ONE THING about The Pick-up Artist : it's fast. Crazy fast, like a manic 2-year-old in a major pout - all energy and no direction. This is a picture for the channel-hopping set, something to watch with half an eye while all your mind is coasting elsewhere, less a movie than a feature- length trailer, a series of short, cluttered scenes cut to a rock 'n' roll score and leading . . . . Well, that's the other thing about The Pick-up Artist: it leads precisely nowhere. [18 Sept 1987]

Like the fakery it satirizes, DiCillo's Real Blonde ends up ringing hollow.

Clarkson is fascinating to watch, but the denouement is quick and flat. A storm blows over unexcitedly, as does this film.

Ares is a mostly disposable and thoroughly dumb product of lazy franchise fetishism from filmmakers who could not seem to care less about what story they are trying to tell. But as a two-hour visual screensaver to a thunderous and hypnotic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, Ares rules.

The oddest movie to come out of Disney since Herbie ran out of gas in Monte Carlo, Brother Bear is a cartoon about a boy who becomes a man by learning how to be a bear.

A high-school talent show, no doubt, but, at its best, well worth glorifying.

The presence of some genuine feeling distinguishes Saw III from its predecessors. That said, it has plenty of the blood, torture and dismemberment that moviegoers demand from their Halloween weekend entertainment.

With its jazzy saxophone noodlings during the opening credits and its bruised black-and-blue look, it's so quaintly and conventionally pulp that you feel like filing a report with the cliché police.

The difficulty with the film starts with the amount of improbability one must swallow. [24 Dec. 1998, p.D10]

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

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.

It's an empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable, low-rent "Moulin Rouge" that pays curious tribute to Barnum by similarly hailing its audience as slack-jawed rubes, slobbering for whatever passes as entertainment. It's godawful.

The movie is a preholiday trifle that’s mildly risqué and a lot sentimental.

Burdened with a needlessly complex conceit, flat character design, limp jokes, and a soundtrack completely absent a single ear-worm (unless you count an overreliance on Madonna’s Lucky Star), Luck feels dredged from the bottom of Pixar’s few lows (Cars comes to mind) than plucked from its many highs (Inside Out would like a word).

Ultimately, his (Silver) film settles for a queasy mix of high-toned intentions and commercial compromises.

There's a wonderfully subversive film buried somewhere in Spanglish, but it's never allowed to get out.

Isn't quite funny enough to make it as a comedy, or touching enough to make it as a romance. It's a pleasant effort that doesn't hit any of its targets.

The fiction that follows can be safely regarded as much more than a war movie -- hell, this is a pro-war movie. Were it a politician, it would be Donald Rumsfeld.

Sinbad lacks, alas, the sparkle and inventiveness of the stories that inspired it.

At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses with a series of swing-and-miss gags, often with an abusive twist.

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

On his own, Dangerfield is still a buoyant presence. But the cliche tells us that movie-making is a collaborative exercise, and the price for Easy Money must be paid. Ultimately, Captain Rodney goes down with his film and sinks without a trace. [20 Aug 1983]

Dan Aykroyd has been consistently disappointing since he left the Saturday Night Live television show to work in feature films. His latest film, Doctor Detroit is more evidence that Aykroyd's comedic talent, which was brilliantly spontaneous when feeding off a live studio audience, isn't suited to the big screen. [9 May 1983]

Despite the strength of the cast, Demon Knight stumbles over its own indecision. It's a scream, up until the laughing stops.

There’s one big problem: Anne doesn’t drive her own journey. She spends scene after scene passively letting Jacques tell her what to do, eat and think. And there’s no detouring around that.

It’s an action thriller that’s effective and never boring.

Poor genre efforts like Backstabbing for Beginners hurt cinema’s chance to survive and thrive as the greatest medium for storytelling.

While the film has all the makings of something that could easily be overly saccharine because it’s so predictable, Blue Miracle manages to be a rather charming family-friendly affair.