Lacks the kind of rhythm and snap to make it work -- and allows this fitfully entertaining romp to dribble on way too long.

Filmgoers looking for copious amounts of mindless violence won't be disappointed.

Legend of the Guardians sounds as if it were scripted by a team of 11-year-old boys, with too much plot for its 91-minute running time, a script that steals liberally from "Star Wars" and some occasionally eye-roll-worthy weirdness.

As a call to action, The Hunting Ground truly goes to bat for rape survivors. As a documentary, the movie as a whole is much lesser than its individual parts.

Joachim Trier is a Norwegian filmmaker who made a strong debut in 2011, with his film, “Oslo, August 31.” Louder Than Bombs is his first English-language effort, and it’s disappointing.

As far as complete wastes of time go, Zookeeper is not especially offensive. Yet it is surprising that everything you might expect to be charming in it just isn't - namely all the bits involving animals.

A viewer of the film misses any sense of what distinguishes a great Cartier-Bresson picture from a good one, never mind a bad one. And the photographer himself cannot have been happy with the short shrift the documentary gives to drawing, which occupied him through most of his last decades.

If the movie sometimes seems not to come to much either, it does have something to say to those patient enough to stick with it.

Get past the comedy and there's something almost weird at the movie's core - a deep cynicism about family and a longing for family, both at the same time.

Take Every Wave remains entertaining because of Hamilton’s awe-inducing skill on the ocean, and his determination to ride the waves as long as his body will allow.

For about half of its running time, Hellraiser: Bloodline is watchable. In fact -- let's throw around the superlatives -- it's mildly entertaining. [9 March 1996, p.B3]

Despite the paint-by-numbers nature of its plot construction potentially working against audience engagement, the film moves along briskly, benefiting from strong performances virtually across the board.

Will you find yourself wishing you were looking at someone else? Not really.

I think mature pre-teens along with immature teens might relate to this overbearing showcase of bizarre rubber duckies. Adults are bound to find it a major yawn, and young children are likely to be scared out of their wits. [27 Jun 1986, p.82]

It might be enough that 12 Strong makes you feel good that the United States still produces guys like this. Too bad we didn’t get to know about the real guys and their actual story.

You could blast for it, and you still won't find 30 uninterrupted seconds of truth in Baby Mama. The characters are lies. Their emotional workings are lies. The jokes are based on lies about human behavior.

Despite its worthy subject, this feature by veteran Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has a bluntness that's at odds with Bishop's personality and work.

Let's just say it: It's great there's a movie that makes teenage girls scream. Half the movies Hollywood makes are designed to make teenage boys scream, and those boy movies are just as ridiculous and a lot nastier than New Moon.

Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.

The film, “based on the incredible true story” that happened in 2014, is an efficient, fun but by-the-numbers movie that has the distinction of being shot on location in the Dominican Republic, which looks quite lovely onscreen.

Horrible Bosses has a handful of hilarious moments, but it's not exactly funny and not exactly serious, either.

The strange case of a movie that clunks in every possible way but the ultimate way -- it entertains.

True Colors is obvious and heavy-handed, loaded with cliches, and never really seems to inhabit the world in which it is set -- Washington politics. But more than just being mediocre, there's something obnoxious about the movie. It's a look at the ethics of the generation that came of age in the 1980s, presented by an older generation that has no more insight, sympathy or understanding of its subject than Gramps had of Woodstock. [12 Apr 1991, p.E1]

We are aware going in that Varsity Blues' cannot be a landmark of world cinema. Yet working within the tired formula, the picture turns out to be not so bad.

In the end, it’s left to Shaye to carry the film, and she does so with aplomb. The “Insidious” franchise may be running out of places to go, but Shaye appears to be just getting started.

Credit Freyne for ambition — he’s trying to make a zombie movie with a certain amount of discretion, and evoke sympathy for at least some of those who’ve perpetrated unspeakable actions. But he’s juggling too many themes here, and manages to lose us somewhere along the way.

The remaining twisted population that likes this kind of movie will enjoy a horror film that is surprisingly stylish.

Isn't a terrible addition to the teen coming-of-age party movie catalog. It just feels dated.

Yet, even at its worst, Zombieland is better than most movies of its kind - disgusting but not too disgusting, and with a few laughs.

Lumpy.

Gooding can't will this well-meaning film into life.

