Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.

A movie gaudy enough to make Dancing with the Stars seem dignified.

Finding Neverland takes a big, brave leap and lands splat on the sidewalk.

By the time all the bets are in, Cincinnati Kid appears to hold a losing hand.

Not till the very end of the film, when King Richard pops up, portrayed, in a surprise appearance, by an actor who has launched many a grand movie adventure, will audiences get a glimpse of epic star quality. Then, like the Merry Men, they will unleash a hearty ho-ho. The rest of this Robin Hood merits only a ho-hum.

Thor: Love and Thunder is packed with gags and jokes, advertising itself so loudly as “Fun!” that it ceases to actually be fun. This is the way with Waititi, a gifted director who, now that he’s no longer required to wield a light touch, seems to have forgotten how to do so.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

With the exception of Zohra Lampert's subtle and knowledgeable performance, no one in the cast has enough substance even to be considered humanoid. And after the first reel, the vampires seem to have lost their bite.

When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.

It tries to be sexy but isn’t; it strives for screwball energy but only ends up being insufferably madcap; it works hard to serve up lashings of black humor, in the tradition of older Coen Brothers movies like Raising Arizona, but you can hear the wheels whirring behind every joke.

What is left, besides a lot of pretty dolphin footage, is some bad intercollegiate-revue satire, a shadow of Sea Hunt, and a calculated sentimentality that evokes memories of Lassie Come Home.

When an unknown director turns out a suspense melodrama as dreary and unconvincing as this, moviegoers revel in the thought of what it might have been if Hitchcock had done it. It is disconcerting to come away from Mamie feeling precisely the same way.

Studying the topography of decay in a veteran actor’s face is one of the few worthy pursuits for moviegoers sitting through the epic-length, belligerently inconsequential The Expendables 3 — a picture whose very title proclaims its redundancy.

Frantic and rote by turns, mislaying the power of the central love story and piling on the mutant adversaries. For at least this installment, Spider-Man is Amazing no more.

Bewitched means to be a civilized entertainment, which occasionally it is. But the gentility of this antique sitcom cannot be recaptured at this late date.

The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquaver.

Filled with competent but unexciting performances and, like its protagonist, is strangely lugubrious.

When Eastwood, who also directed the picture (from a Michael Butler-Dennis Shryack script), faces off against Russell's Maleficent Seven, viewers may get an old-fashioned western tingle. But Pale Rider does nothing to disprove the wisdom that this genre is best left to the revival houses. A double feature of Shane and Eastwood's High Plains Drifter will do just fine, thanks.

An idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart.

In short, The Karate Kid presents the smallest imaginable variations on three well-tested formulas for movie success. Robert Mark Kamen's script is developed with maddening predictability, and John G. Avildsen's direction is literal and ambling. Films like this are what the PG rating is supposed to be all about.

Bottoms, though it presents itself as a sort of sideways heir to comedies like Heathers and But I’m a Cheerleader, simply runs its jokes into the ground.

Ferrell's latest excursion into delusions of manhood is director Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost, an action comedy with the sloppy construction and saving grace notes of the star's other movies.

A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite.

In Downhill, everything is played for blunt laughs. Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus — both gifted performers who have done much better work elsewhere — muddle through, recognizing that they’re making a movie about Trust with a capital T, but failing to get at any real darkness that might lurk beneath the movie’s shiny, slippery surface.

The movie is less ho-ho-ho than uh-oh, or oh-no. Emitting a stale odor from the first reel, Fred never engaged the audience of kids and adults that I saw it with.

The Rite is all windup, weak delivery.

Left-wingers in the mainstream media - by which I mean me - are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie. Some organic life is needed. And the only crop Promised Land harvests is Capra Corn.

When it comes to dating, there’s no doubt we live in confusing times. But no one needs a confused movie about dating confusion, and Cat Person’s ideas are so blurry it’s impossible to know what its goals are.

This isn't a love story, it's a misery story that drags on, not to a dramatic conclusion but a tepid moment.

It's all mildly deplorable and instantly forgettable. Kevin James remains a potentially appealing movie star - if only he didn't have to be in Kevin James movies.

There's a point at which movies become only merchandise, and the Paranormal franchise may be heading for that nexus, that nadir.

On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet."

Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?

Stone's camera closes in on Bogosian's face as if it were the cratered moonscape of the American mind, and the actor / starts shouting into his megaphone mike. Finally, these two have become like Barry's listeners, shrill and unconvincing, weaving their own conspiracy theories in the bleat of the night. This is bag-lady cinema.

A Pixar movie is always lively, and this might be the studio's liveliest (and loudest) yet - but its leanest in terms of warmth and heart.

This overloaded finale, directed by J.J. Abrams, is for everybody and nobody, a movie that’s sometimes reasonably entertaining but that mostly feels reverse-engineered to ensure that the feathers of the Star Wars purists remain unruffled. In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fanfiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie.

Inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe of the problem.

Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

Halloween Kills is scattershot and febrile, a confused film in which people spend a lot of time milling around, figuring out what to do next.

The film (directed by Andy Tennant) has more problems than Melanie, and they're insoluble. Its lazy calculation telegraphs each plot turn and underlines emotions with corn-pone music.

This is Meyer's worst offense - her disturbingly Victorian attitudes about sex and love, which this particular movie falls modestly in lockstep with, even though it concludes years of cinematic foreplay.

What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one.

So why is the Jersey Boys film a turgid botch? Eastwood’s résumé hints at a reason. His affinity is for American standards as improvised on piano or guitar by indigenous artists in smoky nightclubs, not for the tightly wound, impeccably pounding songs that Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe wrote for the Four Seasons.

