Jennifer 8 is an empty-headed thriller, uninspired, by the numbers, the kind of movie that gets made not because anybody wants to make it but because of a perceived market out there for this kind of picture. People do like thrillers, but they don't like long, boring, vapid thrillers, and Jennifer 8, which opens today, is definitely in the latter category. [6 Nov 1992, p.C1]

An unfortunate casting decision, however, comes close to sabotaging a witty script.

The potential for a funny film is here -- one that captures people with their ''clothes'' off, and uses fashion as a metaphor for emotional defenses. Sadly, Altman seems to have taken out all the jokes, and given his actors nothing but sketches to work from. [23 Dec 1994, p.D1]

Nattiv, working from a sharp script from Nicholas Martin, expertly mixes in documentary footage to convey a sense of the times and the war.

Has more in common with a horror movie than with a genuine political work.

It is impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

What The Banger Sisters offers in place of an eloquent statement is the charm of two actresses at the top of their game in flashy roles and a smart script that's decidedly more coarse than sentimental.

Cate Blanchett has the title role, and she does wonders with it, bringing a degree of passion but also suggesting something essentially unevolved in Charlotte's character.

Most of the right laughs in most of the right places and some unexpected ones thrown in.

The most compelling reason to see this movie is the profile we get of the horrors of war.

Clearly, this is something rare: a movie that insulates itself against its own rottenness by being lousy by design.

Earns its emotional moments, and it takes the audience along.

It’s scattered and messy and startling and electric and fun.

Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa) makes a fine comeback after his fall with High Spirits, by directing with as witty a touch as the Mamet script requires. [15 Dec 1989, p.E1]

There's nothing here but wreckage. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is so ineptly made that the story is advanced solely through announcements.

It's up to Ellen Barkin to carry the movie, and she manages until the thing just becomes a dead weight. [10 May 1991, p.E1]

Maggie Q has been in good movies before, but The Protégé is the first movie that’s good because she’s in it.

Tokyo Decadence is not an action picture, blue or otherwise. Murakami almost batters you with his slow, deliberate style, and in the end the film ventures into puzzling bravura sequences that seem hard to grasp for someone outside Japanese culture. Throughout, Murakami subtly accompanies his work with strains from the introduction to an aria from Verdi's ''Don Carlo'' where the aggrieved King Philip sings ''she never loved me.'' [18 June 1993, p.C12]

The desire to go back in time to change things -- or just to visit -- is so central to the experience of being alive and stuck in time that Timecop has a built-in power. It's a power the film, a satisfying science-fiction thriller, takes full advantage of.

A sharp, engaging look at what it's like to be hungry and not-so-young in New York.

This is a shrewd and effective film from a director who understands how to create and sustain a mood.

A coming-of-age story that gets it all wrong.

It is bearable, in every sense of the word, and that's worth something for parents looking for G-rated entertainment.

The film is a damning look at a key Bush operative.

It's a celebration of nerd pride in all its many-feathered glory.

While "Saw" and "Saw II" were pretty good splatter films hampered by spectacularly unbelievable endings, Saw III is annoying for almost the duration of the movie.

Writer-director Seth MacFarlane is like some weird combination of a stupid, dirty-minded teenager and a brilliant comic master. His impulses are sophomoric, but he knows where to find the punch line, and he hits it, again and again.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

It's a sweet, low-key and satisfying film -- and it deserves a heap of credit for treating its subject with humor and humanity.

This may be hard to believe, but Bride of Chucky is a smart little horror movie. The fourth installment in the "Child's Play" series has a sense of its own silliness -- and a tight plot that provides a clothesline for a string of funny, macabre murders.

This society makes no sense except as a metaphor. The social layout of Divergent was supposedly devised so as to maintain peace, but putting people into airtight factions guarantees conflict.

