Neither hilarious nor a credible spoof.

It takes about 20 minutes to catch on that Friday is without narrative drive - and about as long to figure out that the film offers nothing better in place of it.

The film, “based on the incredible true story” that happened in 2014, is an efficient, fun but by-the-numbers movie that has the distinction of being shot on location in the Dominican Republic, which looks quite lovely onscreen.

Like its low-key star, Hamlet 2 is more likely to elicit quiet chuckles than raucous laughter.

The bad outweighs the good and the cringes outnumber the laughs in Brüno, a disappointment from Sacha Baron Cohen, whose "Borat" was one of the funniest movies of the decade.

Going into this movie, there was a question whether “Bad Boys” might just feel like entertainment from an earlier time, but instead it feels like a cozy return — at least as cozy as possible, given that the movie is extremely violent.

The brilliant comic observation behind Strays is that dogs never quite get the complete picture. They misunderstand much of what they see — they believe rival dogs are in the mirror and that the mailman is the devil — and thus by staying entirely inside the dogs’ point of view, the movie taps a major source of humor.

Puccini for Beginners is literate and sensitive, characterized by witty dialogue and smart, emotional two-person encounters.

Remaking Get Smart for the big screen might have sounded like a bad idea, but the movie shows it to have been something else: a REALLY bad idea.

The documentary seems equally divisive. Like most of Young's recent work, it's scattered and unsubtle.

A culture-clash comedy that, in addition to being very funny, captures some of the discomfort and embarrassment of being a bumbling American in Europe.

A self-indulgent mess.

Saved throughout by its inviting atmosphere and richness of characters.

Mystery skillfully evokes Victorian London's dark depths.

A touching, sophisticated film that almost seems like a documentary in the way it captures an Italian immigrant family on the brink of major changes.

There is something of a Halloween costume about Woody Harrelson’s appearance in the film. He looks as if frozen midway into some morphing process between himself and Lyndon Johnson, a process that, by pure chance, happened to stop at the precise moment he began to look comical.

First Purge further lessens the drama by offering a hero and villains too mercenary to care about.

Blue Chips is in many ways like a modern Frank Capra movie, about a battle between corruption and idealism, money vs. love, the pack vs. the individual. It's an Americana story about white farm boys and black ghetto kids bringing their talents together in a pure endeavor and about the cynical forces that would pollute that. [18 Feb 1994, p.C3]

Plays like a movie that some teenage boy cooked up in his chemistry lab. There are lots of potent things floating around in it - sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland - but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.

'Night' is the kind of horror movie where a zombie puts his hand through a window, grabs the hero's face with a decayed hand and fellows in the audience laugh, knowingly. The laugh I can understand. The "knowingly" part I don't even want to think about it...As horror movies go, it's a little better than average. [22 Oct 1990, p.F1]

The movie is so cleverly entrenched in its sardonic style that Russell's toughest act must have been keeping a straight face. Escape From L.A. is surprisingly effective in picturing a former nirvana clenched in the twisted rubble of its own excess.

A mostly absorbing but strangely inert espionage drama that could have been a heart-pounding thriller.

While False Positive has lapses in logic and could have a quicker pace in the second half, it fully embraces a bizarre sense of the macabre that is irresistible.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I came away feeling cheated by Eddie the Eagle. It’s a jolly real-life tale about an underdog who made a splash at the 1988 Winter Olympics, and it does make you feel good, but it turns out that the film’s story is 90 percent fiction.

Why such a structurally scattered movie should hang together at all is a mystery. That it does more than that, that it works brilliantly, is a miracle, or at the very least the product of unquantifiable causes.

Booty Call never quite gets tiresome, thanks to the appealing cast and its sexy-goofy spirit. The picture succeeds in finding jokes within jokes.

With Stewart, we arrive at the only saving grace of Seberg, but a genuine saving grace. She is the only reason to see the movie, but she’s a really good reason.

But who cares what grumpy old grown-ups think? This reviewer watched with two movie-loving kids, and they did each laugh. Twice.