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]

The Mandalorian’s memorable catchphrase is: “This is the way.” His first theatrical feature gets about halfway there.

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.

Considering the talent on both sides of the camera and a story that worked beautifully the first time around, Shall We Dance? should have been a lot better than OK.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.

A formulaic, predictable and yet reasonably likable picture.

There's something wrong with a time-travel movie that allows an audience's interest to drift so that we have time to worry over where he's parked, and whether he remembered to take his key.

The problem with this one may be that it just isn't British enough.

The movie gets bogged down in the formula conventions of romantic comedy, and in the process, it loses all honesty.

It's a coy, cautious film about a frank, fearless writer.

There’s nothing wrong with Aftermath, but for one strange and nagging thing: To watch it is to want to be faraway from its world and everyone in it. The movie draws a circle around itself that holds no attraction or appeal, though it’s in every other way competent, well-acted and reasonably intelligent.

The New Zealand feature Boy almost pulls off the trick of merging cartoonish humor and '80s pop culture with a story glancing at deeper family issues. The film has an appealing 11-year-old hero, but in the end feels half baked.

Has a certain slow, mechanical quality.

Stolen owes its persuasiveness less to its substance than to the visual craft of Dreyfus and her celebrated cinematographer, Albert Maysles. In telling the story of an unsolved crime, they use every trick available to awaken and prolong suspense before a payoff that never comes.

Ultimately, Regarding Henry has its heart in the right place, but is far too reluctant to share it with us. [10 July 1991, p.E1]

Of mild interest as a curiosity, but not as entertainment.

A mediocre college comedy that blends bits of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Mean Girls" and "Legally Blonde" and doesn't have much to show for it.

The early scenes are amusing and true to life.

Requires us to repress any thoughts about stale material and keep Caine's heartfelt performance front and center.

Has some laughs - more than a few thanks to Michael Douglas as a dead swinger (the movie's Jacob Marley) - and some moments of tenderness, too.

It’s colorful and imaginative, but other than Lu, the characters don’t have much depth. Emotional, that is, not oceanographic.

Sabotage cannot be called a good movie, not with a straight face. But as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it has something.

Most of this huge-cast extravaganza is a botched farce. When that doesn't work, it turns sentimental. The presence of liked and familiar actors helps make it watchable, but there is no disguising that this is a weak, badly constructed comedy. At least it's short.

There are times when watching this film is like a near-death experience.

Die My Love is not plot-driven, with events that don’t necessarily follow one another in cause and effect. Rather, it’s a slow-burn psychological drama populated by imperfect people struggling with painful realities. Instead of a dramatic arc, it’s a dramatic decline.

Keeps sinking into its own grimness.

Talky, emphatically unsteamy psychological drama.

My Salinger Year, which is basically The Devil Wears Prada set in the literary world, is a film that feels like it’s ready to take off at any moment, but stalls every time it tries to do anything.

For a little while, comedy ensues.

A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.

Lacks even mild drama.

No classic, but neither was the original starring Burt Reynolds. Instead, it's an odd mix of amusing nonsense and nastiness that chugs along, hit and miss, until the last section, which is the best part of the movie and its real reason for being: the game.

It's not always clear what this film is driving at, but Shiota makes the weirdness visually arresting.

It’s a busy film, so it holds your attention that way. But it’s busy checking off all of the crooks and crooked cops cliches it can, leaving the project little time to experiment with much that’s new. Or worthwhile.

The filmmaking is unremarkable, but the obsessiveness of the lead character is infectious enough to make this drama passable entertainment.

The spectacular scenery and compelling message counterbalance the somewhat plodding pace and wooden performances.

By the end, it reveals itself as too pat, too absurd and -- as a polemic against capital punishment -- philosophically self- defeating.

A junior version of "Fight Club," only with no movie stars and different moves.

It’s Miller, however, who gives the most affecting performance, in that we see the light fade from her eyes. What an awful thing this husband did to her — to praise her for courage and then use all her courage against her.

Feels like an extended skit stretched and stretched, maybe not to the breaking point, but to the sagging point.

The semiserious comedy by director Sven Pape is in its own category, and unfortunately it's not always an interesting one.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

Despite bursts of hilarity and an A-list cast, this is a dark, difficult, weirdly existential film - like some seriocomic spin on "I and Thou."

The film is long, empty and bogus.