The sad fact is, this 90-minutecharade - like almost every movie ever made that features "Silent Night" on the soundtrack - will be showing up on late-night television every Christmas Eve into the next century. Talk about your nightmares before Christmas. [5 Nov 1993, p.D32]

Bandit wants you to believe there’s some kind of moral underpinning to all this. There isn’t. There’s only another place to case, another outfit to don, another person to lie to, another bank to rob. No one’s born bad, but that doesn’t mean Bandit, the film or the man, is good, either.

It’s pretty. It’s empty. It’s pretty empty.

The sparring couple at its center are played by Naomi Watts, a fearless actress who seems game for anything, and Matthew McConaughey, who just seems off his game here.

Just another big dose of mindless violence. [06 Oct 1990, p.C5]

You loved “The Conjuring” in 2013. Now here’s “2,” with more, more, more of what you adored the first time around.

The basics of Draper’s story hold promise, but the film derails because Jack and Oliver just aren’t charming as social pariahs.

As long as the third and, one hopes, final installment is, it feels even longer. There’s more of it, much more, yet paradoxically, much less.

Performances are lively, the story is incredibly stupid - and if you've seen one fight you've seen them all. Van Damme should market his next film as offbeat comedy - go for the laughs he'd get from the art-house crowd. [11 Jan 1991, p.26]

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

This picture stands as the best argument yet that the YA dystopia cycle has passed its sell-by date.

You watch wondering what good actors like Lively, Law, Jeffrey and Sterling K. Brown (as a former C.I.A. officer) saw in this muddy screenplay, and why Morano, best known for the Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” couldn’t find a way to make them spark.

In the cast, only Isaac makes a vivid impression, in a swaggery, relaxed turn that seems to imply that he’s in on the joke, or at least having a good time.

The changes Bissell makes to the story are overly contrived, and the writing and editing are shaky. Most egregiously, Ann’s perspective is completely underwritten, without any personal history and the single humanizing factor of one daughter, who appears only briefly.

There must be dozens of film buffs out there with an unsatisfied hankering for Cinemascope Westerns. It's too bad, then, that Quigley Down Under fits the label, but doesn't deliver the goods.

Essentially a mugging contest masquerading as a science-fiction farce, My Favorite Martian suggests that nothing really changes in the universe of bad Disney comedies. [12 Feb 1999, p.G7]

Hathaway and Wilson, instead of exuding odd-couple comic chemistry, seem to barely be in the same movie; they don’t click, with each other or with a bland Alex Sharp as their tech-bro mark.

As welcome as a race riot on Christmas Eve, this excruciating comedy is destined not to become a year-end television perennial. [02 Dec 1994, p.I32]

The ever-game Dormer and that lovely green forest — which is, according to the press notes, played by a photogenic woodland in Serbia — deserve better.

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.

There are some genuinely funny bits but, alas, far too few.

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

The whole purpose of this teen horror movie is to show creatively gruesome deaths. If you prefer your horror flicks with a dash of wit or suspense, look elsewhere.

The new "Magoo" ends with a statement that it doesn't mean to slight near-sighted people or prejudice anyone against them. But so few of the sight gags relate to Magoo's near-sightlessness that the apology is baffling. [25 Dec 1997, p.26]

Saddled with a script full of lifeless, mock-clever ideas (such as having the local blacksmith make a pair of Rollerblades), Gottlieb can only do his best to mollify his audience with a few fleeting hints of the movie's untapped potential.

Hardly anyone comes off looking good in this glitzy and faintly ludicrous melodrama. [16 Feb 1990, p.34]

Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

Weirdest. Feminist. Movie. Ever.

Unfortunately, the script is so hopelessly superficial that very little of this registers. It's the work of Eric Roth, who wrote the unspeakable Billy Crystal comedy, "Memories of Me," and Michael Cristofer, a playwright whose most prominent previous screen credit was the disastrous "Bonfire of the Vanities."

Despite the stakes, Mendeluk can’t scare up any particular urgency, largely because everything is so contrived and inauthentic.

The main monster communicates in noises that sound like belches. Appropriate for a picture that’s the equivalent of a cinematic burp: gassy and inconsequential.

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.

An indigestible blend of sentiment and gross-out humor, Cadillac Man is an appalling choice for Robin Williams to have made at this stage in his career. [18 May 1990, p.28]

There's no emotional pay-off when the characters change under pressure. The audience never knows enough about them to care when they demonstrate bravery or resourcefulness, and there's no chemistry between the people who are supposed to be deeply attached to each other. [06 Oct 1990, p.C7]

With their white-boy blues grimaces, Aykroyd and Goodman are almost unwatchable.[06 Feb 1998]

“Cats” the movie is deeply, deeply weird, and not in a good way.

