The Boxtrolls is a visually repellent pile of stop-motion animation, populated by grotesques and filmed in the palette of an exhumed casket's interior. It can frighten small children and bore anyone, with its cracked, cackled British wit.

The most gratifying takeaway from He Named Me Malala is how ordinary Malala is shown to be, when she isn't lobbying the United Nations and visiting beleaguered countries.

Every fallen-star cliche director/co-writer Brett Haley employs goes down smoother with Elliott's baritone and unforced cool. He has deserved a spotlight role for years and now deserves a finer one.

Despite sharp humor and bravura performances - including a cameo by Regis Philbin as the epitome of Harry's dream of success - Night and the City is not a pleasant experience. While anything less would betray its bracing dose of true grit, Night and the City is so downbeat that it ultimately seems like an exercise in self-flagellatio.

Imagination is the key element that Conviction lacks.

The Secret Life of Pets is funnier than Zootopia and fresher than Finding Dory. Bonus points for a genuinely touching finale that had me crying behind my 3-D glasses.

McKay and Ferrell keep the jokes naughty not dirty and flying for shrapnel accuracy; many miss, but when one hits it counts.

Finally though, it is Van Peebles who runs New Jack City aground. The film ends up being slightly long, both in terms of time and self-righteousness. Van Peebles is to be commended for making such a hip morality lesson, but New Jack City's finale, which is predictable and trite, could have been handled more creatively by a more daring director. [12 Mar 1991, p.1D]

It will mightily preach to the choirs of concerned citizens, and be ignored by anyone else.

Anything men can do women can do dirtier, funnier, fresher, since distaff raunchiness shows no signs of going stale and isn't contained to Melissa McCarthy.

A solid, ultimately uplifting comedy that questions what we require of our heroes and our popular notions of bravery. [02 Oct 1992, p.5]

Broadbent carries the movie with signature ease, making Tony easy to dislike while wishing him an overdue peace. Despite its time-flip fixation, The Sense of an Ending finds emotional focus in Broadbent's wilting gaze and discoveries in character with the simplest line deliveries.

Magic Mike XXL is darker, and between money-rain showers, duller. It's the movie many feared the original would be.

Project X is a predictable, sappy Save The Monkeys movie. [17 Apr 1987, p.1D]

Hot Shots is consistently funny, but it produces more guffaws than laughs. Its jokes read better than they play on screen. It's not The Naked Gun, though considerably better than The Naked Gun 2 It suffers a bit from its underdeveloped plot: a bunch of greedy industrialists want Harley's squadron to crash and burn so they can sell the Navy a new, super-expensive warplane model. [2 Aug 1991, p.6]

Addams Family Values is a rare sequel that surpasses the original, primarily for the same reason that Superman II topped the Man of Steel's first outing. This time, Sonnenfeld doesn't bury the jokes in exposition about characters we already know. [19 Nov 1993, p.7]

Has something for everyone, if everyone is looking for young nuns taking showers, a department store Santa dealing weed, a coked-up infant crawling on the ceiling and Danny Trejo as the father-in-law-to-be from Hell. I didn't think I was looking for that but found it. And heaven help me, it wasn't bad.

The actors are so good that you wish Collyer offered them a richer arc to play, rather than just a topic.

It's Lane who's saddled with dragging this nag over the finish line, with her cliched portrayal of another single-minded woman beating men at their own game.

Nick Cassavetes, like his father, works out his movies through the instincts of the actors, not the camera lens. It's a fitting, and occasionally fitful, eulogy to an unheralded legend. [29 Aug 1997, p.3]

This franchise that won't die began in 2001 as The Fast and the Furious and has pretty much run through every title permutation, so the inevitable next chapter might be called only "The & The 7."

This Must Be the Place is a movie existing in a zonked-out realm where reality smashes head-on with a train-wreck hero too strange to be real, unless you're the love child of Ozzy Osbourne and the Cure's Robert Smith.

Muppets Most Wanted is pleasant enough to recommend as family entertainment. But the movie falls short of what immediately preceded it, musically and emotionally.

Three elements rescue Three Men and a Baby from its inherent shallowness: its casting, pacing and its infant. Nimoy capitalizes on parental instincts without being cloying or cute, so after viewing Three Men and a Baby's tender moments, it's practically impossible to dismiss the movie as mere fluff. [27 Nov 1987, p.7]

What does cut it, for action fans, is Kaplan's direction. Kaplan can spook audiences with the best of them. His movie is like a giant capacitor, storing tension, then releasing it at prescribed junctures in massive jolts. [26 June 1992, p.5]

Carnage gives Polanski the best opportunity to express his devilish sense of humor in decades, proving again that comedy really is tragedy happening to someone else.

Efron makes hay with his richest role post-High School Musical, making Dean a rural rake with conflicting charisma.

The globetrotting is reined in, the mayhem at each stop just as exciting. Renner is a sturdy action hero, with an interesting face that unlike Damon's appears to have taken a punch or two.