For a film about memories, Reminiscence is ultimately truly forgettable.

You don’t need to root for the best movies and you don’t want to root for the worst. But, occasionally, along comes a picture so nearly good that you dearly wish it were better. Welcome to She’s Out of My League, where the rooting interest is strong but so is the frustration.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

Brooks knew how to engineer a well-crafted script. Yet on the evidence here – a stuttering two-hour outing bereft of any rhythm, a bunch of scenes in search of a movie – he's apparently forgotten.

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

May not be your idea of a fun European vacation, but Roth's trip offers horror fans more than the usual sick kicks.

The plot is simple, the character development is lazy and the use of the oh-my-God-there’s-someone-right-behind-you device is tiring. Still, the premise is sound. Evil in the church – who would have thought? Duh-duh!

If I Stay is true to principle in one significant regard: It makes no concessions to anyone outside its teenage female cohort.

The look of the film is sterile and monochromatic, as is the acting and the mood. And while fans of the genre will absolutely appreciate the surreal gloom, for most others Level 16 will come in at a level below an average "Twilight Zone" episode.

A poet is not a pirate (except in his dreams), and, minus the gold in his teeth and kohl over his eyes and trinkets in his tresses, Depp is handicapped here -- for all his deft brushwork, he can only do so much with a flat character on a small canvas.

WITH the russet beauty of New Mexico as the setting, White Sands sports a nice look. With the angular Willem Dafoe in the lead role, White Sands boasts a solid performance. And with director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) behind the camera, White Sands maintains a brisk pace. Now if it only had a script that made a lick of sense, White Sands might have been a good movie. It doesn't; it isn't. [24 Apr 1992]

Brian and Dom could drive from L.A. to Mexico City and back blindfolded, but would require a GPS to find the zipper of a dress. The only time they smile here is when they are alone in a garage, tinkering with their dream cars.

The goal is apparently a double exercise in heartfelt lessons and deep hilarity, but it's hard to tell because the pace feels so lethargic. Director and screenwriter Wil Shriner is a TV-sitcom veteran (Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond) whose idea of directing a movie is to make another sitcom, only four times as long.

Much was made about how, with respectable director Sam Taylor-Johnson at the helm, Fifty Shades was going to be a legitimately good movie. It’s not, and it’s also not over-the-top enough to suggest future cult-classic status. What it is is a movie best saved for at home viewing, both because there is no compelling reason to see it on the big screen, and mostly because the pause, rewind and fast-forward controls are sure to come in handy.

It wants so much to cover everything, and do so in a way that is so laudatory of Salinger's genius and purity that it never really delves into anything interesting or complex. It merely skims.

Director Ross and his stars have been eagerly comparing Undercover Blues to the Thin Man movies of yore. True, both feature a bantering husband and wife team that excels at crimebusting, but Nick and Nora Charles had more substance - and, for that matter, more style - than Jeff and Jane Blue. And unlike their modern imitators, Nick and Nora had the good taste not to smile so overbearingly that you wanted to punch them. [13 Sept 1993]

The tension between trying to make something unique and trying to adhere to whatever expectations you place on yourself when you call your movie Capone (although to be fair its working title was Fonzo) is right up there onscreen. In all its glorious mess.

Like a two-bit philosopher working the wrong side of the stone, Howard has managed to turn gold into lead.

More than sufficiently funny.

As interesting as reading the computer code that was used to create the original Mortal Kombat video game, and about as fun as getting your spine torn out.

From the script to the title character to the direction, the watchwords here are three: Play it safe. The whole thing reeks of the formulaic.

More than merely stale and dated, Hollywood Ending seems lazy and careless -- the structure is loose to the point of crumbling.

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.

If CJ7 feels like the love child of Charles Dickens, Mao Zedong and Steven Spielberg, it's because that's exactly what this PG-rated, Chinese-made fantasy is.

Horns is allegorically cluttered, unsure of its tone and outrageous with its snakery in a half-serious supernatural thriller about good, evil and redemption in a garden of Eden.

The makers of The Meg may have gone to school on Spielberg, but the big-budget deep-sea thriller is nothing but bloodless summer filler. Unsure if he wants to have some fun and jump the Sharknado or make a seriously gory fish fest, director Jon Turteltaub has surfaced with nets empty.

An absurdist comedy such as The End, with the tone teetering from slapstick to sorrow, is quite another matter, requiring a sophistication Reynolds simply doesn't have. [27 May 1978]

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