A rule of thumb for characters in heist movies: If the idiots hatching the scheme swear it's "foolproof," it isn't. If they say they've got a rock-solid alibi, they don't. If they're convinced nothing could possibly go wrong, something will.

It's not particularly deep, but it's a good-natured, sprightly comedy that ought to find its most appreciative audience among preteen girls.

Pretty much everything shot by Shepard and co-director David Palmer looks as if it was done in one take. Hit & Run is closest in tone to the Tarantino-penned "True Romance," but it lacks that movie's menace.

Freeheld is formulaic, but some formulas are good if you do them right, and it helps knowing that it all really happened, or most of it.

It is 140 minutes long and repetitious beyond belief. Yet for all its weaknesses - unconscious contradictions, travelogue simplicity and mix-and-match spirituality - Eat Pray Love is, like its central character, on a genuine quest.

Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.

The new Planet of the Apes is not a remake, and it's not a sequel. It is an amazing display of imagination.

Nearly every bodily fluid makes an appearance in "Rules," a mean-spirited paean to hedonism set at an East Coast college where students attend class only occasionally, and then only to perform oral sex on instructors.

The movie isn't hellish, because there's always hope of leaving it. It's more like purgatory, two whole hours of it.

If Hoffa is supposed to be an intimate portrait of the labor leader, it never gets much beyond painting a murky picture of a one-note Johnny who seems more like a stock Jack Nicholson character. [25 Dec 1992]

A work of art such as A Good Person cannot be the product of some casual connection. It’s the product of a soul connection, and I hope Braff and Pugh get another chance to work together.

All that said, this movie is likely review-proof. The franchise is doing just fine without critical approval. This one is less of a slog, but there is precious little interesting or new in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’ll likely earn a billion dollars anyway.

At some point or another, you will be offended by The Hunt. But see it anyway, confident in the certainty that other people — people you don’t agree with, people you don’t like — will be offended, too.

Little White Lies is never boring, always watchable, always reasonably rewarding. It's just that, when it's over, 2 1/2 hours seems too big an investment for just pretty good.

A spirited adventure with generous romantic and comic charms.

It takes a winning recipe and adds some distinctly Hollywood flavors...The result is a botched job.

It’s always fun to watch the charismatic Bernal.

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]

Too bad. The trappings of The Equalizer 2 are first-rate — the star, the director, the central character, the concept — and they make for a movie that’s watchable and intermittently pleasing. But not enough time was spent getting the substance right.

Among the many strengths of the sweetly touching Introducing the Dwights, a small gem from Australia unearthed at the Sundance Film Festival, is that Jean never becomes Godzilla.

Will satisfy its young fan base and is bound to make a ton of money. At this point, though, the series is no longer an artistic pursuit; it's a business deal.

In the end, all the bitterness seems like window-dressing to disguise a trite story.

A smart, nicely paced crime drama, with colorful characters, compelling situations and an assured style. [17 Apr 1993, p.C3]

Efficiently directed by Marc Webb (the Andrew Garfield “Spider-Man” movies) with an excellent production design by Kave Quinn, “Snow White” is everything you need it to be and nothing more.

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

Contrived and overly schematic, but De Niro and Hoffman are such good actors that it never slips into pat sentiment.

Until now, it may not have occurred to you that what we needed was a witty lesbian romance. Once you see A Family Affair, you realize what we've been missing.

Queeny, corny and impossible to resist.

Offers a lively but jumbled insider's view of a world of great talent and greater risk.

Director Jill Soloway gets the most out of her actors, fleshing out their characters and letting us know what makes them tick. It's refreshing to hear dialogue that's natural and modern and doesn't try to pontificate. And the rewards are many.

Standard issue and sluggish as it sometimes is, “Elevation” maintains engagement.

