When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.

The skitcom format soon becomes tiresome.

Doesn't offer much.

The Greatest often feels like a mash-up of Sarandon's greatest grief hits.

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

A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.

An ambitious but sub-ordinary SF epic in which, as so often, Willis is better than his material.

The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating.

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

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.

Unhappily, Producer Walt Disney tells his shaggy-dog story so doggedly that he soon runs it into the pound.

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.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."

That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat ( and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. (24July 1989, p.53)

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.

Whatever director Peter Hedges' intent, the movie itself, a sentimental blend of magical realism and saccharine emotions, is oddly false. It made me want to go on a sugar cleanse.

Walt Disney's best films—barring his wonderful slapstick—have suffered from sticky taste; in this effort to be just plain folksy, that stickiness pretty thoroughly gums up the works.

This sugary sweet chick flick is so rich in its ripeness and full in its foolishness that I look forward to groaning in happy horror when I inevitably see it again, whether while drinking or when laid low by the kind of flu whose symptoms include a desire to watch Meg Ryan rom coms on cable.

Last Action Hero starts out mostly nuts, and winds up mostly bolts. Or, rather, winds down. That's a problem with pastiche: it must be constantly jump-started with ingenuity, and even that ultimately pales. By the end, nothing matters. [21 June 1993, p67]

Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense.

The Sting was not made to be taken seriously, but many people may find it difficult even to enjoy casually. It lacks the elements that could have given it true drive. [31 Dec 1973, p.50]

Wheatley — who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like "Kill List" (2011) and "High-Rise" (2015) — overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power.

Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment?

Painful, and not in a good way. A glimpse into the '60s should give us not just the warm bath of recognition but the shock of the new, as least as it felt in days of old. That doesn't happen, in a movie that evokes less empathy than apathy.

And while the new Lion King is slightly easier to take—maybe because these heavily CGI-enhanced “real” lions don’t have the same cartoon humanity of the earlier version’s animated ones—the picture still has a manufactured, preachy sheen. This is calculated virtuousness masquerading as imagination, though it’s easy to be sidetracked by how adorable the cub Simba is.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks could use some magic itself. The fantasy is earthbound, the score by Richard and Robert Sherman (who also wrote music and lyrics for Mary Poppins) is forgettable, the special effects lackadaisical.

Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.