Action in an action comedy is supposed to be funny, too, as Jackie Chan well knows. The refitting of the crashed plane is so tedious we feel as if we're doing the work ourselves.

With Lloyd Webber onboard not just as composer but also co-screenwriter and producer, the film seemed destined to stay true to its roots rather than attempt to transcend them.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

In general, the humor is understated, excessively so.

As for Beowulf itself, it's all about the visuals, which means that as soon as the novelty of 3-D wears off, the experience has been had.

Wicked fun with flickers of intelligence.

When it's not awful, it's dull.

Very earnest, often engaging, but not quite as much of a pleasure as the original.

JT Leroy is on safer ground when Albert and Knoop are matching wits, mainly because it’s a pleasure to watch the perfectly cast Dern and Stewart on the screen. It’s easy to understand what attracted these fine actors to these roles, but the script allows them to only scratch the surface of this maze-of-mirrors story, where the truth remains deliciously elusive.

Overly long and not especially enlightening film.

The film has its flaws, but after watching its catalog of shifty hedge fund types, Kardashians, plastic surgery addicts, bling-laden rappers and children of Hollywood royalty, you can’t help but agree.

It's a pleasant and well-intentioned end of summer diversion that doesn't possess the imagination-stoking qualities of a premier children's movie.

The real trouble is that it's supposed to be an outrageous comedy, but in fact it's fairly tame and not all that funny.

It's 90 minutes of flying, dismembered limbs and explosions of blood, but give the man credit. Stallone can do action. If you want action and nothing but, here it is.

The plot relies heavily on pat betrayal, forced coincidences - and the sort of closure that lands, with a thud, in a tidy package of cliches. Yet some of the humor is delicious.

A mishmash of a musical. The movie never gels -- despite Kline's nuanced performance, the stars' exquisite period clothes, designed by Armani, and, of course, Porter's great songs.

Most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment. Guy Pearce has a lot to do with that, as the most impervious action star imaginable.

This is pleasant, safe entertainment that ought to appeal to kids younger than 10, especially to girls, with its female-empowerment fantasy.

If ultimately Slow West seems more like a filmmaking exercise than an engaging piece of work — despite Fassbender’s star presence — that’s all right. Filmmakers need to get their exercise. Let’s see what Maclean does next.

It could have been something substantial.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

A documentary in search of a story.

Anyone who appreciates Sylvester Stallone or enjoys the "Rocky" movies will find moments to enjoy in Rocky Balboa and will leave the theater reasonably satisfied. It's just good to see the guy, and it's good to revisit the character. And that's everything good to be said for the experience.

The body-swap movie “It’s What’s Inside” dazzles up to the moment its plot gets going.

Jingle wants to warm our hearts and establish Schwarzenegger as a family man -- but devotes so much time to goony violence and broad physical comedy that the last-reel schmaltz feels hollow and tacked-on.

Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.

A sweet, bordering on saccharine, comedy.

The resulting film has the integrity and the ugliness of the truth. It's not true because it's ugly; no, it's ugly because it's true.

The film is better than it has any right to be, considering the prosaic source.

House of Spoils suffers most from genre hybridization. The more explicit horror moments feel grafted on to what is essentially a character study with mystery elements. But as “Speak No Evil” recently demonstrated, Blumhouse no longer signifies low-budget, terrifying horror. The brand has become shorthand for movies lacking clear identities.

Definitely worth your time, if not your $9.50. In other words, wait a few months and definitely check it out as a rental.

The film is a reasonably entertaining trifle, though it’s overstuffed with battle sequences and peripheral characters that often consume the main story line.

Before it becomes entirely too Australian, the well-crafted haunted-hand horror movie Talk to Me perfectly captures the one-upmanship of social-media-fueled youth culture.

Freejack is the kind of picture that you watch and scoff at, and then when it's over, you leave the theater having had a good time, only mildly aware that the good time had something to do with the quality of the movie. Freejack is convoluted, a meeting of bad writing and bad science fiction. And yet, taken as a whole, it's really not bad. [18 Jan 1982, p.C3]

In Hollywood, where integrity is rapidly consumed and careers defined by market value, there's trash and there's trash with a pedigree.

