With his beard and '70s clothes, Reynolds looks like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. Before things go precipitously south, he gives an endearing performance that proves he's ready for far more substantial roles than Van Wilder.

Two Night Stand, is a clever, if uneven, romcom about Generation Y's conflicted, paradoxical views of sex and love. Featuring strong dialogue and terrific performances, the film has moments of near-brilliance, but falls apart with a lame, conventional ending.

The Naked Gun 33 1/3 has the feel of a movie with too many jokes off the cutting-room floor. Through it all, Nielsen's consummate timing and ability to come through in the klutz makes things seem more amusing than they are. [18 Mar 1994, p.3]

A curious screwball "noir," doesn't so much bend established genres as blend them into an unappetizing cocktail, where they curdle before pouring.

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

Alas, the conceit of a double-dating Grandson and Gramps does not produce a great many laughs in this cringeworthy film.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

Most of the humor in this film arises from the ludicrous squabbles among Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day, who can springboard from logic to lunacy in a single exchange.

A raunchy spoof of the disaster-movie lampoon Airplane! - does everything to get the laugh. And in the way that a broken watch is right twice a day, a shotgun comedy like this one occasionally hits its target.

Mazel tov, Adam, for having three movies released in five months. You should maybe spend more time on the next one?

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

The trouble with Alfie - apart from the film's existence, and the wrongheaded idea of remaking a minor classic - is that not a soul is likable.

The question is not whether Murphy can do anything. He can. The question is why he would want to make a movie as squirmingly unfunny as Norbit.

Feels thoroughly canned.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

Has a low-key tone that works in its favor for a time.

It works here and there. And then it doesn't.

Ultimately, the values and the CGI are good, but the acting is broad and the chipmunks aren't really differentiated. What happened to Alvin, the rodent counterpart of Dennis the Menace? Was he declawed in the translation to CGI?

Now that Nina has finally arrived in theaters, revealing itself to be a listless, oddly constructed tale that does a poor job of capturing Simone's star quality or indomitable racial pride, it makes you wonder: Was it really worth kicking up all that controversy for a movie that's this bad?

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

Shrek the Third isn't a movie, it's the extension of a brand.

The film is a ponderous, overwrought meditation on grief, loss, guilt, and memory that prods and probes its characters more like lab rats than living, breathing creations.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

Shot in Panama, with a cast of local Indians and B-tier Latino and Anglo actors, End of the Spear has neither the marquee heft nor the artistic gravitas of "The New World."

Not one of Sparks' best flicks (The Notebook is quite good) Safe Haven is marred by film cliches. It has an alarming number of throwaway montage sequences.

Chicken Little is entirely lacking in anything "Disneyesque."

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

Somehow the star emerges from this mess smelling like pure testosterone. You can't stop the Rock.

What redeems the film...is that for every nonstop explosion, there's a hilarious burst of Reynolds' nonstop patter.

The trouble with The Last Kiss comes down to Paul Haggis' screenplay.

Muniz is quite winning as a plucky teen who is constantly being thrown into situations over his head. But the usually reliable Anthony Anderson e-mails in his performance as Cody's handler.

An alarmingly charmless attempt to evoke the elegant romance and jaunty, jet-setting intrigue of the aforementioned titles, The Tourist is notable for the total absence of movie-star heat that movie stars are paid unseemly sums to radiate.

Suffers from "Bridget Jones" Syndrome but without that movie's charms.

As in "An Education," Scherfig's settings are unshowy, imparting period flavor without overwhelming what is, ultimately, an underwhelming film.

Until Seven Days in Utopia sucker punches you with a surfeit of faith-based platitudes, its upbeat brand of golf mysticism isn't altogether unappealing.

The film never gives you a real sense of what drove Darin on, fighting a heart ailment (from childhood rheumatic fever) and fighting an industry and press that wanted to pigeonhole him.

Less the blistering satire it imagines itself than a blustering, bloody, blundering melodrama about bottom feeders nibbling each other.

A script with the most underdeveloped characters and spectacularly realized visuals since "Titanic."

Mildly diverting and utterly dispensable.

