for families to look past their own burdensome self-mythology, to see each other again as just people.

The cast is terrific, and kudos to Boyd for including some specifics about how 20-something Angelenos hook up in the 2010s. But there’s just not enough that’s new here — either in what’s being said, or how.

While Elgort, whose big breakout role was in last year’s “Baby Driver,” does a decent job of delineating the two characters and Patricia Clarkson reliably comes through as their sympathetic doctor, the clinically distancing production never forms a meaningful bond with its audience.

Anecdotes and photos bring the golden age of Catch One to life, with a lively disco soundtrack and Thais-Williams' font of fascinating stories. But the film itself could use a more rigorous structure as it wanders from anecdote to anecdote and era to era.

Not funny enough to be a successful comedy and not coherent enough to be taken seriously, the latest film to star the talented Jim Carrey is a baffling combination of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Cape Fear, a misguided attempt to extend the actor's range by having him play someone who is demented and dangerous.

At 100 minutes Careful begins to bore, whereas at half that running time it might well have been unalloyed fun. [05 Nov 1993, p.F12]

There's little in the underdog sports dramedy Champion that feels vital, aside from its star.

If Perfect didn't have a germ of an idea tucked away in all its posturing silliness, it wouldn't be quite so infuriating. But it has: Superficially it's about sliding-scale morality in journalism today, a not uninteresting subject. [7 June 1985, p.C1]

Like its developmentally-arrested, misbehaving man-children, the long-shelved source material hasn’t aged particularly well.

Dhont’s film is a strong debut from a technical angle, but it lacks the humanity necessary for a story of this nature.

This disjointed, though consistently tense retelling dives full force into ostentatious pathos more often than it opts for narrative prudence.

As the piles of Biggie-related material has proven, it’s perhaps impossible to cover everything this story is really about in under two hours. City of Lies makes an honest effort but doesn’t get the job done.

Not an exposé, and hardly a case of sports-as-uplift, The Workers Cup feels like a toe dip when the topic calls for at least a deep wade.

Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

The focus of The Aftermath is in all the wrong places, spending time with characters in which we are unable to gain an emotional foothold. This misplaced attention makes for an erotic drama that feels cold, and a political thriller that feels empty.

A rehash of plot conventions from a slew of mismatched movies. A Perfect World will remind you of any number of previous films, but almost everything it attempts to do was done better the last time around.

It's nearly impossible to put together a picture about ennui without dramatically succumbing to it in a big way. Michael Tolkin, talent that he is, isn't yet the movie maker to meet the feat.

As much a commercial for Royal Caribbean cruises as it is a dramedy about a bumpy daughter-dad reunion, Like Father swamps its workable emotional core and adept lead turns with some slapdash plotting and a raft of floating festivities.

The serviceable but astonishingly generic Damascus Cover features the usual political-thriller tropes — tough but haunted protagonist, zigzag of foreign locales, rival spies, arcane twists, shifting allegiances, wedged-in romance — without adding much that feels unique or exciting.

The startling spike in anti-Semitism over the last two decades is certainly a vast and vital topic for documentary exploration, but director Laura Fairrie’s Spiral proves a largely underwhelming look at an overwhelming problem.

Roddy and Bereen in particular give fully fleshed-out performances, playing agents of a religious institution they both disrespect in subtle and blatant ways. Clarke and company inject some old-fashioned scares into the context of a deeper moral rot.

Even with all of Haddish's hard work, she still can't clean up the mess she's landed in.

The humor is often broad to the point of being shrill — especially once an eccentric genius nicknamed “Hopper” (Lee Kwang-soo) joins the team. For the most part though, The Accidental Detective 2 whooshes by, easily and forgettably.

In the absence of more intricate, involving plotting, the tongue-in-cheek characterizations and eye-catching production design only take things so far, and the novelty begins wearing off well before that dog-eared copy of “6 Dynamic Laws” reveals its final chapter.

Despite the final escape of star Steve Guttenberg, and the loss, long since, of the original director and writers, this is almost a good movie. It's an incremental, heavily qualified success, but "PA 5" is an improvement on the elephantine, witless "2," "3" and "4."