To mildly respect Japanese Story is easy. To enjoy it would require an act of will.

Rough around the edges, it's still a formidable movie.

Mediocre-TV-drama-load of formulas.

A great movie was within reach with Judy — the new Judy Garland biopic starring Renee Zellweger — but the producers and creators made an epic mistake: They didn’t use Garland’s actual vocals. Instead, they let Zellweger pinch-hit for Babe Ruth and ended up spoiling the movie.

While dinner and a movie is in theory a great idea, I'd avoid eating before taking in Lunacy.

Father of the Bride Part II is too long, completely predictable and unabashedly immersed in a posh world that is totally out of reach of most people. It's a comfort to see that riches don't keep some guys from being dithering fools when it comes to life's fundamentals.

Joner is a capable actor, but he’s required here to remain for such a long time in a one-note condition of mental fragility that our sympathy for the character starts to give way to exasperation.

If, in the end, the movie fails to generate much beyond several crackling jump scares and a nicely gothic mise-en-scene, it has enough mood, and enough Radcliffe, to carry us through the mist.

Roger Michell directs it as though it were an uproarious comedy, but the laughs are light, and the story's real appeal lies in its behind-the-scenes look at the manners and politics of morning television.

The “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series has been, at its core, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” without the rodents.

A tender, gently paced coming-of-age movie whose strength is its young lead actor.

A series of vignettes that are edited in much the same way one might click from one random Craigslist posting to the next, the film is a fun and free-form celebration of the site's communal spirit and only-in-San Francisco ethos.

The smarter way to make this movie would have been to edit out everything extraneous to the story of Xavier and Wendy. They're the soul and heart of the movie, while everything else is pretty much dead weight.

Though it ultimately recovers, too much of The Good Thief forgets about Bob, and in the process the movie loses much of its allure and vividness.

The movie is too lethargic for its own good, and many of the events and minor characters don't quite ring true.

Little Buddha is ambitious, sincere and squeaky clean -- a dose of spiritual eyewash that skims the surface of the Buddhist religion and leaves us wishing for more. [25 May 1994, p.E3]

Directed by Mark Waters, cast members seem to operate on the belief that they can best deal with the plot’s improbabilities by grimacing their way through and not giving anyone time to react to them. Pesky details brushed aside, the film can play to its strength, which is the charm of its leads.

The film is mildly diverting, occasionally engaging, certifiably workmanlike and altogether too flat an experience to inspire any strong feelings, positive or negative. It’s just there. Some people watch movies for the same reason others climb mountains, because they are there. Well, this is a movie for that audience.

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on - not generally, but specifically - you'll be doing better than most.

In the end, it's really just a thriller, slower than most, with pockets of dead time but with a few extra flourishes, too, thanks to Norton.

I'm not denying that a 40-year- old woman might be self-conscious about going around with someone this young. But the subject isn't interesting or provocative enough to sustain an entire movie.

Has the slapped-together, cheesy look of a porno movie. While this could be distracting, the shoddiness sets the mood for a humorous spin on the European porn industry circa early 1970s.

An intelligent literary mystery story that holds interest and is intermittently affecting, but it never soars.

The strange thing is that for all of Fonda's whining, Pullman's wary squinting and muttering, the bad dialogue, the cheesy effects, the severed toes, the severed heads, the severed bodies and the cliched directorial choices, Lake Placid adds up to a halfway enjoyable time at the movies.

Reynolds often seems lost for material, whether it’s the restrictions of the PG rating, or deficiencies created by the four screenwriters. By the halfway mark Pikachu might as well be in an “Alvin and the Chipmunks” sequel, resorting to bodily function jokes.

Driver keeps their tales engaging with great music and vintage clips of CBGB, Club 57, the Mudd Club and the crumbling Lower East Side.

It's the typical elements that make Eraser no more than a solid bit of fluff: This is one of those movies where good guys don't miss, and bad guys can't shoot to save their lives.

At its most interesting, and a bit frightening, when Moore starts to get a little loony. Too bad they didn't follow through and make this more of a psychological thriller than a melodrama.

