What began as a feature-length toy commercial instantly disintegrates into MTV fodder. [22 Mar 1991, p.24]

Begun by screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson (Grumpy Old Men), Jack Frost ended up taking four credited writers to finish - and still it's a derivative mess. [11 Dec 1998]

The odd couple here is just as charmless, and their adventures are equally unfunny. When the filmmakers try to get sentimental about the relationship, you'll either be rolling your eyes or thinking about heading for the exit.

McCarthy’s trademark blend of chipper likability and treble-voiced rage just isn’t quite enough to carry things through.

Megalopolis is a misfire from the start.

Criminal has a strong supporting cast, but the big names aren’t doing much beyond the bare minimum to qualify for a payday.

If The Black Phone dabbles in crimes that are taboo, even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, Black Phone 2 commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze — and not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

[Neeson's] impressive physicality, (a tower among men), his rumbly basso-profundo voice and his impressive demeanor give him a natural gravity that allows him to rise above the most absurd material. And he does exactly that in The Commuter.

"We're in Twin Peaks here," says the only surviving teenager in town. It's a lame attempt to create class by association. Unlike David Lynch's kinky series, the creators of Freddy's Dead couldn't care less about the movie's interchangeable characters. The actors are often hard to tell apart; some are just worse than others. [14 Sept 1991, p.C5]

A supernatural thriller that would like to be the new Exorcist, this hapless film has a promising villain and a sympathetic hero, but their confrontations are mostly anti-climactic. [02 Sep 1995, p.F3]

Sloppy writing, inconsistent tone and gaping plotholes make this film look more like instant video product. [1 May 1992, p.34]

It’s Honeyglue, a romantic drama, which fittingly, given that title, is sticky with sentimentality.

Many decisions...make “Batman v Superman” a joyless slog.

Although it is as harmless as its predecessor - and harmless should not be mistaken for a compliment - there is only one sad conclusion to be drawn from this kind of profiteering kiddie fodder: We owe our children better than this.

The worst thing about Life Itself is not that it is emotionally sadistic. It's just how much it wants to be emotionally sadistic, while missing the mark by a mile.

Time-travel movies don't come much dopier than Freejack. [18 Jan 1982, p.C5]

Much of the time, for all the leering effort she puts into portraying this demonic tease, Barrymore just seems to be playing dress-up. She also needs a more responsive co-star than Gilbert, who gives a one-note performance in the part that should be at the story's center. [29 May 1992, p.18]

In trying to do too much, Halloween Kills ends up doing nothing at all, other than tarnishing this franchise’s good name.

Nowhere to Run isn't the worst of its kind - it's just painfully uninspired. Perhaps that partially accounts for Van Damme's apparent disinterest. With one expression at his command, it's surprising that he actually musters three distinct acting styles: concrete, steel, and petrified wood. [15 Jan 1993, p.18]

Sadly, Friend Request is not even the first movie to travel that harrowing Dead Girl Who Still Maintains an Active Facebook Presence road.

It's no more obnoxious than the original, and in several ways it's more interesting. [08 Apr 1995, p.C7]

Elba, always a powerful presence in whatever role he takes on, does the best he can in Beast, but the threadbare nature of the plotting and dialogue ultimately defeats him.

Toy Story approached toy frenzy from the toys' point of view while craftily exploring the media-driven delusions of that Turbo Man-like doll, Buzz Lightyear. Jingle All the Way had that kind of potential, but somewhere along the way the filmmakers lost all perspective. [22 Nov 1996, p.F7]

A more disagreeable collection of cynical, backstabbing, self-aggrandizing, shallow, vicious and vile specimens of humanity gathered together in a single motion picture would be difficult to conceive of.

Once it gets going, Black Adam feels like a continuous closed loop of destruction where the moments of mayhem blend darn near seamlessly one into the other. And those special effects look incredibly cheesy.

When words fail in The Last Knight, the crunching and crashing and KLANKing of the special-effects scenes take up the slack. Punishingly overwrought in every aspect, Last Knight is a KLANK! KLANK! KLUNKER.

It’s a mishmash in which characters are thrown from dimension to dimension and from dream to dream. The main character, played by Bannister, is forever baffled as to what his actual reality is. His bafflement is shared by the viewer.

Cute and daffy enough to make your molars ache, Bakery in Brooklyn is the kind of romantic comedy that lacks all conviction.

Every scene in this film, which stars Robert De Niro as the washed-up title character, is dragged out — kicking and screaming — far longer than it needs to be.

A joyless experience.

Amsterdam is not entirely without small pleasures: Emmanuel Lubezki’s sepia-toned cinematography is lovely to look at, and it’s fun to play spot-the-movie-star with the talented cast, and to note with pleasure how Washington’s scratched-velvet voice sounds so much like that of his father Denzel. But ultimately it’s a big disappointment.

I was hoping to miss the preview of Encino Man by scheduling some other, more entertaining diversion like, say, a few hours of unnecessary oral surgery. No such luck...There is a special annex of hell for movies like this, where sinners and simpletons are sent to atone for watching too much MTV. [22 May 1992, p.22]

We can see everything that Manhattan Night has in store from a mile off. Every step of the way it’s predictable. And that predictability makes it tedious.

