Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

Truth be told, J. Edgar drags, even when it pays homage to the widely discredited urban legend that the guy liked to dress in drag.

An unsatisfying if often surprising experience, a less warm and fuzzy "Parenthood."

The laughs - Doug tries to take up the pipe, a la Sherlock Holmes - are on the flat side.

Actually, the rating fits. The movie isn't quite enough fun to qualify for the "average" category, yet not quite lame enough to deserve to be called "poor." [28 June 1991, p.6]

Extraordinary Measures isn’t extraordinary. It’s simply safe.

If Last Man Standing is a failure, it's far from a disgrace. Its intentions seem pure; its method, precise and painstaking. You might say this movie has everything. Everything but excitement. [20 Sep 1996, p.22]

Kilmer makes a worthy, if somewhat underscripted villain. And some of the bits -- MacGruber idiotically setting traps that the bad guys never fall for -- tickle. But this still feels instantly dated, a "Hot Rod in a Role Models" era.

Basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

When the dust clears, Blue Steel turns out to be just one more violent movie whose basic theme is women as victims. [16 Mar 1990, p.3]

Passenger 57 was directed by Kevin Hooks, a former actor who directed last year's Strictly Business. He manages to keep the action fairly clear, which is something that can't be taken for granted in today's adventure movies. [09 Nov 1992, p.C1]

All these years after Predator, these decades past the classic film, "Most Dangerous Game," that inspired this genre, it’s good to see the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted still gets the blood racing.

It's a solid, engrossing thriller, but a slack one.

Precious, protracted and pleasant enough.

I am not going to try to tell you that this one-joke, talking-horse comedy is, in any meaningful sense, a good movie. What I am going to say is that it's a little better than my rock-bottom expectations led me to predict.

An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.

Though the film does contain a few other humorously erotic moments, it's mostly a listless exercise in intentional camp.

Lacks surprises.

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

Memphis Belle simply doesn't fly. [12 Oct 1990, p.4]

Filmmaker Haynes has brought forth a punishing little movie, but he fails to make the case that the viewer deserves to be punished. Poison really wants us to suffer - which, come to think of it, is also the underlying aim of many exploitation flicks. For all their cheap thrills, they are basically soul-deadening - and so, ultimately, is this earnest little message movie. [17 May 1991, p.6]

Bottom line: Stake out another movie. [23 July 1993, p.8]

The Expendables feels, well -- disposable, a movie whose nostalgia isn't enough to make this 50. caliber trip down Memory Lane worth the fake napalm.

But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don't hew to climate change dogma, Cool It leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered.

The best to be said for the current production is that the editing is refreshingly swift, the cinematography is clear-eyed and the running time is mercifully short. (I clocked it at just under an hour and a half.) But do I recommend Fire Birds? That's a negative. [29 May 1990, p.D1]

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

Bad Teacher is a pulled punch, a pot-smoking/kid cussing/teacher copulating farce that is less than the sum of its parts.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

The performers are given stock types to play, and Elba and Dillon, at least, can do a little with that.

While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.

Frankly, the original was never one of my favorite Disney cartoons - pleasant enough, but uninspiring. The sequel, I'm afraid, isn't much of an improvement. [16 Nov 1990, p.8]

A big-screen version of a routine cop show that occasionally gets by on momentum from the original movie.

Woman of Straw, which was by no means a sparkling production or masterful mystery-thriller, did verge on Hitchcock territory. [30 Nov 2003, p.9]

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

Fifteen years ago Sylvester Stallone starred in a movie called Rocky, which won an Oscar. Now he is starring in a movie called Oscar that is, well, a little rocky. [29 Apr 1991, p.D1]

The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.

Most of the names in My Girl are meant to seem a little peculiar. In fact, everything in My Girl is meant to seem a little peculiar. Which, I would say, is the problem with the movie. When eccentricity becomes as insistent as it does here, it's not really eccentricity any more, it's affectation. My Girl, which opens today, is a festival of affectation. [27 Nov 1991, p.E1]

Barkin's performance is so detailed that it becomes a little essay about the physical differences between men and women. Too bad that this modern woman's performance is trapped in the movie of an old-fashioned man. [10 May 1991, p.6]

A routine action drama, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book contains qualities of both forgettability and painlessness.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

Whatever its virtues, Eli is a movie that can’t help but suffer in comparison to the much-delayed and much better "Road."

