The chipper tale is admittedly interesting, though not “fascinating,” as self-advertised.

There remains a nasty whiff here of a movie that is trotting out lesbian love interests and clawing cat fights for male titillation. With fashion taking the place of ballet, The Neon Demon may well prove controversial in a "Black Swan" kind of way, offering a love-it-or-hate-it debate over the appeal of its melodrama versus the politics of its social critique.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

Every time you think you grasp the concept, another layer of outlandish supernatural gobbledygook is laid on top, leaving the viewer feeling as spun-out as Linda Blair's head.

While the movie and the accompanying series are being pitched to a younger audience than most new Star Wars ventures, parents may be perturbed by the film's relentless violence.

The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

Even the neatness here is borrowed. A Kiss Before Dying isn't a remake; it's a rehash. [27 Apr 1991]

A bouillon cube, a bland and boring thing with only a meagre resemblance to its source. [23 Oct 1984]

Winkler is a singularly boring director, forever telegraphing his scenes by tracking the camera behind a rustling bush or pulling the lens up close on his villain's eyes or gun. As a result, the film feels enervated and predictable when it should be energetic and surprising. It's a testimony to the abilities of the perky Bullock that she's entirely believable, but even she can't paper over the movie's many holes of logic. [28 July 1995]

American Me is a graphic and honest effort that, unfortunately, becomes a catalogue of other films on similar subjects. Its depiction of prison life is much too slow, too long, too repetitive and too familiar. [13 Mar 1992, p. C3]

When The Big Chill is busy being funny, it's a great comedy, but when it goes for depth, it hits bottom an inch down. [30 Sep 1983, p.E1]

The movie 10 to Midnight gives you two genres for the price of one. You get the reactionary vigilantism of Death Wish combined with the slice 'n' dice misogyny of low-grade horror films, the kind in which virginal female bodies are systematically bared to allow unobstructed ingress to knives and other instruments of brutality. All that and Charles Bronson, too: a weirdo jackpot. [15 Mar 1983]

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

In the worst scenes in Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow, it's as if Schneider and Co. are straining to invent new taboos just so they can break them, a strategy that provokes more confused silence than laughter.

Everything about Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers movie is too much. Its 165 minute running time. Its convoluted plot. Its deafening score. Its product placement. Its never-ending action scenes. Its swooping camera work. Its overwhelming stupidity. Well before it finished I was numb from its bludgeoning excess.

School for Scoundrels suffers from an old-fashioned identity crisis. The poor thing is awfully confused, and so are we. Is it a black comedy that isn't dark enough? Or a dumb comedy that isn't stupid enough, or a gross-out comedy that isn't yucky enough? Or is it really just a romance comedy that isn't sweet enough? Don't have a clue, but this much is certain: It's definitely a failed comedy that isn't funny enough.

Nominally set in some rural American backwater, The Neon Bible is a hellishly muddled reprint of Davies' personal canon - muddled enough to turn all his past virtues into present transgressions. [19 Apr 1996]

If it had the guts to be either zany or pointed, it might have been both; instead, it's neither. It's an old copy of Mad magazine that wouldn't have been your favorite even when you were 12. [6 Jan 1986, p.C11]

It never reaches the soaring, cloud-busting heights of Frankie Valli’s otherworldly falsetto, and it doesn’t even try.

I'll personally toast the buns of anybody I hear saying anything good about the movie Broadcast News. Broadcast News is for boobs. It doesn't apply to us. Anyone who thinks otherwise is invited not to think, because thinking is for statues. [16 Dec 1987, p.C5]

Interminable techno-dud.

The thin premise is just an excuse for an ultra-violent film. Worse, with the final scene, the suggestion is made that all the mayhem was the woman’s fault. Unhinged falls down in the worst ways possible.

Because it’s emotionally manipulative, unashamedly contrived and outrageously sentimental. Lead actor Oscar Isaac doesn’t care a damn about that, mind you, giving a memorably heart-wrenching performance anyway.

A sadly miscalculated affair, a frigidly uninvolving interlude of torpid romanticism: welcome to Shivering Heights. [08 Nov 1982]

Do we at least perk up during the ol' gunfight at the O.K. Corral, or the vacant lot at Fremont Street, or wherever the hell it did take place? Sorry. Kasdan never was an action director, and he clearly hasn't gone to school for this flick. Bang, bang, I'm dead, you're not, next scene - I've seen livelier shoot-outs at a soccer match. [24 Jun 1994, p.D1]

However, for me and my two kids (aged 10 and eight), this dive into the deep sea wasn’t as thrilling an adventure as we’d hoped for.

