Never feels like anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon pumped up to big-screen dimensions.

Planet of the Apes is never quite boring -- the movie is constantly giving you something new to look at -- but it's still a disappointingly dull and underplotted ride.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

The movie is quick and breezy for its first half-hour, then seems to grind down to a deadened pace: The actors' routines lose their freshness, and the nonexistent story line becomes apparent. The jokes get worse, too. Fortunately, at 80 minutes, the film is too brief to drag. [21 April 1992, p.E7]

Does the movie bear any relation to the video game? Not much. Do the dinosaur effects steal Jurassic Park's thunder? Keep dreaming. Will kids want to see it? Depends on how big Nintendo fans they are. Super Mario Bros. is like watching somebody else play a video game: It's flashy, colorful and wholly uninvolving. [29 May 1993, p.5]

The more hellish the story gets, the sillier and less involving the movie becomes.

You never really get the sense Zhang is taking the movie seriously, so you can't either. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop proves that American filmmakers aren't the only ones who can bungle remakes of foreign movies.

It's pretty much a waste of everyone's time, especially yours.

Mother and Child is good when it takes a harsh, unsparing look at lament and the burdens we carry throughout our lives. Then it goes for your tear ducts, and we're suddenly stranded in Lifetime TV territory.

An almost-horror film called The Hunger has in common with Flashdance an apparent obsession with style over other considerations, and the result, though weird, is no more satisfying. [02 May 1983, p.C6]

At heart, The Ghost and the Darkness is essentially Jaws with paws -- at one point, you can see the lions' silhouettes circling under a sea of roiling dry grass. It has all the requisite elements for a sweeping, old-fashioned jungle adventure -- except the adventure. [11 Oct 1996, p.6G]

Depp and Burton are two gifted, like-minded artists whose affinity for oddball characters and humor makes them natural creative partners. But they also enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: Too often, they seem to be making movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.

One of the great pleasures of the original Love Bug comes in watching all the live-action stunts, and CG just isn't the same.

Amusing at times but never more than a modest diversion, lacking the cleverness and imagination required to turn it into more than a one-joke movie.

The third -- and thinnest and weakest and least funny -- installment in Ice Cube's popular Friday series.

What's missing in Kickboxer is a solid script and keen direction of dramatic sequences... Van Damme choreographed and edited all the fight scenes, and his talent is undeniable. If you're thrilled by a flurry of spinning back kicks, elbow punches and assorted high-flying martial-arts tricks, Kickboxer has your name on it. [12 Sep 1989, p.C7]

There are not enough thrilling musical interludes, and few come close to capturing the sly joy in Porter's music.

Feels like a cobbled collection of ideas and conceits rather than a stand-alone story.

Overall, the film's sheer mediocrity prevents Thurman from flying to its rescue.

Jingle All the Way is at its best when piling on the slapstick, which director Brian Levant ( The Flintstones ) wisely does often. [22 Nov 1996, p.6G]

The acting is better than Ivy deserves. Barrymore is surprisingly good, bringing the right amount of sexuality and mischief to her performance without coming across as ridiculous. It's tough for someone known mostly as a child actor to break into more adult roles, but she pulls it off. [04 Jun 1992, p.F3]

Set almost entirely in one location and shot in widescreen to accommodate its ensemble cast, The Invitation seems tailor-made for a talented filmmaker who wants to show off skills within the constraints of a small budget. But the script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (who somehow still find work after having written The Tuxedo, R.I.P.D., and Clash of the Titans), is flimsy and nonsensical in the manner of cheap, straight-to-video-not-even-VOD horror pictures, and Kusama’s direction is clumsy and uninspired. She also telegraphs too many of the plot’s twists.

Of course, Eddie Murphy is a funny man -- not the kind that throws around a succession of one-liners, but one who proceeds by hovering on themes. And, of course, he scores some points and gets some good laughs here -- and his quota of jeers, too. [24 Dec 1987, p.D7]

A severe bout of sequelitis afflicts this eagerly awaited but only sporadically amusing follow-up.

