It seems Joris-Peyrafitte can’t decide what film he is making, and as a result we’re left with a jumbled mess with a slapped-together resolution that will satisfy no one.

What makes Rampage especially enjoyable is the way it sneaks up on the audience. Before casting off every shred of dignity and abandoning itself to good-humored excess, the movie passes itself off as a reasonably serious science-fiction movie.

And give credit to Stallone: He just leaves the camera on Rourke, in the tightest of close-ups, cutting only once, to himself, for a one-second reaction shot, but keeping the focus on his actor. A great actor.

SWAT is better than "Gigli," but so is most outpatient surgery.

It's about as close to French farce as romantic comedies get, and the closer the better.

This slight, predictable comedy has appealing moments.

It’s an elaborate and artificial concoction, without any discernible ambition behind it.

The sum here is less than the parts, which have problems of their own.

Extremely bleak but occasionally compelling debut feature.

So at the very least, audiences will come away from Chasing Mavericks with a deeper understanding of surfing and an appreciation for surfers.

But the single most compelling performance may belong to Australian actor Guy Pearce.

Like every other action movie, it's designed for a 14-year-old boy's mentality, but it's enjoyable enough to turn most people into 14-year-old boys.

The film's overburdened, silly plot renders it a disaster.

Brothers Oxide and Danny Pang co-directed. What they lack in discipline they make up in razzle-dazzle, even if it sometimes is pointless.

Saddest, most hang-dog, most depressing movie possible.

The premise might sound gimmicky, but it's realized honestly and specifically. [27 Sept 1991, p.D6]

If anything keeps “Red Door” going, it’s Autumn Eakin’s exquisite cinematography. The Further looks like a shadow reflection of the real world, and she and Wilson never fail to come up with aesthetically interesting and sometimes ingenious light sources to illuminate portions of it.

Legends of the Fall is so gorgeous that its failure to catch fire seems a piddling concern.

The movie is pleasant. It's reasonably funny. But the one who gets the real laughs here, the hard laughs, is Carrey, who plays the kind of role he should be playing - a complete lunatic.

Pathetic yet stupidly entertaining for several minutes of its interminable running time, 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain makes half its cast look like retreads and half like fresh ponies desperately karate-kicking a dud script to see if it has any signs of life.

Cherry is like three different movies in one: the teen years, the war experience, and then life as a drug addict. It’s held together by the smart writing, by the overarching tone of tragic absurdity, and by Holland, who hits every bump on Cherry’s way down.

Chock-full of holes.

A good bio of any historical character has to have a compelling story, whether evil or good. Klimt appears to have had that story. I sure would have liked to know what it was.

As one might expect from a Christian film, Miracles From Heaven centers on faith — and a major miracle — but it’s also a decent family drama about a mother’s tribulations in caring for her sick child.

It would require a near-lethal injection of nitrous oxide to induce laughter.

The show takes little more than an hour to finish and less than a minute to forget, while politely reminding us not only that gay movies have fallen on hard times but also that they refuse to give up.

Self-indulgent and admirable.

The role of Kate, a spunky but romantically unfulfilled marketing expert, seems made for Ryan. Unfortunately, Ryan no longer seems made for it.

Has an oddness and whimsicality about it that can, at first, be confused for authenticity.

The best we can hope to get from a movie of this kind is an interesting story, a hint of the artist’s work, some factual accuracy and surfaces that make sense. We get that from Mapplethorpe. And while Smith can’t show us Mapplethorpe’s depths, he can suggest them, enough so that, if anyone wants to know more, they can consult the ultimate source — Mapplethorpe’s own work.

That's why the more you like the Judy Garland film, the more you might appreciate Oz the Great and Powerful. Appreciate. Enjoy. Admire. Be glad to see. Have fun with ... But as for love - well, love will be harder to come by.

Like most ruckuses, it is frequently loud and not always intelligible.

It works primarily because of the chemistry between Chan and Tucker, which is at its combustible best this time out.

An inventive and caustic comedy that really does look like the thing it's mocking.

Hill and his cast, including Christopher Walken as a sadistic hood, struggle to score a victory of style over substance. But substance, or a lack thereof, wins.

By creating likable characters and putting them in situations that seem plausible, if a bit of a stretch, the film succeeds where others of its genre fail.

Gentle, wacky, down-to-earth and romantic.

Light on inner conflict and heavy on cliches.

It's a fizzle as as comedy. Still, the film has character.

The specifics of their predicament are well handled -- being thrown in a Third World prison may be every tourist's nightmare -- even if the movie eventually goes soft and squishy.

Summoning silliness Roman Polanski salutes and spoofs satanic thrillers .

It comes down to a pair of appealing performers in a series of bad-relationship skits.

It expertly capitalizes on the emotional associations Americans have with Pearl Harbor and renders the battle scenes with an excellence that goes beyond proficiency and into the realm of art.

[Brody's] mannered performance helps downgrade this picture from a middling sci-fi film to a bad, borderline-camp sci-fi film.

This is a slacker comedy with "festival" stamped all over it, so you can bet the consequences will be quirky.

Despite all the mayhem, “The Golden Circle” often feels slow and belabored, particularly in its middle section, when inspiration is nowhere to be found, and the chaos seems to be there just for the sake of being there.

It’s competently made but boring — and desperate.

There’s authenticity in the coach’s belted khaki shorts and in the anguish Hunt brings to a moment where the coach no longer can bear being at her star player’s wake. This moment is the film’s most moving until images of the real coach, and real Caroline Found, accompany the credits.

