The movie becomes a cavalcade of tired gags — less com than rom.

To the director Michael Fimognari’s credit, "P.S. I Still Love You” doesn’t condescend to Lara Jean’s dilemma even as her choices deserve popcorn pelted at the screen. Yet, he’s content with a product that seems beamed in from a staticky old channel.

A computer-animated feature of bright hues, hectic action and only occasional charm.

Gene Saks, directing his first movie, has paced it so unevenly and allowed such glaring mismatches of scenic backgrounds and even of gag sequences that it looks as though his costly picture was made by people who didn't know their way around.

Nothing spoils a horror story faster than a stupid victim. And Nightmares, an anthology of four supposedly scary episodes, has plenty of those.

This film is quite literally lost in the wilderness, with an intermittent, picturesque prettiness that doesn't suit the action at all. More damagingly, Mr. Dickerson does nothing to keep his cast from chewing up the mountain scenery. [16 Apr 1994, p.11]

In addition to his acting duties, Presley also wrote and directed the film. But while he provides beard and brawn as the heroic musher, he struggles with the technical challenges of editing and staging the run.

It’s an unchallenging movie, but as far as unchallenging kids movies go, the actors ensure this one doesn’t fall into soullessness.

The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain.

A big problem is that the students are all affluent and status-obsessed, but the film has no temperament for self-examination: Instead of a John Hughes-style satire of class and social divides — not that acute here, to begin with — we get an uncritical depiction of homogeneous entitlement.

Guerra aestheticizes everything to an extreme.

At some point you’re tempted to stop following the narrative and start keeping score between husband and wife. It’s a good debate. It just isn’t much of a movie.

Realism without much reality, enormous care for the wrong details, historical accuracy and spineless dramaturgy, The Molly Maguires vacillates among intentions and settles finally for ponderous spectacle and easy irony.

More of a raspberry than a reboot, The Banana Splits Movie, available to buy (and later to rent) on multiple digital platforms, is far less crazy than it wants to be and far more soporific than a synopsis would suggest.

A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.

The movie looks and sounds great, but greatness and depth elude it.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.

Torn between the maternal and the cosmic, the tactile and the unearthly, Proxima feels as unsettled as its heroine.

Natali whips up an atmospheric frenzy in kind, but every new addition is a subtraction. Two characters condemned to an eternal game of “Marco Polo” is scary enough on its own.

The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.

The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic.

The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.

It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, The Children's Hour, could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version.

Class of 1999 is the paranoid student's dream movie, full of absurd battle scenes and failed attempts at dark humor.

With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a lame attempt to cash in on her character's success.

While Mr. Doug brings plenty of enthusiasm to the task, he doesn't have the moves, and the scene, which ends with his following a mouse into a Dumpster, is one dull thud. The movie also crams far too many subsidiary characters into its 89 bumpy minutes.

It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.

Conceived frankly as a product, complete with hit-to-be theme song over the closing credits, this adventure film cares less about storytelling than about keeping the Musketeers' feathered hats on straight whenever they go galloping.

Innocent Blood, which could easily have been titled "A French Vampire in Pittsburgh" in homage to one of Mr. Landis's earlier triumphs, is even more dependent on gruesome special effects than "An American Werewolf in London" was, and is a lot less imaginative.

Operation Dumbo Drop is painlessly good-humored by any lights, but the viewers most likely to enjoy all this are those most easily driven to giggles by the idea of elephant poop.

Too often, Betty Blue has the posturing good looks of a fashion spread and nothing more.

If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."

Considering the ersatz tension and plotting, Black Christmas is hardly worth the efforts of all concerned.

In its quest for entertainment value, this documentary loses sight of the actual grief and hurt a devastated son would feel.

Angels have proliferated in popular culture in such profusion lately that maybe they needed a comeuppance. A few more movies like The Prophecy should stop the whole celestial bandwagon right in its tracks.

The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.

Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness.

Unfortunately, in Matthew Rosen’s fictionalized take, Quezon’s Game, this story of intrigue turns stiff and sentimental.

A big expensive, star‐studded bore in which a lot of famous talent is permitted — no, encouraged — to do a series of campy turns on their own worst mannerisms.

There are some jokey parts, some weepy bits, a sexy moment and a few fine displays of anger from Louis-Dreyfus, but they’re all just thrown together like salted nuts and cheap candies in a snack mix.

A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.

Sneakers is jokey without being funny, breathless without creating suspense, in part because of the feeble plot.

FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.

Frank Pierson has written and directed a melodrama about three generations of gypsies that is all color and no substance.

Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.

The movie's distinguishing feature is not the number or variety of horrible murders, but the length of time it takes for the victims to die. This is a technique that may have been borrowed from Italian opera, but without the music, it loses some of its panache.

Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.

The movie’s structural dynamics make it play like a cross between “Nocturnal Animals” and “Sleuth.” But the stagings are stilted; the relations between the conflicted characters never catch fire.

Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date. It has no recognizable center of interest, no anchor for our attention. It's a series of whoopee-cushion gags...More than anything else, The Hotel New Hampshire is exhausting.

Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.

This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.

A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

It feels like an artifact from a particularly contentious past, a stale corn chip trampled into Party-convention carpeting.

The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.

For all those out there who can't get enough of Prince, Under the Cherry Moon may be just the antidote.

In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.

Like a magic brew thinned into bouillon, Come Away folds spellbinding storybook tales into a mundane melodrama.

If “Created Equal” is trying to promote the conservative cause, it does so gently, and blandly.

Derivative as it was, ''Romancing the Stone'' did have a certain spunk, thanks to its contrast between the workaday life of Joan Wilder, romance novelist (played so gamely by Kathleen Turner), and the far-flung adventures into which the screenplay propelled her. Sadly for the sequel, the novelty in that contrast was more than used up the first time around. This time, through no fault of his own, the director Lewis Teague (the first film was directed by Robert Zemeckis) has little more to do than construct a retread.

Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.

Tank is as immediately forgettable as a lesser, made-for-television movie.

Steel Dawn has been directed by Lance Hool to emphasize Mr. Swayze's biceps. The movie starts with the mysterious fighter standing on his head. Maybe it looks better that way.

Frank Deese's script is as rudimentary as the lyrics that pound through the hallways, and Christopher Cain's direction provides no surprises.

Back to the Beach opened yesterday. But if you catch a television commercial for it, or the rock video that's on television, you'll get the joke and see the most this movie has to offer.

Madonna, left to her own devices and her own canny pace, is a very engaging comedian, and the screenplay, by Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman, contains a lot of raffishly funny ideas that get lost in the busyness of the physical production.

Resistance feels disjointed and dated.

It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.

A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.

In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn.

Slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.

Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.

The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.

For a film so exhaustively loaded with silliness, Kansas is remarkably dull. [23 Sep 1988, p.C17]

Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.

Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace.

While the film may speak to viewers with a spiritual investment in these events, it does little to bring them alive for others.

The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative.

Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.

The grim film feels excavated from the subconscious: The coarse illustration style, with its frazzled, stray lines, emphasizes the bleakness of the images.

Now and then, there is some horseplay involving the whole group or an angry exchange between a couple of them, but mostly we're watching a set of shticks, some amusing, some not. It's like being at an Actor's Studio showcase.

The film plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.

THE smashing, crashing, thrashing battle between Farrah Fawcett and James Russo that takes up about half of Extremities leaves the contestants in a state of exhaustion -and the movie along with them.

The rest is mainly whack, splat and kaboom, with fast cuts to a rock beat. Miami vise.

The Surrogate feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column.

The “Trip” movies have always been self-aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That’s as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop-out.

The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.

This huge cliche of a movie isn't even a distant relation of films like The Color of Money, which can actually make you root for hustlers. The Big Town only proves we've gone back to the 1950's one time too many.

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

The surfing footage is fairly routine until the film's climax, a contest featuring some spectacular shots of surfers seen beneath the overhang of breaking waves. Otherwise, the surfing, writing, direction and performances are of a caliber to interest only undiscriminating adolescents.

Airport '77 looks less like the work of a director and writers than like a corporate decision.

Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.

Ideas and issues in this film are as scarce as hen's teeth. In their place are little signposts that tell us what we are supposed to believe without thinking...Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that -if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does - anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.

It’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is because the director, Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods,” “Candyman”), has talent, the cast is appealing, and there’s a lightly gonzo scene that shows you what the other 100 minutes could have been. It’s almost as if the suits at Marvel Studios know it doesn’t matter if their movies are any good.

Under Bob Radler's direction, the sequences involving tae-kwan-do, a lethal ballet-styled hybrid of kick boxing, judo and karate, carry very little visceral charge until the last 15 minutes, after which the movie expires in a saccharine slush of blood, sweat and tears.

The main characters tend to be either grotesques or stereotypes, who keep getting into incoherent arguments, composed largely of variations on America's favorite epithet...For a movie with pretensions to laying out political realities, the colorful Salvador is black and white.

A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.