Child's Play 2 is perfunctory, disagreeable and patience-trying. [09 Nov 1990, p.24]

Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but it just isn’t worth putting the puzzle together. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman.

The movie’s unrelenting sensory onslaught is exhausting. It’s torture to sit through.

It quickly becomes apparent that the narrative content of “Kingsglaive” is a barely coherent muddle.

There are some fleeting moments of inspiration — the music by Rob Simonsen is a master class in sudsy melodrama, and Nixon turns in a great performance — but The Only Living Boy in New York is rotten to its Big Apple core.

It's perhaps the only film that could make you wish they'd made a sequel to "Encino Man" instead. [2 July 1993, p.D24]

Tokyo Decadence includes what may be the only near-death experience ever played for laughs in a movie. [15 Oct 1993, p.D26]

It’s just the same movie over and over, until the end of time and everybody dies, in which case “Pitch Perfect 45: A-Ca-Wait-Are-We-Dead?” might be a thing.

Only the super-speedy Flash, played by Ezra Miller, lightens up the proceedings. Miller’s goofy eager-beaver take on the character, very reminiscent of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, is the picture’s saving grace.

It’s a rare misstep for the usually sure-footed folks behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As "M3GAN 2.0" drags on, it's impossible to shake the sense that Cooper's voice was the key to the original.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who already love it, it’ll be just right.

Generic abuser, generic victim, generic nice-guy-next-door, all going through highly predictable motions. [08 Feb 1991, p.21]

The whole picture is an exercise in obvious effort, try, try, trying really hard to win the audience’s affection. However it only succeeds in trying the audience’s patience. It’s a trial.

Passenger 57 is so completely routine and devoid of imagination that it seems to have been directed on auto-pilot. [09 Nov 1992, p.D4]

Unfortunately, the recycled plot is still the driving force here, and the movie becomes increasingly frantic trying to accommodate it. In the end, Raffill can't bring this dummy to life, but he does try.

The fight scenes, full of swordplay and gunfire, are choppily edited and somehow lackadaisical. It’s as though Schwentke was operating from a checklist of expected action-movie clichés and hurries through them all.

A film is a different experience from a book, and the movie “It Ends With Us” doesn’t really bring us inside Lily’s head; it simply leaves us puzzled and horrified.

There's only so much a director can do to dress up a sequel as ill-conceived and impoverished as this one. [30 Aug 1991, p.24]

A deeply uninspired sequel to last year’s surprise (and surprisingly sweet) hit “Bad Moms,” this movie was made in a hurry and it shows.

The best that can be said of this campy but witless time-travel thriller is that it's acted with some authority. [12 Jan 1991, p.C7]

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (“Kon-Tiki”) seem to not have the slightest idea how to make this material sing; instead, it’s mostly a noisy, dark 3D blur in which the characters run around a lot, seemingly looking for the exits

A picture in the running for the dubious distinction of being perhaps the worst Marvel-derived origin story ever.

Coerced jollity is the order of the day in the kingdom of trolldom in this animated kids movie from DreamWorks. And I do mean order.

Cheap and cheesy at every level, this Ben-Hur barely qualifies as an epic. It’s a wholly unnecessary addition to the venerable franchise.

Unfortunately, he's working from a cliche-choked, insensitive script, written by Gary Goldman (``Big Trouble in Little China'') and Chuck Pfaffer (``Dark Man''), that makes a point of stirring up old prejudices.

The cast of "Ladybugs" is good-natured enough, but Dangerfield is reduced to reading lame one-liners about "drag races" as his future stepson hops in and out of a dress. Brandis is never allowed to have much fun with the complications that result from pretending to be a girl, and his best friend (Vinessa Shaw) barely seems to notice when he reveals that he's been deceiving her. What should have been a wild door-slamming farce never really gets started. already are turning from brown. [28 March 1992, p.C5]

Unfortunately, everyone's trying too hard to recapture the original's wry tone, and Culkin lacks the gawky, impish charm that Billingsley brought to Shepherd's childhood alter ego. [06 Jul 1995, p.E1]

It’s all just a day at the beach, harmlessly fun and instantly forgettable.

The dumbest, goriest bone-cruncher of the season: an unnecessary and Arnold-less sequel to the Schwarzenegger science-fiction hit of three years ago. [21 Nov 1990, p.C3]

Some of the most preposterous fights ever captured on film ensue with a baby-faced hero who sports an aerodynamic mullet. Also, Thomas does flips as he takes on two roles in an imaginary conversation. [28 Jan 2007, p.K5]

Although the sense of being inside a video game is strong, one critical element is lacking: interactivity. Players are always working their controllers to send characters on their complicated journeys. They’re participants. A movie, by its very nature, turns everyone into spectators. We watch, but have no control over what we see. And what we see in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is nothing more than empty-calorie visuals.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” lumbers on for more than two hours, weighed down with oversized elephants, excessively populated action sequences, and weirdly sudden occurrence of slow motion, as if the film is yawning.

