Writer Leslie Bohem and director Roger Donaldson brush briskly through the standard scientific and romantic blather. They know that in movies like this, complexity is the province of the special-effects people.

You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.

This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels.

Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp.

Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market.

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

As the film's producers investigate the circumstances of that leaked video, at least there's also evidence of canine joy in A Dog's Purpose, in the form of movie-star mutts chasing their tails and fetching semideflated footballs. That part looks like fun--and when fun is involved, a dog's face doesn't lie.

M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game.

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.

The mythology he tries to build in Glass is rushed and sloppy; the surprise twist at the end is really just more of a damp wrinkle. Shyamalan believes so strongly in the dramatic impact of this trilogy that he almost makes you believe in it too — that’s his secret superpower. But the illusion is fragile. You don’t need a sixth sense to know you’re in for a letdown. The five you’ve got should be plenty.

Wearying, stupefying, dumber than dumb, When Nature Calls would be a career ender for Carrey--except that a zillion people have seen it. Stop this, folks. It'll only encourage him.

Gatsby's sad and curious history has resulted in a dull, dreadful movie. The film is faithful to the letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel but entirely misses its spirit.

It’s nearly impossible to care about any of the humans. For a guy with a job that almost no one on the planet has, Denny is shockingly dull, and Ventimiglia fails to vest him with even an iota of personality. The generally charming Seyfried is saddled with a bum role that mostly requires her to suffer beatifically, and Donovan and Baker, both marvelously subtle actors, are badly suited to playing monsters-in-law.

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.

When else has the obscenity of child murder been the cause of such gravity and grace?

A film that's fun to argue with.

It’s wandering, not urgent, while indicating that all-Shailene-all-the-time can be too much of a pretty good thing.

Sanctum is a stinker, a horror movie without a visible monster.

If "Waiting for Superman" was intended to make audiences think, Won't Back Down is supposed to make them feel. It made me feel more annoyed than outraged.

Clever ideas early on go rogue, or go missing, in the gallop toward an action-film climax that then, perversely, doesn’t materialize. The movie’s intelligence is artificial, its affect solemn.

Even after The Ice Road overcomplicates itself, there’s enough gas here to keep the thing going, including some nicely sustained bridge-crossing suspense and several fine demonstrations of stunt dangling.

The result is a flat, dumbly brutal movie, full of overplotted complexity and empty of all emotional resonance, except that provided by the presence of Jane Greer (the original film's dark lady, here doing a supporting role) and Richard Widmark.

You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.

The tone is cloying, the running time bloated.

A film full of smart laughs.

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.

Provides the familiar cheap thrills but with a salsa tang.

This movie exists wholly in the realm of metaphor, whose messages stick out like placards: Find joy through pain. Reunite with estranged loved ones. Keep hope alive.

The performances are compelling (although Jones is underused) but the thin narrative is less instructive of the strange way female friendships operate than of the way stories get recycled.

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.

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

The scorekeepers at the various sites that rate critics' enthusiasm for a film shouldn't even try to elicit a Pass or Fail grade from me on T3. I'm a fascinated, stupefied outsider. Just mark me Present.

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.

Beauty ends before it has really dug into anything of consequence. Its heroine, whom we know is headed for trouble, is left stranded in the middle of her own story.

Unfortunately, Persuasion isn’t a great movie, maybe not even a good one. But its problems are failures of filmmaking, not necessarily of adaptation: Cracknell, who has until now worked largely in theater, may make some choices that undermine her aims, but she gives no indication of being careless with the material—her affection for it comes through.

Hardly unforgettable, but it is an amiable diversion, kept afloat by some comic moments of the raunchy, silly variety, and by something that does feel rather retro: a kindness to its youthful characters.

He's neither a fun villain or a secret good guy; the movie feels like a senseless venture because, even with his pants down on top of Clotilde or manhandling Virginie, he's the dullest scoundrel around.

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.

George Clooney’s statement-making black comedy Suburbicon, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, is a misfire on nearly all counts.

Dorothy encounters a pumpkin with stick limbs, a tin soldier and something called a Gump, which looks suspiciously like your basic moosehead. They are all mechanical marvels, not actors, which means they can do anything except win an audience's heart. Still, it would defy the gifts of an Olivier to find interesting, amusing life in a context as charmless and joyless (and songless) as the one Murch and his design team have concocted. [1 July 1985, p.63]

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

The bad news for everyone else is that the colorfully named characters from Clue remain flat enough to be stored in a box, and that all three endings are unpersuasive. [23 Dec 1985, p.79]

It's silly enough that young teens are unlikely to be drawn to it unless they've got a thing for Hudgens or want to take an early peek at Hutcherson, who will soon be seen as Peeta in "The Hunger Games." He was great as a sulky brat in "The Kids Are All Right" but in Journey 2 he comes across as wooden, dull and though not yet 20, too old for roles like these.

Edgeless, it takes a wistful, hopeful approach to heartbreak and job loss. That's sweet, but when it comes to unemployment-themed cinema, I'll take the greater realism of last year's "The Company Men" or this year's "Everything Must Go" over Hanks's too rosy vision of life after the pink slip.

The awfulness of What to Expect When You're Expecting, an ugly brew of guide book, reality television and romantic comedy, is of course, entirely to be expected.

An action figure with a sweet core, Johnson can pump up the humanity of any franchise, whether he’s playing a stepdad who becomes a hero in Journey 2 or, as here, a stud soldier who treats Flint and Jaye like his grown children and shepherds them through peril. Following those younger Joes, the Retaliation audience is encouraged to clamber up on Johnson’s huge soldiers and go along for a pretty cool ride.