This film, about a French war correspondent and the Kurdish Amazon with whom she is embedded, has the worthy intention of telling the story of the women’s battalions in Kurdistan, but it’s formulaic and melodramatic.

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

The problem is that somewhere around the middle of the film, one begins to realize it probably isn’t going any place worthwhile.

Dance gets political in Step Up Revolution, the fourth installation of the popular movie franchise, which delivers plenty of spectacular fancy footwork in what is otherwise a flat-footed fantasy.

D.C. Cab is a high-energy comedy in desperate search for the big laugh. So desperate that the film has the manic pace of a sitcom gone bonkers. The score pounds, the cars careen, but the laugh is never found. And a few chuckles are a minor reward for a major assault. [19 Dec 1983]

Watching Attack of the Clones is like getting rapped on the head with a rubber mallet -- no lasting damage (I pray and hope), but bad enough to bring on an acute bout of dizziness and disorientation. Definitely do not operate heavy machinery after viewing -- this behemoth is brutal.

Topical ideas on humanity, mistrust and alien-as-immigrant metaphors are a plus, but a laughable romance and a ridiculous wrap-up render the film as only a staging ground for the next two parts of the trilogy to come.

Sparks fly and so do private helicopters, but will true love prevail? Are you paying attention?

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

The finale just seems hypocritical, even nonsensical in a comedy that derives its few laughs from a farting dog and an accidental gynecological exam. This book is better left closed.

The heroic irony that was hilarious in Raiders is merely ridiculous here, and the half-tribute/half-parody of the adventure genre is toyed with to threadbare extremes. [23 May 1984]

An ugly, strictly-for-meatheads comedy that can only be recommended to couples who wear matching Tie Domi Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys out on a date.

Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.

In the end, this musical is not a disgrace - Huston has too much experience to let the thing die. But he cannot summon the magic required to let it live. Watching Annie is like being buried alive in balloons. [21 May 1982]

The bafflingly unfunny and terrifically irritating new Disney version of My Favorite Martian is so empty that it makes the original TV show look like a lost work from George Bernard Shaw. [12 Feb 1999, p.D2]

As a testimonial to the powers of creativity and the imagination, Barney's Great Adventure is pretty unconvincing. [03 Apr 1998, p.C7]

Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.

It's a colorless, poorly paced film in which the most interesting thing is McQueen's half-hearted struggle to create a saleable character. Most of the time, the calculation comes across as lukewarm Clint Eastwood, who is not a model McQueen should ever be reduced to imitating. [4 Aug 1980]

The Game Plan, created as a vehicle for Johnson, is a family comedy heavy on syrup and low on laughs.

Nowhere in Phantasm II is there the wit of Phantasm the first. [8 July 1988]

With barely a laugh to be found, Confetti takes the "mock" right out of the mockumentary, and you can guess what's left. Yep, a Umentary, a brand new genre best defined by what it's not -- not real like a doc, not funny like a mock, not this thing or that thing or much of anything.

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

The new animated film UglyDolls is a lazy flip, its main intention to foster the toy-aisle bond between kids and its quasi-hideous title characters.

It isn’t hard to find all the many ways in which this film exhausts both itself and Lisbeth. It is time, already, to give this Girl a rest.

Kline and McCarthy are lovely in their few scenes together (they’re the reason for that extra half-star) and for those brief moments, you see the film the actors thought they were making.

The film sputters and stalls and winds up behaving like the worst sort of oldster – passing gas and pretending to be deep.

Though Silent Hill's shoddy dialogue and incoherent story constantly irritate, several sights and scenes possess a certain surreal grandeur...Sadly, that's not enough to compensate for Silent Hill's utter lack of tension, intrigue, character development or satisfactory explanations for what the hell's happening on the screen.

The only truly shocking thing about this new work, though, is the fact it took this long for von Trier to make a movie about a serial killer. For a man who loves blunt provocation, the subject should’ve been first on his hit list.

David Beckham may star in Goal II: Living the Dream but calling him an actor is like calling his wife a singer.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

What Porky's II has gained in sophistication from its "expanded view" it has lost in raunchy, anarchistic energy. Who wants a socially respectable pig out? [25 June 1983]

The film has one sly, ominous touch Peckinpah would have liked. David is writing a script on the defence of Stalingrad, a battle that swallowed two million lives. Otherwise, the new version is a vigilante action film bereft of subtlety or restraint.

