Avildsen does a good job with all of these actors, and his re-creation of 1930s/1940s South Africa on sets in Zimbabwe and Botswana is convincing; his handling of squalor in the townships is particularly detailed and vivid. It's the best work he's done since winning the Oscar for the first "Rocky." But because of the script's shortcomings the result is only half of a good movie. [27 March 1992, p.22]

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

Final Analysis has the most convoluted plot about dreams, heights, murder, infatuation, Freudian imagery and a duplicitous San Francisco blonde since Hitchcock's "Vertigo." It's the kind of whopper that keeps you watching not because it's good but because you can't wait to see what the filmmakers will throw at you next. As it turns out, there's not much they won't try. In fact, by the time this cracked thriller reaches its hysterical finale, it's obvious that anything goes. [7 Feb 1992, p.22]

What we have here is a standard-issue comedy-tinged crime thriller indifferently directed by Tim Story (the “Think Like a Man” and “Ride Along” movies). Its nothing-special plot, the product of writers Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow, features ill-defined villains and briefly touches on Islamophobia and military veteran PTSD and drug abuse — and never follows up on any of those issues.

It’s Harley Quinn’s movie and everybody else in Suicide Squad is just a supporting character. No surprise there. That’s the way it is in the comic books, too. It’s all about personality, and Harley has that by the freight carload.

The Goldfinch feels like a series of often-elegant moments, in service to a story that never quite comes into focus.

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.

This may be the easiest installment in the series for parents to sit through.

This is a production from producer Michael Bay, master of the cinema of CG run amok. And all we helpless mortals can do is cower and duck as those 3D fists fly.

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.

Last week, it was Ninja Turtles. This week, it's Ernest. And Ernest, quite frankly, is an improvement. It's more colorful, cartoonish, imaginative. And it feels like a movie, not just an advertising ploy. [07 Apr 1990, p.C5]

Happy anniversary, Little Women, but I think I prefer you back in the 19th century; dreamy professors aside.

In recent interviews, Van Damme has announced his intentions of acting, and he tries in Double Impact. It's a shame because he and his story - which he also co-wrote and co-produced - wind up being a little too tame. [10 Aug 1991, p.C3]

It is a singularly irritating semi-comedy, colorfully wrapped but with batteries definitely not included. [18 Dec 1992, p.28]

RoboCop 3 is junk food, but it's tasty none the less. [05 Nov 1993, p.D37]

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]

A thriller that fails on every level, it doesn't even make you want to find out what happens next. [26 Apr 1991, p.20]

MTV veteran and first-time director Jim Yukich makes the most of the flashy if uneven visual effects, which usually have a state-of-the-art quality but occasionally look as phony as matte paintings in 1950s biblical epics. [04 Nov 1994, p.I39]

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

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

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]

The chief distinction of the picture, and what makes it more guilty pleasure than patience-tester, is Pakula's strong visual sense, which is reminiscent of his work on "The Parallax View." [16 Oct 1992, p.3]

What say we tiptoe quietly away and pretend this movie never happened?

An enjoyably nutty more-is-more family holiday extravaganza.

Though the messaging is a bit flat-footed, it’s nonetheless effective, and clearly deeply felt, and it brings a sense of significance to this otherwise wacky real-life story, one that really does have to be seen to be believed.

It all works quite well as glossy entertainment, but ultimately The Bodyguard satisfies only if you don't think about it too much. [25 Nov 1992, p.D3]

The only thing original in Dr. Giggles - about a psychotic doctor (Larry Drake) who escapes a mental institution to resume his belovedly departed father's explicitly unhealthy rampage of serial killings - is the freakish instruments that the pun-filled physician totes around in his bag of dirty tricks.

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.

As an homage to Friedkin’s movie, Green’s take is respectful and genuinely scary. Let those tubular bells chime forth in celebration.

As a vehicle for Grammer, the movie seems a comfortable fit. But why bother with a big-screen part if it can't match what he's been doing for some time on Frasier? [01 Mar 1996, p.F3]

In between all of these delights is an awful lot of filler

If Brooks could have mustered up a screenplay half as good as “Broadcast News,” this movie would have been a delight; instead, it disappears into agreeable blandness and earnest platitudes. It’s not at all unpleasant spending two hours with Ella and her family and colleagues, but it leaves you feeling a little nostalgic for what it could have been.