There’s idiotic, and there’s magnificent, but The Greatest Showman is that special thing that happens sometimes. It’s magnificently idiotic. It’s an awful mess, but it’s flashy. The temptation is to cover your face and watch it through your fingers, because it’s so earnest and embarrassing and misguided — and yet it’s well-made.

Last Vegas is an entertaining movie with a lot of integrity, and it gives all of its actors - all heavyweights and Oscar winners - real moments to dig in and play something.

It's an intriguing portrait, but it makes no pretense at objectivity, erring on the side of hero worship.

If there's a revelation to be gleaned from these youthful entries, it's that much of what made Hitchcock great was there from the beginning. [18 Feb 2007, p.26]

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.

The movie is pretty stupid in a lot of ways. But in a multiplex world of grim action thrillers with dark heroes, it isn't the worst thing to blow an hour and a half on a film where everyone - including supporting players Gary Busey, Beverly D'Angelo and Kristanna Loken - seems to be having a good time.

Pleasing but routine British comedy.

It's a movie you want to like, but its sometimes laughably bad execution makes that difficult.

Predictable.

A mildly pleasing romantic comedy, a trifle held together by Drew Barrymore's charm and a decent high-concept gimmick.

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

Bluntly speaking, Ju-On is anything but frightening. Ridiculous. Unbelievable. Unintentionally funny. It might as well be a parody of a horror film.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

This quirky film does the unexpected: It pours on the restraint, emphasizing the grit and making the romance as low key as possible. It’s an anti-romance romance.

The movie isn't particularly well-paced, and I found it dull. But I've got to give credit to Todd Masters, who designed the special-effects makeup, to Gilbert Adler, who directed the Crypt Keeper sequences, and to Zane, who plays the Collector with style and wit. If I were 12, I might've loved it.

How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.

A poorly acted, colossal bore of a film that strikes wrong notes from beginning to end.

It’s hard to know what Maiwenn was trying to accomplish here, besides giving herself a juicy and an entirely sympathetic historically-based role. She achieves that, and she’s good in the film — Maiwenn always is — but the “what’s the point of all this” question takes “Jeanne du Barry” down just a notch.

The star's amusingly inventive performance keeps your attention through predictable early scenes when "Ohio" repeats familiar material on women's sexuality. It's like a continuation of "The Vagina Monologues" to see Liza Minnelli, as a New Age orgasm coach.

Eubanks takes someone else’s screenplay, one that’s full of incident, and infuses it with his own sensibility. Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t a writer, either. Being a good director with a real point of view — that’s plenty.

Yonkers Joe is incoherent, succeeding neither as an exciting gambling ride nor a touching family story.

The film is like watching a very bad play as presented by a very bad director.

It means to be knowing and cynical but is just callow.

The musical numbers are the only real drag on this otherwise odd and appealing picture.

It's a fact that becomes riotously evident in the reel of outtakes that caps the picture and incites wonder about why no one thought to give us 90 minutes of those instead.

The scary thing about this spoof of '90s teen horror movies is how funny it is.

Eventually, the plot feels more perfunctory than palpable, but Watkins is careful not to drag things out. All in all, we don’t mind being taken along for the ride, yet in the end, we’re ready to disembark.

Unreconstructed fans of Chevy Chas, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight or Bill Murray might find something to guffaw at in this lamebrained movie that purports to be a satire on country club life but makes everybody look like slobs. Except - perhaps - a little Irish wench named Sarah Holcomb and the gopher who tears up the golf course. Should have put the gopher to work on the script.

Mayron, who directed a remake of the Disney comedy Freaky Friday for TV, took on a lot with The Baby-Sitters Club, and the strain shows. She's got too many characters to establish -- several adults besides the girls -- and her movie feels under-rehearsed, as if she hadn't been given the benefit of preparation and wasn't allowed to get as many takes as she needed of most scenes.

An occasionally rousing but mostly just adequate sequel to last year's "Planes."

Escape Room is an amusement park ride. It has no reason for being beyond that base-level kick, and it doesn’t, as they say, transcend the genre. But there’s something to be said for amusement park rides. People like them for good reason.

