May be dull, but the familiarity of it all makes it feel ceremonial, a reassuring ritual.

What audiences should expect is a tone-deaf, superficial, charmless ensemble rom-com, focused on five attractive, but uninteresting, couples.

This is Johnson’s baby, a film spotlighting a complicated antihero he has championed for years. It wins some battles and packs plenty of punch, yet it just can’t get past familiar tropes and flaws.

A more sure-footed shoot-'em-up that finds some heart, wit and perhaps enough momentum to spawn a formidable action franchise.

Has the refined taste to crib from classics like "Double Indemnity."

Machete Kills dulls more than anything. It's not that Robert Rodriguez's sequel lacks any of the camp or exploitative violence of the 2010 original. The mayhem has just become boring.

The slapstick would put Curly and Moe to shame. The raunch is crude as often as it is clever.

It takes more than an awkward title attempting to sound cool to overcome its mundane plot and silly dialogue.

First-time director/writer Richard Stanley hammers together chunks from films past to form a clunky horror show that never rises to the level of its source material. [14 Sep 1990, p.4D]

Mostly, Battleship is a noisy, overlong and numbing military-vs.-aliens saga with laughably bad dialogue.

There's nothing wrong with fairy tales, but they don't have to be formulaic. A movie like this would have benefited from a blending of the fanciful and the inventive.

The cycle thrills here are everything: flips, collisions, a chase across the top of a fast-moving train and even a zoom down the aisle of one of the train's cars as the passengers take it in stride.

The result is another middling comic-book adventure for the fan-favorite Spider-Man antihero that leans kooky and earnest and even saps some of its title character’s bite, though does give the snarling Venom a new aspect: a big baddie daddy.

Tango is a Lethal Weapon without lethal wit. [22 Dec 1989, p.7D]

If you'd like to know about the famously eccentric psyche of surrealist artist Salvador Dali, whom Pattinson plays, you're better off consulting written biographies. Little Ashes does nothing to illuminate the iconic Spanish artist.

The Rookie is Clint Eastwood's ultimate cops 'n' robbers fantasy, where all the cars are sex machines, all the guns shoot loud and hard, and real men say things like, ''Wanna guarantee? Buy a toaster.'' [07 Dec 1990, p.4D]

Makes its point ham-fistedly and then devolves into a blood-spattered slasher movie. It also unashamedly cribs from more disturbing films like "Straw Dogs," "Funny Games" and "A Clockwork Orange."

It's been a long time since a movie wasted as much talent as Stand Up Guys, a film that aims to be a geezer "Goodfellas" but whose execution is a misfire.

If "You've Got Mail" jangled your nerves with its Starbucks-fueled cuteness, here's a romance that goes down like instant decaf. [15 January 1999, Life, p.18E]

Unfortunately, Leo is the only well-developed character in a handsomely mounted but tedious drama with an impressive international cast.

Hart is much like Murphy: fast-talking, mischievous and irresistible. He's so confident and good-natured that we see how Angela fell for her pint-sized slacker.

Based on a popular children's book by Chris Van Allsburg and directed by that "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" guy Joe Johnston, Jumanji is a calculated but very entertaining special effects extravaganza. [15Dec1995 Pg. 01.D]

This may be the most laugh-free comedy of the year.

It seems as if no professional actors were hired in the making of this motion picture.

As funny as it can be, this underdawg comedy isn't much more than Sandler's golf-oriented "Happy Gilmore" with a Cajun accent. [6 November 1998, p. 10E]

All coy and fey -- and painless to digest.

It's an awkward jumble whose only value is as a forum for movie junkies to track the progress of half-a-dozen screen careers at once.

As thrilling as the adventure sequences might be for kids, the better scenes take place on the high school campus.