It's a pure feast of eye candy. [06 Mar 1998, p.9G]

Rarely delivers anything above and beyond the scope of the series.

The movie isn't terribly well written, and the acting is rarely more than OK, but there's one character who brightens the screen. Seth Green plays Ronald's pain-in-the-neck kid brother Chuckie, and he's as droll as Frankie and Annette's kid in Back to the Beach. [14 Aug 1987, p.D5]

It's a movie of surpassing flatness, all surface, all monotone. Pace? It's as if the director, Alan J. Pakula, had dialed in half speed on the first day of shooting and never checked the throttle again. [27 July 1990, p.G5]

It's unimaginative, crude and so derivative it hurts.

If anyone other than Gus Van Sant had directed Restless, the film could have well been impossible to sit through.

The Bear is a big, polished children's film, nothing more. [27 Oct 1989, p.G5]

Audiences with an insatiable appetite for car chases, explosions, menacing helicopters and relentless mayhem should have a good time. For the more demanding, Lethal Weapon 2 is closer to Excedrin Headache No. 2. [07 July 1989, p.G5]

White Hunter, Black Heart looks good, but it's as humorless as Eastwood himself increasingly appears to be. [21 Sep 1990, p.G5]

Plays like a colorful but inert timekiller that you might tolerate while dozing off in front of the TV, but only because you are too sleepy to reach for the remote control.

With touches of humor throughout, the gentle and peaceful film never becomes depressing or sad.

I suppose if you haven't seen Rocky or its many imitators, The Karate Kid might have its modest charms; there's a good bit of man-to-boy philosophizing in it, on the order of "To thine own self be true," and that's harmless enough. But there's a measure of laziness in this whole idea that is dismaying, that borders on cynicism. One wonders what went through the minds of the filmmakers as they prepared to make a film that has been made so many times before. By the look of The Karate Kid, some quick-play box-office may have been the highest aspiration. [26 June 1984, p.B3]

This is mildly amusing, and the scenes with Niven -- his last, and reportedly dubbed by impressionist Rich Little when Niven's illness had taken the strength from his voice -- are poignant. But there is no restoring the force that made the earlier Panthers work. [12 Aug 1983, p.C5]

In the wake of TV's powerhouse "The Shield," Dark Blue comes off as something of a retread, with little of "The Shield's" electric fury, edgy camera work or deft characterizations.

Fails to capture the anguish and struggles of an ultra-Orthodox Jew adapting to a more secular world as did Amos Gitai's Kadosh, a film this one sometimes brings to mind.

It's the kind of movie for which the phrase ''you've never seen anything like it before'' was invented. The question is whether anyone would want to.

Never gives us a single reason to care about any of these people. It's a druggy, sordid spectacle.

Flamboyantly over-the-top, visually kinetic.

The film, bound to bore the socks off impatient viewers, mistakes reserve for depth and ends up hamstringing its talented cast into playing characters you never care about all that much.

It's not awful; it isn't dull. But The Golden Child is a kids' film, and there are times when Murphy himself seems uncomfortable, as if he knows he's making a movie he wouldn't pay to see. [13 Dec 1986, p.B1]

The result is less an examination of the porn industry than it is a portrait of Jeremy's own humanity, with all its quirks and eccentricities.

So superficial and formulaic that even Garner's mega-watt grin can't completely save it.

Shakespeare's rich language does not fit soundly inside every mouth.

The movie does miraculously end up making good use of a couple of running jokes, and the cast soldiers on, though the laughs are meager. But mostly, Girl Most Likely is a case of good actors in serious need of worthwhile material.

Rhapsody fails to completely hook you, perhaps because the events happen so quickly you barely have time to sort out the characters.

In The Monuments Men, director George Clooney takes a wild, stranger-than-fiction true story and turns it into a dull, prestigious slog.

The coming-of-age tale The Way, Way Back is sweet, heartfelt and utterly trite and predictable from beginning to end.

Even if you're willing to overlook the preposterous plot holes in its premise, Accepted pushes its luck in its final half-hour.

