Pet Sematary is creepy for a time, before it becomes stupid. Then it’s creepy again: The final image will make you want your mommy.

Bad Teacher revels in being distasteful. But it can't just let a bad woman be bad; she also has to be burdened with physical insecurity, even if it makes no sense. Can you imagine if Billy Bob Thornton's character had become Bad Santa so he could steal to fund his penis implant?

This cutesy film is overwhelmed by a sense of forced farce.

The best seller's passions were misplaced, but in toning them down, the adaptation turns bland.

I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child.

Morris's manner of relating this story is very often quite inappropriate to its substance. It is a sordid and appalling tale and what it demands is almost an anti-style -- rough, crude, grim, technically poor imagery unrelieved by sleek, slick fancy work. If you are going to rub our noses in this ugliness, you must not let up until, perhaps, we have learned our lesson.

Given its budget, the quality of its writing, acting and production is remarkably high--about miniseries level.

At least in a video game the player decides who needs to be killed, and what trail to take in the labyrinth. The Max Payne moviegoers are passive hostages on a long ride they've taken so many times before.

Even when the film is cool, it manages to be wrong.

Even by Shyamalan’s usual standard of reminding us that he’s a thinker of deep thoughts as well as an entertainer, the result is cumbersomely preachy.

Curiously, if fitfully, intriguing.

Gigi is dressed to kill, but if all the French finery impresses the customers, it also smothers the story.

To make something like Firewall good, you have to make it at least a little bit new--or add more than an unending patter of rain and techno-talk.

What's true about The Perfect Storm is true of many effects epics: it's not a bad movie, except for the people.

In the end Beast is, frankly, sort of dumb.

What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. [28 Oct 1991]

This Mummy movie is really two movies: a good adventure epic, with all the Chinese people, and a wan one, with O'Connells and the other the Westerners.

One of those shaggy-dog stories that you keep hoping will get sharper, smarter, cooler, more worthy of its star. Buscemi may not be exactly celestial, but he still deserves better.

A little less agreeable and way more aggressive than its better begetter, Rio 2 has the overstuffed agenda of a movie that’s been focus-grouped to death.

I have the anachronistic notion that romantic comedies needn't be exclusively partial to one gender; they should be critical and loving and true to both. So I'll soldier on with my mixed, distant, defiantly ignorant review of this 142-minute trifle -- which comes close to being the longest non-musical romantic comedy in Hollywood history.

Ambitious of vision and swooping of camera, I, Frankenstein is no "I, Robot," let alone "I, Claudius," but it’s definitely watchable on a cold Jan. evening or, a few months from now, on your I, Pad.

Like most children's movies, Rise of the Guardians mimics the patterns of adult entertainment. Where is the magic in that?

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.

You are hereby absolved of all guilt when you laugh your ass off in the first half of the film.

The story hits every expected beat, right when you expect it to. And it squanders some of its best resources.

The first Rush Hour was a pretty good movie, the second one pretty lame. The threequel is somewhere in between: nothing special but with a high amiability quotient. The two stars know they click; it's no crime for them to extend and exploit that good vibe one more time.

The movie has an air of recent discovery, of shocked innocence about the tawdry quality of city life that is gratingly naive. The film goes most disastrously wrong when it tries to turn slice-of-life realism into full-scale melodrama.

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