The humor is gross-out but inoffensive, since it's rooted in whimsy, not malice. Smith finesses the sophomore jinx with sophomoric high jinks. [6 Nov 1995]

Here's an audacious, inventive and character-driven blockbuster with some wit sprinkled in for good measure. It's fun, and filled with a surprising degree of intrigue and suspense.

A buddy movie that limps along, pausing for breath and pulse checks like a geriatric dutifully fulfilling doctor's orders to get some exercise.

If the film is to work at all - and it eventually does - the two 27-year-old leads must radiate enough star quality to obviate the ramshackle plot. They just about do.

Too bad that Ride Along never makes it to Ordinary; it sinks into sub-. This is a movie you keep watching only from lethargy.

Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization.

And yet, in these stressful times, a little mindless action isn’t wholly unwelcome, and Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse—directed by Stefano Sollima, who not long ago gave us Sicario: Day of the Soldado—is moderately un-terrible, a diversion that hits every beat predictably, with a mighty grunt.

Curiously, if fitfully, intriguing.

Better luck next time, Owen.

A wildly flawed but fitfully diverting picture.

The picture is enjoyable not so much for its twisty plot—which, even if you haven’t already read the book, is essentially pretty guessable—as for its artful dedication to its own highly theatrical, drapes-drawn somberness.

At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.

So inward and remote does the movie seem, it might have arrived in a time capsule from one of the four warring planets. Most sci-fi movies offer escape, a holiday from homework, but Dune is as difficult as a final exam. You have to cram for it.

Inside this failed picture there’s a sicker, darker, more truthful one crying to get out. But for a while, Passengers is really going for something. The movie it might have been is lost in space, alone, never to be seen by mere mortals. All we can see from Earth are its few brightly burning scraps, but at least it’s something.

Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.

Mojave’s real reason for existing is the wiry, woolly dialogue that Monahan has spun out for his actors.

Carr’s account is strongest in shining light on the early years of the conservatorship while elegantly steering away from the exploitative images of Britney—shaving her head, or getting strapped to a gurney—that sold magazines in the late ’00s.

It has a gentle if unenlightening message, namely that we should all take time off to reconnect - the soundtrack tends to the Bonnie Raitt but the movie seems to subliminally hum "slow down, you move too fast" - and Keaton and Kline have decent chemistry.

The movie is best seen as straightforward, sometimes harrowing melodrama, packed with mistaken identities, beautiful villains, a kindly tourist who can outrace the bad guys, and a lost little girl whom the film brazenly sends onto a highway full of speeding cars. It's as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin.

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

By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.

A scant hour and a half long, padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment.

Crude gags mingle with squishy, underdeveloped messages about family and belonging and empowerment. And while self-abasement is part of the comedian’s toolbox, there’s something depressing about watching as a chortling Michelle airs her unmentionable area while spraying herself with self-tanner. McCarthy deserves better than this. She can aim higher.

Harley Quinn’s entrance is the best moment in Suicide Squad. After that, you can leave. Robbie is a criminally appealing actress, likable in just about every way, but that intro aside, Suicide Squad doesn’t serve her well. It serves no one well, least of all its audience.

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.

If the movie had been content to replicate the Taken formula, and left the fatherhood angle as a subtext, it would be easier to take. Instead, even for Costner admirers, it’s a hard 2 hours to kill.

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

If I had a daughter of impressionable age, I'd rather have her weeping over this mildly tasteless romance than the nonsense of "Twilight."

You can’t ask for more from a winter diversion—even if you wouldn’t wish for less.

It's because of AnnaSophia Robb's performance...I don't think you'll see a more fascinating and nuanced performance at the movies this year.

Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours.

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation — decked out with our latest scientific finery — of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot.

As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house.

The spies in The 355 approach their work, and the work of being a woman, with grim determination. Rarely has a spy thriller so much resembled a pile of ironing.

It's fun in a perverse way; the viewer gets to experience a vivid sense of what it feels like to occupy a pigeon-poop smeared piece of stone high in the sky.

It has some of ["American] Graffiti's" sweetness of spirit, but none of its style or depth of feeling; it has some of "Animal [House"]'s raunchiness, but none of its loony anarchy.

Suffice it to say that these morons have, quite simply, turned The Day the Earth Stood Still on its head and what's falling out of its pockets in that upended state is a stream of junk.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an O.K., not great, Marvel movie...Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.

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.

Apart from some spiffy visual effects, which create coherent, scary textures and architecture for outer space, Green Lantern is the most generic of summer time wasters.

The Change-Up tries so hard to be scandalous that it's a shame it doesn't do more to change up the formula.

As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.

The mix is not nearly classic but is congenial enough to warm up a January weekend and perhaps to stoke a sequel. Call it "The Green Hornet Strikes Again?" No: "Kato II!"

This is cinema reduced or distilled to its purest definition, of movies that move. If you want dewy humanity in your entertainment, watch Lifetime.

Another dreadful entry in the festering form of romantic comedy: the forced intimacy of two people who have nothing in common but hatred for each other.

Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.

Just because a movie is based on a true story doesn’t mean you have to fully buy it: The Greatest Beer Run Ever isn’t terrible, and it’s hardly great. But the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s almost as dreamily clueless as its hapless hero is.

A watchable film, but it -- and its star -- might have done so much more.

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.

Other questions to ponder: Is The Kissing Booth 2 a good movie? Yes and no. Is the acting adequate, if not necessarily good? Yes and no. Is it a wholly accurate depiction of young love in any era, past or present? Yes and no. The Kissing Booth 2 — directed, as was the first installment, by Vince Marcello — is kind of terrible and kind of wonderful.

And yet, all three women are less watchable and amusing that Nicki Minaj as Carly’s legal assistant Lydia.

The Sitter is predicated on a belief that chunky Jonah Hill, or at least the persona he presents, is secretly supercool. While it turns out to be a wisp of a movie, on that front at least, it is persuasive.