It’s a lazy movie that fades from memory the instant the credits start to roll; a blandly pretty cog in a studio wheel. Moms deserve better. So do moviegoers.

The Dead Don’t Die isn’t just deadpan — it’s dead.

A more self-impressed movie than Dicks: The Musical would be hard to imagine.

There’s a problem with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It’s attempting to mock something that is beyond mockery.

Toula and Ian are sweet and bland; their relatives are predictably wisecracky, and the whole thing just feels like watching someone’s extremely well-produced vacation video.

Kidnap has a tossed-together sameness to it, like a salad made up only of tired lettuce.

There’s no problem keeping up with these Joneses. The audience is way ahead of them every step of the way.

Unfortunately, Craven's constant emphasis on cannibalism, child abuse and incest adds up to more unpleasantness than thrills. [02 Nov 1991, p.C3]

The politics of 1980s are certainly due for an examination in American film. But True Colors isn't it. [19 Apr 1991, p.27]

The game, propelled by twitchy point-of-view camera work and abundant jump scares, is fast-paced. The movie is anything but.

Cynical, over-hyped and enthusiastically brainless, Bird on a Wire demonstrates the programmed, soul-less bankruptcy of the Hollywood hit-making system in the early 1990s. [18 May 1990, p.28]

Striking Distance wants to be a whodunit, a buddy movie, a serial-killer thriller, a romantic drama, a story about one honest cop fighting a corrupt department - and the ultimate car-and-boat chase movie. It is all of these, and so much less. [17 Sept 1993, p.D16]

The script earns a few points for trying to deal with the puzzles inherent in time-travel stories, and it's not surprising that the author is John Varley, who has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for his science-fiction novels. But he needed a more inspired director than the plodding Michael Anderson. [15 Mar 1990, p.D5]

Kraven may be the world’s greatest hunter, but next time, he needs to track down a better movie.

Stuck in this largely infantilized role, Cowen imbues Angel with as much verve and spunk as she can; she’s often funnier and darker than necessary, offering a refreshing dash of acid to temper the sickly sweetness.

Director Malcolm D. Lee, whose previous movie, 2017’s raucous “Girls Trip,” gave Haddish her star-making breakout role, does her no favors here. In this mess of a movie, her performance is merely adequate. She, and the audience, deserve better.

The picture’s real weakness is that the reanimated dead display a great deal more vitality than the characters in their pre-killed state.

It's not enough to say that the Ernest movies are aimed at very young children. They are aimed at very young, very stupid children, and their unfortunate parents should steer them toward more edifying entertainment. [12 Nov 1993, p.D24]

Johnson and Dornan’s performances are wooden and their chemistry nonexistent (particularly in the movie’s more-of-the-same sex scenes), but think of it all as ultra-deadpan entertainment and it kind of works.

You feel for the actors, who you know are better than this stuff, and you wonder if director F. Gary Gray (“Straight Outta Compton”) just threw up his hands. And you wonder if, somewhere, Smith and Jones are chuckling. At least somebody was.

A movie that numbs the head. [12 July 1995, p.E1]

Captain Ron feels like the work of people who've had too much exposure to equatorial sunshine, as if it were lazily shot between vacation dips in a blue lagoon. Comedically speaking, Captain Ron is a sinking ship. While Russell is passably amusing with a care-free, phoned-in performance, Short's character is an irritating killjoy, and the role rarely capitalizes on Short's considerable comedic skills. [18 Sep 1992, p.22]

We don’t even see that much of Cuba. Most of the action takes place at Hemingway’s estate there — the actual house, a vanilla-ice-cream-colored mansion (now a Hemingway museum), which gives a restrained, elegant performance. Pity the rest of the movie doesn’t rise to its standard.

“I’m tired.” — Overheard from a member of the audience at the end of the seemingly endless closing credit crawl at the critic’s screening for “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.” - I hear you, lady. Believe me, I hear you.

This installment is essentially the same mix as before, with only a better-than-average cast to recommend it. [30 Sept 1995, p.F7]

It’s just a bad movie; a flat melodrama in which some lovely camerawork and a ferocious central performance from Winslet can’t conceal the rote tiredness of it all.

Stuffed with touristy images but not enough dramatic substance to make any of them count.

Were expectations running too high for this "erotic thriller" from legendary director Richard Rush, who hasn't completed a movie in 14 years? Or is it really the full-blown fiasco it appears to be?

That’s a lot for a viewer to take in, and as pleasing as some aspects of Your Name can be, there’s no question Shinkai’s overstuffed movie often trips over itself.

It wants to comment on the algorithms that rule our lives, spewing constantly recycled content at us seemingly at random, but it is exactly the thing that it points to: an upcycled Frankenstein’s monster of intellectual property spraying a stew of Easter eggs and Halloween costumes at the viewer, praying that something sticks.

A soggy thriller in which every scene, even a daytime one early on at the newspaper where Lo works, seems to take place in ominously blue darkness.