A weak "Toy Story"-esque animated film for preschool kids made with little imagination, little art, and even less soul.

All that's missing is the spirit and the anarchic humor of the sitcom created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The result is an overdressed, carefully stitched scarecrow of a comedy.

Love Happens announces itself as a romantic comedy but doesn't speak the language of love. Instead, it trades in the slogans of self-help procedural.

Sandler, shambling and smirky, delivers another of those one-take performances of his - likable and lazy, forever on the verge of cracking himself up.

Let sleeping bros lie.

The closest FF:ROTSS gets to wit is when Johnny convinces a reluctant Reed to attend a bachelor party, after promising the uptight groom-to-be that there won't be any "exotic dancers."

It's a sorry spectacle, watching garden gnomes being robbed of their dignity.

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

The humor here is overcooked to the point of limpness.

It falls short of its tie-dye target.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Jaw-droppingly corny. [22 Jan 1999, p.03]

Surely there is a good comedy to be framed around that strange limbo of powerless celebrity we reserve for our ex-presidents. My Fellow Americans merely proves that it has yet to be made. [20 Dec 1996, p.45]

As Roscoe's parents, Margaret Avery and James Earl Jones emerge with drawers undropped and dignity intact.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

The jokes are framed by a silly plot about a missing jewel - a prize sought by assorted thieves and law enforcement types and unwittingly protected by Magoo. Of course, Nielsen saves the day, but there's no way he can save the movie.

If that sounds a lot like Rushmore, it is, except that the heart has been sucked out of the thing -- replaced by glib chatter, gratuitous Baudelaire references, and distracting product placement.

300 is "Gladiator" for the gamer set.

For such a formulaic vigilante film, The Punisher has a far better cast than it deserves.

This is not the plot of your typical Ice Cube movie. It does, however, combine the plots of at least three John Hughes movies.

A disaster of a disaster movie that veers from the parodic to the preposterous. [6 Dec 1996, p.03]

Perry and Campbell are charming despite this straitjacket plot.

Despite some jaunty performances and its pretty Cotswolds locale, the film, in the end, is hardly a pleasure at all.

Madonna the director deserves a script better than the one Madonna the screenwriter handed off to her. The movie is full of incidents that don't quite cohere into a story - kind of like a Power Point presentation without a throughline.

The germ of an interesting idea in Get Hard is completely overshadowed by the onslaught of jokes meant to be boundary-pushing and edgy.

Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.