Viewers may feel let down because the depth promised by the movie's visual artistry is never quite delivered.

This sometimes clever, outrageously gory and slickly violent horror comedy is more “John Wick” than Tod Browning, and that’s just the tip of its tonal confusion.

The movie is unable to achieve lift-off and transcend the formulaic stuff coming out of Hollywood, despite the perfect casting of Uma Thurman.

The result isn't a great film, but it's true to the original brutal vision.

The new movie eloquently dramatizes the unusual cultural conflicts between contemporary, violent urban life and an archaic rural community with pacifist convictions. [08 Feb 1985]

A sequel arrives for Valentine's Day with the unwieldy title Step Up 2 the Streets. If it performs as well, watch for "Step Up 3: the Sprained Ankle."

Melodramatic take on love and war.

Over the last few years, the Avengers, together and separately, have spawned a number of good, very good, or reasonably entertaining movies. But with Avengers: Infinity War, the Marvel Comics franchise arrives at the stage of decadence. There’s just too much of it. A victim of its own success, there are just too many appealing characters here to stuff into one story.

The Seagull has all the big things going for it and yet so many little things going against it that it’s just not the movie it might have been.

A cut above most pictures of its type.

The only thing wrong with “Shotgun Wedding” is that it isn’t any good. Aside from that, it’s a pleasant experience.

A feat of droll, refractive, melodramatic self-portraiture.

Don't tell Mom, but everybody seems stoned.

This is the world of Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the third installment in the “Maze Runner” trilogy, a kind of destitute man’s impoverished cousin’s answer to the “Divergent” series.

As light entertainment goes, CHiPs is fairly accomplished, and Pena and Shepard make a good team. If someone wants to turn CHiPs into a franchise of some kind, worse things have happened.

There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.

Dreamy and deliberate.

A disjointed movie with uneven acting and too many scenes that defy belief.

Suffers from Resnais' inability to open it up and give it the look and pulse of a film.

Graffiti Bridge is a bad excuse for a movie but a very good excuse for a rock concert. [03 Nov 1990, p.C3]

Ponderous, repetitive and lacking a single rousing action sequence.

A lively and amiably stupid action movie, given an extra dose of atmosphere by the presence of Vin Diesel. He is his own quality control, his own authentic center, so that even in a story like this — a kind of Philip K. Dick for dummies — there’s something onscreen that’s not ridiculous, that’s reliable and consistently cool.

Extreme Measures has disturbing moments, and poignant ones, too. It plays a good game of paranoia with its unlikely hero. Once the story gets past Luthan's implausible firing on trumped-up drug charges, it places him alone in a hostile world. Relying only on a determination to solve the medical puzzle, he goes on a desperate expedition into the bowels of the subway system. It's a grim, scary sequence, and Grant seems a million miles away from his stammering comedic style -- an extreme that is surprisingly engaging.

Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies.

As Enzo Ferrari, Driver looks stylish and commanding, but the movie doesn’t figure out how to make him into an interesting man.

There is a kind of historical British movie — Tolkien is one of them — that almost feels as if the subject were incidental.

For a bighearted effort like this one, some patience on the audience's part is not too much to ask. Go ahead. Take a chance.

A film about profound ideas deserved more imagination.

It's more psychological than a genre movie, and that is the source of both its greatest interest and its biggest problem.

It is maliciously entertaining, up to a point.

What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins.

A cute and amusing little romance that has all the fiery impetuosity of an egg sandwich.

The Plot Against Harry isn't stark and merciless enough to be a black comedy or zany enough to be just plain fun. After a while the oddball characters and unlikely twists of the plot lose their charm, and the movie just seems self-conscious and cute. [07 Feb 1990, p.E1]

It's beautifully shot by first-time feature director Antoine Fuqua, whose eye for sensual surfaces, deft camera moves and elegant framing was refined with commercials and music videos

Aside from the defection scene, the only tension in The White Crow concerns whether Nureyev will achieve the renown he deserves or whether his career will be killed in the crib. That’s not nothing, but it’s small stuff to peg a two-hour movie on, especially one with an unsympathetic protagonist.