There are a few beguiling moments in Holy Motors, particularly a martial-arts sequence and an erotic dance while Mr. Oscar is dressed in a motion-capture body suit, but the road between those moments is so strewn with stalled ideas that audiences who care about character and plot are liable to take the exit to a movie that makes sense.

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

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

Lovely to look at, and Vikander does nothing to derail her inevitable ascension to the A-list. But as a story, it evokes a word that no battlefield nurse would ever apply to her experiences: sterile.

A Bigger Splash? More like a small trickle.

It's a worthy cause and an honorable film, the first full-length Disney cartoon with an African-American heroine. But without a strong story, it's a case of one step forward and two steps back.

Wingfield's attempts to bring the movie to a smooth conclusion fail completely, and the weakness of the story undermines the smooth, careful direction of Robert Mulligan, a veteran with 40 years of movies like To Kill a Mockingbird to his credit. [15 Nov 1991, p.3G]

Manages to waste the talents of its strong supporting cast, which includes Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell and Stanley Tucci.

By design it’s monotonous, and with so much clunky hardware, Liman can’t generate the same pace he produced in the “Bourne” movies. Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today.

This undramatic and flat peek “inside” the sewing rooms of Christian Dior holds little in the way of entertainment.

This film might give you the urge to check out a comic-book movie.

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]

This movie is Denzel Washington stopping a speeding train devoid of subtext, blunders and earth-shattering revelations about the human condition. It is precisely as entertaining as it sounds; no more, no less.

Is briefly entertaining but shows mainly that sports films featuring women are no better than those featuring men. Much of the problem belongs to director Penny Marshall, who reaches for the cliche, and for the easy way out, each time the movie seems to be about to make a serious statement about women or about baseball. [3 July 1992, p.3G]

Land Ho! is a tepid little movie that goes almost nowhere, and if I had to sit in that rental car for one more boob joke, I’d rather jump into a volcano.

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

If you don’t crave the taste of motor oil on your popcorn, Furious 7 can’t end fast enough.

Damsels in Distress is shockingly tone-deaf. Stillman is still capable of a few amusing quips, but his storytelling is sophomoric.

On its own terms and against all odds, "Outrage" is adequately entertaining, with more than enough cringe-inducing violence and cruel humor to please the average American moviegoer. But true Kitano fans will find its title sadly ironic.

Fast Five represents Yankee ingenuity of the brutally stupid kind.

A highly sensual but not very believable love story between a 43-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man, and not much else. [19 Oct 1990, p.3F]

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

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.

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."

This time around, the story seems old and tired as well. The result is a routine space opera, an only moderately entertaining finale to a series that has had some great moments. [6 Dec. 1991, p.3D]

People over 60 are as sexual and complicated as their grandchildren, and there ought to be more movies about them, but only an audience as constipated as these characters could mistake this lukewarm stream of pablum for a hard nugget of truth.

Episodically structured and lethargically paced, the new film attempts to convince us that there's something incredibly charming about an old guy who makes a habit of ogling young women. Actually, the whole scenario is pretty creepy.

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]

Director Alan Rudolph and writers William Reilly and Claude Kerven don't play fair with the audience. They stack the deck and then deal from the bottom, and the result is such a surprise that I felt let down, even angry. I don't mind not figuring out who the murderer is, but Rudolph should show the viewer a few things along the way to allow it to be figured out. [19 Apr 1991, p.3F]

The problem with In Praise of Love is not that it seems to be possessed by a kind of free floating anti-Americanism. I'm not all that crazy about some of the things this country does, either, and I detest some of the big-budget movies Hollywood makes. The problem with In Praise of Love is that it never shuts up. [1 Nov 2002, p.E4]

An inconsequential mess.

The movie falters because Waters' screenplay is too shallow and brief to provide sufficient underpinning. [15 Apr 1994, p.3D]

We need to have a dialogue about the wages of war in the remote-control era. But it’s hard to spark a good dialogue with movies whose dialogue is so bad.

More scenic than scary.

It doesn’t help that Weisz and Claflin have zero chemistry, and both come across as miscast. She lacks the aura of mystery that her character requires, and he’s woefully low on the charisma required of a romantic hero.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

Fans of the franchise will greet Les Misérables as a feast for the senses, but the rest of us are left with crumbs.

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

Pretty good entertainment, but not an outstanding time at the movies. [17 Aug 1989, p.6E]

Laggies is the kind of indie film that gives the genre a bad name.

Megamind falls flat.

It's as if there's a missing reel of film that could tie the story together and give it the emotional impact it takes for granted.

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.

