Because it attempts so much more than Excalibur, the disappointment of Knightriders cuts deeper. Romero wants to tell the tale, to comment on it and to relate it to the present; he wants to bring contemporary satirical life to the myth, a service he performed cannily for the Dracula legend in Martin. [18 April 1981]

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

The Santa Clause 3 is a colourful jumble. (But quite a bit better than Jungle 2 Jungle). Nevertheless, whether parent or elf, You might laugh when you watch it in spite of yourself.

This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]

Unfortunately, the actual incarnation of My Spy is a hot mess, full of more confused character motivations and emotional blackmail than the season finale of "Love Is Blind."

These characters don't seem illuminating at all – just damned annoying and, ultimately, dead boring.

One of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results.

A recruitment poster loosely disguised as a movie.

The reflection offered in the puckered muscle and polished chrome of Furious 7’s heroes feels like a cheery escapist distortion of a culture that more closely resembles the smashed steel, mangled bone and blood and vomit of a plain ol’ unsexy car wreck.

Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]

What might have been delicious trash lacks the courage of its trashy convictions, and the result is high-born melodrama with the juice boiled out, so much dry cabbage on fine-china plate.

Perhaps the film's biggest weakness is that all the characters are so naive and petty you can't really work up much fervour about who sleeps with whom. That would never be a question in a movie like "Casablanca."

A successful hoax is annoying for everyone except the hoaxster. No one enjoys being the credulous, unsuspecting dupe of a wise---joke -- personally I loathe it.

Other than keeping Hamilton’s name out there and giving her brand exposure, Unstoppable stops short of making a compelling case for itself.

The question is, is the interspecies wrestling match really worth the ineptly acted spy antics, the big flatulence jokes and Steve-o's endless grandstanding? Not without a handy remote control with a mute button, it isn't.

Done up strictly for laughs, this might have been fine. But the picture actually starts taking itself seriously, and that spells instant yawns. [16 Dec 1989]

This is a comedy at cross-purposes -- by turns low-key, bombastic, mildly amusing, manically slapstick. At least there are the fart jokes as a connecting thread.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

It attempts to take local history of the illegal whisky trade and raise it to the level of myth.

The dogs and the snow and the flag-waving and the choo-choos are all reduced to TV-sized portions. Just as well, I suppose - think of it as audio-visual aerobics, forced training for next month's big bout in our living-rooms. [14 Jan 1994]

Plays precariously close to an unfunny sociopathic case study.

A pleasant flick, more suitable for families than football fans.

Lives down to its title -- what an odd and gauzy reverie this is, a strangely muted picture that unfolds at a distinct remove from the reality around it.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.

The well-acted Clara lacks clarity, and there’s nothing worse than an out-of-focus telescope.

Zeroville features a lot of fancy cuts, freeze frames and buried imagery because it is, well, about a film editor. It will either make you feel like you’re having an anxiety attack after overindulging at our country’s legalized cannabis buffet or you can roll with it. Either way, please hydrate.

When it comes to retelling the tale of Tristan and Isolde, give us a movie that makes love. Or even a movie that makes war. Anything, just anything, but a movie that makes nice.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Although Tom Stoppard's script lifts Ballard's spare dialogue directly from the page, the context in which it is placed is kitsch. [11 Dec 1987]

Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.

It's not a winner and not quite a loser either. Like many a beauty contestant, it's glib instead of serious, stylish instead of substantial. Miss Universe, it could never be. Homecoming queen, maybe.

What the film needs more than anything is Perry's alter ego, Medea – a rampaging bowling ball who might knock all these stiff, upright characters spinning.

More Than a Game is less than a movie.

At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

This movie wants to be a horse but, even measured in box-office millions, it's just another nag.

How to Be Single at least marshals its surfeit of incident in service of a point of view that prizes individual fulfillment – in whatever form that may take – over idealized portrayals of courtship and coupledom. However clumsily delivered, it remains a message worth taking to heart.

