This is a movie that repeatedly calls out a dead kid just to make its points. If that’s your idea of entertainment—or even just adequate message-based filmmaking—run, don’t walk, to see Dear Evan Hansen.

To deny Jackson’s complexity only flattens his genius—as well as his kindness and fragility—into something manageable, explainable. In the end, Michael does the same.

Not quite in the class of the first film, Underworld 4 is still the most enlightened girl-power film of the week, nosing out Gina Carano's "Haywire" by the length of Pinocchio's proboscis.

As a person who removes a woman's clothing in the half light of a Southern afternoon, Efron acquits himself reasonably well.

Over and over, Him both shows and tells, when one or the other would be enough. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you feeling indifferent rather than chilled to the bone, clobbered into numbness with good intentions.

And while more than 30 writers worked on the screenplay and untold numbers labored to re-create the ambiance and effects that the animators once tossed off with a few squiggles of their pencils, The Flintstones doesn't feel overcalculated, over-produced or overthought.

The Rite is all windup, weak delivery.

All three give performances that would suit a better movie than this pallid shocker with little heart and no bite.

The Golden Glove is, in the most basic sense, well constructed. It’s also the kind of movie you may end up wishing you’d never seen. Even hardcore Akin devotees should proceed with caution, and be ready for disillusionment. The craftsmanship is there. But Akin’s judgment has gone AWOL, and with it, his heart.

It's not that I Don't Know How She Does It tells actual lies about working motherhood - many of its observations and jokes are on point - it's just that it omits the edge, the desperation of a woman on the verge.

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.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t as terrible as the trailers make it look, but as an enterprise it’s just all-around sad, a movie that courts sympathy for its characters yet ends up only as a requiem for itself.

A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal.

Pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast.

For a tale of thieving, The Words plods along. Not that a literary heist is as exciting as a bank robbery, but there's a remarkable lack of tension in this story.

Yes, Burt Reynolds has some dirty, lively moments as a crooked, sex-starved Congressman. But the crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman's fastidious reach.

Those jokes are mostly just toothless and silly. The plot is barely serviceable, but it will do, and most of the first movie’s cast has been reassembled under its flimsy umbrella.

Shrill and charmless. I didn't believe a word of it. I wanted to spank it and banish it to its room.

The pitch is enough to make you swoon, but the movie itself is curiously limp.

Wrath of the Titans, like its predecessor, is a slightly-better-than-OK mashing of one of history's great literary troves: the Greek myths.

It’s got too much on its mind, and it’s unsure of its tone. This is the rough cut of a slimmer, better movie

The Other Woman earns a viewer's respect for the grace notes that director-screenwriter Don Roos finds beneath these familiar tunes, for the unassertive skill with which he paints upper-class life on the Upper East Side, and for the rightness of the performances.

You can, if you will, think of All the King's Men as a purely political parable, but that is to miss its blackest, bleakest meanings.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.

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.

The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's.

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

Mostly the movie is like the marriage: good casting, golden promise, yet somehow a grating ordeal.

The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost.

Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies.

It's a shame that W.E. smells so bad.

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him.

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

Massively stupid: preposterous yet boring.

There's no denying that Pan is one ambitious fairy tale. But what's being labeled a "wholly original adventure" feels far from new, never mind necessary.

I can't deny I did feel fonder of my own family afterward, mostly because I know none of them would ever make me sit through Parental Guidance.

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.

Assassin’s Creed the movie is fairly innocuous. It’s also cheerless and dumb.

A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.

Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.

Corelli is a coffee-table movie: one leafs through the gorgeous vistas and nods through the narrative.

Red Lights reaches for a "The Sixth Sense"-style twist and whiffs it completely.

You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.

There are gaping holes in logic throughout this sloppy, cheap-looking mess from "Disturbia" director D.J. Caruso.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army. What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. [30 May 1988, p.64]

But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs...and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the "Fame" kids.

There’s only one reason to see The Huntsman: Winter’s War: Gowns! Insane, off-the-hook gowns.

It's too empty to applaud, too insignificant to deplore.

Talk about off-casting: brittle-romantic Nora Ephron writing a high-concept comedy about a Mafioso's troubles when the Federal Witness Security Program plunks him down in white-bread suburbia; humorless Herbert Ross directing it; Steve Martin playing the gangster. Talk about miscalculation. [3 Sept 1990, p.72]

Neither the most super-awesome Marvel movie nor the worst. It exists in that micro-millimeter’s breadth of in-between. Venom has energy, style and Tom Hardy — all good things. But it doesn’t really make sense, a bad thing.

The director is going through the motions, and he doesn't display the cinematic skill, at least in the release version, to bring off an exercise in either Hitchcockian or Shyamalanian suspense.

Jumper is so lame -- undernourished in its characterizations, stillborn in its action scenes -- that it inevitably leads the idled mind to wondering how this movie got past the pitch stage.

The cast does great impressions of the original cartoon characters, and the computer-generated Scooby is convincing, but it turns out that what we liked about Scooby-Doo in the first place was that nobody was trying.

