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 pretty ugly movie in its own right.

Takes some admirable risks.

Kinda cute, laced with a few chuckles, but mostly just annoying, the new feature film version of The Little Rascals is not likely to go down in history as a paean to kids or a filmic delight for anyone much older than 7. [05 Aug 1994, p.C3]

The makers of Into the Blue know what the audience wants. And they deliver a little bit more.

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.

It’s an elaborate and artificial concoction, without any discernible ambition behind it.

The remake is a solidly crafted movie with a lot of good scares, but it also raises the question: Why even bother with an update?

By the standards of most IMAX films, this is a bizarre entry, a documentary about bugs that was produced by Terminix, the pest control company.

Compared with other movies, Seven Psychopaths is clever and inventive enough to be considered a weak success or a modest failure, the kind of effort that usually gets damned with the faint praise of "not bad."

Trespass never advances beyond being a grand manipulation.

A pleasant addition to the time-honored genre of terminally cute youth romance movies, roughly equivalent to staring at a saccharine greeting card for a while.

Rust isn’t so much a poor story or even badly told; there’s just too much of it, strung out along a discursive narrative trail that turns out to be unnecessarily repetitious.

Cleverness won't carry it. Nothing less than overarching vision is required; otherwise, the audience will laugh for 10 minutes and then start to check out. And that pretty much states the problem of Mirror Mirror.

It's an apocalyptic ghost story with some eerie images and a surprising turn toward the end, but it bogs down considerably between the good scenes.

Hard to hate, but if you actually want to love it, you've got to force yourself. [27 Nov 1991, p.E1]

Throughout the film, we always feel ahead — way ahead — of the narrator, even if the movie does contain a certain sense of dread for Trump detractors, as the inevitability of the election draws closer.

It's the supporting players who stand out.

To be fair, War of the Buttons is a film with a modest agenda. It does not attempt to provide a complete or even vaguely realistic depiction of the rural French resistance in the endgame to World War II. Instead, it provides a fable.

Campbell's admirers will probably enjoy the documentary, but I don't think it will do much for anyone else.

Campbell and Edwards work wonders with the rocky, wide-open Oregon landscape, but none of their periwinkle-blue skies and sparkling shots of whooping cranes in flight can compensate for a film that aims high, means well, and ultimately fails its audience. [20 May 1994]

Isn't all bad. It isn't good, either, but it's better than it deserves to be, and if one sits and watches, the laughs do come, a few.

Traveller is entertaining in a mild, relaxing way.

The result is that a story with a couple of good ideas founders for lack of a third or fourth good idea. Still, any picture that features Radcliffe having a nervous breakdown for two hours has something to recommend it.

Rarely rises above the level of a TV movie.

Neither hilarious nor a credible spoof.

There’s no way to call Havoc a good movie, but as bad movies go, this is a good one. Depending on your mood, its variety of craziness could be what you’re looking for.

This is a movie in which whole sequences consist of nothing but guys fighting stiff computer images. Such scenes would be boring even were they done well, but these scenes aren't done well.