The enormous, make-or-break things are perfectly in place, and just that is enough for a reasonably enjoyable movie. But plot problems, some comically weak dialogue, repetitious scenes and a non-ending ending keep the experience a little more earthbound than it had to be.

Salinger, who died in 2010 at age 91, probably would have hated this movie. If Jones doesn’t quite pull it off, it is at least a film of many pleasures and a thought-provoking look at American literature’s most famous loner.

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

Take everything extraneous out of Undercover Blues and you're left with about 15 minutes of physical gags and banter, more than enough to make an amusing coming-attractions trailer but about 70 minutes short of a decent movie. [11 Sept 1993, p.F5]

The Ghost and the Darkness could have been an effective film about the virtues of courage for its own sake. But the picture is too lightweight, too posturing and too self-important to go in an introspective direction.

When you finally stop laughing, there is something to think about.

Capone is about as demented a movie as you can see right now, and that’s apart from the fact that it’s about a demented person. If Al Capone were ever put in an insane asylum (he wasn’t), this movie could have been made by the guy in the next room.

There are reversals of expectation, miraculous escapes from certain doom -- all the things that make thrillers thrilling. But The Da Vinci Code isn't thrilling.

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

The effort is undermined with crass humor, mugging and slapstick.

Mortal Kombat II is a sterling example of an action movie that starts out dumb but gradually becomes kind of awesome — and a little bit smarter.

To earnest for its own good. Sincere and heartfelt, it's the kind of family film that might be at home on cable.

When you've got three of the nation's best actresses in leading roles, it doesn't matter if your script is only adequate and the audience really has to squint here and there to believe what's happening on the screen.

This is an excellent comedy, and the fact that it's made by a filmmaker with even better movies on his resume is nothing to hold against it.

Even apart from the fact that it's not nearly funny enough, Bruce Almighty is a peculiar film.

Feels like a personal vendetta.

The slasher scenes, though relatively few, are amazingly evocative for such a low-budget movie.

Overall, the film sparkles. But it's a curiously unaffecting sparkle, an example, almost, of how the special effects stole Christmas.

A bit of a letdown. The manic comedian who has gained fans worldwide for his outrageous slapstick and special effects-driven antics in "Kung Fu Hustle" and "Shaolin Soccer" takes a backseat this time - and that's part of the problem: This is lesser Chow because there is less Chow.

The result is that a story with a couple of good ideas founders for lack of a third or fourth good idea. Still, any picture that features Radcliffe having a nervous breakdown for two hours has something to recommend it.

It’s a tired, inert sci-fi thriller featuring a succession of escalating action sequences that all, somehow, fail to ignite. The cliches mount.

How can you screw up a movie that has Lady Gaga? Here’s how: Make it claustrophobic, with the first half a brutal prison picture and the second half an excruciatingly dull courtroom drama.

With most movies, the question for viewers is: Who should see it? With Project X, the most pressing issue is: Who shouldn't see it?

As Barkin's nemesis, Moore is evil, and that's a good thing - she doesn't back off. Kate Bosworth plays Barkin's fragile daughter and is a pleasant surprise: Who knew she was an actress?

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.

To enjoy it you almost have to be stoned on marijuana.

Imagine watching Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," except without good scenes, without a marriage (legal or spiritual) and without people worthy of anybody's attention, even each other's. Now imagine something even worse.

First-time feature director Rashid has made a piece of eye candy that's irresistible. The point of this film may be to embrace reality, but frankly, who needs it?

In the end, Knight and Day isn't really about much of anything besides having a good time or perhaps the meaning of Tom Cruise-ness in the universe.

French cinema has a lot going for it, but the one thing Americans do best is story. And so “Intouchables,” now The Upside, has a story that finally works.

For about an hour of its running time, The Magic of Belle Isle seems like a tiresome, sentimental and slow-moving story about a grumpy old man redeemed by the sweet spirit of a rural town and by the nice family that lives next door. But no, it's even worse than that.

Emily Rose is the thinking person's demon possession movie, which presents a chilling case history that's hard to explain away.

Cusack should have been half the picture, but the screenplay keeps shoving him offstage for no good reason, and it's a mistake. One of many.

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.

