Dekker's notion of pouring comedy and horror into the cinematic Cuisinart and leaning on the starter switch doesn't work here. [14 Aug 1987, p.D1]

If comic book movies are the last place you look for a soulful, serious performance, The Wolverine should be your first.

What's fun is how the new Karate Kid embraces and vastly improves the cliches, keeping the plot cleverly updated for a generation that never heard of Ralph Macchio.

Mo' Better Blues is not only about artistry unfulfilled. It is artistry unfulfilled. It is perfection without a meaningful plot. It lopes along, pleasantly, never reaching fruition. [03 Aug 1990, p.18]

Kingsman is as violently kinetic as anything Vaughn has made, a list including Kick-Ass (the good one) and Craig's U.S. breakthrough, Layer Cake. But Kingsman is also wildly uneven, often slowing its roll to stiff-upper-lip pacing necessary (or not) to create a new British secret agent movie mythology.

Director Derek Cianfrance attempts to bring the emotional rawness of his previous films and influences to the melodrama genre with The Light Between Oceans, but he never quite pulls off the feat.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is good at its feel-iest, a beloved but stale tale retold with novelty while revealing an interesting rest of the story. Let’s hope it becomes a perennial like so many versions before, with Plummer’s Scrooge as a yearly gift.

For the initiated, however, Alfredson weaves a tidy web from loose ends left dangling.

Watching Spectre unfold, lumbering and slumbering, on the heels of a franchise high is a shock, so much talent coasting this time.

Ghostbusters is back, it's not bad, get used to it.

Certainly amusing, but it never accelerates past one-note characters playing out separate personal crises in ways that aren't surprising.

It's a movie that grows on you, after grating your nerves while viewing it.

Like most of Hill's movies, Johnny Handsome plays like an outline: a good idea in need of development. [29 Sep 1989, p.7]

Spike Lee's cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson demonstrates he has the juice to be a top-notch director with Juice. His directorial debut commands respect. What it needs is a deeper story to match its fine acting and visual panache. [17 Jan 1992, p.5]

Any resemblance between Allied and a much better movie on the subject isn't coincidental but unfortunate.

Cool Runnings is enormously unfaithful to its subject, piling on one sports cliche after another with shallow characterizations...Regardless of those faults, Cool Runnings has an agreeable goofiness to it that brushes aside any picky complaints. It isn't art, but it surely is disposable fun. [1 Oct 1993, p.6B]

State of Grace is smooth and persuasive but ultimately as senseless as the lives it shows. [05 Oct 1990, p.7]

When director Paul Feig — who revitalized feminine comedy with "Bridesmaids" — allows McCarthy's improvisational instincts to take over because, honestly, nobody else in the cast can stand up to her. McCarthy is the best thing about The Heat.

It isn't a movie to embrace (except for Leguizamo's brilliance) but it deserves one of Noxeema's air kisses - a passing, passionless show of affection, and then we're off to the next party. [08 Sep 1995, p.8]

There's a surprising number of salient, even revolutionary notions about human nature and intelligence throughout, none fully explored but enough to make the running time at least 20 minutes too long.

Whatever raffish charm Reeves and Swayze exhibit is lost in the superficial gloss of Iliff's screenplay and Bigelow's direction. [12 July 1991, p.7]

It's a valuable history lesson crammed into a creatively uninspired movie. Wiki-cinema, if you will.

Although The Bear is as handsome as Quest for Fire - the story of an Ice Age tribe moving up the evolutionary ladder - it is also as turgid. [27 Oct 1989, p.12]

It's an amusing geriatric uprising that might just as well be titled "Gray."

Rules Don't Apply is affably mediocre, even tolerable between brief pleasures. The movie's lone constant amusement is Beatty's madcap portrayal of Hughes, keeping aloft his Spruce Goose of nonromantic not quite comedy.

The Beaver plays like a thickly veiled confessional and plea for forgiveness. It's too creepy for comfort.

While the result isn't the greatest show on Earth, it certainly is a lot of fun.

The best moments in Wayne's World 2 have been done before and better - a kung fu movie spoof and a running gag based on Oliver Stone's The Doors (which was unintentionally funnier). Surjik trots out a slew of star cameos and cinema salutes, but without the verve of Hot Shots!, Fatal Instinct or Wayne's World itself. [10 Dec 1993, p.6]