Although it's reasonably well-acted and offers a few certifiable jolts, feels awfully familiar.

No comedy this vile should be brazenly foolish enough to give itself this title. [25 November 1998, p. 3D]

Though it has flashes of promise, Bones traces the footsteps of its fantasy film predecessors too closely to blaze anything close to an original narrative.

In Roy Orbison terms, enduring this movie is like working for The Man.

It's for people who have always wanted to see Willie Nelson ("Uncle Jesse") lob Molotov cocktails on a freeway and smoke weed with Joe Don Baker, who plays Georgia's governor.

Jade recalls Sliver (even before its fizzled finale) by reuniting Eszterhas with producer Robert Evans, the faded genius and ill-pegged comeback producer who fared better with last year's lively autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture. Judging from his last two movies, the aging kid stays on the D-list, too.

Desperate Hours is a monumentally awful take on The Desperate Hours, a '50s best-seller/stage hit, later Humphrey Bogart's movie-gangster swan song. [05 Oct 1990, p.4D]

The 5th Wave finds a way to make the most of Moretz’s talents, with the emotionality she showed in If I Stay and the utter physical chutzpah of her Kick-Ass films.

While Basinger admirably invests her role with deep passion and looks splendid in her Kenya khakis, the true story she stars in is disappointingly tame and dramatically inert.

This junior chick flick merely reinforces superficial clichés one associates with female teens: petty fights, intense highs and lows, and self-absorption.

As far as acting goes, neither Olsen is ready for Euripides' Medea, yet each projects well enough in their shared big scene.

With its excessive sleaze and gross-out gags, Soul Plane overshoots effective spoofery. Mostly it's a foul, eye-rolling experience.

Sleepover might appeal to 11- and 12-year-old fans of slumber parties, but it likely will leave their parents stifling a few dozen yawns.

The tone is consistent, but consistently uneventful. [06 May 1994]

Slavishly follows the well-worn and soggy Sparks path.

Where it should be light and graceful, Leap Year trips and thuds.

Fatally dreadful. This umpteenth parody flick of the year moves sooooooo slowly, it may be the first movie candidate for a pacemaker. The Naked Guns and the Hot Shots may not be Noel Coward cocktail parties. But those films toss out so many joke grenades, a few are bound to set off laughs. Not director Carl Reiner's latest. He takes the same five gags and grinds them into the ground like old cigarettes. Or allows each bit to drag on and on like the toilet paper that keeps sticking to femme fatale Sean Young's killer pumps. [29 Oct 1993, p.4D]

Trashy and disturbingly violent yet fairly zippy and amusingly cast.

Face it. Parody comedies are no longer a laughing matter. [25 October 1996, p.5D]

The movie goes wrong from the start.

There's nothing very wise about The Brothers Solomon. It's a moderately funny premise in search of some real laughs.

It's a pretty twisted concept, bordering on offensive. But mostly it's just not funny.

Aspires to be a cinematic "Sex and the City," but it's more like South Park Goes West.

Deafening, deadening and about two hours too long, Extinction would mark the weakest installment yet of the 7-year-old Hasbro franchise — if the previous three movies were discernible from one another.

Another invigorating, extremely raunchy sports movie from Ron Shelton .

This remake is shorter than its predecessors, a welcome earthly reward.

This leaden teen comedy is meant to be lively, but it's curiously bland.

This unbearable cross-generational fantasy, with Coreys Haim and Feldman, has one bit that sums up its overall ineptitude. It's a romantic interlude featuring the great Sinatra standard Young at Heart; instead of the 1954 hit version on Capitol, the filmmakers use the 1962 Reprise remake - photographed on a revolving turntable (and with the wrong label) as a 78! A 78 in the era of Gene Pitney? - what preschool did the filmmakers graduate from, anyway? [8 Sept 1989, p.3D]

It plays more like a "21 Jump Street," full of pretty people and a thumping soundtrack but offering little in the way of something to say.

Ridiculousness needs to abound somewhat in a film like this — reality takes a seat early and often here — but Resurgence pushes everything to an egregiously over-the-top and often infuriating degree.

Warcraft wins by not trying to be the second coming of a 10-hour cinematic trip through Mordor with Hobbits and jewelry. Rather, it’s a simpler, yet still wholly entertaining tale of magic and larger-than-life soldiers in a battle for survival.

