McKay keeps piling on the sardonic observations, and the outlandishly ill-behaved characters, long after the movie has crumpled under their weight.

Tron: Legacy is not good, but it is amiable. While it seems less like a parody than the original, it is also silly in a not unpleasing way.

Another Saturday Night Live skit is turned into a winning movie. And this one has a little heart. [2 Aug 1993]

Where the Red Fern Grows is quite possibly the saddest, most purposefully depressing movie (and book) we’ve ever experienced.

Guys and gals from the first film, now thicker and with incipient crow lines, pair up in more or less the same permutations as when they were young and shiny. The movie's message is that the way to face impeding maturity is to embrace your inner teen idiot.

Some clever soul might have done something moderately effective with this idea, but Krampus is too dumb to be scary and too listless to be entertaining.

The Gray Man inadvertently pulls off a mission you’d think would be impossible: rendering its stars nearly invisible, or at least just people you can’t wait to get away from.

The glossily photographed family drama People Like Us is not without appeal, but it has a major construction flaw. It's dramatic arc is predicated on the problem of accidental incestuous attraction. Egads.

Applying Dad's directorial style of sweaty closeups, prowling telephoto shots and an ominous electronic score (by ex-Tindersticks member Dickon Hinchliffe), the younger Mann has dished out a meaty drama with familiar ingredients from the Law & Order kitchen but a distinctively bitter taste.

So Broken City stokes a lot of hopes. Too bad for all of us, the makers and the watchers alike, that it's a grimy botch.

What aims at being terrifying is just loud and goofy.

What's lacking is the sense of emotional balance and urgency that the original Terminator, though just a B movie, was blessed with--the quality that earned it fans in the first place.

Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.

In strict filmmaking terms, Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumph squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with “bad” movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.

The frenetic pace masks an emptiness; this Ice Age is just a collection of slapstick moments and fisticuffs.

It's strenuous, smartly-made and ordinary to an extraordinary degree.

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.

If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year.

The goofy hysteria of something like "A Summer Place" was infinitely more entertaining and emotionally authentic than the distant smugness of this failed clone. [7 April 1997, p. 76]

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 skitcom format soon becomes tiresome.

Although Little bears some similarities to the 1988 kid fantasy "Big," it’s a thoroughly modern comedy, one that lives comfortably with the idea that women can hold power and authority–though because they’re human, they can misuse it, too.

It is the movie's uneven writing-half funny and daring, half punishing and senseless-that proves to be Lola's biggest opponent.

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

A filmmaker can do a lot with this Sliding Doors-style idea; there’s also plenty that could send it careering off the rails. But Look Both Ways has a mild sweetness that makes it go down easy.

After a while, Nine plays like some Hollywood charity revue.

For a soul-sucking 83 minutes, you're trapped inside the film's tiny, ugly mind.

Even in a predictable horror film like Silent House, Olsen draws empathy like a magnet.