Tombstone, in spite of its action-movie pacing, becomes an awkward, unconvincing tale as Russell's stubbornly benevolent Earp is slowly nudged by moral compunction into fighting various scourges, not the least of them a vicious gang of red-sashed cowboys led by Curly Bill (Powers Booth) and his fiendishly cool gunslinging sidekick, Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn). [25 Dec 1993, p.E1]

Although the film ends with a facile, romantic comment by Oppenheimer, the unnerving momentum of all that has gone before will remain to haunt the imagination of the viewers. [20 Oct 1989, p.D2]

A peppy, bouncy documentary that is watchable and informative, although Tickell's celebrity name-dropping at times detracts from the serious message.

Has a weirdly divided structure that alternates Irwin's nature segments with clumsy dramatic footage set in the CIA.

Stays funny despite rickety gags because Ben Stiller and 81-year-old Eileen Essel are old pros at playing it straight.

Like its lead characters, Going in Style just grooves along nicely, until the credits roll and you realize it was time well spent.

Passenger 57 is silly but fun -- an action movie accidentally saved by its glorious stupidity. It will make people shake their heads, roll their eyes and laugh at the screen, but it will keep their attention, because the movie has a crazy kind of life. [06 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

Zero is more of an intellectual exercise in which you’re never given all the variables to solve the problem — and then you find your calculator was on acid the whole time anyway.

Two good characters and two good performances go into the old poubelle — or, as we say in English, the garbage bin.

There are laughs throughout, but Guilt Trip isn't joke-happy. The humor is light and well observed, as when Mom keeps playing the audiobook of "Middlesex," and the son gets uncomfortable hearing about anything sexual in front of his mother.

The screenplay is deceptively tight, even as the main characters seem to be buzzing aimlessly through the proceedings. Like the most successful films of the drug-hazed genre, this movie only appears to be going off the rails.

Subliminally speaking, you may not like this movie because it goes so far. Or, you may not like it because it stops short. Or you may like it for one of the above reasons. [21 Feb 1986, p.68]

Big, loud, glossy and entertaining.

To their credit, by the time the movie ends, Blunt and Johnson have made the sale. I believed them and liked seeing them together. They don’t make Jungle Cruise worth seeing or even worth tolerating. But for scattered minutes across this wasteland, they make it less painful.

Painless and predictable, with an amusing if overwrought featured performance by Woody Harrelson.

It doesn’t help that there are strong similarities with Sony’s equally disorganized yet superior 2016 film “Storks.” Both films work off the same premise — that humans don’t bear live young.

Like a Christmas present you didn't know you wanted but are delighted to receive.

A near miss, a respectable but uninspired thriller that's intelligent and considered in its details, but ultimately weak in its impact.

There's nothing about this thriller to prevent it from soon becoming enmeshed in the memory with others in which Michael Douglas wears a starched collar and grits his teeth.

Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching Cobweb, you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.

Has no narrative throughline, no emotional spine. It's a mess.

A remarkable cast for a small, non-mainstream effort.

Boundaries is a slog, a succession of weak and uninteresting incidents, leading to a conclusion that seems foreordained.

The sum is difficult to watch. But this isn't a film against Islam or religion in general: A clear distinction is made between Allah's more vicious followers and the mercy of Allah himself.

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.

By the time we get to a kaiju-inspired third-act throwdown involving multiple giant sea monsters and a mystical trident, this story feels like it’s gotten too big for its small frame.

Therapy for a Vampire has nothing to say. It just has stuff happening, none of it repulsive and all of it performed by competent actors, but that’s just not enough.

It's as if a trumped-up biopic of Andy Warhol were to appear titled "Soup.''

Harrelson and Olson make a good pair. He’s genial and bewildered and expects the best, while she’s guarded and clear-eyed and expects the worst. They deserve a better movie, but they make Champions more than bearable.

It's just a simple thriller whose goal is little more than to keep moving.

The resultant spoofery is nonpartisan, or at least vague - we never learn which of these flesh-pressing idiots is the Republican and which is the Democrat - and raucous in its send-ups of the moral, financial and sexual peccadilloes of the common political animal.

It is, in fact, good: a simple, well told story, about an impossible love decades ago, and the collateral damage that results.

Anyway, thanks to Lourd, Clooney and Roberts — who radiates an appealing groundedness and sanity, despite having been suffocatingly famous since her early 20s — “Ticket to Paradise” is a lot more enjoyable than it deserves to be.