The biggest mystery about Repo! The Genetic Opera is why the grisly Goth-horror musical is opening the week after Halloween. The second-biggest mystery is why this unfunny, unscary, preposterous bloodbath about organ transplants is opening at all.

Cats isn’t for everyone – much of it is a cheesy, B-grade affair seemingly crafted solely to take over midnight-movie slots from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Those with an open mind, though, as well as little kids and the T-Swift posse, might find it somewhat pawesome.

Stretching what was a cute concept to the breaking point.

Angelina Jolie slums her way through Beyond Borders, a film that telegraphs its plot and then drags ploddingly, its humane spirit obscured by an inane script and Jolie's implausible character.

It's hard to know just who the intended audience is: The movie is too surreal and bawdy for young kids and too silly for anyone older than 25.

So much luck is pressed with an absurdly overblown finale that 60 seconds will likely be Swordfish's shelf life after a couple of noisy opening weekends.

Though it has some mildly amusing moments (mostly in the visuals accompanying the novel's narration), Alex & Emma is disappointing, neither very romantic nor very comic.

A blah romantic comedy that has the bad taste to force the heavenly Ashley Judd into being an insecure, date-desperate, quirky career gal.

A mostly dreadful reboot by director Camille Delamarre (Brick Mansions) that casts English youngster Ed Skrein in Statham's role as well-dressed driver-for-hire Frank Martin.

Nothing happens that is not thoroughly predictable under Jeff (Revenge of the Nerds) Kanew's direction. Maybe kids, even though they won't have a clue about all those references to chichi Beverly Hills hairstylists, may find these shenanigans more fun than anybody. Maybe we could find a badge for them: the endurance badge. [22 March 1989, p.4D]

A wan version of the same old tired serial killer story, despite its updated milieu -- cyberspace.

The skiing scenes are lively enough, and one avalanche scene is even better - but cliches, overlength and jarring lapses in continuity mean that Barbra Streisand needn't spearhead a boycott of this Aspen. It can clear theaters all by itself. [25 Jan 1993, p.2D]

We had hoped for just a funny movie, but instead we get some laughs and plenty of yawns.

De Niro's scowl and Murphy's sass are inherently funny, though in this case both actors are forced to call in moviegoers' long-established goodwill.

A bland road-trip film that falls flat while heaping on the raunchiness.

Despite an unlikely setting and a moderately intriguing premise, Chernobyl Diaries proves to be a generic horror flick where young tourists are systematically victimized in unoriginal and not terribly scary ways.

Sitting through this movie is worse than being locked in a room with a continuous loop of "Nip/Tuck" playing on a jumbo screen.

Though not nearly as raucously funny as the leads in "Wedding Crashers," Nick and Shawn resemble junior versions of the one-track-minded womanizers played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

Max Payne couldn't be more appropriately named. Sitting through this stylish-looking but derivative, vacuous and bullet-riddled movie inflicts maximum pain.

The computer animation of the monsters here is a herky-jerky cartoon blur that is anything but scary.

It's an improvement on some of Perry's other films that strike a heavy-handed moralistic note. And it lacks the silly slapstick humor of his Madea movies.

Actually does manage to be the best of the BDSM bore-fests in the forgettable erotic saga based on E.L. James’ Fifty Shades novels.

Mannequin Two desperately wants to be magical. But the spell it casts is one of idiocy. [21 May 1991, p.4D]

With its homages to "Frankenstein," "The Exorcist" and "The Shining," director David Gelb's The Lazarus Effect is at least smarter and tenser than last year's crop of tame horror films.

A pitiful update that saddles poor Cedric the Entertainer with the unenviable task of taking over Jackie Gleason's premier creation, Ralph Kramden.

Lucky Numbers is anything but lucky for stars John Travolta and Lisa Kudrow.

Is there a word that means the opposite of Cowabunga? If so, that's the word for the charmless, dull and derivative new take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Superficial and lurid, Perfect Stranger is the cinematic equivalent of spam and should, like those trashy messages, be avoided.

Misguided raunchfest.

Silly action sequences grow tedious and rarely blend with the wannabe madcap comedy.

That's My Boy is puerile, mean-spirited and charmless.

A glossy wisp of a cautionary tale.

