The strange case of a movie that clunks in every possible way but the ultimate way -- it entertains.

Writer-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore find a nice balance between the over-the-top high jinks and an emotional core, which unexpectedly crystallizes relatively late in the movie.

It's Valentine's Day! Unrealistic romantic expectations are in the air! And Safe Haven does the unrealistic romance thing pretty well.

The Ice Age screenwriters seem to be making up the rules as they go along, distracted by tired side plots to give the other characters a reason to exist in the film.

There's a case to be made for The Real Cancun as a document of the mating dance as well as an unintentionally poignant film about the brevity of youth.

A joyous, hilarious send-up of rock star pretensions and an enchanting celebration of "girl power" in pop culture.

The makers were clearly paying attention to the smaller details. But somehow, they missed all the big things that made the first Point Break a memorable escapist film of its time.

At best a little boring and at worst stomach-churningly offensive.

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

The movie's not bad enough to be world-ending, merely clumsy.

Another inert, soul-dead action drama that turns actors into zombies...It's garbage.

Sometimes indie pictures like this, with over-the-top acting and outrageous situations, are meant as a calling card for its creators - a chance to show their wares to others in the industry. So calling all producers, there is one tour-de-force performance in Scenic Route: the makeup team of Brian Kinney, Sara Robey and Maia Wagle. Admire their work, and bring earplugs.

As pleasantly earnest as Jim Belushi tries to be, and as pert as Linda Hamilton is as his plucky wife, their new movie Mr. Destiny is so contrived, pokey and predictable that it becomes a test of viewer patience. [12 Oct 1990, p.E5]

The Mummy is the rare Cruise film that doesn’t quite give audiences their money’s worth.

Vacation is consistently funny from beginning to end, a piling on of dumb but inventive jokes and excruciating, awkward situations.

Love Hurts is that rare action movie almost devoid of noticeable computer effects. It’s a hand-to-hand, bone-crunching martial arts movie with tongue firmly in cheek, resembling those Jackie Chan action comedies from the 1980s and ’90s.

In any case, Fatal Affair is one of those lucky efforts in which everything good about it is good and everything bad about it is fun. The cheesiness is part of the experience.

Think of The Bubble as part of a pattern we could have anticipated. Pandemic movies almost can’t be any good at this point. The pandemic won’t be funny, interesting or anything anybody wants to think about until we’re safely beyond it by a few years. So, filmmakers, set your watches for pandemic nostalgia to commence circa 2027, and between now and then, just put it out of your minds.

There's nothing particularly wrong with A Kid in King Arthur's Court and nothing right with it, either. Parents will take their kids to see it and suffer, but the pain is mild.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.

Efficient action thriller.

Diamonds doesn't shine.

These are good moments, and there are a few others, that prevent Tomb Raider from being one of the worst films of the year. But they're not enough to make it worth seeing.

Raises the bar for movies geared to teens.

Super- violent, super-serious and super-stupid.

There's no satisfaction and no pleasure to be gained by sitting through it. The characters are ludicrous and, worse than that, boring. And this is despite all the lead actors doing the best they can.

Better than a lot of teen comedies.

Yes, the life expectancy of a chipmunk maxes out at 10 years in captivity. So biologically, we must be coming toward the end of this franchise. That’s not the type of thing a critic looks up when filmmakers make more of an effort.

The movie keeps a snappy pace and the suspense pot boiling. The snippy interplay between the two cops adds enjoyable twists of comic chemistry. Constant rain and slick streets, though a cliche, set a moody tone. [07 Oct 1996, p.D2]

There are fun distractions, but it's easy to focus on the flaws.

What this really is is a great deal of screaming and running from room to room, wacky chase scenes, the old bag switcheroo, dim-bulb crooks and zany antics. Everyone is working hard, but as with Sofia Vergara's costumes, there isn't enough material.

Combines the usual dumb ideas with one good one. And not just good, but impressive, in that it makes sense of much of what went before.

Not since "An American Werewolf in London" in 1981 reset the standard for man-to-wolf transformations has anyone tried to get away with special effects as pitiful as the ones in this movie.

The best thing about “Living Boy” is the performance of Cynthia Nixon, who plays Thomas’ emotionally unstable mother.

The jump gimmick sounds as if it might make a cute romantic movie. But If Lucy Fell has so little meat that it plays like a television sitcom that somehow grew into a feature-length movie. It's airy, fluffy and ultimately uninteresting.

While it's possible to have a great time with the movie without having any interest in Kiss, it should be noted that the band does make an appearance.

A fun bit of escapism that's even tender in spots.

Though charming at times, just misses, due to a contrived story.

A joyous first feature by director Kwyn Bader, is a charmer.

But the jury is still out on Romano's future in movies. Hackman blows him off the screen.

An intermittently pleasing children's film.

Besides the fact that the film is flabby (way too much time is spent on history), its efforts to tie subliminal messaging to a vast array of political, media and pop cultural events turn the proceedings a little hazy (or a lot hazy, depending on your worldview).

An odd duck, a Southern melodrama that aspires to be a sensitive coming-of-age story, with some humor mixed in. Sometimes it doesn’t soar the way it should, though it remains engaging most of the way.

Fortunately, Beau Garrett brightens things up with her performance as the neurotic Brenda.

By and large a misguided and lame affair. Except for gratuitous gunplay so extreme it actually jolts you awake, it's a major snore. [28 Aug 1993, p.F1]

This poor excuse for a thriller turns, with a great crunching of gears, into a mess of a buddy comedy. Either way, it misfires.

It's not bad. It's cute.