Ultimately, the best thing about (500) Days of Summer isn't its gimmicky script. It's the constant performance of Gordon-Levitt, who shifts, scene-by-scene, from moments of ebullience to abject dejection.

Wonderfully theatrical in conceit and frequently beautiful to look at, Archangel is nevertheless choppy and listless in pace, and has little of the surrealist zing of the earlier film (Tales from the Gimli Hospital). [03 Sep 1990]

This thing can take pride of place in a long tradition of Hollywood howlers.

Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Cancer, ironically, turns out to be a hard subject to dramatize. We spend the majority of the doc accompanying Jones to doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy sessions. As compelling as this is to the person going through it, it’s not fascinating to watch.

If 1911 doesn't impress as historical spectacle, neither does it rank high as a Jackie Chan film.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

If you see Clue only once, and it's hard to imagine seeing it more than once, even for the five different minutes, the "A" is by far the best, featuring as it does (this does not give away the identity of the murderer) a splendidly funny shtick from Madeline Kahn. [13 Dec 1985, p.D5]

Five Armies only feels truly entertaining when it embraces the arch silliness of its material; like when 92-year-old actor Christopher Lee whirls about in combat with a handful of ghosts.

Although the subject, school bullying, is as fresh as today's headlines, the treatment isn't. Despite the efforts of an impressive cast, the film starts out stale and then just gets tedious.

Tropic Thunder is an assault in the guise of a comedy – watching it is like getting mugged by a clown.

Director Walter Salles, who knows a thing or two about picaresque journeys – in "The MotorcycleDiaries," even in "Central Station" – does make an honest effort here.

Sorry, this one doesn't really work at all, but don't blame the workers.

The Robertson-authorized Once Were Brothers is an account of The Band’s rise and fall, as remembered by the titular guitarist, chief songwriter and excellent raconteur.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

It's a combination that seems ideal for 10-year-old boys who adore violence, and could well be the cornerstone of the next DreamWorks franchise.

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

With less expensive actors, it might just have been called Chase Movie, and played for laughs.

It’s ripe to the point of bursting and, with a plot that tilts to melodrama, Davies flirts dangerously with cliché, creating an over-wrought period piece where every wheat field is bathed in golden sunlight and every childbirth is announced by chilling screams.

There are so many events here but no real story. Perhaps that is what's making the drowned kabuki ghost so irate: She's desperate to find a coherent script.

When one of the most enlightening moments of a film comes during the postscript (black holes!), you know there’s a problem – one that has nothing to do with math.

Reign Over Me drizzles down on us for two full hours, persistently determined to prove that, if it hangs around long enough, a coherent movie will turn up. No such luck.

As Kurt finds his true art in the West, thanks to the help of a fictional version of Joseph Beuys, the film turns gripping, but it ultimately reduces art appreciation to the autobiographical.

More than anything, the film lacks a rapport with its audience.

But there's no sign of the writerly derring-do that is really essential to daisy-chain storytelling. 200 Cigarettes burns itself out well before midnight.

David Keith, a native of Tennessee, had a tiny role in The Rose (as Bette Midler's soldier friend) and he is one of the few in the Brubaker cast whose accent is authentic and who appears to have the wherewithal to survive in a penitentiary. His scenes are the only respite from the movie's shrill, simplistic self-congratulation. [21 June 1980]

5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.

Trying to pick faults with a sound-and-spectacle juggernaut like Armageddon is like taking an ant gun to an elephant: All the movie's staggering conventional weaknesses -- ludicrous plot, weak characterization, incomprehensible staging and ambient racket -- are irrelevant.

As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.

Kenneth Lonergan's new film, Margaret, finally released six years after it was shot, now seems destined to become part of film history as one of the more stunning examples of a filmmaker's sophomore slump.

Not much flair to this vehicle. [26 May 1989]

Saddled with this hollow script, Stone pads with elaborate set pieces.

Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.

