It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

A probing though ponderously episodic drama that ultimately feels as stitched together as Sawchuk’s frequently unmasked mug.

Ultimately, just as the events tread a fine line between fantasy and reality, so does the film teeter precipitously between promise and pretense.

To its credit, the script, by director Sara Zandieh and Stephanie Wu, works hard at inclusivity. Unfortunately, while a lesbian couple is fun, the gay men feel like a throwback and Alex’s bisexuality, which could have provided an intriguing and credible complication, goes nowhere.

Tedious and contrived.

In a pandemic, some might call the film a beacon of hope; others might prefer science to prayer for salvation. As a piece of cinema, though, Fatima is unlikely to be canonized.

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear.

One suspects Inside the Rain is a labor of love. One wishes its makers would have let us in enough to love it as well.

Anger? Outrage? Are these new feelings for audiences dealing with the fact of rape--aborted or not? You might hope not, but if they are, the film generates them, as well as the shamefully satisfying taste of bone-cracking revenge. But they still don’t add up to reason enough to make a movie, or to make it in 1986.

Band of the Hand is a formula 1986 revenge thriller, and, though it hooks you frequently into its thin plot, it never gets far past formula. It’s a bad movie with saving graces-- Dylan’s song among them--which is better than a bad movie that just lies there and rots.

Tape might be based on a true story but it still feels disingenuous, both in its bleakest moments and in those meant to inspire solidarity. There’s clumsiness present in the filmmaking, with issues that deserve so much better.

The film drifts from grown-up to kid problems with mostly anecdotal evidence but very little science to back it up. It tries to cover too much ground in 71 minutes without going deeply into any of the areas it lightly explores.

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why is Sidney Lumet’s Power the sexless diatribe that it is, all high-tech visuals and no emotional grounding? Its sole juiciness comes from Gene Hackman as a raffish Southern media consultant, well-cured in bourbon and branch water. The outlandish daring of his performance is almost rave-up enough to recommend the movie. Almost.

The Tomorrow War tries its hand at throwback ‘90s action glory, back when cinematic adventures could be everything for everybody. Instead, this post-apocalyptic combat flick lacks the intensity to reach the 1.21 gigawatts worth of power needed to emblazon our screens in escapist flair.

The Wizard is bright, fast and energetic, but there’s not much real life to it. It’s another movie that’s disappeared into its own marketing hook: Three kids on the road, living and loving, racing toward personal redemption and video ascension.

Although director Albert Pyun brings out nothing but the worst in the mercifully brief recitations of dialogue, he does know how to stage and pile up effectively brutal action sequences till you feel as though you've been through four world wars in under 85 minutes. It's desensitizing violence in all its glory: You may cheer during the rousing slugfests, then hate yourself afterward. [07 Apr 1989, p.12]

This is not a “but the book was better” argument. It’s simply that by abandoning the original character and cobbling together broken story shards and spare parts, Branagh and company have produced something off an assembly line: safe, generic and utterly disposable.

The filmmakers cast several comic performers — Adam Pally as the dad, Tichina Arnold as the grandmother, Ken Marino as the bad guy — but there aren’t really opportunities for them to shine. Arnold seems to have the most fun with it. The Main Event, sadly, never gets off the mat.

It almost works as food porn when we spend some time in Chico’s kitchen, but we never linger long enough for the experience to marinate.

The new David Bowie biopic Stardust could be marketed as “Bowie as you’ve never seen him,” but it feels like “Bowie as no one ever saw him.”

Inspired moments can be found throughout “Eurovision” if you have the patience.

Poison Ivy suffers from a basic dramatic hitch. We in the audience are so far ahead of the people on the screen that there are no surprises, just the inevitable sound of the inevitable shoe dropping.

It’s full of missed opportunities and lacking in telling details.

First-time director Andrew Scheinman -- one of the partners in Castle Rock Entertainment -- may have too much of the Billy in himself to bring out the true roisterousness of baseball. He manages the movie with too soft a touch. The film's injected pathos isn't true to what most adults respond to in the sport -- let alone children. [29 Jun 1994, p.F5]

Its most memorable effects, though, are not technological in nature. They are the wary side-eye glances and unexpected smiles that cross Fishback’s face as she banters with Foxx and Gordon-Levitt and also the streams of hip-hop poetry — carefully scripted but thrillingly delivered — that come pouring out during a few welcome stretches of down time.

This is a bore -- arch and unfunny 80% of the way. [26 May 1987, p.1]

Norman Jewison directed, but overall it's surprisingly labored, with that cheesy, set-bound look of a lot of many early '60s Universal pictures. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

The Eight Hundred fetishizes martyrdom, but for those seeking big-screen, epic violence, it’s pretty much the only game in town.

Cohn, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, likely was aiming for subtlety, but these are not subtle times. Trying to get a spark from a damp match is a lot harder than holding a flame to dry kindling.

In such troubled times, one supposes there’s comfort to be found in the lack of adventurousness of Holidate, but it’s like opening the same present again and again.

It’s one of those pseudo-thrillers with car chases and shootouts in which it’s hard to invest yourself because its rules seem fungible.

