The settings and supporting roles suggest that If I Stay started out as someone’s passion project, but the final product only requires its star to sleepwalk through buckets of schlock.

It's almost offensive that Danny Glover is relegated to playing the mysterious old confidante who haunts the same fishing hole as Cal. By the time Glover's character delivers the homily, Legendary is pinned to the mat.

Toys may be beautiful to look at, but it's hard to love. [18 Dec 1992, p.1G]

As long as Hollywood keeps hitting us over the head with empty spectacles like G.I. Joe: Retaliation, regular Joes will be too numb to fight back.

Decent performances from Emilio Estevez and Denis Leary can't rescue this movie from its weak screenplay and predictable story. [21 Oct 1993, p.7G]

All in all, it's better than your average boy-meets-girl techno-thriller - but only just. [30 May 1995, p.5D]

The best thing about Renegades is a beautifully choreographed car chase early in the movie. After that, the movie creeps along for 20 minutes or so while the two principals grope toward buddyhood. Then, with bonding accomplished, the action picks up somewhat, but never really catches fire. [07 Jun 1989, p.3E]

With stingy portions and plenty of filler, Magic Mike XXL is the worst sausage party ever.

The most rewarding way to watch Water for Elephants is to focus on the sideshow of costumes and craftsmanship, because the romance in the center ring smells like trained animals going through the motions.

There's a fascinating story here for a bolder filmmaker, but after so much meandering it's a relief that "All Good Things" must come to an end.

Because we don't know or care much about the characters, this Israeli film never fulfills its potential as either an absurdist comedy or a humane drama.

All that complexity backfires at about the midpoint, leaving viewers with a standard yarn about a popular guy who makes a grossly insensitive wager after his trophy girlfriend drops him. After that, it is all a case of "been there, done that." [29 Jan 1999,p. E3]

’Round these parts, when a movie promises a million laughs but only delivers a dozen chuckles, that’s a hanging offense.

CRAZY PEOPLE is a one-joke movie. It's a pretty good joke: Slightly unbalanced people write ads that tell the absolute truth about products, and the products sell like crazy. But it isn't good enough to make us care for long about a mental-institution romance between Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah that has the feel of ''David and Lisa: The Sit-Com.'' [13 Apr 1990, p.3F]

Hearts and Souls is an only intermittently entertaining reworking of an ancient Hollywood formula. [13 Aug 1993, p.5F]

A B comedy so forgettable that although I know I saw it, I was equally sure that Fred MacMurray was in it. (He wasn't.) But over time, movies - particularly Disney comedies - tend to acquire a hazy, nostalgic charm. [10 Nov 1995]

An odd mix of special effects, cartoonish adventure and father-son bonding isn't very funny or poignant. [20 Dec 1998, p.C9]

Here, Dan Aykroyd mimics the original voice, but the three-dimensional CGI isn't loose and lively enough to compensate for the unimaginative story.

A foul-mouthed comedy, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. "Bad Santa" (2003) also had plenty of crude language and lewd behavior. The difference is, "Bad Santa" was extremely funny.

Like so many great stories, Maverick should belong in memory, because taking it to the big screen again is a major disappointment. [20 May 1994, p.3E]

Judged solely in comparison to its corporate cousins, Iron Man 3 is a defective model. It’s lightweight but slow, padded with cheap jokes to disguise how hollow it is.

Duvall is a powerful actor, and this folksy fable could have been a career-capping feat, but the movie is toothless and slow.

The franchise has sadly devolved into a cynical cash grab.

This gravely serious drama is as insular as a tomb with Muzak. It takes a particularly heavy hand to make us numb to the abduction of two children, but that's the effect of the wall-to-wall music and earnestly dour performances.

First Kid is filled with slapstick and predictable jokes. The kids in the preview audience seemed to enjoy it, despite the commendable fact that it generally avoids bathroom humor and age-inappropriate gags about children's sexuality. [30 Aug 1996, p.3E]

Back when it was planned as an African-American "Ocean's Eleven," this project might have been edgy, but the script has been whitewashed into a generic caper comedy with pretensions of timeliness.

The movie version of Fifty Shades is better than the book. It's still awful, but when a filmmaker starts with stupid source material, he's handcuffed.

This is a generic, uninspired and mind-bogglingly boring comic-book movie that’s out to steal your money and time.

On a scale of 1 ("Men in Tights") to 10 ("Naked Gun"), I'd give "Fatal Instinct" about a 5. [31 Oct 1993, p.9C]

This is an extremely gory flick, with autopsy scenes to complement Schwarzenegger’s usual shoot-first sensibilities. After 30 years, it’s pointless to complain about the collateral damage in his movies, but here Schwarzenegger is taking vigilante justice to dark new levels that can only be reached via plot holes big enough for a Hummer.