What's so amazing about the Police Academy movies is that they keep being made even though they stopped being funny after the hilarious original. We're now up to No. 4, and the most you can say for it is that it is the teeniest bit better, not quite so crass as the last two...Director Jim Drake is at least brisk and amiable; if nothing else, Police Academy 4 is good-natured and doesn't drag.

If this installment is just slightly less laborious than Karate Kid II or III, it's not from Mark Lee's surprise-free script or Christopher Cain's placid direction, but because young Swank really might be a find. Early on, she's such a convincingly testy teen that parents may flinch, but she does seem to blossom before your eyes.

When the movie shifts more toward fright in its final third, Burns and Parker don’t have much new or exciting to offer. But with the help of a strong performance from Mann, they do a good job capturing one family’s feelings of brokenness, and how far they’d go to get back what they lost.

Ernest Saves Christmas is an improvement on Ernest Goes to Camp, mostly because of Seale. But basically it's another TV ad, a chestnut roasting on an open fire, exploding in your face every so often with another Ya know what I mean? [15 Nov 1988, p.7]

Whether you're won over depends on your own taste for ineptitude. Like the others in the Worrell saga, Ernest Goes to Jail is a movie with couch-potato stylistics and switching-channel logic. Watching it is like sitting with a lukewarm TV dinner for an hour or so, while somebody tries to pound you into a Smurf. [09 Apr 1990, p.F12]

Over the years the movies have made precious little use of the distinctive talents of Eartha Kitt, but adults who accompany children to Ernest Scared Stupid, Disney's silly Halloween kiddie horror comedy, can be grateful for her stylish, witty presence.

Highlander: The Final Dimension is elementary and vague, but this purportedly last installment works well enough on a comic book level. Music video veteran Andy Morahan, in his feature directorial debut, has the right idea: Go for as much energy, pace and visual panache as possible. [30 Jan 1995, p.F8]

There's probably sufficient energy and violence in RoboCop 3 to satisfy undemanding action fans, but it's as mechanical as its cyborg hero.

My Favorite Year” meets “Nebraska” in An Actor Prepares, a comedic road movie that doesn’t take any fresh detours from its well-traveled route despite the presence of a very game Jeremy Irons.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never rises above its marketing-hook origins. It's a product, a commodity, a toy tie-in, a trailer for the comics, an advertisement for the cereal. It's a naked sell.

It would be silly to expect this movie to achieve the cinematic equivalent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliance, but you can’t help wishing it had more to offer than righteous speeches and stirring glances, that it put a few more ideas in your head to go with that lump in your throat.

Unfortunately, what director Joanou makes of all these promising elements is thudding pretentiousness.

Like most sequels that exist for chiefly commercial reasons, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn’t a great movie; with its flat dialogue, overblown battles and cloying CGI critters, it’s not even a particularly good one. . . . But it’s also not without its pleasures.

Despite its singular star and bursts of audio-visual vibrancy, the film may prove more ponderous and patience-testing than enlightening or involving for all but the most intrepid viewers.

Sommer, who did fine supporting work on TV’s “Mad Men,” doesn’t prove a distinctive or charismatic enough presence to carry an entire film, especially one as uneven as this.

God Bless the Broken Road is a strange Frankenstein's monster of a film, trying to combine too many ill-fitting story elements while straining to incorporate the title of a popular country song.

The ensuing abundant gore is simultaneously gleeful and nonsensical as the filmmakers rope in so many monsters — from seductive vampires to routine zombies to killer clowns — the entire movie becomes literal overkill.

Al Franken is good enough, he's certainly smart enough. So, doggone it, why is "Stuart Saves His Family" so mediocre?

Like a wrestler struggling to balance his real-life and in-the-ring personas, the grappling comedy Heels feels torn between its dual personalities, one warm, one coarse. Though individual parts work, this indie film from actor-writer-director Ryan Bottiglieri never fully unites its various elements and disparate tones into a well-crafted whole.

What the film mostly lacks is its own flavor.

