A slow-moving legal thriller that fills the many idle moments with scenes plucked from a random selection of Hollywood standards. [17 Feb 1995, p.52]

Yes, Tolkien is a little on-the-nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well-cast, and well-acted.

There are a few moments wherein Schumer has a chance to successfully deploy the brash, take-me-as-I-am persona she has cultivated on stage and in her starring debut, Trainwreck, but mostly the script shows signs of having been awkwardly retrofitted to accommodate the star and her brand.

The chemistry between these two attractive people and fine actors is unaccountably bad.

It’s an obvious formula, but when the movie sticks to it, it works well enough; Reynolds and Jackson have pretty decent chemistry.

A very sloppy piece of work, apart from the cinematography, which is pretty, and the Mills Brothers songs, which are fantastic.

The Ghost and the Darkness doesn't seem to know what to do with this unsettling bit of history. There is a little bit of Hemingway bullshit about manhood and courage and grace under pressure, but the movie always seems to be reaching for a philosophical/mystical edge that would have been better off in the hands of a director like Peter Weir. Instead, the job went to Stephen Hopkins, whose credits include "Nightmare on Elm Street 5" and "Predator 2," and whose taste for straightforward commercial thrills gets in the way of the stories more interesting possibilities. [11 Oct 1996, p.56]

The movie is a cheerful pastiche, unpretentious and efficient, and the giant shark, when it finally shows up, is a pretty good special effect, although I’m not sure I’d value it at $150 million (the amount of Chinese money it took to make the movie).

Even if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, you have a pretty good idea where the drama is headed. Still, The Upside nonetheless does an amiable job of taking you there, thanks to hard work by the two leads.

Half the movie has a game McCarthy starring in scenes that live up to the promise of the movie’s title (’80s dance off! Bust a move!), and yet there are major plot points built around this same woman’s fear of public speaking. It has you longing for the narrative consistency of Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School.

Flash provides some comic relief...Aquaman some terse tough guy laughs, but the jokes land stiffly, and Wonder Woman, recently the star of her own blockbuster movie, is back to being part of a superhero tag-team, taking turns in the end at beating on Steppenwolf.

Leisure Seeker leans heavily on the charm of its two veteran leads. Sutherland and Mirren work hard to establish John and Ella as a couple worth pulling for, even as we begin to suspect that what they want is to go out on their own terms.

The incident on the train accounts for just a few minutes of screen time — for another 90 minutes they’re in a flatlined buddy movie, without much help from Eastwood (he insisted they not train as actors) or the screenplay.

Necessary Roughness has the right kind of rambunctious spirit for this kind of picture -- even if it's not quite as inventive as similar movies like the recent baseball send-up, Major League.

The movie needs an editor, or a bartender, to remind the director when he’s hit the two-hour mark: Last orders, Mr. Vaughn.

The only creepy things about Brightburn, though, are its labored, derivative narrative, its giddy sadism (it gets off on Brandon’s adolescent power trip, and expects its audience to do the same), and its cynical built-in branding.

While the movie is often dazzling, it’s also frequently dull.

Hollywood movies with anti-profiteering themes always strikes me as tacky. We're talking about an industry, after all, that sends trade reps all over the globe, lobbying other countries to prosecute anyone trying to dupe a copy of "Waterworld." There is a cheaper way to protect U.S.-made movie products. Keep making movies as bad as "Chain Reaction." No one will want to copy them. [2 Aug 1996, p.32]

Forster does some interesting visual work here to suggest the perspective of a person who is (legally) blind, but in general, when your thriller requires the heroic intervention of an ophthalmologist, you’re in trouble.

All of this is in Hart's wheelhouse, and Night School might have fared better if it had surrendered completely to random comedy one-offs. It keeps coming back, though, to the desultory story of Teddy's strained romance, the least-compelling feature of the movie.

A delightfully schlocky horror comedy about a race of vicious, bloodthirsty invading aliens who look like circus clowns - but with very sharp teeth. [15 Aug 2013, p.C01]

As Knightley and Skarsgard wrestle with this material and each other, the movie around them goes plot crazy.

Dark Phoenix has a cast of lame-duck actors wearing expressions that say, “Check, please,” and the movie has the kind of knotty, suspenseless plotting that makes the veins in your head throb.

There is a lot of plot in those final minutes, and don’t bother trying to outguess the magician. He pulls a rabbit out of a hat, just to distract you from the next rabbit.

It all adds up to a bicultural comedy that is good-natured if not especially or consistently well-written. The movie takes too long to get moving, stays a tad too long, and efforts to retrofit the movie as a vehicle for Derbez come at the expense of Faris, a talented comedian who has very little to do here.

Fans can best enjoy the movie the way the bad moms make the best of the holiday: lots of alcohol, lots of forgiveness.

It all feels flat-footed and pretentious.

Meyers-Shyer loves movies as much as the young men in Home Again and the best scenes reflect that.

