Don’t Worry Darling makes a better entertainment than it does a serious parable.

It’s not always clear if we’re supposed to think the “new” Renee is basically unbearable, or totally awesome. The movie has many more flaws than Renee does: It isn’t as light on its feet as it should be, and Kohn and Silverstein frame some of the gags too broadly, particularly a boardwalk bikini-contest scene that’s dragged down by some crude gross-outs.

Director Fran Rubel Kuzui's frenzied mistrust of her material is almost total. Somebody should have given her a garlic necklace -- or a Miltown -- and told her to chill out.

The film has a hectic, sitcom air and a full-of-himself hero who is as likely to grate as to ingratiate.

This is a big, often quite scary action movie, with tons of creepy computer-generated imagery that's right up there with Voldemort in terms of physical nastiness, although less powerful emotionally.

It just runs on and on -- like a slightly stupid story you wish you hadn't overheard in a singles bar.

Crowe, despite his loutish rep, is forever surprising viewers by slipping snugly into the disparate characters he plays. This time he surprises by failing. Oh, he can do engaging as smartly as he does stalwart or tortured, but he gets sabotaged by the cloying script.

You're entitled to ask for more than that in a comedy, but these days you're often obliged to settle for a lot less.

This movie could induce terminal boredom in adults and rot the minds of the young. [26 August 1985, p.64]

Did anyone have a good time making this movie? The actors seem to be reading their lines at gunpoint, in an enterprise whose mood is less summer camp than internment camp.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

The picture is sometimes wayward and unwieldy, its dialogue creaky and awkward, like an amateur’s attempt at scrimshaw.... But in a movie climate rife with superhero reboots and rehashings of childhood favorites, it’s a small marvel that In the Heart of the Sea exists at all.

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?

We're talking fables, not reality, here, and this is a fine and merry one--"Ms. Woods Goes to Washington"--played to airy perfection by Reese Witherspoon and a light-on-its-feet cast.

The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing.

Maybe even more surprisingly, about 70% of the crazily imaginative plot hangs together. But the other 30%, sloppily thought out and superfluous, drags the movie down.

Tin tailspins into silliness and never regains its flight pattern.

Swing Vote falls from agreeable fable into wan satire.

Coming to America seems to be more career move than movie. After the raucousness of Beverly Hills Cop II and the raunchiness of Eddie Murphy Raw, the star apparently wants to assert his claim on the currently vacant title of America's Sweetheart. His aspirations must be bigger and badder than that. We want -- may actually need -- something more from this gifted man than Eddie Murphy Tame. [4 July 1988 p.66]

The actors, especially the ever appealing Smith, do what they can to ground the movie in reality, but it stubbornly remains dawdling, remote and pretentious.

Diverting without being fully absorbing, this is a film best appreciated as an exercise in--shall we say it?--Primal Gere. [15 Apr 1996, p.100]

Feels like three-quarters of a movie. It leaves you wanting some elusive soupçon of comedy or drama or romance that it just doesn’t deliver. Yet even within those parameters, there’s something appealingly human about it: It has the warmth of a tiny beach fire on a cool night, casting a soft glow that makes you want to creep closer; there’s wistfulness, at least, in its low-key quietude.

It’s perfectly entertaining as you’re watching, but when it’s over, you might not feel any smarter—or humbler—than you did going in.

It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre...But the movie also has an aching solidity that allows you to surrender to its cuddly-creepy feelings without hating yourself in the morning.

An uninvolving muddle.

Wyatt Earp drones past its logical conclusion, which is, of course, the great shoot-out. Since Earp's life uninstructively limped along after that event, so must the movie, further abusing our overtaxed patience and undertaxed intelligence.

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.

Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.