The picture promises to be a gossipy, biting tale about the travails of a middle-aged Hollywood player who doesn't always have the magic touch -- or, perhaps more accurately, finds he has it less and less. But the picture is more self-congratulatory than it is vicious, or even illuminating, and it dawdles when it needs to crack along at a clip.

For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life.

Reeves’ presence in any movie tends to be a sort of salve; even with bad material, he generally coasts by on his laid-back radiance. But not even Reeves can put an adequate shine on Outcome, a satire that takes one spindly premise and grinds it down to a nub.

As for Green’s Exorcist: Believer, which starts out strong—evoking all the reasons demons in search of a body to possess can’t resist the hormonal lightning rod of adolescent girls—and ends in a dumb jumble of generic-looking zombie-girl Blumhouse special effects: I’ve already forgotten it.

Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.

They have fussed with Sabrina, but they have not really engaged it. They have not found the little twinges of pain, the awkward stumbles into vulnerability, that animate the best comedies, and the best love stories too. Wilder's film had a few of them--enough to ensure that the movie and its audience did not feel totally manipulated.

Watching this is like flipping channels randomly between a Masterpiece Theatre drama and a splatter film on Cinemax. If you're like me, you'll stick with the splatter.

"Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie. [20 June 1983, p.73]

As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds.

The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor.

Yesterday, a fantasy that works well enough as a Beatles love letter but falls short in the love-story department.

Its glorious, snow-capped visuals aside, The Hateful Eight comes off as haggard and atrophied. It’s bloodless even in the midst of all its bloodiness; its characters are devoid of nobility, even the horrible kind. These are uglies not even a mother could love.

Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock.

The first few minutes have promise (with an all-star list of Gen-X actors), and the last few minutes provide fun (with snapshots of lovers and losers). In between there is a void--feeble jokes, a lot of falling down and foolish declarations.

Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.

The picture is mostly tedious and unpleasant, which is a shame for the sake of the performers. Jackman works hard here, and his performance does away with vanity altogether.

Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.

Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.

So why does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments.

The film finally collapses under the burden of implausibility.

Mostly, though, Death of a Unicorn just feels like exhausting, enforced fun: its plot goes everywhere all at once for no discernible reason. All the actors are appealing and engaged with the task at hand, but they're at the mercy of an unfocused plot.

Ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion.

Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask?

Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream.

Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.

Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (kids) and "The Passion of the Christ" (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun.

It’s a shrill, razor-shredded mess, a fringy assemblage of action, cartoony violence, and allegedly snappy dialogue that has the soporific effect of white noise. This is proof that too much lousy action is worse than no action at all.

While Admission remains the story of a woman who comes to question her past choices and jeopardize her career, the movie version is lighter, fluffier and dramatically inert.

As a simple detective story, the film is defeated by narrative loopholes, unconvincing plot twists and the last-minute injection of a demon who seems to have drifted in, half-baked, from The Exorcist. The psychological drama is forfeited by the handling of the central character.

This pickpocket of a movie flashes open its coat to proudly display all its swiped goodies.

It sure is handsome-looking, throwing off a majestic gleam. But that’s not the same as possessing actual majesty. There’s barely a minute when The Great Wall doesn’t veer into the trying-too-hard zone, and to watch all that striving is simply exhausting.

Shot by Garland’s regular cinematographer Rob Hardy, Civil War has the vibe of your standard desolate zombie movie with a modern American backdrop, but it's far less effective than your average George A. Romero project: sometimes a B movie with a sense of humor about itself says more about a nation’s despair than an overserious, breast-beating one.

Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120]

The real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me.

Jurassic World Dominion is the biggest, most excessive Jurassic Park–franchise film yet. But what good is a movie that leaves you feeling more flattened than entertained? That rumble you hear is the sound of millions of disgruntled, long-dead dinosaurs, rolling in their fossilized graves.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

Instead of the meeting of maestros at the top of their form, Righteous Kill has the feeling of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds facing off for the first time in an exhibition game. It's like Old Timers' Day at the Motion Picture Home.

When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.

The skitcom format soon becomes tiresome.

Doesn't offer much.

The Greatest often feels like a mash-up of Sarandon's greatest grief hits.

What's Your Number? is not much dumber than the average romantic comedy, but there is something sad and infuriating about it.

A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.

An ambitious but sub-ordinary SF epic in which, as so often, Willis is better than his material.

The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating.

It's all more wearying than fun. Except for Law, whose courtly sangfroid can elevate even the dumbest roles.

The story condescends to Mae, and, by extension, to smart, ambitious millennials everywhere — I’m not a millennial, but I felt offended on their behalf.

Unhappily, Producer Walt Disney tells his shaggy-dog story so doggedly that he soon runs it into the pound.

Hotel Transylvania isn't a complete stinker. Sandler, speaking in a pitch close to his Opera Man routine from his days on Saturday Night Live, is less obnoxious than usual. The visuals are consistently enticing - the castle/hotel is artfully rendered...And there are some bright and funny lines.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."

That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat ( and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. (24July 1989, p.53)

The Goldfinch, director John Crowley’s prestige adaptation of Donna Tartt’s beautifully detailed novel, isn’t a great movie; it’s hardly even an OK one. Yet there’s something wistfully unfortunate about it. From its casting to its structure to its layering of visual textures, you can almost see how every good intention and carefully considered judgment call has somehow gone wrong.

Whatever director Peter Hedges' intent, the movie itself, a sentimental blend of magical realism and saccharine emotions, is oddly false. It made me want to go on a sugar cleanse.

Walt Disney's best films—barring his wonderful slapstick—have suffered from sticky taste; in this effort to be just plain folksy, that stickiness pretty thoroughly gums up the works.