Ultimately, all we come away with is a few cheap laughs at online culture, which dates Love Me to its own time and place, an artifact not even of now, but the recent past. This love story isn’t futuristic at all.

Species doesn't scare or dazzle you. [07 July 1995, p.H25]

The fact that Bracey is the equivalent of a charisma black hole (at the movie’s center, there is no there there) and the further fact that the movie runs out of plot long before it runs out of stunts to showcase, make Point Break a remake that ought not to have been made.

Just as there can be fresh angles on the old story, there is a growing number of urban-survival cliches that lose their dramatic impact as they grow tiresomely familiar. Sugar Hill is a virtual catalog of these cliches - a serious, well-meaning film that offers no new insight into the crises it professes to understand. [25 Feb 1994, p.D21]

The plot is so filled with inconsistencies and lapses in logic, especially during the desperate concluding reels, that it's difficult to take seriously its proposition that some people are born evil. [24 Sep 1993, p.D12]

Hyperactive, incredibly gory, gratingly sentimental, The Killer is pure cinematic junk food for those who are into blood-and-guts highs.

Because so few movies focus on stories about women, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this strong cast drifting away on a tide of soap bubbles — there’s no movie here, just scene after scene of melodramatic cliché.

Board games, threats from Howard and desperate escape planning by Michelle take up most the picture. And then, first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg and the screenwriters, apparently realizing that not much has been going on so far, ramp up to a full-bore CG explosion extravaganza finale...Too little. Too late.

It’s got a flying carpet. It’s got an enchanted lamp. It’s got a shape-shifting genie. But alas, Aladdin lacks real magic.

Childhood: courtesy of Mr. King. Filtered through the pedestrian sensibilities of director Andy Muschietti, who seemingly never met a horror-movie cliché he couldn’t incorporate into his adaptation of King’s thousand-page-plus mega-opus.

Writer-director Ti West brings not an iota of originality to his handling of this material. Plods, the picture does, through its predictable paces.

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]

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.

Almost nothing works here.

Unfortunately, the script by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (a husband-and-wife team who previously collaborated on "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle") eventually throws out all ambiguities and endorses Field's actions, even suggesting that her husband and Mantegna's policeman just aren't committed enough to seek justice...It's a revolting development in a transparently manipulative movie, created by people who clearly know better. [12 Jan 1996]

It is as if Pugh is having to push her way through narrative waters that threaten to wash away her performance. No matter how she continues to rise to the challenge, the film’s cascading of contrivances drown her out.

Dennis the Menace is essentially a live-action, 90-minute Roadrunner movie in which Dennis is the Roadrunner and Matthau and Lloyd take turns playing Wile E. Coyote. It's a lot funnier when it's seven minutes long and the tortured Coyote is made from oils, ink and paper. [26 June 1993, p.C5]

Watch this movie and you might die, of boredom.

You expect lots of fight scenes in a Wick movie, and Ballerina certainly delivers on that score. Overdelivers, in fact. It’s one damn dust-up after another.

So consistently unexciting, so monumentally unconvincing, so silly. [28 Sept 1990, p.22]

By the end, it’s made glaringly obvious that the people who made Madame Web intended it to be the prelude to sequels featuring the three proto Spider-Women. Spare us.

In space, everyone can hear you yawn.

It's a good thing this third and presumably final Highlander film will appeal only to those who've bothered to see the first two, because an uninitiated viewer wouldn't be able to make even the slightest sense out of it. [28 Jan 1995, p.C5]

Nyong’o’s prodigious talents are sadly wasted in this noisy, pointless movie, which never approaches the cleverness — or the genuine scariness — of the first two in the franchise.

“The Last Dance” brings nothing new to the series. In fact, it brings less than the previous two movies

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.

The funniest element of what vaguely gestures toward dark comedy is how poorly written this story about writers is.

Linda Blair and Leslie Nielsen deserve better than the scattershot script for Repossessed, a desperate spoof of The Exorcist that generates perhaps two belly laughs, three well-earned smiles and about 287 groaners. [29 Sep 1990, p.B7]

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.

It wants to make a joke at its source material’s expense, but all it ever accomplishes is making you want to watch those classics instead.

Nothing But Trouble is nothing but dismal. [16 Feb 1991, p.C5]

You watch hoping that the always-splendid Condon, an Oscar nominee last year for “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is getting a really good paycheck, and wondering why writer/director Bryce McGuire saw fit to expand his very effective four-minute 2014 film “Night Swim” into this soggy mess. Don’t go in the water, indeed.

Collateral Beauty is a pretty terrible movie, but it left me with one overarching thought: My life, and surely yours, too, would be vastly improved if only Helen Mirren were perpetually lurking nearby, offering advice.

