It's a dreadful exercise, tin-eared and sincere, bereft of any truth or inspiration.

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

Lacks the clever twists and turns that made the original such fun. The sequel has exactly one twist, and it's not very clever.

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

But the film suffers from a major and unforgivable flaw, one that grows more implausible and ridiculous over time.

A wildly implausible thriller.

It's hard to tell if Cage's performance is a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year. [2 June 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E8]

Dick Cheney deserves better than this — or worse. So does Lynn Cheney, played by Amy Adams, who strains in vain to give dimension to a script that paints Mrs. Cheney as little more than an amoral social climber.

With its flat story, numbed-out protagonist, and faux artistic lighting and set design - everything is dark or moody or darkishly moody or moodily dark - Max Payne seems a good half hour longer than its running time.

They try to make Beverly adorable, and the movie comes off strained and dishonest as a result.

This lurid thriller comes to life in fits and starts, and then sinks into the bog of its own cleverness once again.

When you walk out of the theater feeling more empathy for the tortured monster than his Bride, the experiment has failed.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

The biggest betrayal of The Traitor is its crime against the usually compelling Mafia movie genre. This is an offer you can refuse.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

The movie's bereftness of invention can be measured by how no story element builds on another. Instead, Happy Feet Two is plotted so that a bunch of disparate things happen, until it's time to end the movie.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

A third-rate effort, with a weak script, cheap-looking effects and no genuine frights.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

That Summer leaves me with Beale fatigue. It would seem to appeal to “Grey Gardens” completists only.

Approximately the last hour of Dante's Peak is made up of action scenes, and how well one likes computer-generated destruction will determine how well one likes the movie.

This latest from director Wayne Wang, about the friendship of two young women, travels from 2011 to 1997 to 1829 to 1838, in search of a reason for the audience to keep watching and start caring. That reason is never found.

In an attempt to be complex and fair-minded, a simple story becomes a jumble of confused motivations.

Wilson and Helms favor Bradshaw in likability. But they are not two hours’ worth of likable, in a film this flawed.

To call this effort misguided would be kind. The job this "prequel" does on the original Dumb and Dumber is the movie equivalent of surgery that removes all the vital organs and then gives the patient a prosthetic third arm. What's needed isn't there, and what's here we don't need.

Of course, the real problem here isn’t that Ritchie isn’t Noel Coward, but that he’s not clever or funny in his own right. The Gentleman isn’t offensive, and it’s not even good enough to qualify as coarse. If it weren’t mildly annoying, it would be as close to nothing as an experience can be.