It's loud, it's large, it's stupid, and its best gag involves a chicken burrito.

Dreadful teen comedy with a "Cinderella" theme.

It's only January, but already we have a strong candidate for the most thunderingly stupid movie of the year.

A coming-out comedy that mines every cliche of cloistered Italian culture. But like "Greek Wedding," Mambo has enough funny moments to save it.

By the time audience members start to get the joke, the film is already over.

Home Again is plain vanilla, from start to finish.

If you’re talking about “Venom: The Last Dance,” you know you’re talking about something unimportant. If you’re writing about it, you know you’re doing something embarrassing. But what about the people who made this movie? What level of awareness do they have?

A forced, tedious but stupidly amusing police action comedy starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as undercover cops who dislike one another but are forced to do some male bonding to save their hides. High-minded people who eschew violence, harsh language and meatball humor just might want to skip this one. [22 Dec 1989, p.22]

With the exception of Jessica Lange, who tears into her fairly brief role as a wealthy and wicked former movie star, everyone in Marlowe is directed as if to seem groggy with depression. It’s as if they’re all bored with the story before they tell it, and then they tell it while trying not to fall asleep.

Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.

This is a welcome and unusual movie, and Gere gives a compelling performance.

For all its faults, some of the action scenes in The Rookie are spectacular. [07 Dec 1990, p.E1]

There are flaws, but also some fun surprises. Much closer to Hitchcock than "Hostel," this is what can happen when a pile of trash falls into the hands of a talented and resourceful director (James DeMonaco).

The thing most people will take away from Stand Up Guys is that it contains Al Pacino's best performance in years. So if you don't think Al Pacino still has it in him, this is a welcome chance to be proved wrong. But here's something interesting. Stand Up Guys also contains Christopher Walken's best performance in years. In addition, the film is extraordinarily well cast, and the acting, even in the smaller roles, is more than noteworthy.

The sweetest little movie about a neurological disorder that we're ever likely to see.

Movies don't get worse than Good Burger, a wretched little comedy. It's a movie that inspires wonder -- at how it got made and released.

The script is as bland as they come.

A skillfully observed but never quite satisfying lesbian romantic drama.

The best thing you can say about this “Moment” is that, at a breezy 92 minutes, it’s a brief one.

Mocks without achieving the level of good satire.

As a movie, it's far from compelling. As a thrill ride, though, it's a rampaging special effects and animatronics extravaganza that will make small children cringe behind their seats.

Mr. Woodcock may be a nasty tyrant, but he also knows his domain is small. "For Christ's sake," he tells Farley at one point, "it was just a PE class, you fruitcake."

It’s a more modest Traffic in several ways, adequate at what it tries to say about this dirty business but light on the wider scope of the suffering that it causes. Because there actually is a crisis, maybe it should be addressed with more of an emphasis on authentic details than on genre conventions.

First, and perhaps most important, it should be disclosed that my 4-year-old laughed pretty much nonstop throughout Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. This was his "Citizen Kane."

Sollima knows how to film violence, so individual moments stand out. What Sollima can’t do is make a good movie from a bad script.

Sarah Palin -You Betcha! is probably the scariest movie you will see all year.

An unabashed wallow in the moronic humor of Adam Sandler.

Gazecki's film is so journalistically flawed and needlessly melodramatic that it will be treasured only by those who share his singular vision.

A confounding and unsatisfying film.

Wants to be a brightly colored bubble but has trouble getting aloft.

An entertaining film for kids and young teens. It's also a product of the era in which we're living, and weird times make for weird movies.

The picture doesn't come close to approaching the near-classic quality of the earlier film.

The only problem with this movie, a substantial one, is that there’s a major sag in the story about halfway through. For its first hour, Moonfall is a blast.

The movie is so enamored of Walker, and Colter radiates so much charisma and pleasant mischief in the role, that it takes about half the running time to realize that the movie is not delivering on the basics.

Repressed desire! A sultry soap-opera star! Incest! Gay politics! "La Mujer de Mi Hermano" has it all. Now if it only had a decent plot.

The second half of the film is much funnier and warmer than the first, but the movie is still difficult to recommend.

It's that wonderful, totally unambitious yet satisfying thing, a really good movie.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

It sets up two or three dozen satirical targets, hits the mark occasionally, but has trouble maintaining an even satirical tone or satisfying pace. Dawber, too, is unappealing in the female lead -- definitely outclassed by Ritter. I'd wager Stay Tuned will die an early death at the box office and find its real life, appropriately enough, in home video. [15 Aug 1992, p.C3]

The Substitute is a guilty pleasure, but it's not garbage. Berenger brings to the role an appealing ruggedness and world-weariness, and Ernie Hudson, as the corrupt principal, is sleazy and elegant. The script isn't bad, either.

Visuals can't fill a spiritual vacuum, and Stay remains a pretty package that's empty on the inside.

Lakin’s screenplay veers so wildly between sitcom antics, pitch black comedy and heartwarming family drama that it leaves you feeling whiplashed. The film never quite merges its divergent tones, leaving Being Frank a frustrating mix of promising elements and appealing performances shackled to an unwieldy central premise that dispenses with joy the way a black hole dispenses with light.

A pleasant enough movie whose overt charm sometimes works against it.

Has no insights, no point, no urgency and no importance.

It’s so uncritical of its subject that it has the unintended effect of undermining its mission, which appears to be recruiting new devotees of the faith.

Curiously mellow for a John Carpenter thriller, Village of the Damned, a full-color, cornball special-effects remake of the 1960 sci-fi favorite, is a trip to a village of the darned tedious.