Solondz should have called this one "So-So Storytelling."

Though the storytelling is a bit lopsided, the slapdash quality is charming overall, and the movie benefits from colorful characters and a couple of hilarious scenes.

For a big, floppy, silly movie that is in many ways the epitome of throwaway entertainment, Twins has its charms. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito make it seem they had so much fun making this flabby comedy that the fun becomes infectious.

A squishy-soft romance set to bouncing Italian pop. It's like a long swallow from a bottle of a very sweet wine. Goes down easy, warms the gut, leaves a film of sugar on the teeth.

The movie is more about how many things Michael Bay can smash up -- lots. That might not be a talent most people respect, but it gets through to people anyway, and here Bay does it exceptionally well.

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

Fundamentalists might take umbrage, but The Ten is not so much blasphemous as it is very silly, and it lives up to the one unbendable commandment of comedy: It's funny.

The truth is, “You People” is too confused to be offensive — too inconsequential to merit that level of engagement. But it’s certainly disappointing, virtually from its opening minutes.

It would be nice to say that Blast From the Past is, but it ain't exactly. Half-blast is more like it.

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.

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

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."

There are many things to admire about this movie, but the main one is that it doesn't compromise.

One of the pleasures of Deterrence is that it does not tell the audience what to think.

This 76-minute Western tall tale isn't out-and-out bad, but strictly formulaic and an underachievement from the studio that made the dazzling "Snow White."

It has verve, color and energy, but there's something fundamentally bogus about it.

Exciting and nerve-racking in the moment, but empty.

Shyamalan's story is clearly autobiographical, and he imbued the tender tale with a wistful atmosphere as well as a kindly regard for parochial school, hitting some of the details just right.

An enjoyable movie with an entertaining angle on a hard-to-resist period of history.

As a Jerry Bruckheimer production and a game adaptation, Prince of Persia has every business being jumpy and sequential, and as a frivolous summer popcorn flick it has every business being inane.

As a romantic comedy, Cease Fire is more annoying than amusing.

The film doesn't see any contradictions between the man and his work, which is folkloric, mostly upbeat, often humorous. Both art and artist are outsized and entertaining, and that's about all that Bel Borba Aqui has to say.

The real power of Society lies in its bizarre, twisted human monsters and its metaphoric message that misfits and nonconformists will be eaten alive by society. The film depicts that, literally. [20 Aug 1992, p.E4]

Director Leon Ichaso (A Kiss to Die For) is intent on presenting the Harlem story in near-operatic terms, but ultimately the beautifully rendered, photographically engaging Sugar Hill is crippled by its own self-importance. [25 Feb 1994, p.C1]

Elles has about half of a story stretched to feature length, and it manages to end just as a good story might have been kicking in. But that is often the way with foreign cinema: The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories.

Take a cowboy movie, add space aliens. That's a gimmick that could easily have exhausted itself after 20 minutes, but director Favreau, a team of screenwriters and some well-cast actors keep it alive, and the result is a crowd-pleasing summer movie with more wit than most.

The new film pokes heavyhanded fun at extreme conservatives and has a "power to the people" sub-theme, but it's full of ultra-violence and is dragged down by standard scare tactics, thin characters and the absurdities of the premise.

Going into The Violent Heart, you must understand that the ending is insanely ridiculous. This is not to say that it’s not entertaining — in a way, it’s even more entertaining for being insanely ridiculous. But by the end, you will in no way be able to regard The Violent Heart as anything resembling a serious movie.

Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb. Intuitively, that would seem impossible, for someone to be that good in a failed picture. Here’s something else that would seem impossible: “Blonde” has seriousness of purpose and a strong director, Andrew Dominik, who clearly made the movie he wanted to make. It’s still bad.

A sour misfire.

A forced, implausible flick that loses its energy as it tries to gain momentum.

Its virtues can't outweigh the disappointment of a movie that might have been a rousing old-fashioned epic, or better yet a provocative reworking of an old epic, and instead became a muddle.

Does not end well. But there's a lot of pleasure in getting there.