Like an early Woody Allen film or a classic Marx brothers feature, more of Hoodwinked's gags flop than hit, but they come at such a steady rate, you hardly notice.

The best stuff comes early in Ruby Sparks, which was written by Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) and directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

While the attentive art direction of Running With Scissors pays scrupulous and imaginative attention to period detail, the film overlooks its greatest asset: Burroughs.

Aside from satisfying some kind of ghoulish curiosity about how such an incident could possibly happen, there's precious little in Death of a President to justify the extremity of its central conceit.

As far as production values go, this Peter Pan is a work of art. So why, then, does the movie feel so crushingly dull?

McGrath makes literal what the other movie only hinted at -- that Perry falls in love with Capote -- turning the relationship between author and subject into something far less complicated and more mundane.

For all its peripatetic energy, Limitless still winds up with the same-old blazing guns and wanton destruction of property. No matter how smart you may be, Hollywood will figure out a way to dumb you down.

An Innocent Man might have been a decent enough study of justice gone horribly awry -- if the screenplay weren't so crudely manipulative, if the bad cops weren't such cardboard villains and if the title character had been played by a more appropriate (and better) actor than Tom Selleck. [06 Oct 1989, p.G4]

The film feels more like an extended epilogue than a stand-alone adventure, which may be because it is the shortest (105 minutes) entry in the series.

Wild Bill is handsomely mounted and nicely acted, but it's also strangely irrelevant, a big ho-hum of a movie. [01 Dec 1995, p.5G]

An exercise intended exclusively for fans of the genre, another crude, hard-R bloodbath from the studio that brought you "High Tension" and "Saw."

The presence of Culkin in the cast should not deceive parents: This isn't a kids' movie. It's just not much of a grownups' movie, either. [24 Sep 1993, p.G5]

This version was directed by Gene Saks, who is Simon's stage director, and who presumably knows what he wants. Getting it is another story -- Saks seems to have been so concerned with cooling down the play, taking the "theater" out of it, that he let the warmth go, too. [25 Dec 1986, p.B1]

Antonio Banderas looks a little older, Catherine Zeta-Jones snares a bigger role, and the powerful charms of both are weighed down by an absurdly plot-heavy script.

What's lacking is any sense of Beverly's brightness. She's supposedly smart, but she never displays a shred of intelligence.

Comes off curiously flat.

Benjamin's creative visual style isn't enough to lift a weak story. [18 Mar 1988, p.D7]

Bad Milo! directly envokes a number of earlier pictures Vaughan clearly adores, including "Basket Case," "It’s Alive" and even the workplace satire "Office Space." But the movie fails to ground its promising (if preposterous) scenario in any kind of recognizable reality.

As far as titles go, Cote d'Azur doesn't quite cut it for this topsy-turvy French comedy, in which an innocent seaside vacation gets really messy once a family full of busybodies starts poking around in one another's business.

It's frustrating to watch Levin try to reason with far-gone street-corner evangelicals (whose arguments are preposterous at best) when he might be building a stronger case by other means.

Think of The Beyond as a Rorschach inkblot of a horror film: It's by turns impressionistic, repulsive, ridiculous and baffling. In the right frame of mind, it can also be a hoot. [17 Jul 1998, p.7G]

The whole enterprise sags and wheezes like the tired, we're-in-this-strictly-for-the-money sequel it really is.

It's a testament to the personalities of the actors, as well as the foundation laid by the original film, that we retain an emotional connection to the main players in Revolutions.

The film seems just right for kids, though what older fans of Cruise ("Risky Business") and Scott will make of it is far less clear. [22 Apr 1986, p.B4]

The Night Flier flirts with being a decent chiller, one that for a time values the dark morality tale over the oozing entrails. In the end, it gives in to its cheap soul (it was made for and first shown on HBO) and sometimes cheesy plot (adapted from one of King's sillier stories), but not before it conjures up a creepy tone and an aptly unappealing main character. [6 Feb 1998, p.12G]

A surprisingly dull and witless film. [21 Jul 1984, p.C1]

For all its respectable airs, The Accountant mostly induces shrugs. Sometimes, B-movies fare better when they settle for being their lowbrow selves.

Splashy, uneven version of the musical, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve). Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra seem miscast, but Jean Simmons is delightful as the Salvation Army woman Brando falls for. [04 Aug 1989, p.G37]