Hall strives to carry The Night House on her more-than-capable shoulders, but she can’t quite compensate for the moments when the movie is outright silly or, worse, boring.

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.

All this eye candy is ultimately only about as engaging as watching kids at play, which is what Sheen and Schwartzman seem to be doing. I can’t argue that this isn’t an accurate glimpse inside some man’s mind — perhaps Austin Powers?

It should be fun – but it isn’t. Ritchie, who wrote the screenplay from a story he conceived with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies, veers into territory that’s possibly anti-Semitic and maybe a little racist. It’s all a lark, so we’re not supposed to care, but some of the gags still leave a bitter aftertaste.

Well, the big questions might as well be answered first. Is Jaws 2 as scary as the original Jaws? No. Is it as much fun? No. Will it make as much money? No. Is it a total catastrophe? Not quite. What, then, is Jaws 2? Quite simply, it is an almost scientific exercise in showbiz mediocrity. This smooth and passionless spectacle is too impersonal to win anyone's affection and too inoffensive to inspire hatred. It's so bland that it evaporates from memory as soon as the final credits appear onscreen.

All attitude and low aptitude.

Four minutes of Bush on SNL is just right, but 85-minutes of Cam Brady feels like a lot, even with a strong supporting cast that includes Jason Sudeikis as Cam's campaign manager and Katherine LaNasa as Cam's picture-perfect, but mean-as-nails wife.

The new Dumbo is ostentatious and overworked, less a work of imagination than a declaration of how imaginative Burton thinks he is.

Bad Words seems to be heading into the creepy realm of a sociopath’s case study, yet it’s presented as a breezy satire about a rebel against the system. It must be the Dictionary-Industrious Complex.

Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving.

Its tone swings violently from pratfall to preachment, from an indictment of featherbed laziness to an extended beer-commercial celebration of the mythical American worker.

Eight Men Out lacks either the spacious simplicity of legend or the patient detailing of realism. And Sayles often seems like a man who, trying to stretch a single, gets caught between bases and is desperately trying to evade the rundown.

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

A grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score -- tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important.

The movie is full of feints, shocks and scenes of particularly perverse violence, but nothing about it is fresh enough to haunt you in the night. It's predictable.

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

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

This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them.

Too bad that Ride Along never makes it to Ordinary; it sinks into sub-. This is a movie you keep watching only from lethargy.

Everything in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk should work — and yet the picture falls flat. It’s a story enslaved by a director’s approach rather than served by it. His mannered placement of the camera is hard to ignore, and the actors suffer for it.

With I Care a Lot, Blakeson (whose credits include The 5th Wave and The Disappearance of Alice Creed) takes the easy way out, showing smart women doing bad stuff without bothering to write actual characters for them.

Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking.

But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief.

The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright and adapted from Stephen King’s 1982 novel of the same name, is dark all right. It’s also garishly obvious, and though it grabs for laughs here and there, it has almost zero wit.

Not a bad concept, and Martin Lawrence is appealing. Unfortunately, the writers have no gift for comic writing.

The screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama.

It jumps around from song to song, and from plot point to plot point, unable to trust in the attention spans of modern children, or even just modern human beings.

Intent on both dazzling and punishing the viewer, Gilliam gets lost in creepy spectacle and plenty of old film clips (notably "Vertigo"). But at the sight of three giraffes crossing a city bridge, you'll think of a more recent movie. A bad one. [8 Jan 1996, p.69]