Can't find it in your vast collection of Fleming first editions? Not to worry. Seems the producers - a.k.a. the Cubby Broccoli Cottage Industry - have run plumb out of titles. And everything else too. [14 July 1989]

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

The appeal of the Jack Ryan character, at least on the page, was that he was always the smartest guy in the room. In Shadow Recruit, that doesn’t seem to be much of an accomplishment, because the movie around him is so dumb.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

And the living are pretty lifeless themselves. As led by the often wooden Tom Cruise playing the U.S. soldier who inadvertently wakes the dead, and directed by an indecisive Alex Kurtzman, the cast is offered some passable action sequences but struggles with weak dialogue and uneven comedy.

Like Mr. Magoo, after 90 minutes the audience still didn't see the point. [26 Dec 1997, p.C3]

A family-friendly adventure.

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

With all due affection, del Toro is the fantasy world’s Quentin Tarantino – his originality rests in how meticulously and enthusiastically he repackages the work of others. DeKnight has no such goals; he can’t even be bothered here to ape del Toro’s imitation game.

Clumsy and erratic, Lolo is a slapdash comedy of errors that slips on its own banana peel but gets few laughs.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

It must be the only movie ever made in which the hero's immediate goal in life is to wrestle in a different weight class. The film treats this event with all the fake reverence tabloid feature writers use to describe disabled people who learn to paint with their feet or mother dogs who swim across lakes to rescue endangered litters. [15 Feb 1985]

Call me Grumpy, but this seems less an adaptation than a random assault.

As you watch -- no, endure -- this flattened-out spectacle, there's really nothing worth pondering save for a single thought: What a difference a director makes.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

Ye gods, there's a lot of hacking and many seismic eruptions in The Wrath of the Titans, the latest 3-D action film that treats the Greek gods as action figures.

The director's approach is far too ham-fisted and erratic to bring Four Brothers up to the level of enjoyable trash -- it's too crummy to earn that distinction.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

As Alice, Wasikowska, who has lost the injured look that made her so effective the first time out, creates a character who is fundamentally sweet, likeable and loyal.

This is a movie which makes its viewers feel ripped-off just for expending a snicker. Camp, satire, sci-fi all have their own rules, rigorous ones at that, but Night of the Comet violates even the codes of trash. Point of view shots point to the wrong views, the cutting is as blunt as stone and the way Eberhardt bleeds the sex appeal out of the sex is the film's only real vision of the end of the world. [16 Nov 1984]

The problem with the taboo-busters is that they feel calculated - in the past, Lynch's creepiness seemed casual and natural - and they take Wild at Heart so high it can't come down; the picture repeatedly jacks itself into frenzy only to crash into lethargy.

With some movies, though, it's just the opposite. Like this one. It's a whole lot easier to forget than to forgive.

Beerfest is safety-by-numbers comedy. A troupe, as opposed to a single comic star like Adam Sandler, shares the comic load and, well, at least the film is funnier than "Click."

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

In its nearly two-hour running time, in its always lugubrious pace, in its almost complete absence of laughs, The Prince & Me is a comedy that plays like a tragedy. No stricken bodies, though, unless you count the ones in the audience slumped back in their seats -- perchance they slept.

An overemphatic revenge fantasy devoid of even a trace of excitement or wit.

Considering that the original story managed to be scarier without people's hair spontaneously restyling itself into dragons, it's worth asking why this kind of film has become the norm. Is it because filmgoers demand it, or is it because filmmakers leaning on technological crutches can't be bothered to learn their craft? More and more, I'm leaning to the latter. [23 July 1999, p.C3]

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

It takes a party pooper to point out that it's not very good. But this is one party that people familiar with the play - especially people familiar with Heath Lambert's memorable performance in the title role - would do well to pass up: every addition to the original results in subtraction. [19 June 1987]

There is a familiarity to its characters and story, which doesn’t do much at all in terms of reinventing the genre, but very much meets its own expectations.

To divulge the plot would spoil the experience -- you'll be shocked to discover, and maybe even surprised to learn, just how lame the damn thing really is.

There is, admittedly, something splendidly subversive about putting the movie's arch-villains into a children's theme park - the ultimate symbol of both apple-pie family values and the whole U.S. entertainment industry. There are no real worms in this apple, however; like most flicks conceived as marketing vehicles, it's hollow at the core. [27 May 1994, p.D3]

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

Air America, starring Mel Gibson's big blue eyes and Robert Downey, Jr.'s big brown biceps, is bland and toothless. [15 Aug 1990]

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

A shameless pastiche of Starman’s alien-on-Earth sci-fi, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble’s medical pathos and any number of young-lovers-on-the-run stories, The Space Between Us may set back the Earth-Mars relationship light years.

There's not a scrap of imagination in the script.

While the monster Wilde is scary enough, the directing and writing is lazy, relying on “boo!” tactics and insinuating a religious subtext by cutting to close-ups of crucifix jewellery. The ending is slapdash.