Every so often there's a tabloid news story about the Virgin Mary seen in a piece of toast or Mother Teresa on a tortilla, and most of us equate them with Elvis sightings. This film is for the rest.

``Blood'' seems to be sketches for a more comprehensible film which, alas, we will not see. [28 Sept 1992, p.C08]

Full of small, weird moments.

Don't go in expecting much and you'll have fun. Consider it The Rock's "Raw Deal."

It's a sweet-natured trifle that sneaks in some social commentary about the modern military and the failings of the American educational system, and it takes a wide swipe at advertising for good measure. [03 Jun 1994]

It is off-putting at first, then refreshing, then downright touching. In short, it works.

An ugly, stupid movie it turned out to be. Incoherent, arbitrary, hyperactive and dark enough to make you fear you've gone blind.

An unsteady mixture of treacle and dark comedy that never feels as "dark" as it pretends. Though well-intentioned, it's not terribly compelling.

One might reasonably despise Funny Games and consider Haneke an exploitative hypocrite. Still, whether it's the original or the replica, this is a film that is impossible to enjoy and difficult to forget.

Opens with a statement that Hillary Clinton, Bob Dole and Al Sharpton are not in the movie. Also not in the movie: laughs.

If the film had been trimmed to 45 minutes of crazed storm-chasing and storm-fleeing, it might've been worth a matinee ticket. But as is, it's the sort of lazy late-summer idiocy you'd be wise to huddle beneath an overpass to avoid.

Befitting a film about Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven is dark and grisly and ghoulish. But it also has qualities that Poe's work never does: It's dull and mechanical and, most of all, phony.

Sudeikis has always been a charming comedic actor. He usually doesn't have to work this hard for laughs.

It's not that Hangover II is a notably bad movie. It's more that nothing in it seems to justify all the effort spent to add a new but nearly identical series of episodes to the original.

Kyra Sedgwick is turned into a caricature of a sports agent. "NYPD Blue" grad Gordon Clapp gets one line of dialogue. And Morris Chestnut is pushed out to make room for one more "ain't she cute" moment.

Remove the razzle-dazzle provided by Azaria, Hoffman, Baldwin, the gross jokes and that ferret, and you wind up with a pretty dull and ordinary face.

Mary Reilly tries, but fails, to revive the oft-told Jekyll and Hyde horror story. [23 Feb 1996]

A mild disaster.

An unsteady and uneven film, which bangs up against its ambitions gracelessly and distractingly.

An unfortunate example of a small picture that feels small.

You'll suspect, and even hope, that what's on screen is a hoax, but it seems to be at the very least one version of the truth.

It's lovely, truly, but so heavy-handed and slipshod that it's probably best enjoyed with the sound off -- an option they're not likely to offer at the movie theater.

Unfortunately, the film's charm ends with the plot gimmick.

When the fly trapped in the spider's web is as clueless and selfish as the sap played by Mark Webber in 13 Sins, it's hard to muster much sympathy.

Fonda gets some of the movie's best moments as the sexually frank, silicone-enhanced mom who got rich off a best-selling memoir that exposed her children's intimate habits.

May be fairly funny, sort of sweet and slightly muddled, but one thing about it is utterly certain: It loves, loves, loves some bad cabaret.

Thriller is hardly the word for this tedious exercise in clue-hiding.

The bright spot, again, is Grant.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

A breezy, dumb and lightweight film that has the benefit of not trying terribly hard to be about much of anything and succeeding (bravo?).

For all the beauty it struggles to bring forth, Snow Falling on Cedars is painfully prosaic.

Surprise! Crystal has given himself most of the best lines, though he also allows a Doberman to have its way with him.

Actually an entertaining action-adventure that not only stands on its own, but surpasses the more limited rewards offered by "The Maze Runner."

