This vaguely likable, too-tame comedy falls short of the mark.

A likably lame rattletrap of a road movie that gets what limited spark it has from the “Dynasty” diva’s still-lascivious on-screen charisma.

The movie’s one recurring joke stems from watching Shaina catch strangers off-guard, and it starts to wear thin by around the one-hour mark, when things start to turn dark.

The movie never quite reckons with just how twisted a concept it’s peddling, and that’s easily the scariest thing about it.

With two excellent antagonists in Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil presents a gripping, suspenseful drama for nearly all of its two hours - then lets go at the end and falls into a heap.

An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.

Oddly stiff where Alexander Mackendrick’s original village farce was infectiously tipsy, Gillies MacKinnon’s interpretation is twee, tweedy and rather timid about putting its own stamp on a now-quaint story.

Competent if pedestrian Urban Hymn takes a familiar walk down the path of inspirational youth drama.

Re-shot, re-cut and somehow rescued from total obscurity, Boone’s movie isn’t half bad. Alas, it’s not half good either. It’s basically just decent enough to motivate those sick of shutdown to risk getting sick for real.

The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.

The film can never quite decide what it wants to be — wounded-inner-child drama, quirky comedy, quasi-thriller, all the above — and its good ideas never quite gel, or lead toward sufficient narrative revelation.

Beginning brightly with goofy slapstick, irreverent humor and a dastardly plot to overthrow the monarch, the film squanders its early success in a second half marred by pedestrian pacing and ho-hum action scenes.

It’s good to see Shyamalan back (to a degree) in form, to the extent that he’s recovered his basic mojo as a yarn spinner. But Glass occupies us without haunting us; it’s more busy than it is stirring or exciting.

This serious-minded, ambitious oddity shoots for the moon of a far-off planet, but it really only finds the grace it’s looking for in its magnificent supple camerawork.

The film is far from incompetent, and it brims with ambition, but too much of the time what’s happening just sits there. It’s a lavishly odd concoction, like a feel-good movie for OCD miniature-world Barbie-doll fetishists.

The movie’s much too flashy, allowing its cheeky attitude to overpower the otherwise humanist message (somehow, absurd situations feel less so when the narrator is constantly pointing out how outrageous everything seems to be), while the acting is all over the place.

If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.

Genre clichés catch up with Schultz just as surely as the past catches up with his characters and the sweet, redemptive possibilities of their relationship gets washed away in the tide of gratuitous bloodshed.

Everyone’s Life contains a few of the most effective individual scenes in the director’s recent filmography, as well as some of the most befuddling.

It’s hard not to wonder how much better the cluttered results might have played as a miniseries.

There’s an old-school, B-movie snap to much of the proceedings, which Nash Edgerton modernizes without imposing too flashy a style upon the material. It’s pulp, plain and simple, delivering on the chance to watch depraved characters navigate unseemly situations.

The film’s thematic preoccupation with the power of images — as perceived through any of the senses — is a worthy and thoughtful one. Yet the execution lacks the visual and emotional rigor of Kawase’s most imposing films, instead swaddling viewers in buttery lighting and blunt, earnest platitudes.

The film itself, unfortunately, is generally less interesting than the business matters behind it, a thoroughly competent affair that tosses in just enough off-the-wall elements to liven up a fairly basic retread of the original’s formula.

This earnestly romantic biopic of odds-beating polio patient Robin Cavendish and his unwavering wife, Diana, keeps its eyes moist and its upper lip stiff to the last — but its sweeping inspirational gestures rarely reach all the way to the heart.

A Skyjacker’s Tale is all in the telling, and Jamie Kastner’s haphazard documentary misses the opportunity to get it right, despite having access to Ali and an impressive assembly of major players from his past.

Legend is a fairytale produced on a grand scale, set in some timeless world and peopled with fairies, elves and goblins, plus a spectacularly satisfying Satan. At the same time, the basic premise is alarmingly thin, a compendium of any number of ancient fairytales.

The various story currents move swiftly but don’t run particularly deep, so the film works better as a kind of best-foot-forward overview of modern urban Russia — “Moscow, I Love You” — than it does as a multi-stranded human drama.

Christine seems like a retread. This time it's a fire-engine red, 1958 Plymouth Fury that's possessed by the Devil, and this deja vu premise (from the novel by Stephen King) combined with the crazed vehicle format, makes Christine appear pretty shop-worn.

