Tex is well-meaning, all right, but a little inept. [04 Aug 1982, p.B4]

Chéri never fulfills its emotional promise.

The Hunger Games takes no risks.

Inadvertently does with the civil rights movement exactly what Banderas set out not to do: trivializes it.

There's an irrelevance to the movie that the filmmakers, hard as they try, can't quite shake - something awfully square about the picture: It would have played a lot better a decade ago.

You Again is at its funniest in the early scenes, when everyone is pretending all is well beneath forced smiles and plotting eyes.

An uninspired, sporadically funny adaptation that falls short of the book's winsome, frisky chaos.

The finished film has been tinkered with and tweaked so thoroughly that it borders on the incomprehensible.

A biopic that is as messy as the life it details.

For most U.S. audiences, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, is going to feel more like a history lesson than a movie.

It's another portrait of amoral, hedonistic youth gone awry, a la Larry Clark's "Bully", and it is alternately engrossing and ridiculous, often in the span of one scene to the next.

It's one of those movies made by hard-core techies, meticulous about the "period" details and utterly neglectful of pretty much everything else, including such nuances as plain old plot. [15 Sep 1990, p.E6]

The movie is bouncy and zesty, its energy unflagging, and some of the big numbers are heavily tinged with Bollywood. Conceptually, it should have been a trip.

Rapidly devolves into a pedestrian thriller in which almost nobody behaves in a recognizably human way.

A fair weekend distraction for 10-year-old girls.

This movie runs in great, lazy circles, covering its implausibilities with gags, and finishes with the let's-get-it-over-with patness of a movie- of-the-week. Goldblum's performance is the key: We never do figure out who he is beyond the easy guess that his cuckoldry was well-deserved. Sometimes he's in charge, outfoxing the thugs, and sometimes he's helpless, and a lot of the time he's just along for the ride. [12 March 1985, p.B4]

Reckless is weak, though teenagers may empathize with the fairy-tale fate of the improbable lovers. [11 Feb 1984, p.D4]

The problem is that hardly anyone in the cast can sing or dance on a level that’s more than passable (Foxx is a fine exception). And that’s a problem when the movie is a musical.

Loud and frantic and filled with all sorts of business, but it's also empty and inert, a creative exercise that would have played better as a 30-minute short.

Irritating when it should be amusing, dumb when it should be zany, flat when it should be snappy.

One question in particular hangs heavily over the entire film, a plot hole so distracting it becomes the only thing you can think about.

One of the problems with Rampart is that we've seen guys like Dave in movies and on TV for years now. The bad cop psyche has been delved into pretty deeply on all fronts, most notably in FX's brilliant series "The Shield."

The Age of Adaline is a modern romantic fairy tale set in San Francisco, marred by bad narration and an unnecessary desire to overexplain random magic.

Little happens that you don't see coming, down to which cast members will get picked off and in what order. It's a dumb action movie in a summer full of dumb movies, and yet it's always entertaining. And you won't really miss Arnold at all.

The main problem with Submarine is that Oliver is not a likable protagonist.

Features one of the more pointless cameos ever when Tom Waits shows up abruptly in the desert to spout mystical nonsense about Domino trading her life for somebody else's. The scene has absolutely no place in this jarring, violent movie; Waits is just another of Scott's distractions.

A garish clashing of sacred images and bloody semihorror, this is a movie that defines the category: interesting failure.

The occult thriller boasts snazzy photography, passionate acting and considerable suspense. But like Marathon Man, it is empty. This pulp never rises above being pulp. [10 Jun 1987, p.D7]