Once all the pieces are in place, the film becomes a more conventional and less interesting thriller, with a single violent villain the heroes have to overcome.

This is Short's picture, and though he can do no wrong in it, he is not in a position to carry the whole thing. His fans will dutifully trek to it, laughing at his skill and wondering when Hollywood will finally do him justice. It's a hell of a good question.

Tsui tries to preserve that human element in fits and starts throughout “Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings” but to little avail.

The intentions are admirable, but the execution and ideas are far too vague.

While “The Last 49 Days” is awkwardly bloated, it does eventually develop some momentum. Once viewers get accustomed to a movie that can move within minutes from courtroom drama to dinosaur attacks, they may enjoy the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

Although it’s a serviceable enough story, the script by Blake Harris, who co-directed with Chris Bouchard, is often too earnest and forced to prove sufficiently fun or wondrous.

Though it is effective in fits and starts, this third version of that sturdy tale (the fourth, if you count Sleepless in Seattle, which it in part inspired) never manages to be more than a reasonable facsimile of its progenitor.

Well-shot and well-intentioned, this drama will likely please its core faith-based audience who won’t roll their eyes at the protagonist’s name or the earnest, hackneyed dialogue. However, most others will find the movie’s script from Gianna Montelaro bland and lacking both nuance and specificity.

A poky thriller that — eventually — delivers some decent scares.

Far too tame for hard-core horror fans and far too lame for loyal head-bangers, who can see much scarier stuff at a Slayer concert. [27 Oct 1986, p.2]

The film never finds its groove. Whatever point Van Peebles is trying to make gets lost in all the noise.

Henson is a gifted actress and physical comedian. She manages to hold together What Men Want with the sheer force of her powerful charisma, but the film around her is harried, messy and woefully underwritten.

Ultimately The Ranger promises more than it delivers.

There’s an outstanding short film lurking within Diane, a sketchy, enigmatic thriller that writer-director Michael Mongillo (reworking a Matt Giannini screenplay) can’t quite fill out into a feature. Strong performances and some memorably dramatic moments suggest what might have been, had the movie been more focused.

The virtues of The Aeronauts are real but they are almost exclusively visual. Despite the hard work of acclaimed actors in what sounds on paper like a strong story, the drama presented is determinedly earth-bound.

The Gate, whatever minor triumphs it dredges up, is too hopelessly copycat. It's basically powdered Speilberg on Zwieback toast and Stephen King on a stick. [19 May 1987, p.3]

The grim relentlessness with which Destroyer seesaws between time frames — as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored — wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.

In this sleek but grisly and far-fetched thriller of the supernatural, [Resnikoff] means to terrify us but winds up leaving us merely numb, the usual effect of contrived exploitation fare. [09 Apr 1990, p.F6]

The cast is talented, the direction is fairly crisp and the dialogue isn’t stiff. When the people who made this movie move on to something better, they’ll have no reason to be embarrassed by where they started.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

What could have been a deep and rousing clarion call on the homeless crisis gets supplanted by surface characterizations and situations, us-against-them broadsides and weak story strands.

The body count goes up, but our interest level doesn’t rise with it.

The need to make an ordinary life extraordinary is so prevalent it smothers any genuine emotion from family members losing a loved one.

This increasingly convoluted tale moves quickly but goes nowhere.

The plodding Out of Blue isn’t out of ideas — just out of gas.

The film’s initial non-judgmental perspective eventually sounds more like a public service announcement for Louisiana’s nutria control program.

It's an all-out horror film--handsomely produced but morbid and not in the least amusing to watch.

When the stakes are raised, ho-hum thriller plotting takes over and Okoro struggles to clarify what his characters want. By the end, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy and the promise of a uniquely complex story of cross-cultural education, opportunity and morality has withered.

Critters is a dumb, but sometimes likable little movie: maybe an odd comment, since it contains savage killings, mutilations and general bloodshed and evisceration. [25 Apr 1986, p.8]

Though it's somewhat better than its predecessor, largely through sheer directorial and photographic panache, it's still pretty disreputable and mindless. [29 Apr 1988, p.4]