In this film we learn that it takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script.

Mostly, The Kitchen flounders, taking one page from Quentin Tarantino here and another from Martin Scorsese there, without ever finding its own sense of authorship. Even the movie’s soundtrack — featuring Etta James, Heart and Fleetwood Mac, among others — feels like a desperate attempt to set a mood that never quite jells. There’s not enough heat in this Kitchen, but there’s nothing cool about it, either.

It’s just a movie, with a dramatic arc that’s supposed to make all that mean stuff drift away into the ether as friendship is born, but it’s that look that hangs around like a bad smell.

How you feel about Morbius will probably depend on how much you have invested in the Sony-Marvel pie slice, and on your feelings about Leto, who perhaps isn’t so much a serious actor as one who takes himself very seriously. Still, his performance here has a quietly vibrating vulnerability; he seems to have made at least a small emotional investment in this film, as if to keep it from sliding into total special-effects-laden soullessness.

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.

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.

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.

A fine copy.

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

The Last Thing He Wanted makes some kind of sense at the end. But getting through its long, unwieldy middle is an undertaking — and not even a serious-minded political thriller like this one should feel so much like an assignment.

This isn't "2001," by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.

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.

My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.

Not all of Hill’s movies are great, and The Assignment certainly isn’t. Maybe, in the strictest terms, it isn’t even any good. But even a mediocre Walter Hill film has more style and energy — and a finer sense of the sweet spot between joy and despair — than ninety percent of the action thrillers that get made today.

Still, at its best Keeping Up with the Joneses riffs on something very real: the existential loneliness of living in a place that’s just too perfect. Everyone needs new friends now and then – even ones who make you eat snake.

And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.

Given how eagerly awaited this film has been, it’s safe to say that readers who love the series deserve a movie version made with more imagination, and less rote efficiency, than this one.

Laughter trumps political fairness, and Get Hard made me laugh at, and with, situations I hadn’t thought could tickle me. The movie has a warm heart beating under its seemingly scabrous shell.

Butler has the showier part, but his impersonation of the tragic hero is undercut by his weird resemblance to Soupy Sales. You start hoping that Shelton will kill somebody with a custard (or puffer-fish) pie to the face.

There are no surprises here, just the pleasant ectoplasmic shimmer of a formula you’ve seen a million times before, vanishing almost as soon as the end credits start rolling.

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

Thunder Force drags until roughly its last third, and then something remarkable happens: its gonzo spirit kicks in. From that point on, Thunder Force feels crazily, joltingly alive, as if it were realizing, a little too late, that it ought to have been a different movie altogether.

The Man From Toronto, a Netflix action-comedy starring Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart, is the kind of movie you forget almost the minute the end credits have rolled, two hours of moderate laughs rolled up in a tissue-thin plot that just barely qualifies as a distraction from the dreariness of life.

Osunsanmi wants you to believe that everything he shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in "Paranormal Activity," which had the added benefit of being a good movie.

One of the worst messes in years.

The film skips along pleasantly, supremely confident in its own cuteness and utterly unapologetic about how shallow or contrived it might be.

The man (Sparks) is a cultural magpie, capable of borrowing from a 1991 Julia Roberts flick and M. Night Shyamalan in one fell swoop. He’ll never get an award for originality, but when it comes to rehashing formula and pleasing his audience, the man is a master.

After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose.

Sucker Punch has vast empty patches, deserts of dead air.

If you dare to keep track, the dumb stuff in The Space Between Us piles up quickly.... But it's not as easy to make fun of the mild sweetness at the heart of the movie.

There’s one significant problem with both Fifty Shades movies that’s impossible to ignore. Dornan is just a dud.

A loose but fairly snappy remake of the 1969 charmer "Cactus Flower."

Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him.

Running, or stumbling, only 90 minutes, After Earth may lack the neck-swiveling awfulness of Shyamalan’s "The Last Airbender," but it quickly sinks in its logorrheic solemnity. The movie makes "Oblivion" seem as jolly a romp as "Spaceballs," and gives neither Shyamalan nor Smith much to smile about.

Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy as the single-minded bride determined not to let anything--including the deadly mishaps that keep shrinking the wedding party--spoil her nuptials. [30 November 1998, p. 111]

Moretz gives the movie whatever warmth it has, though not even she can give it a real pulse.

This film, based on a true story, transcends its handsomeness to present a subtle portrait of a woman's growing consciousness.

All glitz, no glory. [7 September 1998]

It's pretty awful.

Mostly awful.

De Niro's performance begins to seem more a matter of well-practiced gestures than real conviction, and the long, silly finale more an exercise in empty panache by director Tony Scott than a truly gripping suspense piece involving people we care about. [26 August 1996, p.61]

Randy and giggly, this is a femme version of "The Man Show."

Nothing coheres. Movies usually try to come together at the end; this one falls apart. If that's Bay intention, then cinema has finally entered its Age of Extinction.