Russell remains one of our most adorable, underused actors, although this role lacks the emotional and comedic breadth of her turn in 2007's "Waitress."

This is a fun picture, even if it's overly sentimental and has the feeling of an extended Amazing Stories segment. Director Dear is a master Spielbergian craftsman. Now, all he has to do is demonstrate some originality to establish himself as a quality film maker. [5 June 1987, p.1D]

The Great Wall is a so-so movie with eye-popping images.

For Love or Money is a featherweight romantic comedy that barely stays afloat, thanks to the effortlessly appealing personality of Michael J. Fox. [1 Oct 1993, p.11]

Not rocket science by a moonshot but sporadically dumb fun.

Leave It to Beaver turns out to be a pleasant time-waster and a future video babysitter. [22 Aug 1997, p.8]

Jungle 2 Jungle is a culture-clash comedy based upon a French film that was roundly panned when it flopped upon our shores last year. Dumb plot. Dumb jokes. The usual. [07 Mar 1997, p.08]

Finally, a horror film that doesn't turn on the gore machine nor confuse dread with decibels. One of the most convincing members of the cast is the gloriously creaky old house that sets up the spooky action. [23 July 1999, p.03]

I seriously doubt that it happened this way, with such convenient strife and truncated solutions. The movie is about baseball but plays like T-ball, with each situation teed up for easy swings.

Other than its campy title, not much about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is fun.

RoboCop 2 moves fast and looks great. How much you like it depends on your tolerance for machine-gun mayhem. [22 June 1990, p.6]

A movie as slight as Fluke shouldn't be expected to draw gasps and cooing at the drop of a plot twist. [02 Jun 1995, p.9]

Brill's film isn't as offensive as it could be, nor as funny as it should be. Heavyweights is a case of no pain, and no gain, either. [19 Feb 1995, p.16C]

A Bad Moms Christmas is a comedy with better casting than jokes, a sequel sticking to the formula of using twice as much of whatever worked before.

George Clooney’s latest directing effort, Suburbicon, is a movie tipping off why it’s going wrong before it actually happens.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword isn't a movie as much as a feature length montage of bastardized lore and rejected Game of Thrones pitches.

Van Damme, who co-wrote the script, set out to make a punch-packed, entertaining action film, and succeeded. [18 Jan 1991, p.10]

The pleasant surprises in Larry Crowne come from its side characters.

Director John G. Avildsen and screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue do an amiable job balancing humor and pathos while investigating the ultimate nightmare of every sexually active unmarried adolescent. [16 Jan 1988, p.1D]

The only surprise is that Garry Marshall didn't direct this jumbled, star-studded kibitz and rename it "Mothers Day."

The saddest part of the film is that Hogan, after creating an entertaining character, chose to plug the character into a cheap formula whose hoped-for solution is, I suspect, a big chunk of the $300-million the first film was able to milk worldwide. I can see at least a few interesting movies using the Dundee character and Australia: Crocodile Dundee II is not one of them. [27 May 1988, p.6]

This movie never realizes how ridiculous anything it does truly is, right up to the last-second promise of another sequel.

As hollow as it is hip. [5 Feb 1988, p.8]

Hardware runs more precisely, it crawls aimlessly as the robot, pieced together from household appliances, attempts to slice, dice, drill and saw Jill to death. There's no tension, no suspense, no climax. [14 Sep 1990, p.7]

Two flesh-and-blood performers stand out among the machinery. One is pop singer Rhianna, looking lovely as usual despite the military gear and quite comfortable with high-powered artillery. The other is Gregory D. Gadson, an Army veteran who lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Stallone and Russell don't bore. As verbal sparring partners, they provide plenty worth watching.

The Rookie is the most brain dead action-thriller Eastwood has ever directed or starred in. It plays well as a comedy, but that isn't its intent. [07 Dec 1990, p.6]

It's rambunctiously amusing but the laughs clot in your throat. There's a meaner streak this time to Kick-Ass and Hit Girl's exploits, or maybe Carrey's sensitivity is justified. Either way, the third act of Kick-Ass 2 is a visceral beatdown.