The title notwithstanding, "Frontier" is unlikely to be the last in this series. Slow as it is, and disappointing as some of the special effects are, "Frontier" still has some effective humor. Things go just well enough to inspire hope that the level of "IV" can be reached again. [9 June 1989, p.F09]

Run! Run for your lives! Get out of this theater now! Two hours is a terrible thing to waste!

An unfunny, undramatic comedy-drama that asks us to care about lying idiots making implausible choices.

Although there is some gimmickry, this is one of the most straightforward versions of the Tempest ever filmed, making it edifying as well as -- when Taymor hits a groove -- dazzling.

Transplanting so much of the original story to a 21st-century setting only amplifies how badly the story has aged.

Dad is something of a sitcom soap opera in which tragic and desperate things happen, and the participants can always snap out a one-liner for the occasion.[28 Oct 1989, p.C08]

For a Hollywood studio movie, you see, The Mexican is remarkably strange and eccentric with a plot like a wrinkled bed sheet and a black comic sensibility that consistently swerves away from the cliches that have been established in this Age of Tarantino.

The minute the movie flashes forward seven years and Castro takes over as Affleck's grade-school-age daughter: The whole enterprise suddenly becomes rather charming.

It's a safe bet that those who like the music will like the film, and those who don't would find it uncomfortable. But as a combination of historical homage, docudrama and concert film, it is well acted, well filmed and well mixed. [3 Dec 1987, p.E07]

A stultifying bore.

It's not that The Beach is a stinker, exactly. It's that nothing in it -- and that includes the gifted DiCaprio -- ever feels other than perfunctory.

A superb production of a so-so story. [10 Feb 1992, p.C05]

Wiseman's PG-13 remake isn't as funny, or vivid, or splatter-tastic. It contains no mutants, inflating heads, trips to Mars, or freaky little psychic dudes named "Kuato" emerging from people's stomachs. But it does a decent job setting up an unsubtle dystopia.

Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.

It's Zahn who truly conveys what Marshall and Barrymore are going for -- laughing through your tears.

Affleck is in the middle, engaging in derring-do, pitching woo to Uma Thurman and making the whole thing come off as less exciting than it should have been.

A good comedy contains at least one of two vital ingredients: sharp, swift writing or terrific comic shtick by the actors. Unfortunately, Hocus Pocus -- like most Hollywood comedies these days -- has neither. That doesn't mean it's a terrible movie. It's not, though it loses focus and momentum two-thirds of the way through and limps home with unsurprising special effects. It's just not all that funny. [16 July 1993, p.17]

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

Tt is a comeback, and if it leads the director to better work, it can be forgiven as a warm-up.

As the action moves from Vienna to Paris to London to Denver to Phoenix and then back again, the vignettes blur into one another.

Maybe that Hollywood thinks young moviegoers will settle for something not too special -- and so that's all they're going to get. [12 Nov 1993, p.AE15]

Freedomland is the worst kind of bad movie: one that thinks it's important.

When characters are required to grow old over the course of a decades-spanning story, as in Love in the Time of Cholera, it's still a hit-or-miss proposition whether the combination of makeup and performance skills will convince us that a character is 40 years older than the actor.

More of a bunt than a home run.

The Young Unknowns flails about, sometimes realistically, but the cumulative effect is "so what?" These characters may be young and unknown, but they feel old and in the way.

Junk this is and ever was, but this is well-acted junk.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

One suspects that [Verhoeven's] produced exactly the movie he wanted to produce: fast, cynical and profitable. Cha-ching. [20 Mar 1992, p.AE17]

When it works, it's decent family fun; the kids are incredibly sharp. But the script's not as sharp as they are, and not everyone brings his A-game.

This film disappointingly feels like a sometimes brilliantly acted, often gorgeously filmed re-enactment of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries."

The movie works reasonably well at this for its first half, but by then we've pretty much figured everything out.

Has some good laughs courtesy of its cast -- but they're basically papering over a script that's masquerading as urbane and trenchant, when it's really self-involved and didactic and more than a little foolish.