Back in Action is no comedy classic, but it’s a better than average excuse for getting back on the Cameron Diaz train.

IF may have the sheen and aura of an expensive, important production, with a good cast and lots of famous names in voice roles (Steve Carell, George Clooney, Richard Jenkins), but the movie is a disordered wreck that confuses impulse for inspiration and dissipates any impossibility of impact by constantly switching focus.

Some scenes ramble and go on too long, dialogue occasionally turns awkward and adolescent, and the film threatens to collapse from its own unchecked anger.

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

Connery's charm and integrity make all his scenes worthwhile, and Lithgow's stiff-backed turn as the classic British imperialist is in good fun.

Somehow, the funny stuff gets sucked into a kind of black hole in the center of the satire, along with all the comic debris. What should have been a surreal flight to the planet Lucas crumbles into a harmless collection of cosmic dustballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.52]

Relies on comic formula -- but does so with more than usual panache.

A comedy of interracial wariness and misunderstanding marked by a refreshing lack of sappiness.

If you want to watch a gaggle of pretty faux-neurotic people hang out and throw quips, you're probably better off watching "Friends."

For Morgan Freeman ("Seven") fans, it's a chance to see a great actor save a movie from itself.

Cute and clever, but hardly an inspiration in animated film making. [6 July 1990, p.E1]

The Watchers just doesn’t connect on anything deeper than a surface level. Given material that isn’t about looking at the same boring thing over and over, Shyamalan might have been able to really make something.

The Mighty Ducks is not going to be remembered as a cinematic treasure, but for a movie that's built on a fairly shaky framework, it delivers a good feeling you can take home. [02 Oct 1992, p.C5]

So, there you have it, a bad good movie, or a good bad movie, but a very decent Jennifer Lopez movie.

The film doesn't make a case for Lavoe as an important artist.

The comedy, to the extent there is any, consists mainly of Carrey's verbal asides and strained reactions to people. The script gives him very little to work with.

Vanessa Redgrave makes a regal if too-brief appearance.

Rust isn’t so much a poor story or even badly told; there’s just too much of it, strung out along a discursive narrative trail that turns out to be unnecessarily repetitious.

Attenborough has done what nobody thought possible - recreate a classic without raping and pillaging the original, though Chorus Line purists will find plenty to moan about. [20 Dec 1985]

It's funny in spots if you can tune out the Farrellys' ultra-crass jokes - along with any memory of the first movie.

It's not just a feel-good holiday movie, though audiences, especially youngsters, will certainly walk out of it feeling good.

Only occasionally does the film fall into the trap of making the prisoners cute, but it never falters in important ways.

At heart this is a thoughtful, well-made movie about something serious.

Apart from Lawrence's goofing, Blue Streak isn't much of a movie.

What's immediately apparent -- and refreshing -- about Chasing Liberty is that it doesn't play cute with its premise.

An amazing film amazingly tasteless, tin-eared and awkward, but amazing all the same. Anyone with a predilection for bad movies might want to see it, if only in an inspecting-the-wreckage spirit, since because movies this misguided come but once or twice a year.

Life of the Party presents a situation more than a story, and in that it’s more like a sitcom than a conventional movie.

Laura Dern is not a wizard. She cannot make the dumb and formulaic elements of her romance/travelogue movie “Lonely Planet” disappear. But Dern brings such authenticity to Katherine, her confident, matter-of-fact successful author character, that her performance often outweighs this Netflix movie’s flaws.

This is a film that starts out promisingly and finishes with an effective epilogue. In between, there are some interesting bits - including a scene in which Errol Flynn tries to snag a big-time role in "Lolita." But outlandish as that moment might sound, it's not. Everything here, in fact, is just a tad too respectful.

It’s a pastiche of a pastiche, cycling through familiar tropes without adding anything to them; turning what could have been a fascinating critique of society’s superhero obsession into just another way of indulging it.

Has a certain charm and is sure to appeal to tweens, at least the female variety.

Flipped succeeds when it backs off the gluey nostalgia and focuses instead on the subtler pitfalls of adolescence - the tough stuff, the moral stuff, the constant tacking between fear and courage.

Not for a minute is Mad City anything less than entertaining. Yet it becomes frustrating nonetheless. Its ideas gradually seem to be at cross-purposes -- not complex, not tantalizingly ambiguous, but tangled and undefined.

