Dumber sequels to dumb horror movies, such as the Friday the 13th series, are, of course, nothing new. [17 Mar 1995, p.06]

A deeply disturbing, intimate, and not unsuccessful look at 10 years in the life of a young boy, Harlon, who grows up to become a Columbine-style killer.

TMNT has a cool, noirish sheen. There's an attention to detail in the visuals and sound design that pushes it up several notches above most kiddie fare. It's not art, dude, but it will do.

Designed as the ideal confection to attract a young girl or teen, What a Girl Wants will more likely hook their mothers.

The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.

Elegiac and corny and not really convincing on any level (especially when it comes to its treatment of women - be they hookers, or waitresses, or girls on the town), Stand Up Guys nonetheless holds some fascination just for the off-the-charts affectedness of Pacino's performance.

The comedy is usually silly, and - in keeping with the fare served up at these busy counters - often tasteless. The wiry Mitchell and the chubby Thompson may physically suggest such great teams as Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello, but - at this stage of their development - the resemblance ends there. [25 July 1997, p.04]

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

Ride Along is a film so casual in its conception and execution, it should be titled Drive Thru.

The whole thing is rather insipid. But Thomas makes it smoother and more palatable than it deserves to be.

Tries too hard to be playful and sensual, wacky and romantic, and comes away feeling fake and prefabricated instead.

It's sick. It's stupid. But it also is undeniably adept at skewering social hypocrisy, lancing the boils of political self-righteousness, and poking fun where others fear to tread.

Written and directed on autopilot, containing every cliche endemic to these movies: clueless parents, bratty brother, nasty rich kids, pool fight, food fight, girls who can't drive.

With its clever structure and pacing, its range of emotional notes, and its remarkable use of magic realism, The 9th Life of Louis Drax makes for an absorbing and memorable mystery.

Drawing comparisons to "The Wire" may be unfair, but taken on its own, this anemic vehicle for Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan to mug and jive through is just weak, weak stuff.

Some viewers will dismiss Autumn Blood as a pretentious Euro-art iteration of Straw Dogs. For those willing to be open to its experimentation and more charitable about its many faults, the film can provide a powerful experience and serve as an fascinating testament to the tenuous nature of the social contract.

Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

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

It's highly doubtful that you'll grasp even a little of The Truth About Emanuel after seeing this film. It's not so much a thriller as it is a ride on a runaway crazy train.

It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.

Rourke and Roberts! Dueling kings of B-movie excess and cable-TV schlock, together again on the big screen! Talk about chemistry!

The premise of Village of the Damned remains wonderfully scary: that an alien life force has descended on a community, inseminated its women, and spawned a gaggle of evil brainiacs with platinum-blond hair who can read your mind and do funny things with their eyes. [28 Apr 1995, p.3]

There are winning scenes between Wilson and the three teens as they train in various martial arts (like Mexican Judo - "as in Ju-don't know who you're messing with!") and get tips from clips of "Fight Club" and "The Untouchables."

The script depends entirely too much on a succession of reporters, announcers, and spectators to provide context and detail in clunky, implausible dialogue.

Spectacularly silly and perversely entertaining.

Almost absurdly quiet and observant, The Limits of Control is about the space between the action, the steps along the way.

A wickedly funny, Naked Gun-style parody that conflates old-style private-eye pics with Shaft and, yes, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

More a deification than a documentary.

There is a funny movie to be made from the outrageous egos and excesses of rap music. Death of a Dynasty is not that movie.

It's a small, intimate chamber piece with beautiful camerawork and gorgeous art direction ... until it loses its way in a wrongheaded bid for sci-fi greatness.

A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.

Preposterous, if diverting, revenge fantasy that rivals Rambo in sheer narrative chutzpah and vigilantism.

If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before "Pulp Fiction," it - and Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.

This is the type of movie best enjoyed as a late-night indulgence on cable. Really late at night, when your eyes are still partially open, but your brain has called it quits.

Just about the only folks likely to find this humdrum hybrid of "Mission: Impossible" and "The Wind in the Willows" worthy for consideration are non-discriminating pip-squeaks.

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

It would better to call it Two Actors in Search of a Story.

The first family of black comedy goes at this bawdy burlesque with a broad brush. They get their laughs, but not without a lot of unsightly spillage.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

This Romeo and Juliet is hard to take seriously - and simply hard to take.

Wild Target is the sort of farce where nothing, essentially, is at stake, even as cars crash (including an original Mini Cooper), bullets rip, and knives get hurled with deadly velocity.

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

A sturdy and cohesive representative of what tends to be a flimsy and tawdry B-movie genre. It even has a moral: People who live in wax houses shouldn't start fires.

The stiff banalities and trite dialogue of the genre hardly suit his flamboyant comic style. And whatever life Murphy manages to bring to the few moments between crashes and explosions are done in by the lifeless, if beautiful, presence of Ejogo and the completely wasted talent of Michael Rapaport as his partner. Ejogo's London accent is gratingly out of place on the streets of San Francisco. So, too, is Murphy. [17 Jan 1997, p.03]

An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action, Outlander boasts a super-serious Jim Caviezel in the title role

Isn't exactly fraught with psychological depth and nuance, but as a stalker-stalkee suspenser, the pic has some nice things going for it.