Fatman isn’t a lump of coal. More like a fruitcake your neighbor dropped off in early December that’s left on the counter through the new year, its red and green cherries hardening into buckshot before being hauled out to the curb with the Christmas tree.

Rothe and Shum Jr. have such nice, authentic chemistry that they should put it to good use again. Perhaps there’s a jaunty rom-com out there with their names on it.

In the end, you can’t have much movie fun with freakiness if you aren’t willing to freak the movie out a little.

Mason does a lot to make the characters’ distanced interactions — mostly via video chat — seem natural and not like a gimmick. But the real-world resonances are actually fairly dull. Though not especially objectionable, Songbird may suffer a worse fate: being forgettable.

If scares are the movie’s raison d’etre, though, it’s hard to imagine Spell will frighten anyone but those vulnerable to a few bits of graphic gore.

The draggiest of the Crosby holiday vehicles. Even the usually manic Danny Kaye is reduced to a kind of nagging Man Friday. There are some good tunes, though (Berlin was in on this one, too). [19 Dec 1991, p.12]

If it’s an Ip Man adventure you’re looking for in which he’s a full-on superhero, this one exists. Just know you’re getting the B Team.

If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for Just Cause will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater.

The Mauritanian is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.

The craven commitment to fan service that has long afflicted big-budget adaptations is still in evidence. The wooden dialogue and indifferent performances aren’t bugs so much as features of a corporate mindset that sees IP fidelity and imaginative storytelling as mutually exclusive aims.

Whatever its goals, the filmmaking is uninspired. It’s heavily reliant on clichés, especially in its use of score, the lone-wolf cop and familiar devices to build tension.

It’s trying for swank bubbliness--Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” crossed with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” But director Barry (“The Addams Family”) Sonnenfeld and screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner are more suited to slapdash nutso comedy. The swings between clunky slapstick and “heartfelt” moments are jolting. (They’d be even more jolting if the slapstick or the heart tugs were effective.)

The Marksman is more drama than thriller, but really more old-fashioned western than anything else — and a familiar one at that.

An empty-headed movie: one more gargantuan, excessive, over-the-top action thriller with one more superhero -- this time ex-linebacker Brian "The Boz" Bosworth -- battling dozens of deranged villains single-handedly while trucks, motorcycles and cars crash all around him. [20 May 1991, p.F6]

To say that Oscar, Sylvester Stallone’s latest attempt to become king of comedy, is funnier than might be expected (which it is) is really not saying that much.

Any trenchant observations to be found in this Blithe Spirit only pop and fizz into thin air like Champagne bubbles. Though effervescent, it’s a bit too ethereal for its own good.

The occasional action scenes are as appropriately tortuous as the tired teen-out-of-water plot is torturous. This is a kid-flick that’s speed-skating on one leg.

The film has a nutty premise and a game star, but it too quickly runs out of fresh ideas.

It’s one of those movies that seem fabricated for a shopping mall: decorative, pretty, vacuous.

Whatever was unforced and funny in the first film has become exaggerated here, whatever was slightly sentimental has been laid on with a trowel. The result, with some exceptions, plays like an over-elaborate parody of the first film, reminding us why we enjoyed it without being able to duplicate its appeal.

Afineevsky’s by-the-numbers, for-hire production feels unnecessary. Even if one can’t argue with its distilled message of loving thy neighbor, Francesco just serves to remind us of all the horrors unfolding simultaneously.

What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.

Like Sonny’s moving pictures in his mind, Bogdanovich sees things we can’t; when we can join him--in moments of family and connectedness--Texasville is touching. Most other times it’s the darndest mess you ever saw.

But even if Hitchcock’s chase thrillers were the inspiration, with their falsely accused heroes fleeing police through exotic landscapes, the master wouldn’t have approved of this tribute. Logic, character, coherence, psychology--all those vital thriller elements disappear as quickly as the Iowa corn.

It’s an amazingly bald-faced copy of E. T. even though this is E. T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long.

The wonder is that anything in a country this exotic, full of such potential wonder, could be made this enervating.

The scenery’s gorgeous, Redgrave and Bergin are pros, Tom Everett Scott is fittingly gross as the selfish stage dad and Goodacre has some charm. But the film forgot to graft a personality onto its protagonist and seems so determined to be PG-clean that sparks between the leads are … hard to “find.”

The movie is grisly, illogical, contradictory, borderline tasteless, riddled with plot holes--and at the same time, decently photographed, cleanly edited and crisply directed. All in all, the waste it represents--of talent, of intelligence, of fine craftsmen and of the audience’s good will--is enough to make one howl like a dog.

It lacks the cleverness or the panache to give its schtick the proper zing.

The film’s premise is promising but undeveloped.

Watching this San Francisco-based film is a bit like looking at "Vertigo" through several heavy layers of scrim.

It has a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit but it also has high-road pretensions. It’s a violent movie that wants to make an anti-violence “statement,” the oldest ploy in the boxing film genre.

Laboriously paced, the indulgent jolts and bloodless scares, neither deeply rooted nor artfully raised, float as lifelessly as a lily pad on a bog.