In the end, probably the best way to watch Emperor is to pretend that the Supreme Command of Allied Forces in Japan after World War II was Tommy Lee Jones. If you do that, the movie works surprisingly well.

Story problems tank the new Tomb Raider — small, essential things like lack of motivation, lack of reasons for people to do the things they do, and lack of any reason for the audience to keep watching.

As cluttered as the movie gets before the ending, it's funny throughout, with some 1970s and '80s music thrown in to keep adults happy.

Fascinating, obnoxious and poignant.

A movie with an irresistible premise that ultimately collapses around the whole issue of motivation. Until it does, this is a thoroughly entertaining picture.

Unfortunately, Sucka falls apart after the first half-hour. The action sequences are confusing and senseless. The setups for the action scenes are long and pointless. You know where the movie is heading, and there are no surprises along the way. It's one joke, over and over. [17 Feb 1989, p.E7]

Gran Turismo is just the same cars, going around and around and around.

A noble try that disappoints.

For a little while, comedy ensues.

Well-intentioned but predictable romance.

The film is well shot and has titillating action without a single persuasive emotion.

It's a straight-ahead adventure with the usual number of thrills, but with the added virtue of being smarter and more sober than one might expect.

A nice little holiday movie.

An almost successful comedy.

Mostly, Super Troopers is plain goofy.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had their fun with From Dusk Till Dawn, and now they need to stay away from each other. For their own good. Forever.

"300" was an innovative and imaginative action film, but the follow-up, 300: Rise of an Empire, is nothing but a disappointment.

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.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is one of Chevy Chase's best movies. Though more or less a comedy, the picture gives Chase a chance to do much more than smirk and be a wise guy, while providing a good showcase for his dry style of humor. [28 Feb 1992, p.D1]

Sleeping With the Enemy is bound to be a crowd pleaser, with its cool, crazed villain and with Julia Roberts in the lead, as a woman who fakes her death in order to escape her husband. But everything surprising and gripping about the movie happens in the first 20 minutes, and after that it follows a predictable course. [08 Feb 1991, p.C1]

A good action movie, whose title expresses what is, more or less, a recurring motif. It also gives a sense of the film's general attitude toward life. It's a film with no ambition but to get viewers' pulses moving. It does that, and with a fair degree of wit and style.

Amenta was deeply moved by Rita's story, but his prosaic direction can't do it justice.

The Unholy Trinity is a passable, 95-minute diversion, but an unremarkable one.

Despite a few shortcuts and some small but nagging inconsistencies -- not to mention weak performances in a couple of key roles -- Just Cause delivers.

Fortunately, the people save Operation Dumbo Drop, and it's their determinedly good-natured performances that keep the film moving through several well-paced misadventures.

If there was ever a human being who needed a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, this is the guy.

The most exciting contribution to The Girl on the Train is that of Wilson. It’s exciting because it shows that it’s possible, despite the odds, for a distinctive screenwriter to express herself consistently and dominate a film. And it’s exciting because this is a unique voice, and very much a woman’s voice, that our cinema needs.

Preposterous.

Has slow patches and requires a generous suspension of disbelief. But it's also sweet and optimistic -- a welcome antidote to gloom.

Has some faults, but it manages to keep its audience either angry or jumpy from start to finish.

The belly laughs finally start to come --legitimately.

Cheerfully raunchy and undeserving of its prohibitive NC-17 rating, Orgazmo is a harmless sex farce.

Ultimately, Fortress is a formula picture, an action film that has to resolve itself in a conventional way. Still, until its last five minutes or so, when it takes a slightly silly turn, Fortress is nicely realized and holds your attention. [4 Sept 1993, p.E1]

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.

Retro escapist fun.

One Day is a beautiful movie, but beautiful in a way that life often is, not movies. Nothing is sudden or easy, either for the characters or for the audience, and there are no thunderbolts from the blue.