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.