Some of this stuff is uncomfortably close to minstrelsy. Bad Company closes on a patriotic note in a brief scene that pays heartfelt tribute to the terrorist-thwarting sacrifices of the CIA. Timing is everything, I guess.

Stagedoor features unremarkable rehearsal footage (exhibitionists make poor subjects for vérité documentaries) and thoughtful but unsurprising interviews with camp counselors and parents.

That, in chasing something vaguely progressive and YA-inspired with Snow White, Disney has turned out a film with some hilariously timely choices is a great joke, though I wouldn’t call it an intentional one.

This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.

The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.

What I can't accept is that the stringy, insipidly earnest teen idol Zac Efron would grow up to be the defensively ironic, twisty-faced Matthew Perry.

Sets up a cast -- and then proceeds to knock them down like ducks in a shooting gallery.

The film will be huge. It’s busy. It’s kinetic. It’s a treat for kids. But like much of Seinfeld’s work outside his TV show, it’s impersonal. It doesn’t come from anywhere interesting.

It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.

Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity. Auto Focus is the perfect capper to Crane's career: Even in a movie about himself, he remains minor.

It’s not just the action and the magic that flop. Even the film’s more intimate moments fall flat.

A filmmaker has a feel for this kind of storytelling or doesn’t, and the people behind The Girl on the Train don’t.

After its intriguing start, the movie gets dumb and dumberer. “Third-act problems,” concluded many in the Sundance audience. But the first two acts have issues, too.

That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating.

The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

There is something magical about the simple fact that this movie exists, in all its obscene, absurd wonder, its terrible filmmaking choices and bursts of jaw-dropping talent. It doesn’t need to be timely to be an artifact of its time — a movie about nothing but song and dance and, most important of all, about cats.

The only reason to put yourself through Guy Ritchie's overblown, inelegant Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is to see Jared Harris, who plays Professor Moriarty, in a chilling low key.

It’s inert where it should be fast, and cluttered and choppy where it should be rousing. Which is a shame, because Hellboy, as conceived, is one of the more interesting comic book heroes we have. He deserves better than this.

This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.

With McG's migraine-inducing jerky-cam and monochromatic palette (livened only by splotches of rust), Terminator Salvation puts the numb in numskull.

Stupid, stupid, stupid — and it certainly knows it. You might even chuckle contentedly at its knowing silliness — that’s sort of what this low-rent franchise is here for — but you’ll also miss Jason Statham, whose deadpan self-awareness somehow legitimized the ridiculousness of the previous films.

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

This Is Spinal Tap is a comedy about how the desire to be seen as a rock god collides with the humiliations of actually being human, and the visual of a group of guys in their 70s and 80s unable to move on from the styles of their youthful heyday is as effective a continuing riff on this theme as any. It’s also the only one fully realized by the new film.

I Origins really loses its oomph when Ian travels to India in search of a particular pair of eyeballs, and the movie closes on a note that would make even M. Night Shyamalan roll his own.

Watching the movie summons the distinct sensation of arriving at a party just as the guests are starting to leave.

It is one of the more sadistic family films I have ever seen, a picture of the residents of a neglected childhood reckoning with the abandonment of their beloved, now grown-up human leader.

But Besson — by no means a bad filmmaker — has gotten rich off that kind of violence that upsets no one, least of all jaded international action audiences. He tries to have it both ways and fails some of cinema’s most precious resources.

It collapses on all fronts, delivering hot-button platitudes and just-add-water character development.

Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?

The Big Wedding isn’t terrible. De Niro is actually pretty good here — the script gives him plenty of raunchy one-liners, and, while they’re mostly lame, he delivers with conviction, which counts for something nowadays.

It’s hard to think about who, exactly, is going to be moved to make changes to how they live their lives by Don’t Look Up, a climate-change allegory that acquired accidental COVID-19 relevance, but that doesn’t really end up being about much at all, beyond that humanity sucks.

A derivative horror picture that somehow rises to the level of a primal scream. The premise is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and feeble-minded.

Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences.

Thank God for Barrymore: When Beverly's water breaks and she looks down at her feet and cries, "This is so gross," you know how good this actress can be, and how good this movie might have been.

He has told the story of humanity’s fall from grace so many times that you wonder if his wand is starting to sputter.

As a mascot, McConaughey embodies the movie’s lack of conviction, but as an indication that a star could conceivably be computer-generated with no loss of affect or facial mobility, he might inspire the next generation of bloodless fantasy epics.

This is low-grade satire. The shocks to the system in Buffalo Soldiers are nothing more than cheap thrills.

Compounds the problems of its predecessor, "Analyze This," while duplicating almost none of its humor.

As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.

The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.

The concept promises us a melancholy kind of dread, and there are bits and pieces throughout of the movie The Forest could have been. But any compelling sense of unease is ultimately undone as the film gradually settles for tedious schlock.

The result: Characters we genuinely care about are lost in a movie that almost dissipates before our very eyes.

[Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128]

With Joe Johnston directing instead of Spielberg, who executive-produces, and a scrum of screenwriters, none named Crichton, the franchise suffers some negligence.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

The filmmakers think little of the emotional and intellectual connection fans already have with this property, and have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It’s exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story’s Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.

A hapless comedy that already seems about ten years out of date, Be Cool is a curious failure.

The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.

People who see Sinbad for its star power--a big selling point in the movie’s marketing campaign--are being oversold.

It succeeds sporadically as a corrective anti-myth, but as a story about people, it fails to come to life.

Don’t Let Go is a slog. I wish it loosened up, better balanced the potential fear, joy, wonder, and delight spooling out of its premise to yield a more adventurous result. Instead, it carries itself with dread and stilted seriousness, alleviated only by noteworthy performances from Reid and Oyelowo.

