In an effort to generate some excitement (and disguise the limits of the animation) director Nelson Shin keeps the camera constantly in motion. The Transformers has so many cuts that it looks like the film was developed in a Veg-O-Matic. Because it features ineptly blended drawn animation and computer graphics, The Transformers is billed as state-of-the-art. It seems more like state-of-the-marketing. [08 Aug 1986, p.8]

It’s a film that ultimately feels less like a celebration and more like further exploitation of the star, leaving us all with much more unsettling questions about Houston’s life and legacy. Sadly, the disappointing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t let Whitney rest in peace.

The film is sanitized to the point of sterility.

OF: RDG is classic recent Ritchie: star-studded, snarky, and ultimately grating, lousy with weird glasses and bad accents. This thing is so slight, a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a “Mission: Impossible” that it’s barely a movie.

If the story isn’t quite incoherent, then De Souza’s klutzy direction renders it so.

The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare.

The 1974 film was a nightmare that felt too close to reality, but this is merely unpleasant — and not in a good way.

The new Cheaper by the Dozen feels less like a feature than a lengthy sitcom pilot. It’s an assembly-line product scrubbed clean of personality.

It means to be about a struggling family saved by a brave dog. What most viewers will agree on is that it needed more dog.

It holds its audience hostage for an unconscionable 111 minutes with a rambling, unfunny, thickly sentimental comedy that plays like third-rate Frank Capra. [02 Dec 1994, p.F6]

A hopelessly callow, leaden-paced attempt at film noir, is of interest only because it was directed and co-written by Francis Coppola's nephew, Christopher, and because it has a far more stellar cast than is usual for low-budget B pictures. [28 Feb 1994, p.F8]

Amos & Andrew starts out with a promising premise but everything in it is off -- the timing, the tone, the performances. It's the kind of film that makes you wonder from moment to moment just what E. Max Frye, the writer-director, had in mind. Maybe nothing? [05 Mar 1993, p.F10]

Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time.

The teen-targeted fantasy-romance The School for Good and Evil is an exhaustingly long, overstuffed movie that probably would’ve worked better as a TV series.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

Sitting through Plan 9 From Outer Space can be torture for film purists, whose cinematic souls well may be soiled by Edward D. Wood Jr.'s banzai extravaganza of bad taste, bad execution and bad results. [24 Sep 1992, p.12]

The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.

There’s no question writer-director Neil LaBute’s effort doesn’t catch fire.

Yet another silly disaster movie, where the special effects are believable and the characters aren’t.

Davis choreographed another rash of spectacular action sequences, but Chain Reaction is doomed by a premise so simple and so absurd, it's easier to sympathize with star Keanu Reeves (poor guy, his career was going so well) than with his character. [2 Aug 1996, p.F8]

It’s as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

Unfortunately, despite the interesting history, the film itself is a dry, scattered slog, neutered of all the thorny, contradictory details of the real story.

It’s not funny, it’s not satirical, and it’s not worth your time, or Toni Collette’s

The stars can’t save it.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

Michael Madsen brings a much-needed jolt of bad boy energy to this dreary psychodrama that squanders good performances and a sharp midfilm twist.

Writer-director Deborah Brock simply fails to give her film style or wit. The grisly shenanigans are as inane and illogical as the rationale behind making this effort.

There are talented people up and down the One True Loves cast and crew list, so it really makes no sense that director Andy Fickman’s film is so off-key. Nearly every creative choice goes awry.

It’s only October but your Thanksgiving turkey has arrived. It’s called She Came to Me, a mishmash of flimsy, fanciful and far-fetched notions dressed up as a screwball New York rom-com. Given its pedigreed cast and filmmaker, the results are doubly sad.

It opts for too many broad, clunky or far-fetched beats to move the story and its requisite emotional needs forward, rather than weave a more organic, effectively lived-in and, yes, genuinely funny tale.

If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.

A film that boasts about as much edge as a digestive biscuit (translation: oatmeal cookie) too long dunked in milky tea.

