The formula in Chain Reaction is familiar, but at least it has been entrusted to a proven technician. [2 Aug 1996, p.03]

Forte and company have managed to make crude and lewd dunderheadedness laugh-out-loud funny here and there, and that, I guess, is something of an achievement.

Heartbreaking and sometimes dazzlingly effective, the film still has flaws -- most of them in a too-often-maudlin script.

With the raunch quotient cranked up several notches, the sequel is calculated, cynical and, worse, not funny.

Whether he's smacking into an iceberg or flopping topless onto a sandy beach, DiCaprio is still maddeningly lightweight.

On the plus side are engaging performances by Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci. On the minus side is . . . everything else.

Despite its terrific performances and its great use of locations, Shelter doesn't have enough substance to hold your attention or linger in the mind for long.

Strip away the video-game visual effects, the endless chases and zero gravity shootouts, and Total Recall comes down to this: What is reality?

If this melodrama has that haven't-we-met-before look, it's because it combines elements of "The Caine Mutiny" (Gandolfini's Winter is Queeg-like) with those of "Stalag 17."

It's the kind of film -- like Diane Keaton's "Hanging Up" -- that even as it dissolves narratively, still makes you dissolve emotionally.

There are chases that feel way too long, and dialogue that feels flat. Affleck and Thurman make a handsome duo, but there's no spark between the actors.

Silly, but irresistible.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

The film has two curious subplots and supporting performances that feel tacked on rather than organically part of it.

This tale of a white mother's kid gone missing in a black New Jersey neighborhood - and the tensions and news media attention that ensue - is pretty much pure jive.

Fortunately for us, they number these Final Destination scarefests. Otherwise, it would be impossible to tell them apart.

Meet Dave isn't great, but it's good enough. And it proves once again that Murphy can do anything - even a PG comedy in which he isn't a donkey.

It's hard to understand what Malevolence is doing in theaters. If ever a movie deserved to go directly to DVD, it's this dreary horror treatment.

As one unfamiliar with the novel, I found it hard to tease out its meaning from this handsomely mounted, well-acted, aggressively elliptical adaptation.

There's a sign on the way into Norway, or at least a sign that somebody from the film crew put up: "On the eighth day, God created baseball." If amen is your answer to that, then The Final Season is the movie for you.

Laced with a venomous wit, and turning progressively creepier as it unfolds, writer-director Jon Reiss' movie offers a black-humored study of suppressed rage, sexual gamesmanship, domination and subordination.

A gagfest that makes viewers gag at least twice as often as they giggle, American Wedding -- third in the American Pie trilogy -- whipsaws the audience between gross-out and guffaw.

If you actually sit through this enervating ordeal, you'll swear that time is Frozen.

With visual nods to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and a fairly faithful adherence to the tenor and tone of the Korean scare genre, The Uninvited doesn't startle and shock so much as it lulls you into a series of unsettling, hallucinogenic set pieces.

Basic Instinct's characters lack psychology and therefore motive. Admittedly they possess pathology, but that's not enough to maintain suspense in a movie with plot holes big enough to drive a tank through.

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

While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.

By the end of Machine Gun Preacher, its title character has become a cartoon.

Tedious and incoherent thriller.

Does the world really need another movie about a married guy wandering blindly into an affair, or the married gal who can't decide whether to remain faithful or fool around?

The actresses are appealing, the settings photogenic (Budapest doubles for Monte Carlo), and the clothes ideal for a triple-Cinderella fantasy. It's not art, but it is entertaining.

The makeover from ugly duckling to swan essentially replaces narrative catharsis.

To say that The Grace Card piles it on is an understatement of profound dimensions.

The title Brooklyn's Finest is drowning in irony, of course, but Fuqua's moves are less obvious: His film is classical and gritty, his violence makes you want to duck and run.

Refreshingly subversive.

Somewhat fleeter and more engaging than its predecessor.

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

While Flipper doesn't exactly arrive dead in the water, the latest installment in that saga of America's most beloved bottlenose could be dubbed Flopper. [17 May 1996, p.03]

Offers a gripping mix of sexual heat and nasty menace. It's "Dead Calm" meets "Very Bad Things," with English accents.

The connection between the two time frames and stories (the contemporary one with the addition of screenwriters) is flimsy as a frayed rope bridge, forced as the stepsister's foot into Cinderella's glass slipper.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

How Depardieu rises above this nonsense about a girl who tries to make a beau more interested by telling him that her father is actually her lover is something that a physicist should explore. It defies gravity. [4 Feb 1994, p.04]

The film, in its early going, also has a nice light humor about it, and an engaging, albeit tragic, love story.

Cage and Leoni make it offbeat.

Buoyed by the appealing Hart and Grenier.

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

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

Watts' Evelyn is a tricky character - it should be entertaining having her around in the cloven-in-two-to-cash-in-at-the-box-office final installments.

Grisly stuff. The movie, shot in Australia with an Aussie and British cast, makes "127 Hours" look like a walk in the park.

Barnz tries, at least a bit, to acknowledge the heroic and historic legacy of the union movement and its rightful place in the contemporary labor landscape. But much of the blame for the sorry state of Adams Elementary, and the school system at large, is placed at the union's feet.

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

Echoing the lessons learned from "HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey," the message of Transcendence is that computers should not be allowed to become sentient.

Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

The Internship itself would be kind of charming, too, if this Google-recruitment film, this 119-minute commercial for Googliness, weren't so downright creepy.