Carbon Nation serves us a full portion of scary statistics, but overall tries to accentuate the positive.

Lacks compelling narrative.

They can’t make “The Union” better than a genre movie, but they can make it better than a decent genre movie. Also, considering the fact that Berry is one of the most misused and underused major stars of the last two decades, any role that shows her screen personality to good advantage is probably worth a look.

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.

Like the best Marx Brothers films, Brain Donors has gags for the sake of gags. There's no pretense to plausibility. It's just layers and layers of jokes; some work, some don't. [18 April 1992, p.C3]

In the end, what we have here is a Tarzan movie made by people who don’t understand the appeal of Tarzan. He’s about joy and abandon and the fantasy of living in harmony with creation. He’s not about the struggle in the Congo.

Genre movies like “The Fabulous Four” can only be so good, but it’s pleasing enough to do its job.

Stomp the Yard, at nearly two hours, has a decent story, a good subject and a horrible plot.

This is a film that keeps it simple: Don’t cross a mother, or she’ll hunt you down.

A strange and thoughtful little movie.

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

In this film, whenever Harper gets to do nothing but direct, as in the action scenes, Heart of Stone works. It’s in the convolutions of its flat script that the movie falls apart.

Hooking Up is a pretty good movie. I enjoyed it and could even imagine watching it again. But it’s also the movie that shows that Brittany Snow doesn’t have to be relegated to pretty good movies. She’s ready for better.

The young people in Nowhere spend a lot of time worrying about the world coming to an end. Watching these sour characters abuse themselves and one another, the more immediate concern becomes: When is this movie going to end?

Belongs in a less ambitious category of sequels, alongside the creatively lacking “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Ice Age” movies.

The results may be sports-movie predictable in many ways, but the Mighty Mites’ impossible story is one deserving of resurrection from the dusty archives of Texas history.

With Brightburn there’s not even the pretense of idealism. It’s a superhero movie with the soul of an ’80s slasher film.

The picture is a comedy. It's a drama. It's a romance. And it's a vampire movie -- it's definitely a vampire movie....But what it is most of all is a mess. A flat-out, flailing-in-all-directions mess. [26 Sept 1992, p.C3]

Although well intentioned, has the superficial gloss of a TV movie of the week.

By the time the sex actually starts, any sense of tension or anticipation is gone. It's the rare orgy that feels like an anticlimax.

Cox does a better than average job — almost everybody bombs when playing Churchill — capturing the leader’s seriousness of purpose and the weight of his responsibility. He gives us Churchill’s irascibility, but he doesn’t convey Churchill’s twinkle, his charm or his wit.

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.

This is a half-hearted, derivative action film with not a single honest artistic impulse behind it.

The movie itself is just a routine showcase, modest in its aspiration and effective within its limits, entertaining in the moment but, in the end, faintly silly. On the plus side, it's only 86 minutes long.

Sharp and irresistible, and there's no other movie like it.

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.

Angels in the Outfield may not be a great baseball movie, but it is a cheerful line drive as a story about having faith when the world seems stacked against you.

So, The King’s Man is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie proves that raunchy comedies about horny teens aren't just an American quirk.

At least it can be said that Renaissance Man, the new Penny Marshall film arriving at theaters today, has its heart in the right place and that star Danny DeVito comes across as thoughtful, intelligent, even sweet. [03 Jun 1994]

It would be easy to dismiss Foe as a lugubrious downer, except that the reality of its world feels palpable and that marriage seems real. I believed Ronan and Pescal as two people bound up in love, shared history and torment.

Nowhere near the worst film of 2013, but it is definitely the most exhausting.

No matter how guilty our knucklehead-protagonist's victims supposedly are, it's difficult to maintain a rooting interest.

The script is weak and unrelenting. The stunts are unspectacular. The special effects are nothing you haven't seen before. But worst of all, there's the spectacle of Schwarzenegger glorying in the wonder of Schwarzenegger. [18 Jun 1993, p.C1]

A repellent, stupid film.

Achingly long and pointless, "Runs" is a movie about family that's dishonest in its presentation of every relationship.

One pities poor Molly Parker, a fine actress who was somehow persuaded to disrobe for this degrading and dispiriting Wayne Wang film.

The comic drama is refreshingly anti- sentimental but will break your heart anyway.

The plot’s outrageousness — which includes Michael Stuhlbarg as a Ted Kaczynski-esque town crazy — would go down better if there were a sympathetic character or two (or, absent that, some laughs), but no dice.

The technically elegant Voyagers, about a space colonization trip run amok, is easy enough to sit through, but it’s a story in need of more rocket fuel. There isn’t a bad scene in the movie, yet there isn’t a really good scene, either. It’s a quiet psychological thriller, even when it’s trying to stir mayhem.

Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.

Some of that emotion inevitably makes its way into our perception of the film, which elevates it somewhat, but only to the level of mediocrity.

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

It’s a train wreck, but certainly a watchable one that almost plays like fan fiction.

Pleasing and occasionally very funny movie that maintains a mild but consistent hold on its audience.

It's hard to imagine any movie ever topping this one's depiction of killer tornadoes laying waste to the Midwest.

Rodman can't act, but his outsized personality fits right in. Van Damme, as always, does his job and looks good doing it. As for Rourke, he's taken the first step. Now he just needs to rinse and repeat.

The story has its moments, and yet there is something about this tale of a serial killer's patterning his crimes on Poe's most gruesome works that doesn't completely satisfy.

Mel Brooks has made a movie that's completely free and spontaneous, which at the same time is not in any way lazy or sloppy. [28 July 1993, p.E1]

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly.