A dull film with unsympathetic characters brought together by a gimmicky premise that's handled with no imagination and a pristine fraudulence of emotion. Aside from that, it's great.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

Runs out of ideas long before the projector runs out of film.

Fast Color is not a success, in that it’s not enjoyable as entertainment. It doesn’t hold an audience.

Not only a step back in time - to 1431 - but a step back in this martial artist's international film career.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

An overblown action monstrosity with no surprises, no exhilaration and no thrills.

A whimsical but flat-footed attempt to account for several lost months in the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

Only a couple of good gags in its pileup of otherwise lame jokes keep the production from being an unqualified stinker.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.

Seemingly intended as a celebration of the power of books, it's an occasionally incoherent, sleep-inducing picture that reduces narrative to mere mechanics.

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

A bloody mess.

Yonkers Joe is incoherent, succeeding neither as an exciting gambling ride nor a touching family story.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

The plot movement feels very much like an unpleasant formality, shoved forward by tiresome devices.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

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.

In a word, bull - cruddy, foul-smelling and fly-specked, an excuse for a series of cheap sex scenes and single-entendre gags. [15 June 1988]

Any good will built up during the decent first half hour is quickly vaporized.

The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, The Kid Who Would Be King should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.

This movie could really use an Avon Barksdale, but even actor Wood Harris, who played drug kingpin Barksdale in "The Wire," seems a bit lost.

The Peasants is filled with sniping, fistfights, brutal violence and sexual assaults and becomes unbearable through its nearly two-hour running time. Most of these characters you wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes with, if that.

Asako’s only appeal seems to be that she’s very pretty. Her depth of character she apparently keeps to herself.