It's a supremely goofy movie, and one that's almost hypnotically heedless of everything that is currently fashionable in Hollywood, especially in the inspirational teacher genre. You won't be inspired. On the other hand, you won't be bored. [19 Apr 1996, p.42]

The remake, directed by Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, makes substantial changes — taking the bare bones of the story and turning into a sort action-fable about female empowerment, starring Jane the Virgin headliner Gina Rodriguez.

The problem isn’t that the humor is inappropriate, it’s that after almost two decades, it isn’t as funny.

The plot particulars are flimsy and laughable by design — this Shaft has been put together by folks with an instinct for comedy.

The movie works best when it falls back on plain old acting. Merritt Wever is sweet presence as the hobby shop worker and gentle soul who understands Mark’s obsessions, and appreciates his art. Her scenes with Carell are the movie’s least technological, and its best.

If HGTV and Lifetime had a TV channel baby, it would produce movies like The Intruder.

The action is frantic and brutal, and the movie itself has an ugly tone.

No neuralizers needed for Men In Black: International — you’ll forget you’ve seen it not long after walking out.

Who wrote this -- Oliver North?

In its last moments...Aardvark finds a groove.

The fact that it’s a Razzie contender, of course, is no reason not to see it. In fact it could be an inducement — Razzie movies can be quite fun.

Frankenheimer and company, perhaps realizing they were making a bad movie, have taken steps to make "Dr. Moreau" gloriously bad, with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter. [23 Aug 1996, p.44]

The movie also trumpets hometown values, and makes fun of the way Liam’s wealth and fame have insulated him from simple pleasures of small-town life (underlined by director Bethany Ashton Wolf’s cozy visual presentation). The movie pokes fun at his materialism, when it’s not indulging in it.

The picture is apparently intended to mimic the bleak futurism of Blade Runner, but with its cheap look, punk styling and dirty-looking restrooms, Johnny Mnemonic looks more likes a bad East Village nightclub. Furthermore, Longo's staging of action sequences is bland, and he doesn't seem to understand character development at all. [26 May 1995, p.36]

Kin positions itself as a B-movie cobbled together from sci-fi favorites of the past, and so we grant the movie wide latitude to be goofy. It's meant to be out there. Even by those lax standards, though, Kin tries the patience.

The internal logic of the movie is complex, confusing, and as a result the movie is not very much fun.

As a symbiote, Brock/Venom is sometimes funny, and for a while the movie finds a rhythm that seems to suit director Ruben Fleischer, best known for Zombieland.

Wilson and Hathaway don’t click. The characters feel as if they were workshopped separately, and efforts to combine their comic energy on screen fall flat.

Even moviegoers who don't own Nintendo...will thoroughly enjoy these superheroes. And chances are, this is only the beginning of their film exploits.

I give Elba enormous credit for maintaining a straight face — he and Taylor account for the movie’s few good moments — but the silly script seems to have awakened the dormant ham in McConaughey.

In an effort to work all of these characters into the plot, the movie has become incomprehensible, though I doubt anyone will care, since the movie is one big blizzard of karate chops, and that seems to be the point. [23 Dec 1994, p.33]

Whatever slim chance this picture had of emerging as the sports version of "King of Comedy" evaporates amid a muddled plot and a thoroughly unconvincing feel-good ending. [19 Apr 1996, p.42]

The movie sometimes gets airborne, but with an obvious strain that hurts an airy fantasy like "North." [22 Jul 1994, p.31]

The point of this enterprise is to put the slinky, husky-voiced Fiorentino into compromising positions with as many men as possible and to provide director William Friedkin (The French Connection) with an excuse to stage three long chase scenes. Seems like everybody got what they wanted out of this thing except for us. [13 Oct 1995, p.48]

Stories about the way men and women negotiate sex, power, money, work and relationships — Anastasia ends up working for a company Christian owns — should make the Fifty Shades trilogy relevant and exciting. They are, somewhat mysteriously, the opposite of that.

A wishy-washy exploitation movie, which doesn’t show any real verve until the climax.

It's formatted entertainment aimed at undiscriminating children, full of stale little bits like music video interludes, and obvious rehashing of Home Alone situations in which Culkin's resourceful character outsmarts adults. [17 Jun 1994, p.57]

One of the worst Christmas comedies in history and certainly one of the worst pictures of the year, Trapped in Paradise is a movie with exactly one laugh. [02 Dec 1994, p.77]

The Happytime Murders is a good idea executed badly, or at least one that is trying too hard to be shocking.

Bay makes a lot of familiar moves here.

It's rare that a movie so cleverly conceived is so poorly executed.

Eye for an Eye reaches campy zenith when Field, newly energized - dare I say empowered? - by her martial arts and weaponry skills, turns into a tigress in bed, frightening her husband. [12 Jan 1996, p.28]

Gotti ends up feeling like a kitschy assemblage of other directors’ ideas.