In this G-rated movie the effects are gee-whiz, with live giraffes amid the stuffed animals and bouncy balls so manic that they could use some Ritalin.

As for The Happening, his throwback horror flick that plays like "The Birds" meets "The Blob," it's beyond good and evil. It's dumbfounding.

Yes, bestiality in a PG-13 movie. It's the end of life as we know it.

The main flaw of White House Down is that it overstays its welcome, thanks in large part to a silly climax that seems to unfold in three laborious acts. At least, Tatum keeps his shirt off.

Overwritten, over-designed, and too clever by 200 percent, the film does offer the pleasure of actors enjoying themselves.

A noisy, not particularly charming collection of skits and skirmishes.

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

The Getaway isn't going to bore anybody, but it's not going to do anything else either. [11 Feb 1994, p.03]

It's old, old hat.

Not a movie, it's a museum catalog of gorgeously rendered portraits and landscapes. What a crashing disappointment.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

No one is bad in The Big Wedding, but no one is remotely believable, either.

Harmless, mindless and shameless.

What could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

The actors, individually fine although they appear to be in different films, tread warily on each other's turf, like Martian and Venusian making adjustments for an alien gravitational field.

While Stealing Harvard may be a chucklehead comedy, Lee is oddly touching and funny. Mostly because, unlike Green, he's not aggressively trying to make us laugh.

Dull plod.

Yep, it's all fun and games until someone gets brutalized repeatedly. Before you can avert your eyes, it's Katie, bar the door and break out the chain saws.

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

It's a crudely entertaining argument for redeploying the U.S. military into our schools. [19 Apr 1996, p.05]

It is a good hour too long, although it does boast Christopher Walken.

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A case of a yummy yarn spoiled by cheesy visuals.

A moody cyber-noir with not much on its mind but looking good, Blackhat is a must-see if you like your dialogue (romantic, dramatic, subtitled Cantonese) peppered with techspeak.

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

Manages to rocket along at full speed. At the same time, however, the movie feels as if it's not going anywhere at all.

I watched this movie thinking that it used the idea of taking a chance on cards as a metaphor for taking a chance on love. I was dead wrong.

Despite a terrific performance from Shane West, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crash, Secret is a chronology, not a biopic.

An odd mix of stiff and sumptuous.

Brosnan, who finds the truth in his character, is quite affecting. And Mulligan, gamely defining a surprisingly undefined young woman, is like a sunbeam piercing the gloom.

There's nothing in Jungle 2 Jungle that hasn't been treated with more flair and imagination in dozens of other movies. [07 Mar 1997, p.03]

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

Cheerful mishmash.

What Hannibal Rising is, mostly, is a hoot.

This salt-and-pepper buddy movie set in the scenic environs of downtown Brooklyn and the Australian bush is a crowd-pleaser -- for the elementary-school set.

The real Radio, and the real coach -- seen together in the movie's feel-good epilogue -- deserve better.

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from "Casablanca" to Hitchcock's "Suspicion" and "Notorious."

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Claustrophobic and overwrought, Jailbait is an unpleasant excursion into gay panic mitigated somewhat by performances that are hard to shake.

A disquieting and ultimately disappointing political thriller.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

Whenever Andrews - that incarnation of the sensible and the sensitive - glides on screen, PD2 sparkles.

Isn't as jaw-droppingly awful as its trailers suggest.

Shy sheriff Stewart comes up against mobster Fonda and his gang of outlaws; not as good as this pairing should have been. [02 Jun 1994, p.E04]

A thuddingly dull remake of the 1971 crime drama starring Michael Caine.

There are tiny glints of humor and intelligence at work, and the action and animation rockets along slickly and stylishly. But unlike the protagonists of almost any and all of the Pixar titles, Astro Boy's namesake lacks even an iota of soul.

The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.

It's clean and cheerful entertainment, blithely piggybacking on a beloved classic. No wonder Anderson washed his hands of this project - the filmmakers tampered with and trampled on his magic formula.

Epic piffle.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men.

It's still a submarine movie, confined by the ship, the sea, and a convention-laden script.

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of the BP disaster in the gulf: It's a big-screen oil spill, a needless gushing of macho bluster and wild set pieces, and a waste of millions and millions of dollars.

At least an hour of Man of Steel's excessive running time is devoted to the sort of crash-and-burn, slamming-into-skyscrapers CG fight scenes that we've already seen in "The Avengers" and "Dark Knight," "Iron Man," and "Spider-Man." Man of Steel is just the same old same old.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

Not a great film. Or particularly good. In fact, it's fairly bad as B-movies go.

He emerges stinking, and so, alas, does Fathers' Day. [9 May 1997, p.03]

In mood and in content is just SO 20th century.