Career Opportunities is a real strange one, a tasteless and completely off-key comedy that has the elements of the much-more serious and more interesting picture it could have been -- if only the film makers had a clue as to what sort of movie they were making. [30 March 1991, p.C3]

Another dreadful, not-funny Owen Wilson movie, in which Wilson is the best thing.

Desperados is a lot of fun and announces “Saturday Night Live” alum Nasim Pedrad as a comic actress in the tradition of Sandra Bullock.

This wacky buddy road film... has a brilliant glow of intelligence behind the stupidness. It's easily the funniest movie of the year.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

Almost so bad it's good. Almost.

The Woman in the Window is, unfortunately, one of Wright’s amazingly bad movies, and this is a shame, with Amy Adams at the center of it.

More in the tone of the big screen "Friday Night Lights" than "Rudy" or "The Blind Side," it succeeds as mainstream entertainment without relying on a conventional storybook framework.

This time the martial arts philosophy lesson rings hollow. [10 Feb 1990, p.C5]

An adventure in mediocrity that brings together some of the worst current techniques and trends.

Still, Silk Road remains watchable because both Robinson and Clarke are interesting screen presences. And there’s some humor, which consistently lands better than the thrills.

Melissa is the only fully developed character in an overlong, badly paced film filled with cliched dialogue and accented by pleasant yet forgettable music.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

It's good for a few guffaws and chuckles, but in between the screen has a tendency to stretch at the corners and go flat.

More of a tribute than a hard-hitting piece of American filmmaking, which is too bad, because the subject - the imprisonment of ex-Black Panther figure Mumia Abu-Jamal - deserves a thorough, serious examination.

The movie was written by Scott Yagemann, who taught seven years in the Los Angeles public- school system, and you can feel the rancor and bitterness he still carries.

A pleasant surprise. What looked to be yet another science fiction movie turns out to be one of the year’s few romantic dramas, one which just happens to be set aboard a space ship.

All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.

This thick, leaden production starring Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette - and an uncredited Robin Williams - has a sophomoric air, even though it faithfully follows the book.

There's something heartening about a film that aspires to do nothing but entertain -- and does.

This is a film that, in some ways, is too complex for the kids, yet leaves the adults feeling left out, too.

It's a pumped-up, intricate and fast-moving yarn that never flags and continues to play out in unexpected ways as it unravels.

Sabotage cannot be called a good movie, not with a straight face. But as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it has something.

A lot of resources went into making G-Force - a lot of talent, a lot of money, a lot of marketing - and there's not much to show for it, not even some halfway imaginative 3-D gimmickry.

Instead of building in impact, the film feels smaller as the cast dwindles. You get the feeling that the most important actors are getting killed first, so that they can go off to act in better movies. [20 Apr 1994, p.E5]

Disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

A real surprise. It seems to promise an exploitative genre movie, about gangsters and drug deals, and it delivers on that, but it’s something more. Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocet have taken a Mexican thriller, with a female victim at its center, and have turned it into an intelligent feminist film.

Before I Go to Sleep emerges as a mystery — one with a slow burn leading to a big payoff. But what keeps the movie going, beyond questions of what is true and what is false, are the issues raised by the illness itself.

Benefits from Smith and Lawrence's chemistry. As long as they're on screen together, things breeze along. But when they're apart, the movie flounders.

This is a movie of excesses that doesn't know when to settle down. It aims to be a slapstick comedy, a romantic comedy and a plain old romance but falls short of each goal.

A film that looks way more fun to make than it is to watch. There’s a stubbornness to the comedic approach, mostly in its unwillingness to age since the first “Super Troopers.”

I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great night’s sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.

This is the picture the Belgian actor has been waiting for, the step up in class that has seemed inevitable since his breakthrough in ''Bloodsport'' six years ago. ''Nowhere to Run'' is not just a boy movie. Women can enjoy it, too, and Van Damme's boyish good looks and gentlemanly manner -- gentlemanly, except when he's smashing heads -- won't hurt. [16 Jan 1993, p.C3]

In White Chicks, the gross-out humor is minimal, no character comes off too badly and lessons are learned. Oh Wayanses, where are thy teeth?

It’s a good sci-fi action movie, too. Far be it from me to give this movie the kiss of death by making it seem too serious for its core audience. Chappie is everything it has to be — but it’s everything it should be, too.

The most notable thing about Hop is its technical perfection. It puts live action and animation into the same frame so seamlessly that the filmmakers might easily not get credit for it.

Even with a script that doesn’t provide much behavioral variety and goes in many wrong directions, Bullock commands the screen with little more than closed lips and wary stares.

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

Britney Vs Spears often feels just as exploitative as the case it portrays.

After a month, no one will talk about this movie, ever again. Still, with a picture like this, there's really only one question: Is it any fun? Yes. Lots. Definitely.

Metro, the new Eddie Murphy cop picture made in San Francisco that opens today, goes beyond cliched: It's shameless. The relationships, plot turns -- even the action sequences -- are trite and uninspired. Murphy is fresh, as usual, but "Metro" is not.

Never gets the mixture right, lurching between bullet-happy shootouts and overwrought domestic content.

In its second half, Outlander falls apart completely, becoming nothing but a violent, mindless monster movie along the lines of "Alien vs. Predator."

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

Friedkin is steeped in gore, like some cinematic Macbeth, and it's obscuring his artistic vision.

Lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

What is meant to be brave comes off as gimmicky and immature.

Here Today is a weird case — not mediocre, not lukewarm, but genuinely bad and good, cringe-worthy and moving. Take this as a recommendation, and a warning.

Mostly succeeds in unmasking the flaws of fetishizing skin-deep beauty.

Even at her most nihilistic, Cameron Diaz is about as menacing as a boozy college cheerleader.

Come Away is an idea that never takes flight.

There's an appeal here, for sure, but if you're not 8 years old you may never figure it out.