"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]

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

The effort put into making this film work is palpable, but the result is something deeply surreal and strange. Perhaps this story simply can’t work as a film, or perhaps it wasn’t a very good musical to begin with. It’s a question that may be debated for years to come.

Inspiration, old-fashioned style, is the main course being served in Pelé: Birth of a Legend. In essence commissioned by the soccer icon, who is credited as one of the picture’s executive producers, “Pelé” is hagiography. But appealing hagiography.

So there’s not a single surprise along the way. But there is the comfort of familiarity operating in the movie’s favor. And it’s fun.

There’s exactly one good jump-scare, which probably would have caused me to drop my popcorn if I hadn’t finished it already; otherwise it’s fairly uninspired. But something about Quaid’s delivery had me giggling throughout — or, at least, until things got rather too dark in the final minutes.

Greetings from Moldova. Where surly locals stare sullenly at stupid strangers. Where the traditional regional greeting extended to said strangers is a hatchet in the forehead.

All of this is sporadically funny and cheerfully tasteless in its low-budget way, but it’s also unevenly acted, a bit overlong and never quite as daring as it seems to want to be.

Pathetically uninspired. [10 Dec 1993, p.G3]

Him is a bit like the red-faced drunk next to you at the Seahawks game: loud, fun at first, wearing thin after a few drives — asleep by the end.

Mile 22 is one nasty piece of work. It’s an action picture that’s hard-core to the core, populated entirely by killers with nary a truly sympathetic figure among them. But it does deliver.

Gemini Man is full of the expected action and bullets, none of which is especially thrilling, but you leave thinking about those two faces — and about how movie magic keeps finding new tricks.

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.

If ever there was a movie that should never have been made, Bad Santa 2 is that movie. It’s vile, like something written by a pen dipped in bile.

The original ending - which Baldwin refers to early in the film - was completely cut and replaced with an 11th-hour brainstorm by Eszterhas, amounting to little more than a punchline for the shaggiest shaggy-dog story in recent memory.

Pali Road — an engrossing psychological thriller with a trapped damsel’s very sanity on the line — demonstrates how an enigmatic story can unabashedly overflow with disorienting puzzles and perverse twists, all for the sake of blurring the line between reality and illusion.

While it's no breakthrough, this may be the best of Disney's popular Ernest comedies starring Jim Varney as an amiable moron in the Jerry Lewis tradition. [11 Oct 1991, p.23]

Fascinating at certain moments, especially when Lewis is exploring his character’s grief and bitterness, it still feels like a work in progress.

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 jokes are labored and rarely clever, the narration is self-consciously cute and the pace, under director Charles Martin Smith, is that of the snail. "Boris and Natasha" should have been as fast, funny and clever as "SCTV" once was. Instead, "Boris and Natasha" looks more like a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon than a comedy show for grown-ups. [16 Apr 1992, p.E6]

This is the movie that Steven Spielberg's Money Pit should have been. The mind-blowing ending makes it a must-see. [31 Oct 1999]

The special effects are quite impressive for a low-budget production, although the classiest thing about it is the voice of Welles, whose verbal dramatization of the Martian invasion still chills. [27 Apr 1990, p.20]

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

When the two groups meet, the movie becomes incredibly disjointed, as if Trevorrow met his heroes and wasn’t sure what to say. He peppers the movie with callbacks to his first “Jurassic World” movie and the original “Jurassic Park,” but it feels like he wants us to acknowledge that his “World” is as iconic as Spielberg’s “Park.” He’s doing fan service, but he doesn’t fully commit.

It’s all instantly forgettable. Except for the tulips — which, for the record, look stellar.

Although its lofty ambitions as a "social comedy" are never fully realized, Amos & Andrew is a refreshingly intelligent, character-driven comedy that attempts to tackle a timely and serious issue - racism - and still manages to be consistently funny. [05 Mar 1993, p.24]

Then it raids "GoodFellas" and "The Godfather" for most of its material, before winding up as the same old ultraviolent schlock. [13 Apr 1991, p.C5]

The Addams Family 2 feels as if it’s lost the spark of the first one. The jokes that felt fresh in the first film are stale here, with the story’s twists glaringly predictable.

Get out your handkerchiefs, but don’t expect to believe a minute of this vastly improbable tale.

Although it drags for 105 lugubrious minutes, Striptease is not the embarrassment that Showgirls was - not by a long shot.

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.

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

In more careless hands, Middle Man’s deranged farce could have resulted in an unchecked, undisciplined movie with nothing to say. But beneath the roller-coaster madness here is an earthbound terror that art is meant to reveal.