Production values could not be cheaper for a major-studio film. An extended woodsy scene with a collapsing cabin, supposedly set in the Wenatchee National Forest, so obviously makes use of tiny models that you expect the artifice to become part of the joke. It never does. Like so much of Black Sheep, it's a missed opportunity.

Rob Reiner's "North" is a modest, uneven satire about parents and children. It stars the ingratiating Elijah Wood and generates its share of laughs, but the film never moves beyond its obvious point: Kids deserve parents who aren't self-serving imbeciles. [22 Jul 1994, p.D25]

The travelogue-style photography is soothing, the bodies are pretty and the music isn't offensive, but feature-length movies can't survive on the ingredients for a standard airline commercial.

This stupefyingly unfunny attempt to create a midnight cult movie stars Judd Nelson as a talentless stand-up comic who becomes a celebrity when he grows a third arm out of the middle of his back. [26 Mar 1992, p.E2]

Car 54, Where are You? is an insult to the popular late-1950's TV show that inspired it.

At the risk of confessing a breech of duties, I "watched" much of the film with my eyes closed, isolating the soundtrack only because I could always accurately guess what was happening on the screen . . . which wasn't much, believe me. [20 Mar 1993, p.C6]

Eastwood is known for his ruthless efficiency as a filmmaker, but The Mule feels dashed off at best, barely even a movie. It’s a strange rough draft, poorly executed and disastrously performed, despite the starry cast.

Mortal Engines hasn’t much in the way of originality, other than its rolling city, to distinguish it from other, better post-apocalyptic tales.

The nonstop silliness of this picture leaves one choking on stifled laughter.

I wished I was actually watching “Batman and Robin” or “Superman IV,” because for all their camp, those movies felt less pointless and more human than “Thor 4,” a cheap corporate commercial for upcoming Marvel content.

Stone Cold may be the morally bankrupt nadir of what is so far one of Hollywood's worst years. [17 May 1991, p.3]

There's not much any actor can do with material as woeful as this. Pierce seems as charmless at the end of First Kid as he is in the early scenes, while Sinbad seems lost without a stand-up shtick. [30 Aug 1996]

There is real passion in DeBose’s vocal performance as she tries to elevate the rote music. I just wish she were in a better movie.

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.

The script by David Stenn (21 Jump Street), which also includes a hoary subplot involving blackmail, a kidnapping and a guilty family secret, is essentially a way of tying together a collection of familiar-looking music videos that are so loosely connected to the story that they have about the same impact as commercials. [19 Oct 1991, p.C7]

It’s frustrating, because a couponing crime lord (crime lady?) being pursued by an obsessed grocery store employee is a story that has so much potential, but the lazy storytelling and on-the-nose direction suck all of the laughs that could come out of the situation.

It seems director James Wan had one overarching goal in making “Aquaman.” His prime directive? Crush the audience into submission.

In the end, The Rookie winds up looking like a poor relation of Lethal Weapon or Tango & Cash. And that's mighty poor. [07 Dec 1990, p.29]

It’s not a terribly good idea to base a movie on a book in which almost nothing happens for 500 pages, but that’s what we have here.

Mark this one down as a sequel that should never have been made.

Earning instant shame as the worst film of the year so far, "Chasers" offers all the proof anyone will ever need that a theatrically released feature film can be just as bad - and far worse - than the most inanely boring garbage that passes for television these days. [23 Apr 1994]

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 real criminals here are writers William Davies and William Osborne (obviously pseudonyms for Beavis and Butt-head), who have concocted a derivative, imbecilic anything-goes premise serving only to provide random opportunities for the CGI wizards to strut their stuff. [31 Dec 1993, p.C14]

Exposure to Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip may result in the dislocation of eyeballs in viewers over the age of 7 due to uncontrollable rolling of the eyes at the sight of the idiotic antics committed on screen. To avoid eye strain, which is to say, eye sprain, avoid this movie at all costs.

Offering only an atmosphere of deepening gloom and a premise of utter hopelessness, Man Down is like movie antimatter: It repels interest.

Fire Birds reduces it all to kiss-kiss-bang-bang, and the implication that a few theater-rattling explosions will turn the enemy to toast forever. The only blessing is that it runs less than 90 minutes.

The Museum of Modern Art has committed Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to its permanent collection. This spin-off, which has none of that film's brutal energy, won't be joining it. The state of Texas ought to sue the makers of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III for defamation of character. [13 Jan 1990, p.C5]

Maybe there's a serious movie to be made about professional soldiers who can't thaw out now that the Cold War is melting. But The Fourth War plays like Laurel and Hardy's Tit For Tat in slow motion. [23 Mar 1990, p.24]

Blind Fury is cheerfully stupid, deliberately cartoonish and always self-mocking. [17 Mar 1990, p.C5]