The movie is too ponderous and dry — neither endearingly trashy nor effectively scary.

The book too is cluttered and diffuse, but it still has nice, uncompromisingly rough edges to it that this film adaptation has planed away. It was an honest, painful record; it has been nudged into family-style uplift.

Lisa isn’t ineffective. It’s shaped in the usual sadistic way that leaves some audiences howling with blood-lust by the climax. But it’s basically a nasty movie that tries to end up nicey-nice: a house-cat of a sex-thriller that wants to claw the hell out of you and then curl up to warm milk and velvety hugs.

Ritter, Dawber and Jones are skilled comedians, and director Peter Hyams typically handles large-scale entertainments with aplomb. But it’s hard to see how anyone could have made anything out of something as flat as Stay Tuned.

Heavy-handed acting from the young cast and Needell’s hackneyed dialogue further unmask the movie’s lack of visual wonder and narrative cohesiveness.

Madhouse grabs you by the lapels and tries to shake the laughs out of you. But it’s never very funny, despite the best efforts of that facile TV farceur Larroquette and the sexiest contortions of Kirstie Alley.

This one, written by Fellowes and directed by Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn,” “Woman in Gold”) with the same workmanlike efficiency, affords its share of passing pleasures. And not just of the usual luxury-porn variety, although those who watch “Downton Abbey” for the pearls, frocks and waistcoats, the posh furnishings and elegant dinners will hardly be disappointed.

Taking Care of Business is a curious achievement: a laughless comedy starring Belushi and Grodin, two actors who are almost always funny.

It’s off-putting the way Velle bombards us with statistics and warnings and ominous music before settling in to his (mostly white) brain trust of researchers and experts expounding on population growth as the survival topic we shouldn’t be afraid to address.

It’s underwritten yet over-stuffed with songs, and the production itself feels chintzy and airless.

When Side Out gets to its “meat"--intercutting the beach with the law firm, intercutting frantic lovemaking with a tough volleyball loss, intercutting the beach with life, intercutting bikinis with more bikinis--we know we’re dealing with shameless button-pressers.

As it stretches out, it also thins, its Malick-meets-Cassavetes ambitions never rising above clichés of technique and melodrama.

It’s astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us — much less provoke even a moment’s thought — is a thing of the ancient past.

Running Against the Wind is purportedly based on real events, and it’s sloppy and sort of random enough to be true.

Good intentions aside, this sluggish film never soars beyond its innate contrivances and frequently flat, knee-jerk humor.

More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.

Tottering unsteadily between mining Wain’s vast repertoire of eccentricities for comedy and slathering them in pathos, the movie winds up so busily whimsical it forgets to actually be about anything. If you don’t know who Louis Wain was before you see it, you’ll only be fractionally more illuminated, and possibly a good deal more irritated, after.

It may seem churlish to knock a film that works so hard to present everyday, well-meaning folks facing unspeakable, real-life pain. But between the picture’s uncertain tone, quirky-for-quirk’s-sake elements and such self-conscious dialogue as “What color is the sky in your world, kemo sabe?” it’s tough to be all that supportive.

Clean is so lean, it’s as if the story itself was sacrificed for atmosphere. Clean brings the cold, moody vibes and extreme violence, but narratively, it’s a mess.

For a film so grounded in the real-life issue, the movie doesn’t work to make its characters feel human or its world feel real, blunting the emotional impact it could have had.

The premise still feels too thin and juvenile to grab audiences of any age. So what algorithm decided this movie would be a lucrative endeavor?

Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.

While The Forgiven isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.

The thin stereotypes in Silent Night are weirdly uninteresting to observe in this ultimate pressure situation.

Even if the vivid Whale/Karloff version had never been made, this treatment of the Shelley novel would be a loud and tacky disappointment.

A silly trifle about three housewives (Susan Saint James, Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin) who'd rather plan a shopping mall robbery to ease their dire financial straits than try to get a job. [04 May 1986, p.6]

It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.

Although Shattered is a relatively short movie, it takes too long for Prieto and Loughery to put all these pieces into play — at which point the story belatedly does develop some tension.

Ghosts of the Ozarks is an often fascinating puzzle, but once the explanations for what’s really plaguing Norfork start rolling in, any remaining narrative tension dissipates quickly. Even before then, the lack of scares and action proves detrimental.

The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.

The jokes are stale, the energy is stilted, and the whole thing feels like a misbegotten vanity exercise cooked up in the pandemic to keep them occupied.

When it’s a cautionary tale about an unusual family who’ll never know a moment’s peace because of their past choices, Firestarter is worthy of its source material. When in its last half-hour it turns into chapter one of a potential new superhero franchise, it joins the long list of Stephen King movies that are all gimmick, no guts.

The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.

Levi plays Scott as somewhat smarmy and disingenuous — it’s hard to feel for this guy when he seems absolutely clueless about his own kids. Fahy carries the film in her supporting role, an acting imbalance that seems weirdly apt for this story: the supportive, capable wife sidelined in favor of showcasing the inept husband getting himself together and presenting it as meaningful or poignant.