The new film's social message comes through loud and clear, but something in the comedy seems constrained -- effortful, yet muffled. It might be a matter of the right tone never having been found.

Some of the film is imaginatively put together. But the melodrama feels forced - manipulated by filmmakers hell-bent on teaching its main character a lesson or two about life and the need to seize it.

The movie, a rather pointless thing when you get down to it, has little of the provocative intelligence that was found in "Terminator." But at least it's self-propelling in terms of suspense and cheap thrills. [12 June 1987, Daily Datebook, p.78]

A lot more enjoyable if you can leave your cognitive skills at the door.

To his credit, writer-director Jonathan Kasdan is sensitive and observant...But he doesn't know what he's talking about, not really, and though he structures the film around his areas of ignorance, that only works partially.

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is lightweight and fun -- not great fun, but it has its moments. The high school satire angle is both authentic and good-natured. [31 Jul 1992, p.D1]

Too predictable and too self-conscious to reach a level of high drama.

In the end, “My Old School” is a well-made documentary that succeeds in most ways but that starts to crumple in the face of a single question: Who cares?

Priscilla could be described as the story of how the virginal wife finally got a clue, but it takes her too long. We’re left with a movie that mostly consists of a confused woman-child stumbling around a mansion in high heels.

The Lovely Bones is difficult viewing, a meticulously crafted experiment that, it turns out, wasn't worth it.

Shannon is worth seeing, and so is Spacey — hunched over, doing a funny impression of Nixon’s voice and body language. But this time the actors are better than the material.

What little pleasures the movie offers are small and intermittent. Kyle Chandler gets to unleash his inner Shatner by acting intense every moment that he’s on screen.

At its best, the movie is a collection of entertaining memories from a group of gutsy women.

While pacing and believability issues in The Pale Blue Eye cannot be overlooked, this finely made period mystery’s virtues should still be savored.

The heart and the luminous intelligence of Vincent van Gogh are deadened in Robert Altman's coolly distanced Vincent and Theo. [16 Nov 1990, p.E13]

Just like a low-budget football comedy, only with money.

Since the hit-man career is probably one of the most familiar non-law enforcement careers in films, it should come as no surprise that Little Odessa has nothing new to say about it.

This time, it seems as if there’s a little less magic in the woods.

The real issue is that everything about Adam’s journey feels half digested and tossed back up. We’ve seen it before. It was better the first time.

Between the off-center comic riffs of Tom Arnold and the wildly improbable hair's-breadth escapes, the whole business dissolves into amiable action farce.

Colorful and at times quite lively, but I wish it were funnier and its satirical edge a bit sharper.

The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.

Toy Soldiers is to terrorism what just say no is to the temptation of drugs: a will-o'-the-wisp notion that is either laughable or sad, depending upon how seriously one takes either solution to those problems. [26 Apr 1991, p.E7]

Has all the elements of a satisfying movie except knowing when to stop.

A respectable and fairly decent movie.

Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of Pain Hustlers watchable.

Purists should have a field day enumerating the differences between the original "Astro Boy" and this high-gloss reimagining. Someone has to.

An unabashed wallow in the moronic humor of Adam Sandler.

This movie reverie has an almost laughable '80s tone - a yuppified style and even language - that practically buries Costner. [21 Apr 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Something From Tiffany’s rides the line between Hallmark cheese and the Hollywood gloss of big-screen rom-coms once headlined by its producer, Reese Witherspoon. It emerges as a top entry in the former category and a middling example of the latter, with lots of nice moments along the way.

Lacks compelling narrative.

Even now, I can’t decide if it was horrible or if I liked it and must conclude that both things must be true. It really was horrible, and I liked it, anyway.

A sweet, innocuous romantic comedy.

Fortunately, the movie gets a huge lift from Johnson, who reappears in the second half of the film and rescues it from nonstop boys’ hijinks. It’s not enough to say the camera loves her. Put Johnson in a close-up and the rest of the movie disappears.

The core fan base of this English sword battle drama will pay for the boundary-pushing blood and gore. Why bore them with things like plot and context and production values?

Less like watching a movie than it is like being accosted by one.

Once you're done trying to conjugate the smurfs, there's a better movie than anyone could have possibly expected, thanks in large part to an honest effort by Harris in a thankless role.

The strained romantic plot is a slow fizzle.

The movie is an enjoyable but flawed attempt at an epic story, with too much of the best action concentrated in the beginning.

