Antebellum ultimately trips over its gimmicky plotting en route to a conclusion that rings false.

It’s competent filmmaking in the service of lousy storytelling.

At the center, Gyasi is an oasis of stillness and solemnity in a naturalistic performance, but the surrounding action never hangs together in anything authentic, especially with the unnecessarily flowery script and laughably heightened score.

At both its highest and its lowest, Inherit the Viper lacks excitement. The action sequences are sparse, and the plot is underdeveloped.

Unfortunately, much of the acting (save by Bagatsing and Rachel Alejandro as Quezon’s vigilant wife, Aurora) is so spotty that it undermines the story’s potential tension and emotional heft.

Schmaltzy, overlong and a bit tedious.

The movie makers try to revive another day’s genre--the early ’70’s “road” pictures--in today’s terms. And it doesn’t work. The looser, more anarchic feelings they’re going after don’t jibe with the modern packaging, and they wind up with something slicked-up, streamlined and hollow--like “Blowing in the Wind” rearranged as elevator music.

It’s Jasmine’s inept and unprofessional behavior during the film’s climactic trial that really sends the film into absurdist territory. It’s outdone only by a final sequence of events with a horror-show twist that might best be described as bonkers.

The film’s heart appears to be in the right place, but its missteps and melodrama make this a fromage unworthy of savoring.

The most disheartening line in 187 is its last, written in bold type across the screen just before the credits roll: "A teacher wrote this movie." It's enough to make you weep, and not just because it's painful to think that this muddled and manipulative film was penned by someone in a position to mold impressionable minds. [30 Jul 1997, p.F1]

Even as an Eastwood vehicle -- an appropriate term for a movie about a cutthroat car-theft ring -- the film is a warmed-over compost. [07 Dec 1990, p.F10]

A dismal flop that will probably be Exhibit A for years to come in any debate over the wisdom of letting pop stars make their own vanity Hollywood projects. [04 Jul 1986, p.7]

There’s nothing notably new — or especially scary — about any of it.

If Spiral hoped to reinvent the franchise, the dull installment merely amounts to bad fan fiction.

Unfortunately, to fit what are seen to be the particular requirements of its director/co-star Burt Reynolds, Stick has been rendered jokey, flaccid and, the worst crime of all, deadly slow. All this in spite of the fact that Leonard was the original screenwriter. [26 Apr 1985, p.6]

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

These characters need rescuing from screenwriter Colin Welland’s view of life in middle-class America as oppressively banal. By the time he gets finished sketching in the deadening of the American family, you may feel like beating Hackman to the front door...Twice in a Lifetime is a dreary masquerade of a serious movie.

Despite Tanović’s efforts to depict these crimes and their aftermath as aestheticized abstractions, there’s something depressingly mundane about the way the murders and the investigation play out.

Instead of coming to a high, flavorful boil, the whole thing quickly overcooks and begins evaporating into hot air.

A clunky, poorly executed shocker.

Although the production establishes the requisite lived-in, small town feel, it has also chosen to take its dramatic cue from the seemingly sedated gaze of its lugubrious, aliens-obsessed protagonist, whom Le Gros portrays with a remarkable economy of expended energy.

A dull, plodding thriller...It’s not a bad premise for a seamy film noir, but the results are a major disappointment, especially considering that the script was written by tough-guy novelist Elmore Leonard (who authored the original best-seller) and talented young playwright John Steppling. Not only is the dialogue stilted and showy, but neither writer manages to make much sense out of the novel’s complicated proceedings.

Best of the Best is a by-the-numbers martial-arts movie graced by several celebrated actors marking time between more rewarding assignments and crowned by an appallingly brutal Tae Kwan Do competition. There's nothing here except for karate fanatics. [10 Nov 1989, p.F15]

This “Close Encounters” is overlong and rambling — more concerned with disconnected anecdotes than making a compelling case or telling an interesting story.

Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.

The script doesn’t reincarnate so much as it recycles, drawing freely on the nested realities of “Inception,” the free-your-mind metaphysics of “The Matrix” and the amnesiac-assassin revelations of the Jason Bourne movies. Maybe watch one of those tonight instead.

It may be a shoddily made Skittles ad masquerading as a superhero riff, but it’s Levi’s performance that sends it into the stratosphere of cringe.

To very young kids who like cartoon dogs driving shiny vehicles, PAW Patrol: The Movie may be awesome. To grown-ups, it may be an aggressively under-written, 88-minute toy commercial.