It's a shameless don't-hate-me-because-I'm-beautiful-and-impulsive performance (Diaz), and it throws the entire movie out of balance.

The Hornitor and Scorpitron vs. Ninja Falcon Megazord matchup, produced with a snazzy mix of models and computer animation, deftly evokes the spirit of good ol' Godzilla movies and Japanese cartoons. It'll have you standing in your seat yelling, Go! Go! Power Rangers! Or, at the very least, keep you from dozing off. [30 June 1995, p.05]

Penn's over-the-top tirades and bullying threats are still there - it's a wild and woolly performance that isn't always as menacing as perhaps the actor intended it to be.

Evolution devolves to the sight of a colossal alien expelling flatus over Arizona. So that's why this movie stinks. Play that flatulent music, white boy.

Because Vantage Point is really a concept movie, the actors are not much more than pawns on the chessboard: They move one square at a time.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

It's not great, either, but it is better than mediocre.

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.

Owen is all right as the harried husband whose relationship at home has turned frosty, but the essential heat between him and Aniston is missing. The actress succeeds in shedding her "Friends" persona, but there's something missing here, especially as things get knottier.

Suicide Squad does have quite a few tremendously entertaining sequences of high action and low comedy. It's a shame it never rises beyond that.

The characters are (hand-painted) so flat that the film looks like a paper-doll convention at Epcot.

The offbeat comedy is not entirely devoid of charm, but its derivativeness is almost embarrassing.

While the impulse for his concert may have been confession and atonement, the cumulative effect is one of a guy struggling mightily to reconcile his divided self.

Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.

The more pertinent question: Can the audience stick with this flick that showed most of its funny bits in the trailer? For the most part, yeah.

Feels like it's been homogenized and Hollywoodized to death.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

Like Liam Neeson's "Taken" series, Costner's 3 Days to Kill finds its absentee-dad action hero facing off against hordes of goons and gorillas - not to rescue his loved ones, but to prove himself to them, and maybe get a little extra quality time, too.

A dementedly artificial and artsy film, a headache-inducing jumble of fractured narrative, flashbacks within flashbacks, and shifting perspectives.

The nicest that can be said of this unapologetically schmaltzy, and not unenjoyable, affair is that it is the best 1936 musical made in 2009.

Throughout Flatley, now 52, is triumphal and indefatigable. There are two mysteries here: From whence comes Flatley's boundless energy? And why does it make me feel so tapped out?

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

Like other entries of its pulpish ilk, the picture packs lots of violence, a fair bit of gore, and plenty of cheap scares.

A mildly charming, if singularly unoriginal, comedy.

It is by turns illuminating, exasperating, sloppy, redundant, a head-spinner, and a headache.

You would think any movie with the word "salmon" in the title would have to be funny. Think again.

A bummer.

Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory.

The worst sin is the way the film borrows and corrupts the gravity-defying action style of Yun-Fat's international hit, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Shaquille O'Neal and Dr. Phil open Scary Movie 4 with an achingly unfunny couple of minutes of severed limbs and errant hoop shots.

An undeniable pleasure of National Treasure was watching a movie shot locally that wasn't haunted by a virus or by dead people.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

A subpar 3D action comedy featuring four giant motion-capture animated turtles and a raft of human costars, including the dreamy-eyed Fox, wide-shouldered Perry, a remarkably slender Will Arnett, and Laura Linney, who looks tired and uncomfortable throughout the proceedings.

Cold and stylish, slick and violent.

It's a pretty nice movie until, like a Ponzi plan, it collapses.

Catastrophically overdone.

It seems another member of Clint Eastwood's brood is ready for stardom. Francesca Eastwood, 22, his daughter with actor Frances Fisher, is one of the bright lights in writer-director JT Mollner's otherwise uneven feature debut.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

Luckily, Statham is up to the task. Which is a surprise, because he's never, ever done anything like this before.

Vilely violent, Saw 2 is the Phnom Penh of splatter movies.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

Melodramatic and strangely moving.

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

Younger children who might buy into the fantasy are not of an age where they will recognize the family conflicts that Jack Frost is trying to raise and resolve. As the film serves up slapstick, chases and empty-headed seriousness, don't be surprised by their puzzled expressions. After all, a profoundly puzzled expression is what should have greeted the idea of Jack Frost when it was broached. [11 Dec 1998, p.03]

The best stuff in this dopey, intermittently amusing live-action cartoon is the look that the film's effects and computer crews have given New Angeles - the ruined urbanscape of Southern California after an 8.5 quake and a massive tidal wave have sundered the city. [04 Nov 1994, p.05]

An entertaining rethink of the 1951 classic.

Has its effectively nasty, chilling moments -- and it also brings body piercing to new heights of ickiness.

Duets is to movies what karaoke is to pop: a spirited attempt by non-pros.

By the end of the film's two-hour stream of Be-Here-Now-isms, anyone left in the audience will be wanting to yell, "Put a sock in it!" to old Soc.