The result is a loose conglomeration of jokes that never really holds together: Funny in parts, but overwhelmed by the bland emptiness where its protagonist should be.

I found myself staring at his new one, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'Amour), in a state of rapt annoyance and befuddlement. It's constructed in two sections, which are far more fractured and opaque than the simple description I will here try to set out.

Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.

The results are dispiritingly pleasureless, as though to fully embrace the idea of a penthouse prison would get in the way of the movie’s nebulous ideas about art.

Welcome to Marwen is a totally confounding movie. None of this is because of Hogancamp’s actual story, which remains rich and wild and full of pathos, nor Carell’s performance, which is subtle and wounded and resists all mawkish special-man tics it could have lapsed into. But the frame of a Robert Zemeckis–directed Inspirational True Story and the syrupy Alan Silvestri score that blankets it are just too many layers of abstraction over a story that already contains multitudes.

The movie is dogged by wobbly reasoning and dramaturgical lassitude, but at least one actor tries to spice it up. There are certainly other performers who emerge unembarrassed — Dench does a lovely turn from foolishness into new wisdom, for instance. But D’Arcy is as silly as the film itself and the only one who knows what movie he’s in.

COVID has proven a difficult subject for fiction, but In the Earth feels as though it sets up an emotional parallel that it doesn’t follow through on, abandoning the virus as a backdrop for a horror story that’s slapdash and never very creepy. It’s another instance of pandemic cinema that feels as if it could use more distance to figure out what it wants to say.

The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.

The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.

Writer-directors Àlex and David Pastor have come up with a tantalizingly evil idea, but they’re not cruel enough to see it through to its conclusion.

This is some weak, watered-down stuff.

Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.

Iñárritu has a flair for the cinematic, for bold and striking images, but he is not an experimental filmmaker. He doesn’t have that kind of deft touch, that willingness to throw ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and — most importantly — move on.

Like most “universe” movies, this one has about five beginnings and then segues into a round-up-the-team section that ought to have been sure-fire. But the banter has a droopy, depressed air, as if the actors know they’re coming from behind.

It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

It’s a dour, drab, dark movie, enlivened by some moderately effective chills in the first half but ultimately undone by its downbeat aimlessness.

This final installment jettisons most of the Zen mumbo-jumbo from the first two movies in favor of lots of very loud explosions. Since I didn’t take the mumbo-jumbo seriously to begin with, my letdown was minor, but aficionados may feel like they’ve been played for suckers.

The film presents Jakub’s memories in such fragmented fashion that we can’t really piece together any kind of emotional through-line; we’re told about it, but we can’t really feel it, which renders the movie didactic and tedious.

Insurgent is not a very good movie, but it’s better than it needs to be.

A glossy, depthless melodrama.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw, delivers mildly on the torture-porn front, but its tone and focus are decidedly different. It resolves to fix this series’ clichés with a different set of clichés. It does have star power, however, which is refreshing.

I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.

Nearly three %$^&%!!# hours, and they’re brain-freezing.

Most thriller writers don’t aim so high: You really have to grapple with Lehane’s vision to see how tiresome it is.

It's a perfect fortune cookie of a movie, full of bland life lessons for everybody; would that there were some drama or style in it somewhere along the way.

The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.

Evans has assembled a worthy cast and has crammed his film full of what should be fun elements, and yet the final result is weirdly without joy — akin to filling your plate with all your favorite foods at a buffet, only to sit down and realize you have no appetite to eat it.

It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.

It’s hard to tell if The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a comedy that wants to be a drama or a drama that wants to be a comedy. Of course, a film can be both. This one, alas, is neither.

Harriet only highlights how this genre can fail despite the so-called important nature of the picture and a talented black director at the helm.

Wish I Was Here, not unlike its predecessor "Garden State," captures a certain generational drift. It just doesn’t know what to do with it. So it beats the damned thing into the ground until it’s dead.

It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings. Not DiCaprio, though.

I veered between being awed and appalled, though mostly the latter. The trouble with Gyllenhaal is that he shows little range, not from role to role but within roles.

What’s obvious after a few minutes of Piece by Piece is that the movie isn’t rendered the way it is because of some profound thematic ties between its subject’s life and the plastic construction set, but because the Lego is an attempt to inject something of interest into what is, even by the pre-chewed standards of authorized celeb docs, textureless pablum.

Slipshod and tiresome, The Protector 2 is more than a misfire, it’s a betrayal.

Sword of Trust feints at being an Ideas movie, but really only wants to hang — which is certainly not a crime, but given the subject matter, and These Times, it’s a little disappointing.

It isn't just the violence that is overplayed. There is so much creepy-Gothic Sturm und Drang in The Passion that at times it seems as if Clive Barker should get credit for the story along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The script is frantically trying to build a whole world when a modest house would do.

The film does occasionally show a pulse when it tries to reimagine the life of the victim — it turns the tables on the mystery and tries to become a film about love and life instead of doom and death. But it’s too little, too late, and too lame.

If only Ghost Dimension spent more time in the ghost dimension and less time in the people dimension, we might have had something.

Although that pairing (Martin/Latifah) alone may be enough to make this movie a hit, the material is thin and pandering and almost criminally negligent in bypassing opportunities for humor.

The film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art.

While Here Today never works, there is a confessional quality to it that makes it intermittently interesting. It’s the movie equivalent of someone telling what they think is a funny anecdote, but that instead comes out as an inadvertent glimpse into their soul.

You don’t appreciate the art of a good genre contrivance until you see one pulled off poorly.

The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.