Eventually arrives at a lovely place, but it arrives limping. Small but nagging problems drag it down, such as weird acting choices, bizarre casting and strange aging makeup.

A lumpy concoction.

The film is well shot and has titillating action without a single persuasive emotion.

The film will have to settle for a bogey rather than a par. Still, some hyperbole is warranted, like "Safest Movie to Take the Entire Family To."

Sweet and insubstantial -- just like the French Christmas cake for which it's named.

A strange movie, in that it has the atmosphere of a comedy and some extreme characters set up to be comical, but there are really no funny scenes.

Kwak is indeed a highly original voice, but you wouldn't know it from Typhoon. It seems as if he's constrained by the conventional material.

Airplane buffs are going to have a particularly good time; each of the planes seems to have an obscure real-life counterpart. And pop-culture junkies will appreciate a few sly nods as well.

Kline, in particular, has the spark and know-how to overcome some awfully belabored writing and situations.

Onward goes on and on, but it barely moves forward. Long before its 114-minute running time has elapsed, it has overstayed its welcome.

Thank God for James Gandolfini.

Let’s get the bad news over with quickly: Captain Marvel is no “Wonder Woman.”

The film may be intended to launch the movie careers of Patrick Stewart and the gang from ''Star Trek: The Next Generation,'' but any vibrancy, any emotional power it has derives from William Shatner as Kirk. And it's not even his movie. [18 Nov. 1994, p.C1]

Rich with statistics and snazzy visuals, but it ignores those larger questions and, as a result, feels a tad naïve.

Don’t be misled by the middling rating attached to this review. Midsommar is anything but mediocre. It’s horrible and brilliant, a crashing failure but one with many good moments. What do you say about a movie that’s both a disgusting, tiresome and predictable endurance test and an irrefutable demonstration of real directorial talent? Perhaps, this: Ari Aster is definitely someone who should be making movies. But maybe not this movie.

The unsure approach to rich material (based on a story about a newspaper’s homophobic coverage of a drowned man) mixes the sexy and grotesque — and cancels each other’s good parts out.

Hunter Killer seems old-fashioned. It belongs to a genre that was pretty much exhausted before the Cold War was over. And it threatens us with a world that, from the standpoint of 2018, doesn’t look all that bad. The movie is overlong, at times confusing, and it’s self-important, with a soundtrack that keeps telling us we feel things that we don’t.

Makes an unpersuasive case that humans are to blame for the shrinking ice caps.

For all the movie's richness and dazzle, for all that money dripping off the screen, Batman Returns is a gorgeous failure -- flashy, intermittently appealing but, in the end, a big mess. Batman Returns lacks a coherent story. It lacks a point of view and a focus. And so everything suffers, even the art direction. [19 June 1992, p.D1]

Fallen is not perfect, and eventually it even becomes frustrating. Threads remain loose, and the movie doesn't fully exploit its premise. Still, it would be churlish not to appreciate the ride.

While it’s not always as sharp as it could be, the energy in Jolt never falters, and there are definitely amusing bits.

If you have to watch someone cooking or eating, Juliette Binoche is as good a choice as any, but even she can’t make scintillating entertainment out of chewing, stirring a pot and putting on oven mitts.

The dialogue is so earnest that its lack of humor becomes a source of humor in itself. The acting is so primal that you’ll swear a porn sequence is about to break out.

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.

Violent Night isn’t terrible, but it’s stuck between parodying something and trying to fit the genre it parodies. And it really should have been funnier.

Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience’s believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in Trainwreck, that belief is hard to come by.

The film is sprinkled with “f” bombs, which fails to disguise that the enterprise is based on a surprisingly dated notion of what’s racy. Also, you simply may not find Bridget quite as adorable as the filmmaker’s clearly believe her to be.

Still Mine is uplifting and heartbreaking, a contradiction that results in the viewer exalting and being let down at the same time.