Don't blame Kline. This most thoughtful of actors is trapped behind the lectern of a film that spouts contradictory lessons it can't reconcile.

At the film's inconclusive conclusion, the filmmakers strand Erica and Sean in the moral twilight.

The 3D effects are of a gimmicky 1956 vintage, with hands thrusting from the screen to give the illusion of reaching out and touching the audience.

As doggy movies go, this one gets two paws out of four.

Richie Rich has some fun with Richie's pampered life, and Culkin seems at ease with the role of a kid who has been isolated from his peers by money and celebrity - perhaps because it surely touches on feelings in his own young life. [21 Dec 1994, p.E01]

A rambling depiction of a junkie's descent into zombitude.

Harry Connick Jr. acquits himself best of the lot.

It's refreshing to see an actor tell his own story with some real honesty. Overall, however, Tab Hunter Confidential is too much like every other Hollywood True Story out there.

In truth, the only hazardous material to be found in Diana - the title role assumed bravely, if mistakenly, by Naomi Watts - is the screenplay.

Much as I gnashed my teeth during 27 Dresses, I genuinely enjoyed the warmth of Heigl's and Marsden's confident ease. While both might be a few minutes past their star-is-born moment, these troupers with more than 30 years of professional work between them have never shone so brightly. It may sound contradictory, but loved them, hated IT.

Doesn't take itself seriously, and that's a good thing.

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

The film is based on Ryne Douglas Peardon's novel Simple Simon, which I haven't read. I can only hope it's less exploitive of people with autism than Mercury Rising is. For all the filmmakers' apparent efforts to treat the issue with sensitivity (there are teachers and nurses who patiently explain to Willis the various symptoms, the behavioral patterns of autistic children), the issue has no place in a standard-issue Hollywood thriller. It feels like a gimmick, and a shameless one at that. [3 Apr 1998, p.03]

For all its mayhem, for all the smashing windows and kabooming fireballs, the grenade launchers and giant helicopters, A Good Day to Die Hard not only fails to top its predecessors, it also forgets the basic Die Hard rules.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

Short, sour and scabrous, Bosses is that paradoxical thing: a situation comedy where neither situation nor comedy is particularly effective where nonetheless Jason Bateman is sidesplitting, as is Colin Farrell in a supporting role.

This is not about a reluctant hero drawing courage from some deep personal well. It's not about dread and danger. It's about visual effects.

Edgeless as a marshmallow and twice as syrupy.

Did I laugh? A handful of times. Did I cringe? For 101 minutes.

City Slickers I managed to poke fun at the whole Iron John/discover-your- maleness movement at the same time the film was able to embrace it. But while City Slickers II tries for the same mix, it doesn't work. Instead, we get shots of three smelly, unshaven guys getting blubbery and hugging each other. [10 June 1994, p.03]

If there's going to be a "Rush Hour 3," the filmmakers need more of the Ziyi/Sanchez women warriors to punch up the sagging cross-cultural buddy humor of the Chan-Tucker partnership.

The film's recycled nature is most evident in director P.J. Hogan's attempt to marry the farcical hijinks of an "I Love Lucy" episode to an addiction scenario that would not be out of place in "The Lost Weekend."

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

The only likable characters are ebullient Omer (Sam Golzari), a show-tune-loving reluctant Iraqi suicide bomber who comes to the O.C., and earnest William (Chris Klein), an American GI wounded in Iraq, who are mirror images.

Washington's portrayal of a down-to-earth, dedicated detective is what we've come to expect from the star: intense, meticulous, likable. But there isn't much depth to his role. [16 Jan 1998, p.03]

An uneven, mildly amusing, and highly derivative flick featuring a wonderful, quirky cast as a crew of art thieves who run a complex scam on the art world, and on each other.

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

A tediously faithful remake of French filmmaker Luc Besson's terrific 2004 international hit "District 13," the Besson-produced Brick Mansions might have been mildly interesting had it been made a decade ago.

It musters both the merits and the drawbacks of the landmark original.

Yet another Hollywood serving of everyman pluck, sports division.

Heights manages to make the lives of all these beautiful people seem quite tedious. Despite their accomplishments, the only thing they seem suited for is hailing cabs.

This should have been an easy knockout. Yet the pieces just don't fit together. Hands of Stone lurches back and forth between well-crafted dramatic scenes and shabby, cliché-ridden sequences that sap the viewer's energy.

Filled with close-ups of Jesus and his apostles (all the better to hide the absence of elaborate period sets), mixing quotes from the Scripture with flat exposition, this low-budget affair is earnest and, alas, more than a little bit cartoonish.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.