Fortunately, there are many concert sequences to keep the film from being more than one awkward silence after another, and onstage the Pixies still sound great. But watching the movie is not as much fun as listening to the old records.

So what's wrong with Joshua? Two things: The audience is ahead of the movie, and the movie never catches up.

It doesn’t help matters that the movie seems to end three times before it ends, and none of those ends are satisfying.

It's a gallant battle against flawed material, and Hirschbiegel fights it to a draw.

A lighthearted fable with jarring scenes of violence and halfhearted stabs at mystical realism, its saving grace is its gooey center, the luminous Binoche.

Perhaps anticipating an older audience, most of the lessons are one-sided, with the old-timers seemingly harming the children while actually saving them.

As a thriller, Cabin Fever falls short, filled with characters so obnoxiously stupid that just watching their skin slowly melt off doesn't seem like enough punishment.

There seems to be a pretty good film lurking around inside Bullhead, which makes what we actually see on the screen all the more frustrating.

A boxing movie that exists in that gray area between prototypical and typical, the quintessential and run-of-the-mill.

Despicable Me 4 is co-written by Mike White (“Migration”) and has a bit more wit and heart — not to mention a few more laughs — than the recent entries in the “Despicable” series.

30 Minutes or Less is a strange case. Either it goes for a particular tone and doesn't achieve it. Or it does achieve a tone that's not really worth striving for.

Entrapment is an adventure movie without two brain cells to rub together.

A nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable. But the movie's main challenge is a simple one: It is very difficult, next to impossible, to build a movie around an inert, inactive character.

Still feels stagebound, inert when it needs to be cinematic.

A bonbon, not of a full-course meal. Foodies will smack their lips over many delectable shots of victuals prepared by the film's engaging protagonist, a provincial woman chosen to cook for the president of France. As a story, though, it's insubstantial - there's conflict here, but it feels perfunctory.

There’s a mystery at the heart of The Song of Names, but it isn’t much of a mystery, and once it’s solved, the movie loses what little interest it has. Though not exactly a Holocaust drama, the film is one in which the Holocaust figures tangentially, but crucially. Yet the movie’s overall effect is strangely inert.

The film raises significant questions about manhood and offers a few gripping sequences, but isn’t fully satisfying.

The musical numbers are the only real drag on this otherwise odd and appealing picture.

It's a stoner movie all the way, with much deep thought but little active conflict.

As for Williams, he's a warm actor in an oddly cold movie, and his presence certainly doesn't make things worse. But Toys doesn't call for anything new from him. [18 Dec 1992, p.C1]

The main appeal of Summerland, a considerable one, is that it allows Gemma Arterton to hold the screen for a nearly unbroken 90 minutes. It showcases her in a variety of modes and moods and provide some huge acting moments that make us recognize that, somewhere along the line, Arterton has become a powerhouse.

As it stands, Wakanda Forever feels as lost and forlorn as the Wakandan people.

At no point during the movie does it strike him that mass extermination might be classified as "rude." No, Frank has the courage of his convictions, which include the belief that most of America has already flushed itself down the toilet.

The film is bleak, not particularly compelling, and the characters are frustrating, the enemies of their own happiness.

Even within the rules of its own peculiar world - a world well stocked with talking savanna denizens and monkey-powered superplanes - the film is completely irrational.

Murphy is wonderful -- I wouldn't begrudge him an Oscar nomination -- but The Nutty Professor is a mess.

It’s all rather enjoyable, and O’Connor, having starred in “Mansfield Park” (1999), certainly knows her way around 19th century romance. Yet the question remains: What is the point of all this?

Sweet and harmless -- a beach movie in more ways than one -- but it doesn't run awfully deep.

A victory lap of a comedy film taken by a star whose talent continues to propel his career, but doesn’t seem particularly hungry.

The result is a reminder that, with weak material, it’s often worse to have a really good actor. The weaknesses just stands out in sharper relief.

At a certain point, everyone watching Molly’s Game will form the question, “Why should I care about any of this?” It’s a question Sorkin should have anticipated. He has no good answer.

Admiring The Singing Detective is easy, and so is appreciating the originality of the story's conceit, the artistry of the actors and the directorial intelligence of Keith Gordon. But loving it would take an act of will.

Two If by Sea should have been titled "Two at Sea." It's adrift. Stars Sandra Bullock and Denis Leary have no chemistry together, and a perfectly good story is wasted on a really bad script.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

Most viewers will have no more fun watching this story than the characters do living it.

The film was clearly a labor of love, for good or ill. At one point, Galinsky jokingly refers to the production as “semi-unprofessional.” This is unusual and welcome frankness from a moviemaker.

The kind of horror movie that's not a bit scary and quite a bit gross.

The story goes nowhere...We don't understand the motivation of the characters.

While Showgirls was funny the whole way through, Striptease has long, dreary stretches, where you're forced to watch Demi Moore undressing.

Senior Year is a just-OK movie, but it’s a very good Rebel Wilson movie, in that she has been funny in supporting roles, but this is the first time she has excelled as the name above the title.

A modestly entertaining martial arts melodrama with impressively staged fight sequences that help compensate for a stale plot and some less-than-stellar acting.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.

Feels forgettable, even though, in the moment, it's often very funny.

A road trip into the heart of that bumpiest of territories, the adolescent id.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.

At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good.

Open Range veers wildly. It's a movie of beauty and sensitivity, and tedium and absurdity.

Not entirely successful or appealing - not exactly a delightful evening in the company of scintillating characters - but interesting all the same.