The latest Hollywood version of the Godzilla story is neither fun nor fearsome. It’s an empty spectacle in which the humans are as meaningless as the monster.

For the screen version, Baldwin is back, along with Meg Ryan, and there's less chemistry than in a high-school laboratory in July. [10 Jul 1992, p.3G]

Squeezes plenty of color and noise from a thin concept, then runs with it until non-fanatics can’t keep up.

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.

Despite the title, My One and Only is irritatingly repetitive.

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]

Be prepared to think, talk and no doubt argue about the movie after seeing it. Is that what Mamet intended? Maybe, but does that make it worthwhile? [11 Nov 1994, p.3E]

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.

The flashbacks, which get almost as much screen time as the present day story, are far more compelling.

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

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.

The way that Muppets Most Wanted grabs for the green is criminal.

The wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.

In getting so many of the Midwestern details wrong, worldly director Bahrani (“Chop Shop”) teaches an inadvertent lesson to aspiring filmmakers who want to follow his footsteps to the festival circuit: Grow where you’re planted.

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

Although it has a great look and offers a few thrills, the animated film 9 is one of this year's biggest disappointments.

If you're a zombie purist or a fan of "The Walking Dead," Warm Bodies is not for you.

A road-trip comedy that somehow renders both promiscuity and racism harmless. While we're soaking up the sunny surroundings, we're getting nowhere.

Red is an insult to our memories and to our intelligence, an unfunny farce whose veteran cast is cashing a retirement check.

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

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.

Whose story is this? There’s an old saying that history is written by the winners. The screenplay for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies must have been written by elves.

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.

In my old New Jersey public school, the first thing we learned was the smell of baloney.

Colin Firth is an Academy Award winner, so perhaps his lack of chemistry with fellow honoree Nicole Kidman is a carefully laid clue that his middle-aged newlywed Eric Lomax is damaged goods. Yet to the drama’s detriment, Lomax is about as poisonous as a week-old crumpet.

Rooted in empty materialism, but it never evokes the heady rush of a guilty pleasure or the precipitous payback of a thriller.

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]

Footloose poses as a bold update, but it's shockingly out of step with the times.

Everything about Trouble With the Curve is as streamlined and hollow as a Wiffle Ball bat.

As a melodrama, Brothers is passable entertainment. But the film squanders the opportunity to meaningfully portray the impact of war on American lives.

James Bond might as well be any of a dozen movie cops. For whatever reason, writers Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum have given us a hero without the suavity, the urbanity, the sophistication of the James Bond who set these particular movies apart. And when Bond is just another hero, the result is just another action movie. It's sometimes exciting, but it misses all the lovely touches that previous films in the series have provided. [14 July 1989, p.3E]

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.

There’s a sharp comedy to be made about America’s misadventures in Afghanistan. This isn’t it.

Snark is not art. In the evolutionary spectrum of cinema, Natural Selection is like the duck-billed platypus, pretending to be warm-blooded but more than a little fowl.

It doesn’t help that the characters caught up in this fact-based melodrama aren’t particularly engaging. Or that Téchiné doesn’t seem to have much of a feel for the material.

Although it's stuffed with subplots, gadgets and bad guys, this tinny contraption is half-hearted.

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.

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

Amid other wedding movies crowding screens these days, not to mention Perry's "Madea's Big Happy Family," Jumping the Broom feels instantly familiar. And tired.

Genius, like most films about the literary life, has trouble dramatizing what’s involved and making us care.

The kiddie audience will laugh a few times, but it would take an electron microscope to find an original idea or joke in this entire cartoonish movie.

This shrill caper is more like a blind date between fingernail and chalkboard.

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.

What it lacks is the human element. Charlie is more of a rat than a rascal, and instead of working hard to build and operate his robots, he's literally going through the motions.

So friction-free that it slips from memory before the credits fade.

His (Eastwood) first boring film.

The man is bound to special effects as if they were Siamese twins, and while fancy stuff helped a lot in Who Killed Roger Rabbit? and all the Back to the Future movies, it doesn't do much for Death Becomes Her. But Zemeckis insists on emphasizing them over script or cleverness or even acting, and he hammers a viewer into surrender, rather than excitement. [04 Aug 1992, p.4D]

Its mean-spiritedness, stupidity and squandering of talent is uniquely Hollywood.

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]

It's eerie rather than wondrous.

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]

Savvy filmgoers will know they are getting a stale product as soon as they see the wrapper: one of those vintage muscle cars that screams “stakeout.”

Instead of entertaining us, director Robert Redford offers us a handsome history lesson that's as dry as a hardtack biscuit.

The film is constructed from four flimsy vignettes that are artlessly overlapped.