The more movie magic Howard piles on, the less we care. And, boy, does he pull out all the stops, stocking the pic with a tub of red herrings, half a dozen plot twists, and more complex set pieces than a comic-book flick. I felt relieved when it was finally over.

How'd this thing get made?

Warrior has the underwritten, overproduced bluster of "Conan the Barbarian."

Two Weeks Notice is a lot like Trump's tonsorial tower: improbable and overteased.

Has to be the sorriest excuse for a reprise since "Highlander — The Final Dimension."

The movie devolves into a kind of high-tech Flash Gordon, with Ra as a cross- dressed Ming and Russell and Spader as the heroes required to chase big lugs with ray-guns around the inside of a pyramid. Things get pretty brainless before it's over, although Russell does get to deliver a great send-off line. [28 Oct 1994, p.5]

Taylor Hackford directs crisply, unpretentiously. Patti LuPone goes Latina, playing Lopez's soap opera-addicted mom, and Bobby Cannavale is a Palm Beach cop with an eye for Leslie. The action is fast and furious.

Love conquers all. Sadly, Yoo's film does not.

The miscast (or misdirected) Hilary Swank's Jeanne takes so little pleasure in coquetry and manipulation.

I'll be darned if I can think of a more excruciating, ponderous, remarkably unfunny and inert cinemagoing experience to come down the pike in ages.

Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.

I should put in for worker’s comp for the extensive injuries I sustained watching the insulting, abysmal 3-D action thriller xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which left me deeply traumatized and suffering from injuries to my eardrums, my eyes, my mind, my soul, my aesthetic sensibility, and my sense of decency.

From the street corner to the boardroom to the White House, the same paradigms are in play, Brown argues.

Nothing wrong about a movie that says, Stop and smell the roses. Now, if only director Rob Reiner hadn't rubbed our noses in a bouquet of plastic blooms.

The Family is a film at once strange and intriguing. It can't seem to settle on a tone. The early eruptions of violence are treated as slapstick when they are most assuredly not. But the climactic showdown, which fairly cries out for a touch of humor, is played as a tense and grim action sequence.

Freely mixing reality therapy, fairy tale and satire, Dobkin's film does not maintain a consistent tone. Is it a seriocomedy about brothers who need to work on unfinished business? Is it a holiday fable about a Scrooge who comes to surf the yuletide? Is it a satire in which an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) puts pressure on St. Nick to outsource gift allocation and distribution?

Morel and his crew certainly know how to stage action: the fight scenes and shootouts, the stairwell pursuits and motorway mayhem, are as good, if not better, than anything to come out of Hong Kong in a long time.

The overwhelming sci-fi action spectacle is a merciless sensorial assault that leaves you with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

A sentimental kidfilm that only a parent could love. [22 Aug 1997, p.04]

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]

The writer-director has the talent to dig deep and lay bare the assumptions behind our idea of justice and our notions of right and wrong. In The Devil's Knot, he settles for an encyclopedic, if skin-deep, presentation.

The $40,000 budget of The Blair Witch Project wouldn't cover a day's limousine bill for a production like The Haunting, but if you want a genuine chill on a hot summer night, that - not this - is the horror movie for you. [23 July 1999, p.03]

A very sweet, very slight family movie that scores smiles and tears of joy.

A thriller is only as good as its villain is bad, and this is the film's problem.

The problem with NATM:BOTS is that Stiller, Adams, and company seem to be pretending that they're having fun, too.

Orphan, with a perverse plot twist at the end, will keep you on tenterhooks from its nightmarish opening scene to its chilling last frame.

Unsullied was made by a director with real promise. It's a shame Rice picked this turkey to shoot as his first

The best in the latest crop of slasher remakes. Admittedly, that is faint praise.

Wildly ridiculous and thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Nostalgia for the '80s - big hair, Madonna, cocaine, big hair, Duran Duran, more cocaine - is all well and good. Unless it's practiced with the charmless ineptitude of Take Me Home Tonight.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

An astoundingly humorless, sentimental meditation on the magic wheel of life, this oddball endeavor - clearly invested with a lot of passion - is too dark for children and too dopey for adults. [02 Jun 1995, p.05]

A frighteningly unfunny comedy. [17 Feb 1995, p.05]

Tennessee is drenched in melancholy, a trip through a tunnel of pain illuminated by a lone ray of light at the end.

A hare-paced, harebrained and, for the most part, amusing update of "Animal House." [29 Apr 1994, p.03]

Taken for what it is - 'tweenage escapism - Stormbreaker is moderately fun.

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

Kilcher is lovely. But sadly, Ka'iulani is a perfunctory biopic of the sort one might encounter on television during Women's History Month.

Knowing has about a half-dozen screenwriter credits, which may explain why scenes crash up against one another - smart, stupid, far-fetched, compelling. And the trouble is that Cage walks (or runs) through them all, treating each with the same level of intensely goofy seriousness.

Graced with unusually expressive and seamless voice work by Drew Barrymore and George Lopez, the best of its kind since "Babe."

Too cute for its own good, Larry Crowne is nonetheless hard to dislike.

Too cute by half, the high school comedy John Tucker Must Die is just so likable, so, um, cute - in that helpless-bunny-wabbit sort of way - that to diss it would be to admit being a heartless, cynical Bambi-killer.

A likable and completely dispensable heist film starring two of the deftest comedians working (Keaton and Latifah), the film from Callie Khouri is itself an American retread of the British caper telefilm "Hot Money."

A slaphappy, slapdash type of affair familiar to fans of Cheech & Chong and Pauly Shore. It's your basic object lesson in why marijuana is called dope.