The filmmaking lacks the style to pull off its willful blending of fact and fantasy. At least there are the songs to enjoy.

This is a picture that could do with a little bit of scenery-chewing and a whole lot of sensationalism — anything that would make its middling mystery plot more exciting.

While its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.

That title, Cobweb, suggests only one cobweb, but why be stingy? This movie’s screenplay is strewn with them: dozens of dusty tendrils linking it back to older, better horror films, sometimes on a shot-by-shot basis.

A lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie.

Confidential Informant feels cribbed from dozens of other dirty cop stories, restaged with as little original detail as possible. It has the shape of a movie, but none of the stuff to make it move.

It’s as though we’re supposed to already know these people — as if The Crusades were a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen. There is some visual panache here, and scenes that show promise. But too much is missing.

The ineptly told story features the hollow menaces, uninteresting villains, bland heroes, predictable confrontations and static animation that have become standards of the genre. [21 Mar 1986, p.17]

Aside from an occasional reference to Carroll, The Care Bears' Adventure is just standard 1980s children's fare. The same kind of minimal plot, sappy songs, badly timed gags, limited animation and smarmy message have been used in so many recent cartoons that even small children must be tiring of the pattern. [07 Aug 1987, p.6]

Unfortunately, the story, script, voice actors and animation all prove less flexible than the toys, and the film never turns into entertainment. GoBots are more fun to play with than they are to watch.

Everyone here really wants to make something good and moving, but they’re all working so hard to make something out of nothing.

It's the story of a rich girl (Linda Blair) who runs away to enter a disco roller-skating contest with a poor boy (Jim Bray). Along the way, they hook up with other skaters to keep the mob from taking over their favorite roller rink. It's as dumb as it sounds. [09 Dec 1993, p.F2]

When we need the churning dread of an intimate tale of generational trauma, The Marsh King’s Daughter goes formulaic, and when we’re primed for exploitation sweats, it gets flabby.

The overall flavor profile indicates that Waititi, whose own cartoonish appearance as a priest feels like an afterthought, has become bored with his signature brand of goofy uplift. Going by the unfunny self-referential gags (“The Karate Kid,” “The Matrix,” “Taken”), you’d swear the Oscar-winning filmmaker was struggling with the impulse to go full parody.

What unfolds on screen over the course of three hours and one minute in Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 can only be described as a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.

Try as it does to mash slasher and Christmas picture together into some kind of a yuletide “Scream,” “It’s a Wonderful Knife” so badly miscalculates both genres that you count down the minutes, wishing for a guardian angel to save its likable young stars from the movie they’re stuck in.

Love Hurts is an action-romance that fizzles like a science-class volcano made of baking soda and cheese. The individual ingredients are fine: two killers on the run from punishment and their personal feelings for each other, played by Oscar winners Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose. But their chemistry is all wrong.

The whole question of sex blurring deserves an infinitely better film than “It’s Pat.”

Fandango overreaches badly and sinks under a heavy weight of symbolism, bathos and sheer preposterousness that no amount of humor and incident can redeem.

Maybe if "Fluke," which might have been better as an animated feature, weren't such a lavish, big-deal production and closer to the modest level of the recent -- and pleasant little -- pig movie "Gordy," it wouldn't seem so overwhelmingly, at times even laughably, foolish. [02 Jun 1995, p.F6]

The story of Here surrounding Richard and Margaret is relatable, entirely predictable and utterly dull.

Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue.

Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” is his most off-putting picture since his unwatchable political films of the ‘70s.

It’s the kind of movie where everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed--but director Gil Bettman throws in so many snazzy shots, and the editors jack up the pace enough, that you’re often compelled to watch it despite yourself.

As directed with the heaviest of hands by newcomer Paul Flaherty from an impoverished screenplay by debuting feature writers Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Prince, it’s not likely to make fans of either 18- or 81-year-olds.

