Unfortunately Miracle is long on cliché and short on originality.

Someone apparently forgot to tell Harrison Ford he was starring in a comedy when he was cast in Morning Glory.

Like a lot of the elder Cassavetes' work, She's So Lovely contains moments of truly fine acting, its characters are all sharply drawn, and its story never seems to go anywhere. [29 Aug 1997, p.5G]

The Golden Compass comes close, and its originality cannot be denied, but it never quite crosses over into your heart. It stops at your eyes.

Lethal Weapon is neither a good film nor good entertainment, but it will be a big hit. It takes two popular stories, scrambles them together and delivers something truly bizarre. It's The Cosby Show meets Rambo. [06 Mar 1987, p.D5]

It's possible to achieve hilarity and pathos, but it's not easy, and Litvak isn't quite skilled enough to make the sex jokes rest easily beside the final grandiose and pat confessions. As a result, When Do We Eat? merely whets your appetite for a fresh take on family matters.

Has a made-for-TV smallness (it will probably be a big hit on cable), and it never quite vanquishes the nagging suspicion that you could be spending your time better elsewhere.

In the end, for all its auto-erotic flair, Gone in 60 Seconds is missing a money shot.

May be the grandest looking film ever made on the subject, but it lacks the most essential element of all: passion.

It would seem Towne is too much in love with the book to recognize its fundamental limitations as a film.

It's a stylized, overdressed love story with music tacked on. It's a tangle of relationship studies that drag endlessly, slapstick "get the girl" scenes that aren't funny, and clashes with parental authority that only feign rebellion. [03 Jul 1986, p.D10]

The few jokes it does land can't make this more than a look-what's-on-late-night-cable event.

Not even Sherlock Holmes could make much sense out of the overplotted, murky mess that is "Sherlock Holmes," although Arthur Conan Doyle's legendarily brainy detective would probably never buy a ticket to a movie as elephant-footed as this one.

The World According to Garp is another of those films that fairly cries out for Robert Altman, who makes movies the way John Irving writes books. Altman doesn't seem to be making movies any more, so this is as close we're able to get to Garp, and it's not close enough. [23 July 1982, p.D10]

Unlike Uncle Nino's garden, the film never blooms into anything special.

Richard Jordan, who can be uniquely menacing (see: The Mean Season, Flash of Green) is here reduced to lampooning himself in leatherette storm-trooper garb. Charles Durning, looking wonderfully rumpled as the warden of the orphanage, does as little as possible in the heat. The skating stunts are routine. [2 Dec 1986, p.B4]

As time goes on, and more King comes to the screen, The Shining, once widely disparaged, looks better and better. At least that film translated some of King's terror; subsequent adaptations, Pet Sematary included, do little more than animate the gore. [24 Apr 1989, p.C6]

As handsome and playful as the movie often is, it's another example of the let's-further-exploit-a-hit genre.

Cats Don't Dance, though perfectly wholesome and clearly aimed at young kids, is a movie packed with references that only the most nostalgia-savvy child could get -- cartoon cameos by Mae West, Laurel and Hardy, Bette Davis, Max the scary Sunset Boulevard butler, and so on. [28 Mar 1997, p.7G]

The idea that there is evil under the sun and amongst the verities out there in the clean-living heartland is not exactly new to fiction. Neither is the one about the bad seeds, the homicidal children. In combination, however -- the combination in Children of the Corn-- the elements have a perverse novelty. [19 Mar 1984, p.C6]

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.