Only the makers of "Freddy Got Fingered" might crack a smile because it now has competition for worst movie of the year.

Robbins' performance as Winston is the best thing in the movie.

Far from redundant. That's because (Kirk) Wong deftly balances the outrageous stunts. [24 April 1998, p. 6E]

Filmmakers must have been tripping pretty badly when they made High School, a flub that's about as lucid as a stoner at a spelling bee.

Poor Rutger Hauer - the new decade apparently isn't his. This hearty trouper's latest, Blind Fury, is nobody's swell time at the multiplex. [30 Mar 1990, p.5D]

This Hellboy leans more into super-gory horror comedy than its predecessors, trading nuance for ripped-off limbs and boasting as much subtlety as a stone fist to the face.

An American Affair is sordid business blandly portrayed and not worth meddling with.

Envy is in the unenviable position of saddling two of Hollywood's most talented comic actors with a script that doesn't do them justice.

Doesn't make the movie worth watching -- even if you're monstrously bored.

Life is a crock -- or something like it.

Only those with paranoid fantasies of an en masse invasion on American soil will find Red Dawn remotely powerful. The concept should have been updated to allow for more complex and surreptitious kinds of warfare.

Deception is not the cool, noirish thriller it tries to be. Despite a cast that includes double-crossers Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams caught in the middle, the film is a yawn.

Fire Birds may actually be duller than Clint Eastwood's Firefox. It's doing a full-tilt boogie to 3 a.m. cable right now. [25 May 1990, p.4D]

You have to work hard to make an African vacation seem unpleasant. And Adam Sandler nearly pulls it off in Blended.

The conclusion is a sweet bit of frosting on an otherwise unremarkable confection.

While compellingly watchable, it's as overheated as Cage-the-actor's 1991 soft-core (and direct-to-video) "Zandalee," also set in New Orleans.

The picture is all Lawrence and Zahn, whose dynamics get something going, though not enough (please!) to spark a buddy sequel.

Trapped in Paradise is the kind of dreadful holiday mush that often is declared Capra-esque. But if It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey were forced to watch it, he might reconsider suicide. [02 Dec 1994, p.4D]

True, most Christmas flicks tend toward the trite and predictable naturally but they just don’t have to be quite this insufferable.

Hot Pursuit is this week's "Paul Blart." Which is to say, it's ill-conceived, not funny, overbearing and not in any way worth watching.

Director Kevin Smith's tweets, jokes and sharp commentary after being denied a seat aboard a Southwest Airlines flight because of his girth were a lot more engaging than Cop Out, his new movie.

Remarkably, the plot has much in common with "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," yet that bundle of fun has enough vision to make even its Barry Manilow interlude seem appropriate.

It's an unholy mess.

Soon, the audience feels its own sense of despair -- for a movie that might have worked but didn't.

Lurching back and forth through time, Winter's Tale tries to blend the supernatural and the sentimental, with a synchronous nod to elements of New York history. But this would-be magical romance flounders, hitting only dissonant chords.

Slap Happy. [16 February 1996, p.D4]

Rather than being a massive foul-up, Artemis Fowl is a sufficient spycraft fantasy that could benefit from the inevitable sequel, and Gad proves once again to be the Mouse House’s Dwayne Johnson, a rock-solid personality who makes everything around him better.

Moore goes into operatic mode as Mother Malkin, a nasty witch who morphs into a menacing winged dragon. The worst performance, however, belongs to Jeff Bridges as a marble-mouthed, curmudgeonly knight named Master Gregory.

The screenplay is thin, the dialogue lacks nuance and the acting is often laughable.

Perry must have felt it was high time for him to try his hand at playing a darker role. But starring in this badly directed, suspense-free film with its unintentionally laughable dialogue does Perry no favors.

The dialogue is beyond clichéd, and performances feel cobbled together from other movies.

The Spirit is uneven, but its campy adventure provides some amusing, escapist fun.

Bulletproof is both offensive and depressing, from its sociopathic mix of graphic violence and slapstick to its severe career blighting of the once-formidable Ernest Dickerson. [6 Sept 1996, p.3D]

Though the tale may fall short on imagination, the principal actors make Over Her Dead Body livelier than one would expect.

Nothing about this rote exercise feels remotely fresh. It's a re-tread of the 2009 original, sans the inspired lunacy.