What’s left is a visually unappetizing Animal Farm that plays as if someone sloppily traced over a masterpiece. And Serkis (who also voices a rooster) doesn’t so much direct it as twist some grand knob with settings like “Louder,” “Faster,” “Jokier,” “Bigger.”

The problem overall is not so much that the humor, especially in the parent-tryout situations, is forced, but that it simply is not there at all. So little is going on in this mildest of fantasies that it is hard to even guess what kinds of emotional effects were aimed at in the first place.

It’s an overload of overkill, yet as tedious and empty as the last day of a 72-hour trip to Vegas when the novelty has worn off and you just want to go home and sleep.

With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.

From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of "Scream” wants to kill it off himself.

Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.

Awkwardly staged and edited and fitted out with an overly intrusive score drawn primarily from classical music, the film consistently subverts the earnest efforts of its cast.

A dippy clunker like All About Steve has no purpose other than as a challenge: If you laden a usually charming A-lister with a thoroughly off-putting, unhinged character, can she claw her way to likability? The short answer is no. The long answer is, what in the world was Bullock, who also produced the movie, thinking?

It's astonishing how dull a movie that packs so much visual overstimulation into its frames can be.

Lifeless and laughless.

Deeply silly and tendentious.

With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best.

A grimly unfunny and stupefyingly inept comedy.

The picture looks as murky as its story line, the sound is tinny, much of the dialogue is flat or confoundingly technical or merely risible, and most everything on the screen looks patently fake.

Derailed seems to want badly to be described as contemporary noir. But it's just pitch-dumb.

If Aeon Flux is what Charlize Theron does to pay the bills while otherwise being engaged in "Monster" and "North Country," it's probably a reasonable price to pay. For her. For us? No, no, no.

The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.

Klasfeld has for his feature film debut churned out a lifeless series of sketch-comedy ideas that presumably would make even the Wayans brothers blanch at their broadness.

Maple Palm cannot possibly be seriously recommended to anyone, but a reviewer, sitting through it until the long-awaited finish, cannot but be moved by how Stewart and everyone else involved has hurled themselves into the project with the utmost conviction, sometimes with unintended comical effect.

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

Murphy and his brother Charlie, who collaborated on the screenplay, seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the latter's stint on "Chappelle's Show." Where Dave Chappelle used stereotypes to confront prejudice, the Murphys (and their co-screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn) merely squeeze a few grudging drops from caricatures that were wrung dry in the age of vaudeville.

The Salon is a cut below.

Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy Feast of Love, though none of its splendors rings true.

A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.

By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.

Overall, Charlie Wilson's War is glib rather than witty, one of those films that comes off as being more pleased with itself than it has a right to be. It also suffers from being not all of a piece, with mismatched elements struggling to cohere.

Despite the presence of funny guys such as Zahn, Garlin, Justin Long and Jonah Hill, along with veteran character actors Ernest Borgnine, Joe Don Baker and Robert Patrick, the movie fails to be even passably funny.

It isn't any good.

As a horror-comedy, it boldly declines to scare or amuse.

The cast tries but rarely achieves an authenticity of emotional intimacy.

A tedious, by-the-numbers raunch-fest that exists strictly because it can.

The film is awash in doobies and breasts, clichéd cinematic language and clumsy exposition. It's reminiscent of the stoner-culture movies of the late '60s and early '70s but without the naive fun.

Turning video games into movies may be one way for studios to coax teenagers away from their laptops, but this time around, the results are miserable, in every sense of the word.

It says plenty about how torpid the storytelling in Delgo is that the end credits are probably the best thing in the film.

Writer-director Susan Montford eschews all plot and character development for the hackneyed action scenes and grade-Z dialogue, while struggling to stretch the paper-thin story into a feature length film.

The rest of Seven Pounds feels like a half-hour "Twilight Zone" script that has been pressed onto a gob of Silly Putty and stretched to the sinking point.

Not fun, louder than it is scary, not even all that gory, this new Friday the 13th has Jason, all right, but otherwise it's missing nearly everything that made the original films work.