Chris Columbus weighs in adequately in his directorial debut, thanks to a fresh, solid lead performance from Elisabeth Shue. Yet the film can never rise above the leaden script.

The three stories just don’t connect and efforts to join them never work. However, an excellent roster of talent does try its best.

The central reason that Last Flag Flying fails to take wing is that its characters don’t ring true. Not really. You never feel, in your bones, that you’re watching battle-scarred veterans.

Script by Stanley Mann is quite faithful to the Stephen King novel, but cinematically that loyalty is damaging. Picture's length can't sustain the material.

Coming nine years after the original, this supernatural horror sequel is a competently made but uninspired effort. Gore fans should dig it.

Gleeson and Keaton, for their part, play this bourgeois rags-to-tweed fairytale with such good humor that one is fleetingly able to overlook the frank bogusness of the mechanics that bring them together.

So little has been done to update or refresh “The Intouchables” for American culture or a new audience that The Upside has no integrity as a separate piece of work. The casting alone is all that’s keeping it from sinking into a cynical act of franchise burnishing.

Although Demange directs the heck out of it, White Boy Rick ultimately feels like a glorified TV movie, albeit with a better cast and a much hipper score.

Henson is the right actress to play a contract killer grown weary, but as a thriller Proud Mary doesn’t quite do her justice. It’s a connect-the-dots underworld trifle, watchable and minimal...though Henson holds it together and, at moments, comes close to convincing you that you’re watching a better movie.

The movie doesn’t have the budget or imagination to permit subplots.

Marie Noelle’s evidently impassioned portrait of the trailblazing Polish-French physicist and chemist emerges as an odd blend of, well, formulae, following a starchy biopic pattern one minute and giving in to impressionistic abstraction the next.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai plays more like an experimental film than a Hollywood production aimed at a mass audience. It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.

Mr Majestyk makes a first-reel pretense of dealing with the thorny subject of migrant Chicano farm laborers, but social relevance is soon clobbered by the usual Charles Bronson heroics, here mechanically navigated by director Richard Fleischer.

This jokey tone couldn’t be more different from the relative self-seriousness of helmer John Glen’s first 007 directing effort, For Your Eyes Only, and frankly, I yearn for more of that class.

For 92 minutes, it more or less succeeds in sawing through your boredom, slicing and dicing with a glum explicitness that raises the occasional tingle of gross-out suspense but no longer carries any kick of true shock value.

Brian De Palma lets all his obsessions hang out in Body Double. A voyeur’s delight and a feminist’s nightmare, sexpenser features an outrageously far-fetched and flimsy plot.

What sets I Feel Pretty apart is the inspired premise that Renee’s transformation takes place entirely in her head, while those around her are left befuddled by her sudden change of attitude — a concept that begs the question of why our society encourages women to second-guess their self-image in the first place.

Allen's gift is in the depiction of a contemporary intellectual shlump who cannot seem to make it with the chicks always tantalizingly out of reach. That persona could well have served him once more as the focus for a good bit of caustic comedy on today's sexual mores.

Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.

There’s almost none of the generous, involving humanity (and warm humor) of the previous film, nor any clear take on the personalities in the slackly structured script, largely improvised by the actors.

Day of the Dead is an unsatisfying part three in George A. Romero's zombie saga. The acting here is generally unimpressive and in the case of Sarah's romantic partner, Miguel (Antonio DiLeo, Jr.), unintentionally risible.

A slow burn of a horror drama that doesn’t build toward quite enough of a blaze to be truly memorable, Awaken the Shadowman nonetheless ranks a cut above the genre norm for its atmospheric and confident setup

Watchable if never really scary or funny enough to leave a memorable impression.

On its own terms, the film is watchable enough, but it’s blunt and stolid and under-characterized, and at 130 minutes it plods.

The trouble is, presenting all of this mayhem within the framework of a by-the-numbers father-daughter bonding story saps the stunts of their usual appeal.

Danny Strong’s film is diverting, mildly informative and — to borrow Caulfield’s adjective of choice — somewhat phony, heavy as it is on tortured-writer clichés and contrived art-imitates-life parallels.