Bullock maintains a luster and comic naturalness that most actresses couldn't pull off in such mediocrity.

Fine moments, images and performances stand cheek-by-jowl with the clichéd, the on-the-nose and the slightly dopey.

Director David Cronenberg has made a movie about a man who apparently needs to get his eyes checked. [08 Oct 1993]

Mostly it's about taxes -- namely, the argument that the Federal Income Tax, enacted in 1913, is unconstitutional and has been ruled as such by the Supreme Court, and that no law exists today requiring Americans to pay it.

Quite simply, the "Tomb Raider" series has been flat-out boring, even with the talented and fun Jolie -- who needs to take off those harnesses and get back to real movies. She deserves better.

Panders to the worst traits in the target audience of spoiled third-grade girls.

Jumping repeatedly and randomly from present-day Shanghai to 1997 to 1829 and periods in between, the film has a pace that seems almost willfully tedious.

As someone new to the material, I found Jackson’s film soulful, respectful, masterful, horrifying, rending and emotionally true. It may not be the Lovely Bones that you have in mind, but it’s a fine and powerful one.

While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.

You can't just rework a beloved Christmas classic, set it in reverse and expect it to run smoothly.

At 80 minutes, it feels truncated and abandoned -- a sketch of a comic thriller rather than the real thing.

If you think you've seen this movie, you have. Once it had a male protagonist and was called "Harry Potter." Then it starred Jennifer Lawrence and was called "The Hunger Games." Now it stars Shailene Woodley and goes by "The Divergent Series." Same thing, only worse.

Contrivances grow so outlandish as Cain grinds on that De Palma seems to be parodying himself. His intent is seldom humor, but Cain ends up being more inadvertent comedy than thriller. [07 Aug 1992, p.D01]

Individual scenes are OK for bogus suspense and special effects. The acting is as good as it has to be. But on the whole, the film feels like a 90-minute version of something that was many hours longer. [13 July 1988, p.D4]

Even when the details of their lives feel unbelievable, these actresses compel our faith and keep us watching.

Far too often, the film has to submit to the inevitable and stop so that Affleck can struggle like a yoga student to bend his face into a human emotion. He even cries. So might you.

With more discipline and a keener sense of family dysfunction, these ingredients could have gelled into something impressive. As it is, Awful Nice is closer to the former than the latter.

A thoroughly mundane experience.

You end up with a movie that takes that real problem and makes it feel like an exploitation contrivance.

The Boz is filling in the blank where the hero needs to be in a maelstrom of violent set pieces. [25 May 1991, p.C08]

Though this non-stop onslaught of nonsense and mayhem is not really worth watching, it is mildly impressive for Sutherland and Phillips. They act their hearts out, as if they thought they were in another movie that deserved a real effort. [05 Jun 1989, p.C05]

Terrible, unnamable enemies turn out to be uncompelling indeed.

Never maintains the spark necessary to sustain a feature film.

Suffers from poor comic timing and defective romantic pacing.

Maybe if you're younger than 10 you'll be scared or thrilled by this film. Otherwise, be prepared for one of the most unexciting pictures this summer.

The movie is neatly directed by Taylor Hackford, who keeps it moving quickly without descending into a blur of cut-cut-cut edits.

You're likelier to shrink in astonished horror from it than laugh.

So god-awful it falls into the category of needing to be seen to be believed. A purported satire of the 1975 camp horror classic, it succeeds in failing on almost every level, including knowing what it's actually satirizing.

An Italian import that isn't sure what it's supposed to be but knows it's not funny.

The Austen cosplay is too exaggerated, as are the other guests.

Freeman and Nicholson mostly stand in front of special-effects green screens and have the locales projected, like they're in a "Road" picture.

A slick disappointment -- though there's much unintentional humor to be enjoyed.

Not a great movie -- not even a great sci-fi action movie based on toys. But it is brisk and eye-catching, it builds to a truly impressive action set piece, and it's the most fully-realized 3D film since "Avatar."