A relatively harmless movie that becomes killing-a-mockingbird sinful for what it does to its leads.

Will probably pass muster with very young viewers, but their parents may grit their teeth at its saccharine quality.

It is exactly as one might imagine it: slapstick humor, gross-out monsters and more self-referential digs per minute than "Arrested Development."

Between the off-center comic riffs of Tom Arnold and the wildly improbable hair's-breadth escapes, the whole business dissolves into amiable action farce.

A surreal comedy about sex that comes as close to charming as Greenaway ever gets.

It’s bland. It’s benign.

The heart of the picture has to do with the heroes realizing the error of their ways and finding redemption, but it takes a lot for an audience to forgive two murderers. Belly comes up short.

Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.

Has the strengths and weaknesses of a one-man show.

The reversion to formula takes a pleasing comedy and drops it down a notch, but That Awkward Moment is still very easy to like.

Almost everything about the movie lands with an emphatic, preordained thud.

Funny how there are fans of Jennifer Lawrence who will never see her in Serena. It’s not her best film, but it contains one of her best performances, in a role that challenges her more than any other.

It's a respectable B- movie -- airy, inconsequential and a little too cute at times, but fairly entertaining all the same.

Handsomely weathered John Hurt, as Pelagia's father, gives a performance of such unhackneyed dignity that it provides a moral compass for the action and helps to keep the ricocheting emotional content of the film in balance.

Most moviegoers will have trouble looking past Culkin the actor, who does a decent job of sending up youthful fame in a movie that's barely worth the effort.

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

It's a sad sight when two big- name stars sink this low, especially when their demoralization and embarrassment are right up on the screen. [24 Aug 1991, p.C3]

The Nut Job 2 isn’t maddening like “Smurfs 2,” where you continue to hate yourself years later for spending the money. It’s an adequate babysitter that completely fails to inspire.

When its biggest trick is finally revealed, it is not entirely satisfying.

It’s a poorly made film, with rough edits, distracting staging and plot contrivances that can be predicted to the moment.

Has a vacant, inept, why-oh-why feeling from its opening minutes and only gets worse.

The rare David Spade movie that won't make you hate yourself in the morning.

But throwing fairy dust in our eyes can’t make us think we’ve entered Fairy Land. It just takes a lowdown tale and inflates it until it bursts.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

Some clunky writing and a distracting subplot limit the effectiveness of this ambitious low-budget indie. Great idea for a movie, though.

Well-intentioned but frequently inert.

These people are so stupid that they make us think, well, wait a second: Maybe those livers and kidneys could be put to better use.

The sexual tension is thick between the woodland creatures in Alpha and Omega, an animated children's film with a plot that has more in common with "The Blue Lagoon" than "Bambi."

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

Relies on slapstick scenes that are neither essential nor especially clever.

What makes it interesting is the story that the viewer must put together, of a model who lives her entire life -- or at least what we see of it -- in front of the camera.

There is a very good movie stuck somewhere on The Thirteenth Floor trying to get out. Too bad this isn't it.

Although The Reaping' borrows elements from classics of the genre -- rips them off might be more accurate -- it fails to build the psychological tension that made them so creepily good.

This is anti-funny, where every attempt at a joke is like a little rock thrown at your face.

Best reason to stay home and rent "Disturbia": I Am Number Four is a little better and makes loads more sense than "Eagle Eye." But neither has the sass and pluck of "Disturbia."

Who wants to spend a minute on the Strip with the chance that there might be people as annoying as the characters played by Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher walking around?

The predictable script feels as if it were filmed right off the cocktail napkin it was jotted on, but at least the movie has an "Ocean's 11" sequel's worth of good actors, including Alfred Molina, Jeremy Irons and Jean Reno.

Its whodunit plot is easily figured out, and its story is a mess. Most surprisingly, its star, Bruce Willis, manages to pull off an entirely uncharismatic performance...Striking Distance passes through boring on its way from indifferent to laughable, with the last 20 minutes the most ridiculous. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

The Invisible is, at its core, a character study, albeit one with a Patrick Swayze-in-"Ghost" paranormal edge. But it's definitely not mindless trash. If anything, the movie is too introspective, to the point that it doesn't build enough conflict or tension.

Despite its faults Rambo III has an undeniable momentum and, judged on its own terms, a certain comic-book appeal. [26 May 1988, p.E1]

The new comedy is screechingly inane and skitters in nine directions at once.

It would be a mildly lovely thing to be able to say the movie isn't bad. But it is.

Listless, self-absorbed slackers stare into computer monitors, groan about their lives and moan during cyber sex in On_Line. It makes you wonder, is there is a market for soft-porn movies for lonely geeks? Isn't that what computers are for in the first place?

An uneasy mixture of tragedy, satire, monster yarn and David Cronenberg creepiness, No Such Thing can't decide what it wants to be or how it needs to get there.

The Next Karate Kid' has all the makings of a terrible movie, but it never quite becomes one. One reason might be that cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs just loves a beautiful picture. [10 Sep 1994, p.E6]

Bordello of Blood easily could have been called "Bore- dello of Blood." This gory vampire spoof is remarkably free of jolts, hardly registering as a fright film, with a series of weak special effects involving many globs of guts...The big themes in this lackluster second feature under the "Tales From the Crypt" banner are sex and religion. Both are presented with painfully sophomoric irreverence.

The concept might have worked well on paper. But on screen, at least how Chase Palmer has directed and co-scripted it, those clashing elements exert weak gravitational pull.