This is Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and the results are, well, screen history. Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all. Much has been written and said pro-and-con about Crawford since daughter Christina wrote the book on which this film is based. Whatever the truth, director Frank Perry’s portrait here is sorry indeed, 129 minutes with a very pathetic and unpleasant individual.

Picture starts off promisingly enough with Nicholson as a hapless outlaw who makes it across the border but the posse cheats and comes across after him causing his horse to faint. But it never jells, as Nicholson continues to sputter and chomp, acting more like her grandfather than a handsome roue out to overcome her virginity.

Film’s saving grace is its scathing satirical sketches of fictional televangelist preacher Jimmy Lee Farnsworth.

The final effect is akin to that of a Hallmark card inscribed by Christopher Nolan, and it’s that earnest self-importance of tone that finally makes this light sci-fi effort a bit of a trudge, despite Dinklage’s committed and empathetic performance.

The well-intentioned biopic is ungainly, overtly articulating everything it doesn’t need to yet failing to explain much of what starts out as unclear about the tale.

A few good laughs in an 85-minute film do not a comedy make. Basically a running gag about hero Allen's ineptitude as a professional crook, scatters its fire in so many directions it has to hit at least several targets. But satire on documentary coverage of criminal flop is overextended and eventually tiresome.

Follow-up features much of the original’s cast but none of its key behind-the-scenes creative talent, save producer Paul Maslansky. Only actor to get any mileage out of this one is series newcomer Art Metrano, as an ambitious lieutenant bent upon taking over the department.

Technically smart but dramatically a bit flat.

Heading for the jungles in her high heels, Turner is like a lot of unwitting screen heroines ahead of her, guaranteed that her drab existence is about to be transformed – probably by a man, preferably handsome and adventurous. Sure enough, Michael Douglas pops out of the jungle. The expected complications are supplied by the kidnappers, Danny DeVito and Zack Norman.

Story [by John Hughes] of a frenetic, chaotic tour of the Old World, with Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprising their roles as determined vacationers, is graceless and only intermittently lit up by lunacy and satire.

A bedroom farce with a leaden touch, a corporate comedy without teeth. What it does have is Michael J. Fox in a winning performance as a likable hick out to hit the big time in New York.

Freaky Friday is certainly one of the most offbeat films Walt Disney Productions has ever made, but it isn't one of the best. A promising concept - quarreling mother and teenage daughter switch personalities for a day - has been bungled by a talky, repetitive screenplay and overbroad direction. Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster salvage some scenes through sheer behavioral charm.

Tron is loaded with visual delights but falls way short of the mark in story and viewer involvement. Steven Lisberger has adequately marshalled a huge force of technicians to deliver the dazzle, but even kids (and specifically computer game freaks) will have a difficult time getting hooked on the situations.

The Object of Beauty is a throwback to the romantic comedies of Swinging London cinema, but lacks the punch of the best of that late 1960s genre. Mildly diverting but empty picture.

Realive ultimately aims to be all about matters of the heart, and in that realm Gil’s imagination proves disappointingly limited.

Though it basically argues that the surest way to overcome racism is to spend some time getting to know “the other,” Cooper’s film offers audiences no such opportunity, depriving its native characters of so much as a single scene in which they are treated as anything more than abstract plot devices in service of the white folks’ enlightenment.

Tamra Davis, a music video director with the well-received feature debut Guncrazy on her resume, might have really had something here had she settled on any one of the many paths the movie starts down.

Everyone who saw it remembers ‘that scene’ from the original. Here, some of the boys get back at Balbricker by sending a snake up into her toilet.

Airport is a handsome, often dramatically involving $10-million epitaph to a bygone brand of filmmaking. However, the ultimate dramatic situation of a passenger loaded jetliner with a psychopathic bomber aboard that has to be brought into a blizzard-swept airport with runway blocked by a snow-stalled plane actually does not create suspense because the audience knows how it's going to end.

"Mark Felt,” despite bits of bureaucratic cloak-and-dagger intrigue and a commanding lead performance by Liam Neeson, is a film that pings off relevance more than it feels charged with it.

Stapleton is also well-cast in her cliched role, as are Peter Boyle as the good mobster Dundee and Joe Piscopo as the bad Vermin. Deliberately overworking the Cagney mannerisms, Michael Keaton is initially good, too, in the title role, as is Griffin Dunne as Johnny’s D.A. brother. Unfortunately, the material given all of them just gets worse and worse.