Winkler isn't half-bad in a role that requires quiet reaction rather than the facile caricature we see in "The Fonz." Keaton is aggressively funny for awhile, though the lasting impression is of a cut-rate Bill Murray. [30 July 1982, p.D2]

Though there's a scene of racial discomfort (nothing more serious) and a few rather flat-footed references to anti-war feelings back home in Hamburger Hill, the sense of time and place is missing altogether. Hamburger Hill is an all-purpose war movie with the requisite noble message -- war is hell, and futile, too -- but it could be set anywhere. In those parts of the world where local audiences will not accept an American adventure movie with the Vietnamese as vanquished foe (parts of Southeast Asia were shown Rambo with subtitles that portrayed it as a anti-Japanese commando raid from World War II), Hamburger Hill will play with few problems...Unhappily, neither screenwriter Jim Carabatsos (who did Heartbreak Ridge for Clint Eastwood) nor director John Irvin is able to provide the story any tighter focus, either. [28 Aug 1987, p.D1]

Bogosian is at his best in the flashback scenes, when Barry's a jock-on-the-make who has a beginner's balance of humor and slice-and-dice commentary. But by his crucial weekend, Barry has become the worst of talk show sins, a boor. He's the human equivalent of dead air. [13 Jan 1989, p.5]

While the movie sets you up to believe you're watching an old- fashioned American western (in other words, a morality play), it's confusing figuring out what the bad guys represent. [31 Aug 1984, p.C8]

Lives or dies by your ability to buy the sight of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman snuggling in bed and enjoying hot, torrid sex. This may seem like a superficial approach to such a lofty, serious movie, but it is an insurmountable problem.

Point Break has some eye-catching visuals in its frenetic action sequences, but even the slow-mo surfing gets tedious. It's like being trapped in a soft-drink commercial. [12 July 1991, p.G5]

Given their off-screen love affair, how could this couple be so dry and dispassionate? [21 Oct 1994, p.G5]

Beautifully crafted, intricately plotted and obviously a labor of love. It is also a mess.

Lacks the one element that the filmmakers were most desperately aiming for: A genuine sense of fun.

Your basic, humdrum love story, Hollywood-style...The movie's soundtrack provides the most entertainment. Classic Elvis tunes such as Love Me Tender, Are You Lonesome Tonight and (You're the) Devil in Disguise plus others sung by Billy Joel, Amy Grant, Bryan Ferry, Dwight Yoakam and other contemporary pop and country stars keep the film groovin' -- but not enough to make this a Honeymoon worth remembering. [28 Aug 1992, p.G5]

Lumet patches his film together with a quilt of cliches. He wants you to like his characters so much -- to sympathize with their loss -- that he sticks them in unlikely situations that drip with sentimentality. [14 Oct 1988, p.E6]

Jam-packed with plot and characters, Thunderheart nonetheless drags along from scene to scene, never building any momentum or cumulative dramatic effect. It's a dull, muddled whodunit, an exploration of the relationship between Native Americans and white Americans and a tale of soul-searching by an uninteresting character. And none of it works. [3 Apr 1992, p.G13]

It's beautiful to look at, but there's little there to savor.

A combination rock-and-roll tearjerker and domestic drama. It is gloomy, boring and sentimental. [06 Feb 1987, p.C5]

This is superficial entertainment to say the least. But if you're looking for laughs, then Just Friends is just fine.

Don't blame Ormond, who is being vigorously groomed to be the next Julia Roberts in the days before Lyle Lovett. On screen, the poised Brit already has broken the hearts of some of the biggest hunks in Hollywood, from Brad Pitt (Legends of the Fall ) to Sean Connery and Richard Gere (First Knight ). Sabrina probably won't be her breakout film -- it's just not good enough -- though she's charming enough as a beguiling ingenue. [15 Dec 1995, p.6G]

It's Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, as a rival brother-sister skating team who are a little too intimate for comfort, who seem to be giving it their all. If only the movie had been about them.

