The humor, both physical and verbal, is extremely weak. Aimed at suburban mall hoards, it might connect with young children. But no one else except maybe the filmmakers' friends and bums at all-night theaters will sit this one out. [11 Oct 1993]

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.

The result is yet another paean to arrested male adolescence that should be mandatory viewing in convents to prevent nuns from thinking of renouncing their vows of celibacy.

The light touch, the structural economy and lyrical voice that buoyed the gentle four-character piece on stage become cloying and strained in this clumsy expansion.

This is the sort of film for which the term "tearjerker" was invented, but this one jerks them so violently you may need medical attention afterwards.

Despite the high-stakes drama, there's nary a compelling moment throughout, and some of the characterizations, especially Stormare's villainous Sanitation Department honcho, are so absurdly one-note that it's hard not to think that the film is meant as parody.

Embraces its many cliches like they were nuggets of gold.

Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.

Singer hopes to offer the history of Mendes' career, maturation and emotional journey through memory and imagery instead of hard fact, which renders the film feathery and dull. If anything, I wanted less self-discovery and more straight-up musical performance.

While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries.

Hicham Hajji's debut — while featuring an impressive supporting cast and admirably attempting to inject political commentary into its mix — proves such a wan, ineffective vehicle that it leaves its star all dressed up with nowhere to go.

In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.

The dialogue suffers from a strained, turgid quality, most resembling a daytime soap opera.

The most problematic aspect of the film is that Hogan displays none of the cheeky charm and charisma that made him an international star. Although still obviously in great physical condition, he mainly walks through the film looking tired and pained, as if embarrassed to be taking part in such a labored self-reflexive exercise. On the other hand, you can't really blame him.

A deeply disappointing follow-up to her promising 2015 short Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, Gillian Wallace Horvat's I Blame Society is a first feature that points out many of its faults as it goes, as if to transmute them into satirical jabs at an uncertain object.

A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

Even by the slight standards of high concept -- put sexpot in next-to-nothing costume and have her shoot people -- "Point of No Return" is thin. Screenwriters Robert Getchell and Alexandra Seros make attempts at humor, primarily such high frivolities as sadism or food-gorging, and there is a perfunctory attempt to round out Ms. Killer herself, largely socio-drivel about her abusive upbringing. [19 March 1993]

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

Even Wayne Campbell would blow chunks at "So I Married an Axe Murderer." Mike Myers' new vehicle suggests, with the "So" in the title, an off-handed, postmodern take on an overheated Roger Corman flick. But the film assumes anything but a wry, ironic tone -- it, and Myers in particular, try way too hard. The result is a sloppy, nearly two-hour riff on that tiredest of sitcom conceits -- the suspicion that a close comrade is hiding a dark secret. With generic characterizations and a far-too-easily solved mystery, the film will likely be passed over by audiences, who will wait to see Myers on the big screen again when he re-emerges from his Aurora, Ill., basement. [19 July 1993]

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

It's parental wish-fulfillment that isn't at all interested in what being a kid actually feels like.

This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

It's a bust. The characters are bland; the dialogue is lame; and the situational comedy and inevitable dramatics are mediocre at best. The quietly released Warner Bros. film might play well on naval bases and ships at sea, but everyone else will steer clear. [25 Apr 1994]

The film, like the novel it’s based on, skirts the issues — of race, gender and class — that would texture its narrative and strengthen its broad thesis, resulting in a story that says more about how whiteness operates in a society allergic to interdependence than it does about how communities fail young people.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

Whatever goodwill superfan director Colin Trevorrow earned with 2015’s enjoyable reboot, Jurassic World, he pulverizes it here with overplotted chaos, somehow managing to marginalize characters from both the new and original trilogies as well as the prehistoric creatures they go up against in one routine challenge after another. Evolution has passed this bloated monster by.

For a movie with so much volatile physicality and bruising punishment, there’s an inertia about the whole thing, a soullessness that makes every contrived smirk grate. We don’t care about who gets pounded to a pulp or shot to pieces because there are no characters to root for — good guys or bad.