None of this has any real reason for being; even the tiniest bit of drama that Vardalos’ screenplay scares up...gets wrapped up by the hour mark. But Vardalos has created a community of characters and players so likable, it seems almost mean to criticize.

Let’s just say that things aren’t always what they seem, and that there is not enough popcorn in the world to make this particular twist go down.

What you've got here is nothing more (or less) than a smartly recast 90-minute episode of the old show, and that, as longtime fans of the Hillbillies will tell you, can be more fun than a swim in the ce-ment pond. [15 Oct 1993, p.D18]

What a pestilential little picture is Fist Fight.

Mercury Rising could have been a terrific movie with a little more gumption. [3 Apr 1998, p.G5]

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

Under the steady direction of John Frankenheimer, the movie's most memorable scenes involve the beasts' half-human limitations, their blind allegiance to "father" Moreau, and their discovery of the painful implants he uses to control them. They often make up for what was the chief shortcoming in Wells' original: its thin plot. [23 Aug 1996]

The prime attraction of this movie, and its predecessor, is that it envelopes the audience in the Mario world. Every square inch of the screen, from top to bottom, corner to corner, is packed with images derived from the game. Easter eggs abound. Watching it is akin being inside the 2007 Super Mario Galaxy game itself. Which is why it needs to be seen on the big screen. Seeing it on a phone or a laptop wouldn’t do it justice.

Director Renny Harlin and his writers, Robert King and Marc Norman, appear to have spent many hours watching bad pirate movies, and they seem determined to repeat every pieces-of-eight cliche. [22 Dec 1995, p.G8]

The dour environment doesn’t help, the humor doesn’t pop and, disappointingly, the scares just don’t land. There are a few jumps and bumps, but there’s no real sense of dread or unease or questioning.

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?

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]

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.

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

Prince's onstage performances are less fun than they've ever been. He's smitten with the idea of himself as a holier-than-thou rock icon. Day recycles his two jokes from Purple Rain - combing his hair and looking in the mirror - while ogling every chick in sight. This is stale stuff.

If you've already seen the preview trailer, you've probably seen the funniest gags anyway. [09 Aug 1991, p.22]

The director, Jon Turtletaub, completely misses the character-driven appeal of the Karate Kid series, and there's no Macauley Culkin in this cast. The movie is saddled with a junky visual style, haphazard editing and occasional out-of-focus shots. Much of it looks like very bad television, although the toilet jokes and a running gag about laxatives and instant diarrhea may be a little raw for the Disney Channel.

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]

All things considered, this pitifully plotted Belgian-French production represents the nadir of animated movies released so far this year, a farrago of frantic action and mindless cacophony.

The picture has an undeniable rough stylishness...but in terms of coherence of storytelling it leaves the audience choking on all that swirling dust.

What makes The Resurrection of Gavin Stone singular is its fresh and thoroughly modern approach to evangelical Christianity.

Williams' may represent hip-hop's cutting edge when it comes to videos, but concerning Belly, listen to some classic advice from Public Enemy: "Don't believe the hype." [04 Nov 1998]

The film is ponderous, the performances mostly subdued.

One doesn't expect much of Bosworth or Seagal, but Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke have, on occasion, been mistaken for actors. That becomes increasingly difficult to remember as this expensive, interminable vanity production waddles toward its predictable conclusion. [24 Aug 1991, p.C5]

Forever My Girl doesn’t stray from the formula or do anything revolutionary. But for an audience seeking fluffy, escapist, country music-tinged romance, it’ll hit a sweet spot.

While Portman’s performance is skilled, she doesn’t have enough to work with — the character, as written, just isn’t there.

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]

Neither the sophisticated teen comedy it wants to be nor the routine Disney slapstick number it sometimes becomes, it doesn't know what it is. [14 Feb 1997]

The Next Karate Kid is harmless as children's entertainment, but for 104 very long minutes, there isn't a recognizable human being in sight.

The movie is a series of ostentatious effects, without much sense of narrative momentum or rhythmic pacing, and it leaves you feeling like you've landed on a treadmill. [26 May 1995, p.E3]

As recent horror movies go, The Guardian isn't terrible - it's more suspenseful and coherent than Nightbreed or Leatherface, and Friedkin's flair for the genre does surface here and there. But it's hard to care about the outcome when the people are such sticks. [27 Apr 1990, p.20]

Watch this movie and you might die, of boredom.