Out of Bounds is a jazzy, raffish looking movie. It flirts with punk. It's also a fundamentalist summer-teen thriller, with two kids on the lam from everyone, and in L.A., too. The movie wants it both ways: stylish, safe. Mostly it's dumb. [28 July 1986, p.D5]

Best of all, though, is Seann William Scott as the profoundly annoying, profoundly vulgar Stifler.

You know a movie's in trouble when the characters babble on about long ago. In The Presidio, they have to. What's happening on-screen is dull and predictable. The movie's highlights, car chases up and down the San Francisco inclines, pale in comparison to those in Bullitt. [10 June 1988, p.D5]

Watching A Late Quartet feels more like sitting through a Classical Music 101 lecture than entertainment.

This sequel, while lacking the freshness of the original, shares much of its charm and for the most part rises above some trite, syrupy dialogue.

Stories about scientists doubting what they know to be true — "Contact," for example — can be provocative and engaging, on an intellectual and emotional level. But I Origins challenges too little and ties up things too neatly for it to register as anything more than well-made, well-intentioned hogwash.

What is evident from the film is that there was never any chance these two peoples could make a peaceful coexistence.

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck might want to talk to their agents about looking for better material.

If you can get past the ludicrous fantasy — well, wait, that’s the problem. You can’t get past the ludicrous fantasy.

It's all very "Cuckoo's Nest," but in a glib, facile way, and it leaves K-PAX adrift in its fuzzy, New-Agey orbit.

Enemy at the Gates will pique your interest in the Battle of Stalingrad, but it leaves that interest sadly unsated.

For all its ambition, Daredevil can't overcome the fact that at its colorful center lies a perfect blank in a bad suit.

The sins of the inspirational Saint Ralph are venial, but they undeniably prevent the small Canadian film from stretching beyond the boundaries of an After School Special.

Bad in a good way if you appreciate this sort of silly thriller.

Lucky Numbers is like stuff bought at an outlet mall. Sure, it's got the brand names and designer labels, but the color's a little strange, the style a little off, and nothing fits just right.

Giles Walker's direction is TV-slick and the performances predictably smooth. But there is nothing here you haven't seen many, many times before. [12 Nov 1993, p.G18]

Falls far short of the sweep, complexity and passion it seeks.

The story's third-act detour into tragedy is predictable and unwelcome, providing a resolution that is too pat and familiar to be moving.

Director Jean-Marie Gaubert, who also directed this film's French predecessor, keeps the silly story barreling along.

The Great Outdoors isn't great. The Dopey Outdoors would be more like it. It's wildly uneven, yet consistently dumb. [17 June 1988, p.C5]

Sreams its devotion to style over substance with slick action sequences, fast cars and breathtaking stunts.

A rarely suspenseful thriller with a twist ending of the worst kind: It takes too much explanation.

The cast is impressive, and the story even soapier than "The Tudors," if you like that sort of thing.

Despite all the flying bullets, which are admittedly entertaining at times, Shoot 'Em Up doesn't offer enough bang for your bucks.

If Soderbergh set out to make a galvanizing conversation piece, he has certainly succeeded. But this cold, occasionally dull movie practically defies you to embrace it.

As played by the sublimely dazed Keanu Reeves (Ted) and Alex Winter (Bill), the boys are appealing at first, but their witlessness wears thin quickly. So, too, the movie. Ignorance may indeed be a happy state, but you wouldn't want to live there, and even this short visit seems much, much too long. The film acknowledges its empty-headedness early, when the boys meet Sock-rates. [20 Feb 1989, p.C-6]

Nobel Son is not good. Nor is it bad. It exists, instead, somewhere in the middle ground of interesting enough to hold one's attention without actually providing any fresh, sensible or nonderivative developments.

The only positive thing about the aimless film The Yellow Handkerchief is the idea that William Hurt may be ready for his Jeff Bridges moment.

Almost certain to polarize audiences, this bit of emotional agitprop plays like a watered-down "Short Cuts" or "Magnolia" with a shrill, one-note message: We're all a little bit racist.