It's a homemade protein-and-steroids smoothie of a plot, combining elements of gore, self-parody, 1990s nostalgia overload and an attempt to say something -- while actually saying absolutely nothing -- about the American dream.

Kinda cute, laced with a few chuckles, but mostly just annoying, the new feature film version of The Little Rascals is not likely to go down in history as a paean to kids or a filmic delight for anyone much older than 7. [05 Aug 1994, p.C3]

Rod Lurie's heated but empty-headed remake re-creates the original's trudge toward savagery but can't re-create its social context - and doesn't bring anything new to the table.

To put it simply, people may be right and people may be wrong, but there are no right races or wrong races. A writer-director who chooses to have characters representing race and not themselves alone paints himself into a corner in which everyone in the movie absolutely must come out all right.

Shanley tries to make something courageous and symbolic out of the notion of jumping into a volcano, but his philosophizing is sentimental, heavy-handed and forced. The idea of doing something reckless and adventurous even becomes a bit depressing when it dawns on you that Shanley may have been taking his own advice with this movie, for less than glorious results. [9 Mar 1990, p.E3]

It's troubling to watch it stray and ramble as first-time director Antonio Banderas struggles to pull disparate elements together.

It would probably be a mistake to emphasize the relationship aspect of The Tomorrow War too much. At its core, this is just a really good monster movie. All the same, there’s a touch of beauty to it.

Admiring The Singing Detective is easy, and so is appreciating the originality of the story's conceit, the artistry of the actors and the directorial intelligence of Keith Gordon. But loving it would take an act of will.

The important thing is that Clark has found a new way to be creepy, which isn't easy. In the process he has created something irresistibly watchable, the kind of original piece that might mean less but reveal more than its creator intended.

If you enjoy gross humor -- elevated by an occasional witty line -- and looking at babes, and don't mind a little blood and gore, do I have a date movie for you.

Often falls flat.

There's a spark missing, and where it's missing is in Roberts' conscientious but all too reserved performance.

A fairly well-made film, reasonably directed by Eran, and it is a plea for women's rights as the Middle East gradually transitions from a tradition-bound society to a modern one.

Cuesta’s direction is all blunt objects, like a doctor performing surgery with a plastic fork from Burger King. But he shines in the more testosterone-charged scenes, including the opening terrorist attack with its tracking shots above and below water.

Alan Parker's picture is epic, lavish and fascinating. It is not a perfect screen musical, but it is spectacular and it works.

The constant shifting between today and years ago is, in and of itself, powerful.

After sitting through Takers with my stomach rearranged by hyperactive camera spazzing, I hereby formally request all directors and cinematographers to just get a grip already and STOP. WIGGLING. THE CAMERA.

This is a movie about power, and its spectacle is that of a woman losing all of it.

Though hardly anybody’s idea of a jolly time at the movies — and not nearly the equal of Florian Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” — “The Son” provides an arresting and unsettling experience. It’s an interesting movie, and different.

Only partly successful.

It's an observant and heartfelt film, with turns of dialogue that show that writer-director Josh Radnor really can write.

Will wring some laughs out of anyone but the most humor-impaired.

The result is Allen's weakest film in years.

A Christian-themed film about redemption with almost no redeeming qualities as entertainment.

Hoodwinked is a computer-animated, "Shrek"-style satire of "Little Red Riding Hood" that offers a few laughs but overall is pretty tired.

At times, the script gets too dense with technicalities and boardroom arguments for lay folk to comprehend. But at its best, it humanizes the plight of families who cope day-to-day with disabling illness

Uncharted isn’t a classic, but for an action movie coming out in the doldrums of February, it’s practically Citizen Kane.

The Chamber has nowhere to go and it goes there slowly, flirting in all directions.

“The Legend of Hank” offers a few hints of the wit and wisdom of its predecessor but is mostly content to coast through a familiar story on the accumulated charm of its star-studded cast of voice actors.

The makers of Into the Blue know what the audience wants. And they deliver a little bit more.

Involves two mysteries -- one it gives away and the other featuring such badly drawn characters that its outcome hardly matters. But the picture looks great.