There is much of interest in Baumbach's pictures - the confident handling of actors, the introspection, the terra-cotta and teal-painted walls. But what do you call a comedy of manners that's not particularly funny? [19 June 1998, p.04]

The folks at Disney's Touchstone Pictures would have been wiser, however, just to have forgotten all about this hyperactive farce.

From its jungle forays to its waterfall tumbles to its deadly spider bites - is entirely, utterly unoriginal.

A handsome Holocaust melodrama hobbled by a transparent and cartoonish script.

Rather like listening to Vladimir Horowitz play "Chopsticks."

A strange mix of showbiz whodunit and soft-core eroticism, with a couple of fine actors - Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth - wandering around stunned and stoned-looking, as if someone slipped them a mickey.

The best that can be said about the movie is that it's harmless and mostly charmless. The Clone Wars is to Star Wars what karaoke is to pop music.

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

The plot itself has little momentum, and what should feel dramatic instead feels inert.

What's on screen is a hash, though it may very well be the most comprehensive catalog of male erotic fantasies in one single film.

Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.

Seyfried holds the camera's attention, playing this storybook business pretty much straight, although David Leslie Johnson's script puts the actress sorely to the test.

Vera retains her dignity throughout, which is more than can be said for human company, and she seems to be having more fun. That's as it should be in an elephant comedy one soon forgets. [04 Nov 1996, p.D06]

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

if I want to know what Will Smith looked like in his 20s, I can always return, happily, to Men in Black.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Basically, it's a muddle.

Nispel is no Rob Zombie - who achieved something akin to brilliance with his 2007 Halloween remake. What's more, as influential as it's been, Friday the 13th was never that great.

Director Tim Story's film has two speeds: pedal-to-metal and screeching halt. The former is guaranteed to make the audience carsick, the latter to give it whiplash.

That this is a cautionary tale about any people who would wage war in order to win the spoils of oil and water? Your guess is as good as mine.

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?

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

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.

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

Where Mike Figgis' film, with Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, bore deeply and darkly into emotional territory, The Center of the World turns out to be just as fake as its setting.

Suggests that one way women can fight male violence is by using the weapons of the alpha male: Marking one's territory and firing upon anyone who trespasses.

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

But there's not much here: The characters are paper-thin, and the action is slow, at times agonizingly so.

In Time is that kind of movie: Philip K. Dick for knuckleheads.

The big shift between Carpenter's B-movie and filmmaker Jean-François Richet's comic book-style remake is that instead of a troop of bloodthirsty gang members encircling the precinct, the bad guys here all look like good guys.

Bad Company would just be another silly, intermittently funny, buddy comedy (Anthony Hopkins is Rock's training agent) were it not for a plot unlaughably close to current events.

An airless, bilious, endless pageant of pseudohistory.

Despite Angela's skills - and Bullock's charms - director Irwin Winkler's film is so pedestrian that his movie has all the thrills of a school crossing.

Despite the appeal of cobra-eyed Thornton and bunny-nosed Heder, Scoundrels trips early, and often.

Even though it's all preliminaries, no main event, Grudge Match is harmless enough as entertainment. Just not as harmless as its poor protagonists.

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Cutesy and formulaic and has the approximate depth of a cookie sheet.

A horror pic with a new gimmick that likely will spawn an entire subgenre of more substandard rubbish.

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

The constant flipping between stagecraft and reality creates a dissonant static that prevents any satisfying connection with the film.

Eva Longoria brings a crisp swagger and fluent Spanish to her role.

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

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

The Woman in Black has lovely period atmosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much else besides atmosphere.

The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.

Much of the dialogue is the silliest sort of fantasy mush, and a good deal of the picture appears to have been shot while the lighting guys were out to lunch.

Despite excellent elements - great actress, taut plot, slick visuals - Flightplan is like airplane food. No matter how good the ingredients the air chef has to work with, the entree inevitably ends up tasting like a Xerox of a facsimile of a meal.

Rian Johnson's film is a scam wrapped in a sham.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

While the plot is dumb and the script is worse, watching aliens explode in spectacular fashion isn't the worst excuse to spend to two hours in air-conditioning.

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]

Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

A mildly charming, if singularly unoriginal, comedy.