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.