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.