Traitor becomes too busy, ultimately frustrating, and never delivers on its tantalizing promise of offering a little insight into terrorists' motives – and it's even got an inside man.

Director Marc Meyers’s sometimes funny, but more often creaky, spin on devil worship, murder and good ol’ fashioned religion has only one or two nifty ideas – all of which are sacrificed early on, leaving about an hour of footage in desperate need of divine intervention.

Inside The First Purge is a scrappy little indie fighting to come out. Although this is the fourth installment in the Purge franchise, it’s a prequel to the other three, a chance to be born anew. A missed chance, as it turns out.

The target is way too easy and the tone far too smug. This time, they're shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka and congratulating themselves on their marksmanship.

Notable for its enthusiastic abandonment of any semblance of narrative coherence.

The cast has chemistry, but Little is marred by plot holes, a strange fixation on donuts and at least one inexplicable scene.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

The film essentially disintegrates before your eyes, with Koreeda displaying little of the quiet elegance he’s built his entire career upon.

Eccentric and misguided enough to be almost perversely fascinating, the film doesn’t lack nerve; it’s just not very good.

Understandably, a script so obsessed with the dark doings of plot has little time left over for the study of character, and, thus, we never really get to know these people.

Entertaining, if highly predictable, escapist ensemble comedy.

Any one of these narrative components might have made for a worthy picture. But that would have taken a more imaginative writer than Charles Leavitt and a more sensitive director than Gary Fleder.

Whenever it promises to spin into madcap nonsense, Budreau asserts a kind of tortured primness, as if chastened by the realization that this all actually happened to real people. And they seem to be having more fun than we are.

It must be said that the closing sequence, in which Arthur meets the misbegotten Mordred on an orange battlefield illuminated by a shield-sized red sun, is an epic, Oedipal masterpiece of authentic mythic power, a sequence so strong it shakes the torpor from one's shoulders and induces regret that the rest of the saga has been so juvenile, so lifeless and so lacking poetry or Shakespearean sweep. [11 April 1981]

The most engaging performance is Javier Bardem’s solidly nasty Captain Salazar, the undead commander of a ghost ship. His disintegrating skin and holey crew are fabulously rendered as evaporating digitizations: It’s the special effects and swelling action sequences that make the movie palatable.

Before it turns into a thriller, and goes badly awry, Red Lights paints a devastating little portrait of a marriage on the rocks.

Country Strong has a pleasant soundtrack of conservative country music, many of the tunes newly written for the movie, some of them performed by old pros and some of them performed by the cast.

Laugh? Well, once.

For some (okay, me), The Holiday, like the holidays, will require some girding up, and is best met halfway with a self-immunizing smile. Otherwise, the good cheer may ring false; worse, it might even seem to sell love cheap, and lovers short.

After years of inadvertently making us laugh, Sylvester Stallone actually does a picture designed to be funny. It isn't, not very, but, yo, give the man credit for going with the flow. [01 May 1991]

Director Irwin Winkler (Night and the City)is rarely better than pedestrian in handling this story. At worst, the dramatic elements are plain clumsy.

Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.

Still, even Romero's staunchest fans might conclude their hero is going through the motions here. Yes, almost like a zombie.

The Last Days' major flaw, perhaps, is its conventionality: It takes us over the same horrific ground in the usual way. The shock is familiar. [26 Mar 1999, p.C6]

Every Which Way But Loose is a fists-out-and-up Burt Reynolds movie without Burt Reynolds. I never thought I'd miss the Beverly Hills good ol' boy so much. [22 Dec 1978]

Hey, it’s all good clean fun.

To be very generous toward the filmmakers' intentions, Beowulf & Grendel might be seen as a misguided attempt to lend some modern nuance to a traditional tale of good and emphatic evil. But why pussyfoot? The movie is a lumbering and ludicrous mess.

The only thing majestic about Shrek the Third is the title.