For what it is and for whom it is intended, it’s not a bad movie, just an indifferent one.

It has humor and a touch of charm, but plainly needed more love, more passion, more Shakespeare.

Although the film is watchable and, at times, even borderline entertaining, it has its share of problems. Mainly, the filmmakers seem to have had trouble deciding just what kind of movie they were making. [22 May 1996, p.E1]

It moves along briskly and lightly, leaving little trace and doing no serious damage to boomer memories. [22 Aug 1997, p.19]

Half of me thinks that Raising Cain is disappointing. The other half thinks it's just stupid. [07 Aug 1992, p.19]

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

Home Alone-style slapstick with occasional (almost random) heart-tugging. [17 Jun 1994, p.27]

If The Prince of Tides has a saving grace, it's the acting. In what is probably the most subdued role of her life, Streisand is remarkably graceful and charming: This woman who has so often been accused of self-infatuation hands much of the movie over to her co-stars.

The new big-screen Flipper isn't as lame as that series, which is one of the two nicest things you can say about it. The other is that its aquatic sequences are sometimes quite beautiful, with their views of dolphins and other sea life. [17 May 1996, p.17]

Devil is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in "The Twilight Zone," back in the day. Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

You would call Amos & Andrew a comedy of errors if it were actually funny. I suppose the precise term is an attempted comedy of errors - or maybe just a turkey. [05 Mar 1993, p.19]

She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess.

Sgt. Bilko is a bigger con job than Bilko himself ever pulled. [29 Mar 1996, p.A2]

3D or not, the film about the mop-topped Canadian - who turns 17 March 1 - doesn't let us get very close to "the talent."

Reducing the racist characters to the level of frothing-at-the-mouth Karate Kid villains doesn't shed much light on a serious social problem. (Louis Malle's portrait of the young Gestapo member in the 1974 Lacombe, Lucien came much closer to exposing the banality of evil.) And Avildsen doesn't make matters any better by staging scenes of racial violence so luridly that they almost amount to a form of exploitation.

An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.

It begins with such promise, a kinky modernist twist on a classical sci-fi morality tale. That it degenerates into conventional, genre horror is all the more disappointing.

A confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path.

First-time director Claire Denis (a Frenchwoman who lived in Africa as a child) wants us to know that colonialism is a bad thing. Would anyone care to argue the point? Like German director Wim Wenders (with whom she worked on Wings of Desire), Denis achieves some ravishing images but is committed to using a deadeningly static camera. [30 Mar 1990, p.16]

Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes very far wrong as long as he remains in motion.

Like "The Living Daylights", Licence to Kill definitely has its moments. But also like "The Living Daylights", the new, two-hour-plus picture goes on too long and is encumbered by a needlessly complicated plot.

There are a few sensitive scenes, but it’s the big blasts of raunchy that deliver its laughs.

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

The movie never convinces us that Forster is convinced himself. The director lines up this bad good man in his sights, but he never quite has the nerve quite to pull the trigger.

Whatever romance and charm Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has hacked and ground them off.

Director Richard Benjamin and screenwriter Holly Goldberg Sloan use a single comic device throughout the entire movie. In scene after scene, two things are made to happen simultaneously with supposedly hilarious results. [11 Jun 1993, p.22]

It just takes a very long time to get going. Apparently seventh grade doesn't pack as much potential for amusing, scarred-for-life trauma as sixth grade.

Manages to deliver a striking, nicely detailed, visceral thriller built on a corny, old-fashioned script.

It's a movie of thematic dead-ends. Director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt give us a slow SLOW and somewhat morose tale that isn't remotely funny or profound enough to sustain that pace and tone.

Take "Kick-Ass." Strip it of most of its wit and charm, amp up the violence, the sadism. Make it more crude and coarse and gory. And what you're left with is Super.