The questions raised by Oblivion aren’t especially deep, but the movie does answer a puzzler that has troubled humankind for generations: Can Tom Cruise build a concept so big that he himself can’t lift it?

The mediocre mushy stuff isn’t alleviated by enough action.

Prince is a puzzle. Unfortunately, in Graffiti Bridge, he isn't a very interesting one. The main problem may be that most of the music in this sequel to Prince's 1984 musical Purple Rain is mediocre, mainly derived from rap and funk but without the energy those forms generate when they are presented raw. [06 Nov 1990, p.4D]

While it claims to be exported from New Jersey, The Oranges is peddling an alien motto: When life hands you lemons, fuhgeddaboudit.

The verdict on Snitch is that Johnson has attempted a career detour on a street marked Do Not Enter.

Considerably better looking than its predecessor, but it's spewing the same old gibberish.

Spacey evokes memories of other movies in which he's played a shark, and it's inherently fascinating to hear Aniston talking dirty and to see Farrell with a combover, but nothing in the film is genuinely provocative.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

McNaughton directs well, and with power, but celebrating murder is a waste of his talents. [17 August 1990, p.3F]

It's a worn-out show-business fairy tale piggybacking on a nonexistent trend.

Like its main character, I Don't Know How She Does It tries to do everything, but it doesn't quite succeed.

Nocturnal Animals is far less imaginative than even your most banal nightmare.

It's classic sitcom shtick, and The Dilemma is a painful reminder that director Ron Howard was trained in television.

Struggles heroically, but unsuccessfully, to strike a balance between whimsy and pathos.

A movie with no surprises at all, a streamlined chase flick that is running on the fumes from recycled fuel.

ROMEO Is Bleeding is an interesting mess. A very self-conscious contemporary take on the film noir genre, it is so dark (both photographically and psychologically) and derivative that at times it seems like a parody. [2 March 1994, p.6F]

Here's a riddle: What's Alice in Wonderland without wonder? It's a beloved character landing in the rubble of wrong-headed revisionism.

It's eerie rather than wondrous.

If being seated at Table 19 is a drag, watching the film of the same name is worse.

This is another one of those phony movies in which a character burrows into someone else's life without telling them she's an axe murderer, a man or a vampire. Not only that, we're supposed to hope that they get it on. I was hoping that everyone involved would get hit by an asteroid.

We were promised desolation, but “The Hobbit” just keeps dragon on.

McAvoy and Fassbender appealingly reprise their frenemy chemistry. But Lawrence has little to do but look perplexed.

If Repo Men could have sustained its ghoulish humor, it might have been a guilty pleasure.

THIS odd, anachronistic movie is the story of a couple of white guys (Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas) messing around in 19th-century Africa, and a couple of lions who want to eat them. I kept rooting for the lions. The Ghost and The Darkness is not a bad movie, and the scenes with the lions are fearsome. But it is so old-fashioned in its view of British Colonial Africa that you keep expecting Stewart Granger to wander in out of "King Solomon's Mines" (1950). [11 Oct 1996, p.3E]

Although the ratio of comedy to drama becomes increasingly weighted toward tearjerking, few of the emotional moments are realistic or effective.

OK, the musical ode to Doby the shark elicits a grin, but the low-percentage script is loaded with buckshot, not harpoons, and Anchorman 2 ends up sinking.

How you feel about Fast & Furious 6 is a matter of perspective. While a middle-age egghead might note that a series that started out as a harmless cars-and-girls fantasy has devolved into a full-blown assault on human intelligence.

Written, directed and acted by Hollywood pros, Heaven Is For Real is a polished little movie with a hopeful message, but when it literalizes the divine mysteries, it opens the door to a Doubting Thomas.

One small step for action movies, one giant leap into the abyss of mindlessness.

A documentary that clearly aspires to the highest standards of cinematic muckraking but makes for a frustrating experience.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

As a sex-education comedy, Hysteria is flaccid, forced and unfunny.

Given the mood of so many of today's movies, it might be a pleasure to see an old-fashioned love story. But I think movie-goers have changed, and the peculiar coincidences, the large plot holes and the absurdity of so much of the story line combine to make the story more silly than sentimental, more ridiculous than riveting, more foolish than fulfilling, more maudlin than anything else. [21 Oct 1994, p.3G]

With its nonsensical, confounding story, it might not be for anyone, even if its heart is in the right place.

Reaching for meaning in The Nun II is as fruitful as a wander down a dark and dusty old hall. You’ll find things that go bump in the night but not much else underneath all the doom and gloom.

