It's hard to love and hard to hate.

If you’re interested in Williams and his music, this film is better than nothing — but not by much.

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

In the end, audiences will be neither shaken nor stirred. Just bored and confused.

Here, the scattershot spoofery never rings true.

A Bigger Splash? More like a small trickle.

Once Upon a Crime could have been a boisterous slapstick comedy, but writing and direction reduce it to the status of the very ordinary. [12 March 1992, p.3E]

Brooks has his moments. His facial expressions and body language are often funny and his delivery usually impeccable. But as a director, he doesn't keep the pace even or achieve any semblance of balance between humor and poignancy. [27 July 1991, p.5D]

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]

Whaley has some ingenuous charm, and Connelly may have some skills, too. The script gives neither much opportunity. [2 Apr 1991, p.4D]

When a film is based on history, especially a moment in history that almost everyone knows, a built-in major problem is that there is no tension for the climactic scenes. To make it successful, the writer and director must find other places to insert drama, to create tension, to give viewers the unexpected. Maybe Roland Joffe forgot. [24 Oct 1989, p.3D]

Fast Five represents Yankee ingenuity of the brutally stupid kind.

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

Mostly "Hoodwinked Too" is playing to young video gamers, with overblown action sequences and slangy 'tude.

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.

Cutthroat Island ranks up there with other ill-advised movies such as The Scarlet Letter and Waterworld. At least the Harlin-Davis opus is meant to be fun. [22 Dec 1995, p.12D]

After a nifty setup, In Time mostly fails to deliver as it gets lamer by the minute.

Ultimately it's sunk by the hole in the middle: Paul Campbell (presidential aide Billy on "Battlestar Galactica") who substitutes smarm for charm as the archetypal player who gets played.

To paraphrase a classic of Reagan-era cinema, A Good Day to Die Hard is a bad day to stop sniffing glue.

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.

Most. Depressing. Christmas. Movie. Ever.

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.

It's hard to hate a movie that escorts us to such lovely locales, but instead of marking the territory as her own, Madonna has directed a potentially provocative story like a virgin.

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

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

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

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

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