Otomo's movie, set in the usual sci-fi post-apocalyptic world, has all the narrative fascination of a Godzilla movie (not much). The filmmaker does have a vivid visual imagination, but this imagination has more to do with composition and color than with motion (i.e., animation). [01 Jun 1990, p.7]

Egoyan makes you pay dearly by subjecting you to large doses of film-festival-strength ponderousness. [14 Apr 1995, p.19]

Its grisly violence and ridicule-religion tone make it sort of the anti-"Exorcism of Emily Rose."

The problem isn't that the film is derivative, it's that the film fails at being derivative. In Only the Lonely, we get only the baloney. [28 May 1991, p.D1]

Has a "been there, done that, jailed for it" feel.

The Russia House is one of the most gorgeous-looking movies currently in release and also, unfortunately, one of the dullest. If it were a travelogue, it would be great. But it isn't. [21 Dec 1990, p.9]

The basic problem with Indian Summer: The movie sacrifices credibility in an attempt to get easy laughs. [23 Apr 1993]

Even by kid standards, young Macaulay can't act. The boy just races through his dialogue, barely pausing long enough to be understood. And when the script requires him to actually show some emotion, he sounds completely mechanical - as if he were merely parroting a line reading that some adult had given him. [20 Nov 1992, p.16]

The formulaic plot does not give the actors that much to work with. Swank, though, does a good job as Julie. [16 Sep 1994, p.2]

Even if your expectations were not especially high, chances are that you would be disappointed by Into the West. [17 Sep 1993, p.21]

The new creature feature Monsters is an intriguing mash-up of "District 9," "The Host" and assorted recent post-apocalypse road pictures.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

Club Paradise isn't particularly offensive, but it isn't especially funny, either. And all that's holding it together is Williams' amiable performance and the music, most of which was written by Cliff, who also performs it.

Oz is a bit too impressed by the story's enchantment - too inclined to dwell on Omri's astonished gaze and too eager to fill the soundtrack with Randy Edelman's ain't-it-awesome? musical score. [14 July 1995, p.17]

The script, by Showgirls' Joe Eszterhas, seems dead-set on evoking a darkly sensuous mood, full, as it is, of sex games, secret sex tapes and even - Lord help us - a fertility mask. But William Friedkin (Blue Chips, The Exorcist) directs in such a stark, threatening style that the combined effect of their efforts is an uninvolving, faintly creepy brooding. [13 Oct 1995, p.25]

The movie's biggest sin, however, is that during its crucial final half-hour, the action is shot in a confusing way that renders it virtually incomprehensible. This section is almost a series of random images, which is no way to build suspense, let me tell you. That this movie's director has previously specialized in music videos and that he has never before directed a feature film, may explain why this section is so very chaotic. [22 May 1992, p.19]

A well-acted tale of an underdog's triumph that sorely lacks an underdog, it teeters between pleasantly generic film biography and rank manipulation.

Green Zone isn't so much a bad movie as a misguided one.

Jackie Earle Haley, the fans' choice to take on the role of Freddy Krueger in the remake of the 1984 boogeyman blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street proves stunningly, rousingly…adequate…for the job.

An ultimately unsatisfying allegory about war and whimsy, the new film has its attractions, but it's certainly no Aladdin. [18 Dec 1992, p.19]

Cute, bordering on cutesy, yes. Light and shallow and inconsequential in a lot of ways. But funny? Rarely.

This new film adaptation of the old radio serial is like Batman (1989) without its spark of pop-cult genius. [01 Jul 1994, p.9]

This Paranormal doesn't tamper with the formula that worked in the first two films. It lacks the "money" moments that those films delivered and ends with a finale that is downright conventional. "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers.

If “the gals” have to bow out, at least they try to do it in a sprint -- in their Manolo Blahniks. It’s a pity nobody told them you can’t run in heels -- in sand dunes.

You don't have to be a baby sitter to like The Baby-sitters Club, but it would help. It also would help if you're in early adolescence. [18 Aug 1995, p.20]