Christmas Vacation reminds me of a golden retriever I used to know: dumb and sloppy but kind of likable as long as you don't expect any new tricks. [1 Dec 1989, p.3F]

Keeping Up With the Joneses is hardly worth the effort.

Kevin Hart hits the vicinity of humor with a few of his drive-by wisecracks, but the movie itself has nothing under the hood.

After watching Post Grad, you may wonder whether Hollywood will ever stop making generic comedies with zero tolerance for originality.

The clichéd script doesn't develop the secondary characters or the critical theme of the mutants' alienation.

Disney serves up a warmed-over tale that was never one of its best to begin with and mistakenly tries to substitute teen-angst-ridden Christina Ricci for the totally adorable Hayley Mills. It's a serious mistake. [14 Feb 1997, p.03E]

The delivery pouch for Premium Rush promises a white-hot thriller from the bike-messenger subculture. But what's inside the package seems like a lukewarm action-comedy from the pile of scripts that Matthew Broderick rejected after "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

There's nothing cinematic about this turgid tearjerker except the slumming presence of movie star Harrison Ford.

TAKEN AS a Hollywood remake of Japanese movies based on Westerns, Road House assumes a certain style that makes the film not half bad. Of course, that leaves it still not half good. Without provenance, the film becomes just a way to provide work for the man who produces the sound of fist hitting flesh. Given its lineage, however, Road House makes sense. Everything is here but the dog at the end of "Yojimbo" walking out of town with a bloody arm gripped in its canines. [19 May 1989, p.3E]

In the Mouth of Madness is not a bad movie, and it maintains a fair amount of suspense for an hour or so. Then it sags, mainly because it has no real payoff, neither dramatic or visual. [03 Feb 1995, p.3F]

It's clear that Phillips is betting heavily on funnymen Jeong and Galifianakis to hide his creative bankruptcy.

A handsome movie with a handsome leading man. Christian Bale is widely considered the finest actor of his generation. Yet here he’s adrift in the bulrushes. This might be the most indifferent performance of Bale’s career.

J. Edgar is the kind of prestige production that apologists will call polished, but even the technical attributes are tinny. In the gay-geezers scenes, Hammer wears terrible old-age makeup, and the entire film is bathed in sepia tones as weak as its convictions.

An Australian horror yarn that builds occasional tension and brings occasional gasps. The problem is that with the space limitations of a boat and the fact that there are just three characters, it's impossible to have enough tension to make the film work. [07 Apr 1989, p.3G]

The screenplay is such a mess that the cast cannot overcome it, and the result is a major disappointment. [18 Dec 1989, p.3D]

Fitfully, someone will say or do something very funny, but much of the time passes in a rather laborious way. This movie should have been a lot better than it is. [27 Nov 1994, p.9C]

The special effects remain good, but the jokes are creaky, the sentiments are forced and the pop-historical lessons are obligatory.

This movie, which was made by an animation studio in Spain, isn't trying to make a social statement; it speaks in the international language of lightweight comedy.

Mars Needs Moms is dark for a Disney movie.

It's moderately entertaining until about halfway through, when it gets totally out of control. [16 Mar 1990, p.3F]

Ronald Bass' predictable screenplay gives Roberts no brains at all, which is an injustice. [08 Feb 1991, p.3F]

The so-so film isn't nearly as good as any of the movies that may have inspired it, or even its own knockout trailer.

With all due respect to Poitier as a dramatic actor, "Buck and the Preacher" is as bad a Western as many of the routine white-made Westerns. Its only redeeming feature is Belafonte, who steals the picture from the stone-faced Poitier with an engaging clever comic performance of the likable scraggly bearded rapscallion. [05 May 1972, p.51]

A medical drama that pays lip service to the healing power of music but never finds the rhythm.

Taking Care of Business gives little but doesn't take much away, either. It's not a film where you fret about whether everything is going to work out, and you know all the dangling strings are going to be tied in fancy bows by the end. [22 Aug 1990, p.5E]

The Big Year puts the focus on people who aren't inherently interesting - or funny.

Offbeat and unpredictable, Demolition takes a wrecking ball to audience expectations.

Starved of sufficient comedy or drama, The Age of Adaline is a pipsqueak.

Minions is product, pure and simple. Little kids will love it, but grown-ups will feel like they’re being held hostage in a Fisher-Price test laboratory.

The most grievous sins here are sins of omission.

Kevin Kline roars through The January Man as a character who is a mirror image of the one he played in A Fish Called Wanda. This time, he's uncommonly bright but still marches to a very different drummer. But while Wanda was bright and slick and very funny, January is as leaden as the month, and not very funny. [13 Jan 1989, p.5G]

This halftime walk is more like a long slog.

Hot Tub Time Machine isn't a good movie, but like a bubbling bath it keeps pounding at us until our resistance wears down.