A few of the gags land, most of them don’t, but the overall rhythm is stilted and rudderless, flattened further by d.p. Paul Suderman’s point-and-shoot camerawork.

When you can count the laughs in a comedy on the fingers of one hand, it isn’t so funny. Time Bandits, is a kind of potted history of man, myth and the eternal clash between good and evil as told in the inimitable idiom of Monty Python. Not that the basic premise is bad, with an English youngster and a group of dwarfs passing through time holes on assignment by the Maker to patch up the shoddier parts of His creation. What results, unfortunately, is a hybrid neither sufficiently hair-raising or comical.

Taut and rattling in setup, before losing its bearings in more ways than one as no end of jungle fever seizes Daniel Radcliffe’s agonized protagonist.

McCarthy and Rob Lowe (as his roommate) carry most of the picture, and both acquit themselves reasonably well under the circumstances.

There is a parade of roadside set pieces involving may different ways to crash cars. Overlaid is citizens band radio jabber (hence, the title) which is loaded with downhome gags. Field is the hottest element in the film.

Red Dawn charges off to an exciting start as a war picture and then gets all confused in moralistic handwriting, finally sinking in the sunset. Swayze, Howell and the other youngsters are all good in their parts.

However much fun the film’s high points may afford, there is also something faintly depressing about seeing a once-inventive filmmaker plunder his own legacy for easy props.

Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.

There are moments when the film has the ability to absorb us, however fleetingly.

Compelling enough while you’re watching it, frustrating then forgettable once it ends, this is a work that wouldn’t command much attention if it came from any other director. Coming from this one, it mostly intrigues as an unexpected if not terribly rewarding change of pace.

Against the Night isn’t a terribly good movie — it’s mostly a patchwork of clichés, stock characters and low-voltage shocks culled from dozens of similar small-budget thrillers — but it isn’t an entirely useless one, either

The main problem with “Hong Kong Trilogy” is that it over-promises and under-delivers.

Empathetic and yet ultimately too draggy to elicit much engagement with its paper-thin story, Elizabeth Blue proves at once well-intentioned and inert.

The Final Year clings to a precooked thesis about the Obama Doctrine that misses the behind-the-scenes drama and candor of superior political documentaries like “The War Room” or “Weiner.”

Hanover Street is reasonably effective as a war film with a love story background. Unfortunately it's meant to be a love story set against a war background.

More creepy than romantic, more chauvinist than empowered — and in all fairness, funnier and more entertaining than any comedy in months — Long Shot serves up the far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy of how, for one lucky underdog, pursuing your first love could wind up making you first man.

This new "Sabrina" is more fizzle than fizz. Although the revamping of one of Audrey Hepburn's most enchanting vehicles has its share of diverting scenes and dialogue, Sydney Pollack and his writers have uncomfortably tilted this Cinderella story to less than scintillating results.

Chris Farley's first star turn is loaded with fat jokes, excrement gags and other banality, but also offers more goofy charm than most of its recent brethren -- which is to say, not much.

As admirable as its aims may be, however, M.F.A.’s themes call for a careful, consistent tone that it is rarely able to maintain, and an increasingly ridiculous third act squanders much of the empathy and engagement that Leite works so hard to build in the early going.

A shoot-'em-up exploitationer with a few interesting ideas floating around in it, Guncrazy lacks the exhilaration of a first-class lovers-on-the-run crime drama. After a promising beginning, competently made indie effort settles into a surprisingly somber mood that suppresses the possibilities latent in the story and actors.

The artful cinematic strokes of director Robert Wise and staff are not quite enough to override the major shortcomings of Nelson Gidding’s screenplay from the Shirley Jackson novel (The Haunting of Hill House).

Acted and executed with brute conviction, if not much delicacy, by its writer-director-star, with an excellent foil in Jason Ritter’s boorish, baffled husband, the film feels overstretched in its latter half — with its central metaphor revealing only so many facets before the shock factor begins to pall.

A straight-faced updating of the 1950s space monster formula, film stars Charlie Sheen as the rogue scientist who battles E.T.s, uncovers government conspiracies and, most impressive of all, suppresses giggles when confronted with some of the silliest alien effects in memory. [03 June 1996, p.50]