When Costner is good, as he is here, his acting has a purity to it, an unspoken moral dimension. Underneath the sensitive, stoic facade is a loquacious, intellectually alert actor with an encyclopedic understanding of the film tradition he occupies: the rugged, humble movie hero, embodied by the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

The attempt is to create a reality wide enough to accommodate the extremes of absurdity and hard political truth, but the pieces never cohere, and so we end up with a rattling bag of disparate elements.

As for the movie’s ultimate resolution, nothing specific can be said here, except that it borders on inexcusable.

Lottery Ticket is likable, and that goes a long way.

Even as a showcase for the actors, Bird on a Wire is disappointing. More than anything else it's an action movie, and not a very good one, with wall-to-wall chase scenes from start to finish. [18 May 1990, p.E1]

If the movie has a weakness, it’s that Zohar gets the most screen time, though she’s the least engaging character.

Those who just want to watch a cool, competent and only semi-dumb action movie, though, can thank god for small favors like that.

More intelligent than most summer blockbusters and features at its center a thought-out and committed performance by Will Smith. But in the end it's merely ALMOST good.

The brave men who fought and perished at the Alamo believed fervently in their cause. For The Alamo to work, the audience must believe as well. That never really happens.

A tough slog through emotional swamplands. It's murky when it needs to be clear. But Hedlund is the big news here.

By the time the credits roll, we don’t achieve a much deeper sense of who John DeLorean really was — only a better understanding of why this complicated figure continues to befuddle screenwriters. DeLorean probably would have preferred it that way.

There’s a Danish film called “After the Wedding” which was released here in 2007 and nominated for the foreign film Oscar. It didn’t win — it had the bad luck to be nominated against “The Lives of Others,” which was even better. But it’s a great film. The new After the Wedding is the American remake, and it’s fascinating. That is, it’s fascinating in that it’s not even close to great, despite using the same scenario. Indeed, it would be a real lesson in filmmaking to watch both movies back to back, just to see how to do things and how not to do things. And, just to clarify, the new After the Wedding would be in the “how not to do things” category.

Largely and insider's joke.

Still, if you love this kind of movie, you will at least like Honest Thief.

To label the parents in Wah-Wah dysfunctional doesn't adequately describe their wildly inappropriate behavior.

This is a film that works both for followers and for those interested in knowing what yoga is truly about. Hint: It’s not about six-pack abs.

The documentary seems equally divisive. Like most of Young's recent work, it's scattered and unsubtle.

Whenever the movie's point of view turns omniscient, and we're seeing events from the director's vantage point, Man on Fire becomes a blurry, shaky mess.

It's an interesting technique -- the blurring of reality and "movies" -- but Korine's objective is so narrow and mean, and his viewpoint so colored by smug, adolescent condescension, that Gummo comes off like a mean-spirited prank.

Directed by veteran British television director Tom George, “See How They Run” won’t impress demanding viewers, but acts as an a rather agreeable placeholder until the next “Knives Out” movie arrives.

While the fourth "Exorcist" movie may have unmitigated disaster written all over it, the finished product is somehow sort-of-kind-of not all that bad.

Yet it fails to enchant for a reason that might not be fair, but that's just how it is: We've seen outer space simulated so well in sci-fi movies that the real thing seems like old stuff.

The most Stillmanesque Stillman movie yet. It's about a mood, part wistful, part sardonic. It's about a time of life, about repartee, about the vivid character saying the unexpected thing.

Director/writer Kim Joo-hwan (“Midnight Runners”) builds tension deliberately and slowly over the 129-minute running time, delivering some undeniably chilling and visually unsettling images along the way. The Divine Fury doesn’t revolutionize the exorcism movie, but it does manage to shake it up a bit.

As Ella, Mackey shows that she can carry a movie and remain sympathetic, despite a script that sometimes works against her.

This is familiar territory for writer-director Nancy Meyers, Hollywood's queen of the chick flick. Her latest has charming moments and a hopeful message for despondent singles, but it lacks the emotional resonance of Meyers' "Something's Gotta Give" and the zaniness of "What Women Want."

Straddles a number of genres -- horror film, lovers on the lam, fairy tale -- and gives them all a cool, knowing spin.

Unfortunately, despite its ready-made storyline and some likable performances, the curiously inert A Million Miles Away never achieves liftoff, even as its hero does.