On Deadly Ground is in every way the equal of Seagal's Under Siege, his first mainstream hit from 1992, and in terms of scale it's even bigger. Everything blows up. Everybody blows up. [19 Feb 1994, p.E1]

Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director, he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, Sucker Punch - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time.

Dragons may have seemed less out of place three decades ago, but it would have been a bad movie then as well. It's filled with clumsy transitions and erratic performances, and tied together by an awkward framing device.

Delivers all the pain, melodrama and redemption that fans of the genre demand.

What started out with the feel of a tight little kids' thriller turns into a Nickelodeon afternoon movie.

It presents a compelling situation, genuinely touching moments and pockets of strong acting ... and dialogue that has people in the audience turning to each other and laughing because it’s so absurd.

Let It Ride has atmosphere, plus a good setting, appealing actors - and a bad script. [19 Aug 1989]

North is director Rob Reiner's first flat-out failure, a sincerely wrought, energetically made picture that all the same crashes on takeoff. It's strange and oddly distasteful, at its best managing to be bad in some original and unexpected ways.

RV is a horrible movie about horrible people, and just because they call it a comedy doesn't mean we have to play along.

The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.

Fans of previous incarnations are advised to check their nostalgia at the door, while the uninitiated may simply check their brains.

The truly shocking thing about the new version is that it's not bloody awful.

Neither epochal nor epic in its ludicrousness. It's just run-of-the-mill trash.

Feels so moldy and out of date.

It would help if the plot were more than just an outline with a few convenient turns.

Dispiriting mess. The movie is bad in a boring way: tepidly paced, disjointed and lacking any emotional hook.

The last 15 minutes finally get it together for what passes as a movie experience with a considerable "gotcha!" quotient.

Despite moments of unintentional humor, “The Ritual” has an appealing gravity about it, which probably derives from its adherence to the historical record.

Mindhunters is as effective as a movie can be and yet still be 100 percent forgettable.

A strange good movie, bad in every way but its effect. And it’s an effective woman’s story, not exactly believable, but with another kind of truth, a truth of the heart. If that’s not enough, it’s close.

A very funny romantic comedy that nicely combines Adam Sandler's acerbic sweetness with Aniston's down-to-earth warmth.

Father-daughter relationship lacks impact.

Pryce is very good, but Very Annie Mary is a bit too eager to please.

Particularly impressive is the film's success at making an actor of average weight look emaciated. His cheekbones are built up so his cheeks appear to sink.

Badly cast and unevenly acted, “Regretting You” features the least healthy mother-daughter relationship since 1975’s “Grey Gardens.”

Although the finished product isn't great, it's more akin to a bad Steve Martin movie from the 1980s than bad Pauly Shore from the 1990s. We mean that as a compliment (sort of).

Annoyingly simplistic.

Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.

Contains so many insults to the audience's intelligence.

When all's said and done, it turns out to be quite sweet-natured. OK. I laughed. So sue me.

Manages to do the impossible: It makes Lopez bland.

The movie is a mess of bits and pieces that try to gel but don't. Still, it is stupidly fun.

Director/writer Kim Joo-hwan (“Midnight Runners”) builds tension deliberately and slowly over the 129-minute running time, delivering some undeniably chilling and visually unsettling images along the way. The Divine Fury doesn’t revolutionize the exorcism movie, but it does manage to shake it up a bit.

Blood surges, splashes, drips, gushes, swamps, floods, swells, swishes, rains, slushes, shoots and smears over everything. The rest of the special effects -- a mechanical arm melting, a school chemistry lab bursting into flame, a head being twisted off a torso -- are nothing to write home about. [11 May 1990, p.E7]

The result is a film that's far superior to Neil LaBute's "Your Friends and Neighbors'' and more entertaining than Todd Solondz's "Happiness.''

Every moviegoer will have his own breaking point, when The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones surpasses the mundane and enters the ridiculous.

Arrives in theaters today with a sheet over its head and a tag on its toe. So to speak. What we have here is a complete systemic failure, a comedy that's not funny, with action that's not thrilling.

In stiff competition for the lamest thing ever put on celluloid.

Despite its posh trimmings, and Fiorentino's feline presence, Jade never rises above its limitations and never cloaks the fact that Eszterhas' dialogue and script are basically pulp -- minus the trashy fun that we've come to expect from the genre.

It has the curse of earnestness. It is so sincere ... it is so sincere it could put you into a coma.

Surprisingly dull and predictable in its characterizations.

Amusing and holds interest largely thanks to its re-creation of a glitzy, flamboyant era, not to mention its soundtrack of disco songs that sound a lot better today than 20 years ago.

A better- than-average comedy that is raunchy and tasteless but ultimately funny from beginning to end.

A good-hearted 'tween comedy hampered by uneven direction and a misguided plot twist.

The movie [Sugarman] made gives little indication that she understands teen girls, dramatic or plain. Much of Confessions seems clueless and -- even worse for moviegoers of any age -- listless.

It lives up to its title, flying by in fast motion. Even the first-wave MTV generation may find the pace exhausting, but this piece of fluff wasn't made for them.

A mixed bag concocted with an almost willful aim to be quaint and a little arty, but one with small wonders poking through its soft, somewhat plain fabric. [06 May 1994]

Everything in the movie is suffused by a vision of life that is resoundingly and evidently false, but as this vision is not repulsive, but is intended to reassure, the lies don’t produce anger or frustration. No, they bring on the laughs.

It’s just cheap, it’s bad, and a completely out-of-left-field Pink Floyd reference — one of their employees is named Syd, the other Barrett — doesn’t help. It just feels like part of the general sloppiness.

This is a needlessly dull movie that should have gone back to the drawing board.

Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest, and its portrayal of people demonstrates either an ignorance of human behavior or a disdain for truth.