Boogie has some hops. But its all-around game could use a little work.

Stanley Donen's spouse-swapping comedy is not as naughty as it might have been, but it showcases Mitchum in a good comic role. [11 Jul 1997, p.D1]

For the first 20 minutes or so, Crazy People is lightweight but fun. Then the movie defies its own logic and falls apart. [11 Apr 1990, p.E1]

You want to like almost everyone in this film, but they're all undone by a weak script.

Estevez further undermines the film by casting himself in the lead role. He gives an odd performance, in which he consistently seems to be going for enigmatic, but he ends up just inexpressive.

Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) plays the infected daughter. Her performance seems unsettled at first, but it doesn’t take long for Breslin to sink into Maggie’s (rotting) skin, aided by some fine makeup work. Her most effective moments come when the teen faces the inescapability of her death.

Although this leisurely tale of an aged French sculptor offers a few other small pleasures, in the end it lacks heft.

There is something of a Halloween costume about Woody Harrelson’s appearance in the film. He looks as if frozen midway into some morphing process between himself and Lyndon Johnson, a process that, by pure chance, happened to stop at the precise moment he began to look comical.

Sure, The Mauritanian is better than staring at metal bars and better than two hours of rigorous legal preparation. But it isn’t better by much.

There's little illumination.

This is win-win for everybody, but it's too win-win - a setup that short-circuits drama, that shoehorns a situation into a precooked formulation: He's a real prisoner and she's an emotional prisoner, and each offers the other the possibility of freedom.

The Promise is hardly grotesque; and it has good things in it, but by the end, it just feels like a failed manipulation.

The movie has a certain integrity and creates an interesting atmosphere, largely thanks to the soundtrack, of all things, which gives most moments a dreamy undertone.

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by husband-and-wife team Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, paints a picture of naked opportunism that shattered Ross’ legacy. It’s the story of how a man became an industry, and how his family was gradually, systematically left out in the cold.

A glossy miscalculation.

Stolevski obviously wants us to sympathize with these wounded characters who have been shunted aside by a cruel society, but that’s hard to do when they are so verbally cannibalistic.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

Feels more like an earnest commercial for music education than successful entertainment.

The wolf-homosexual analogy is well drawn, but Wolves ultimately feels slight, a tad unfinished -- as if it were conceived as a sketch and hadn't been fleshed out to feature length.

Trying to be provocative with a capital "P," Anne Fontaine's Adore undermines itself by provoking unintended laughs.

It’s entertaining enough, but you wish it had something quirkier, more messily human, more imaginatively drawn outside the lines to it.

Murphy seems committed to pushing his hostile vision, and that in itself is interesting. [01 Jul 1992]

Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work.

Not a mediocre film. It is, by turns, a great and awful film.

Both McAvoy and Horgan handle the rapid-fire dialogue with gusto, and for a while, their devastating banter is amusing. But eventually the effect begins to wear thin: These vocal diatribes need a more developed story to hang on.

This movie borders on the ridiculous, but is pulled back by an aesthetic portrayal of the supernatural and by its stars.

The problem is the script, which, in scene after scene, contains no surprises.

Its impression lingers in the mind, giving the film a longer half-life than it would otherwise deserve.

Problem Child is a beautiful example of what junk entertainment can be with a smattering of brains behind it. While it hangs there as a monument to audience idiocy, it also lets you have a wallow in fun. You leave thinking there have been worse things on which to spend your time and money. [28 July 1990, p.C3]

Vulgarity is fine when it’s pure and democratic. But when it’s mixed with sentiment, it feels false. That’s the problem with Buddy Games.

Dialogue, quirky incidents and a general acceptance that this is the unfortunate way life is make this more than just a genre exercise, though hardly a breathtaking grabber of “Get Out” proportions.

Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I came away feeling cheated by Eddie the Eagle. It’s a jolly real-life tale about an underdog who made a splash at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and it does make you feel good, but it turns out that the film’s story is 90 percent fiction.

Reminded me of the occasional thrill of coming upon Haring's puzzling, unsigned chalk drawings in the New York subway at the turn of the 1980s, before he made a name for himself above ground.

Mulholland Falls is a provocative crime drama with a limp script and a forced feeling. But star Nick Nolte is a ticking time bomb as a brutal Los Angeles police detective with a hulking, gasping sense of pain and meanness. He gives the film an odd, askew tone that keeps it tough and alive.

The third and most uneven film adaptation in the series.

The film's overall construction is faulty. Its dramatic situations ring consistently false, and the story is phony as anything off the Hollywood assembly line. And yet, it's sincere phony.

Thus a tightly edited, 90-minute action flick becomes a bloated, 105-minute exercise on how not to direct an action film.

Leoni is a very attractive woman, and she should be credited for giving a brave performance, but her character starts to produce involuntary shudders when she appears onscreen.

uUninspired, unnecessary and formulaic.

It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.

Glitters, but it's not pure gold.

There are some nice moments and beautiful scenery, but the film is often slow and the dialogue is overwrought.

It starts exploring different facets of its premise and transforms itself into a fairly competent suspense thriller. That's enough to make it respectable, but a few things keep Next from being lovable or memorable.

Does a number of sly things.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

Becky is no “Straw Dogs.” Really, it’s mostly just a nasty genre movie with some gruesome scenes of violence. But it’s served well by a script that doesn’t merely embrace the gimmick of a pubescent girl fighting bad guys — it takes it seriously enough to explore it, at least a little.