Rather than being one of us, this stumpy-legged dingbat is a realization of our worst social fears. Before we were laughing with her, and now we're laughing at her.

At his best, Clint directed as he acted -- sparely, laconically, but concisely, with a clean precision. There are flashes of that trademark style early on, but it soon degenerates badly.

Whatever the locomotive power of the novel, this film adaptation only limps into the station.

We all love Winnie the Pooh; that is why we are interested in the story of the real Christopher Robin. To learn that public affection all but destroyed his childhood makes an audience uncomfortably complicit in this cuddle-free origin story of the world's most famous teddy bear.

A frustratingly toothless film whose heart is in the right place even if its head isn't.

Clunky and preachy, but Freeman's three robots - named Huey, Dewey and Louie - are adorable. [21 Jul 2011]

Skin Deep, the latest and 36th off the line, could sum up his whole checkered career - it's that good and that bad, by turns terrifically funny and terribly flawed. [3 March 1989]

Nothing in this explicit display is remotely engaging. That's because the sex is a metaphor here. In fact, most everything is a metaphor here. Or a symbol -- the picture is a veritable cacophony of jangling symbols.

Once Bullock's character clears her head at the top of the thrill ride, Premonition becomes inescapably dull because it is her mental health, not her purposefully dull husband's fate, that interested us.

The movie is, however, generous in its condescension: Given enough tolerance, cash and a good sex manual, it says, even the mentally handicapped can be just as middle-class and cute as you or me.

In the battle between dystopian science-fiction movies about butt-kicking young heroines, the new Divergent movie, Insurgent, is actually slightly more believably glum than the third Hunger Games movie, "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1."

Let's just say this: It's a lucky thing I wasn't shackled to my seat in the theatre during this movie. I'd be limping home.

Unfortunately, the script, based on Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel "These Foolish Things," might better be described as pure British stodge: high-starch English comfort food of more sentimental than nutritional value.

Next semester, the stars should drop Speech 217 and enroll in Chemistry 101 – they dearly need some.

Unfortunately, the team led by producer Ron Howard and directed by Matthew O'Callaghan has jettisoned much of the charm of the original books along with that politically touchy storyline.

As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.

When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators. [31 Oct 1981]

Except for The Fat Boys, who have some deft comic passes, nobody is required to act, or seems capable of it. But for what Krush Groove is - an unambitious film directed at a black teenage audience - it has its good points. [26 Nov 1985]

Have you ever seen a movie you half-liked a lot?

The movie blows, me hearties, but don't you dare miss it...Why? Johnny Depp, that's why...This has gotta rank among the weirdest performances in the zany annals of the silver screen.

What with two women sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, you'd think that Hollywood would have graduated past the idea of a female lawyer being a "cute concept," but apparently not. Laws of Attraction is stuck in a time warp that pre-dates Doris Day and Sandra Day O'Conner.

With escape as its theme, this thin-plotted pleaser comes hard and goes fast, its rush premium but fleeting.

Thanks largely to Petersen, Manhunter does occasionally evoke the peculiar pleasures of Harris's novel, and it does get under the skin, but only because the picture amounts to an aural mugging: the soundtrack, credited to The Reds & Michael Rubini, is Tangerine-Dream-styled electronic offal cranked up to rock concert decibels. [15 Aug 1986, p.D11]

The so-so film’s soul and saving grace is Rossy de Palma, the Picasso-esque muse of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who steals the show and, as the family maid, the heart of a British art dealer.

The major problem with Around the World is that there's just not quite enough Chan, or at least the Chan we want to see, which is the acrobatic clown.

The Coen brothers have made the A-list of writer/directors with their big-budget replicants of Hollywood genres, but the wisecracking Hudsucker Proxy is all comic sound and fury signifying nothing All talk, no substance. [11 Mar 1994, p.C3]

The Year of Living Dangerously is chic, enigmatic, self-assured - and empty. [18 Feb 1983]