After "Chocolat" and this, how about a moratorium on candy-centered comedies?

The film is fine, familiar fare for gamers and children: Sonic sprints, Carrey mugs, but the creative juices run out quickly.

Dr. Dolittle does do a lot of stuff right. [ 26 June 1998, p. 12 E]

Nothing better than boys with really big toys. Especially when the boys are men like Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, top talents who duke it out among the nukes in the propulsively pulse-pounding undersea thriller Crimson Tide. [12May1995 Pg.01.D]

Anything but cutting-edge. [28 Jul 2003]

Pee-wee Herman may still look good in his ill-fitting suit, but more than 30 years after first hitting the big screen, his antics haven’t aged well.

Even with a wealth of talent involved, Inferno is missing some serious heat.

Next Day Air can't decide whether it's a broad stoner comedy or a gritty Tarantino-esque action flick. The humor is there, but violence brings the laughter to an abrupt halt.

The Power of One plays like a plot-heavy South African fairy tale with one too many big, bad wolves. [27 March 1992, p.4D]

A B-movie at its heart with big-budget ambitions. Full of rampant goofiness, extreme gore, a jumbled narrative and hyperactive pacing, The Predator is also funnier and more clever than you would expect, though at the same time it’s an '80s film that doesn’t realize it’s 2018 in terms of political correctness.

An occasionally entertaining, always fluffy teen romantic comedy with some moderately funny physical comedy by gadabout star Lindsay Lohan.

Kapur's stodgy style halts the momentum of young actors who have impressed in other movies.

Some moments in XX/XY ring true, and the honesty exposed is revelatory. But, like some relationships, this drama can be tough to endure.

Skirts dangerously close to being the thing it parodies: a second-rate space opera.

For a story that centers on intrigue in high places, the few even halfway-grabbing scenes come from the mild if unexplored sexual tension between co-Caine sleuthers Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam.

The fantasy segments, played up in trailers, get bogged down amid the ho-hum tale of a loser making good.

Arthur Newman is an old story and chronically, consistently uninvolving.

Instead of drawing the audience in, the action scenes merely blur together. And the intriguing, thoughtful concepts at the story's core are glossed over.

It dips into the timely satire of mid-20th century suburbia, with inherent racism and white privilege hiding in plain sight next to picket fences and well-trimmed lawns, but rather than embracing it wholeheartedly, the narrative defaults to a lackluster murder mystery and a violent example of men and woman behaving badly.

Smoochy, like the cuddly character, tries to be loved and ends on an unrealistically upbeat note. But it's in better, wittier form just being vicious and biting.

An instant merit barometer of any farce this contrived is the creativity in and conviction of the exposition. It takes an empty half-hour just to get Goldberg into the convent, and even then the payoff is mild. [29 May 1992, p.5D]

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

At least Van Damme parodies himself just enough to avoid an all-out battle of the blands . At least director Roland Emmerich slyly allows supermarket Muzak to play during Lundgren's one big emoting scene. [10 July 1992, p.5D]

Dull and unpleasant.

The movie starts out cleverly enough but grows insipid as the girls' antics become more predictable.

Scoundrels isn't rock-bottom. That a more sturdy vehicle couldn't be found for such stellar leads, though, is a dirty rotten shame. [14 Dec 1988, p. 4D]

Squanders the opportunity to give us a telling glimpse of the woman behind the ruff. Instead, the costume drama is all gilt and opulence.

Madonna's directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, feels more like a collection of scenes than a fully drawn film.