Written by William Gibson, who adapted his own short story, and directed by New York artist Robert Longo in his feature debut, Johnny Mnemonic is inescapably a very cool movie. Running at a fevered pace, with laser and light explosions, it introduces a fantastic yet plausible vision of a computer-dominated age.

One more small thing: Every other scene in Saw IV starts and ends with a potential victim pressing "play" on a tape recorder, to the point where it's almost funny.

Two awful things about Push are at least interesting: The first is the way in which the story is confused. The second is that the story makes no sense.

Kin is not a snoozer, at least, and the Baker brothers are certainly not untalented, but their genre-mashing experiment doesn’t work on any emotional level.

The game’s repetition quickly gets tiresome.

A funny action comedy that comes into your house in a good mood and gets the reaction it’s supposed to get: laughs.

A stink bomb of a movie.

It's the kind of movie that crumbles into trash -- non-recyclable -- if you spend more than 10 minutes thinking about it. It's designed for dumb fun, and delivers some. [10 July 1992, p.D3]

A resoundingly unlovable movie that almost resists being watched.

Grudge Match at its core is an affront to the cinema gods, an attempt to capitalize off two iconic films for a few cheap laughs.

A sharp-witted satire of celebrity journalism.

This latest installation in the “Big Fat Greek” franchise is colorful and celebratory, eager to entertain and wears its heart on its sleeve. There’s something to be said for that.

There's a psychological undercurrent. The movie occupies a zone where science fiction and nightmares collide and intertwine.

Williamson's script, which he also directed, is spiteful and shallow.

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

It's astonishing what little impact even the most imaginatively choreographed and well-filmed aerial escapades can have when they're presented as neither an expression of a character's personality, nor in the context of a compelling mission.

Looks fantastic, but the film suffers from the TV-to-feature transition.

Hernandez's debut feature is a thuddingly slow, often wordless portrait of emotional pain.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

In the end, Venom exists in what may end up being regarded as a no-man’s land — too much like a superhero movie to appeal to people who despise the genre, and yet too deliberately silly to be taken seriously by superhero fans. There’s nothing memorable in Venom, nothing to talk about the next day. But if it happens to hit you right, its lightness is refreshing.

Goes south as a sci-fi film.

The problem with Birth of the Dragon, George Nolfi’s largely fictionalized account of a 1964 fight between an Oakland martial arts instructor named Bruce Lee and San Francisco instructor Wong Jack Man is that Lee...is the third-most important character in the film.

The movie has that fatal triptych that is becoming Reiner's romantic-comedy signature: drippy sentiment, zany scenes that trivialize the characters and a horror of adventure.

What has gone wrong in director Matthew Vaughn’s process that he can offer up an awful mess like “Argylle” and just hope that nobody will notice? He must notice.

No target is too obvious for Salvation Boulevard, a farrago of cheap shots aimed at Christian fundamentalism. It's a blunderbuss satire that criminally wastes a talented cast.

An action movie has to be taken on its own terms, and on its own terms The Perfect Weapon still amounts to a 90-minute bore. [16 Mar 1991, p.C3]

When the end finally arrives, it brings no sense of completion, just a sort of numb awareness that the pain has stopped.

A well-oiled, loudly revving summer action vehicle that does all that's required, and then some, within the confines of PG-13: It cracks genitalia jokes, messes around with toys and blows stuff up.

The best scenes are the ones that Fox shares with Tamala Jones, Wendy Raquel Robinson and the full-figured Monique as her sassy girlfriends. There's a ripe, crackling spontaneity when these women get together.

Mirthless and barely musical.

Do you really want to spend money watching what is essentially marginality, or would those dollars be better used to see a better film or even buy a good book?

Pet Sematary Two' follows the usual horror movie pattern: The first half is a pleasure, because you know what has to happen and you can't wait. And the second half is a bore, because you know what still has to happen and you can't wait for it to end. [01 Sept 1992, p.E3]

A thriller without thrills. It's also a thriller that cheats. The story is stretched to feature length only by having the film's incidents arranged in such a way as to reveal as little as possible.

With Lake at the center, something that could have been innocuous becomes painful, and a sure shot at mediocrity is transformed into one of the worst films of the year.

The only performer who breathes any life into the proceedings is Vincent Perez.

The story is unbelievable and phenomenally silly, not a good combination.

A movie for teenagers, and, as these things go, very entertaining.

The direction, by Ben Nott and Morgan O'Neill, is average, except for the surfing sequences, which are easily as striking as what we see in documentaries about the sport. Another positive is the soundtrack, with amusing high-energy rock tunes of the era.

110 minutes of Euro silliness mitigated only by the presence of Huppert and the striking ability of the actors to keep a straight face throughout this mess.

This movie isn't horrible, but it seems like a waste for Zombie to keep revisiting someone else's world.

It's not a great film, but Event Horizon produces an intense sense of visual involvement. The hallucinatory, almost 3-D-like scenes stick in the mind.

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

Speaking of female gangsters, no review of The Kitchen should overlook Margo Martindale, who steals every scene she’s in as a mob matriarch — a gravelly voiced monster with a gutter mouth and a big photo of John F. Kennedy on her wall. Martindale gets to be evil and has as much fun onscreen as she can without smiling.

A harmless, aimless, mildly funny and thoroughly predictable comic-romantic piffle.

Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.

It's a bizarre hybrid: one part feminist screed, one part French art film and one part skin flick.

A tired and dispiriting affair that takes forever to get going.

Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.

uUninspired, unnecessary and formulaic.

A 2-hour, 20-minute bore-de-force of virtually dialogue-free angst.