It suffers from a major structural problem, which is that in its endlessly padded middle section it coyly refuses to get to the point until it exhausts the audience’s patience, then sprints through a late explanation that deserves more careful consideration.

The writers haven’t given her the nuance needed to differentiate confident from crazy, and the directors, who are two and the same, haven’t given the production as a whole consistent verve; the pace drags when it isn’t frenetic.

For all its noble intentions, its striving for authenticity, its unblinking look at the savagery of war, The Great Raid is far more dutiful than dramatic.

Why is she (Bullock) demeaning herself with such shoddy goods? She’s a talented woman with a faithful following. She has made formula films of varying quality before, and her fans may well swallow this one, but it’s a formula for disappointment laced with dismay.

To top it all off, no matter where you sit in the theater, no matter how far you arch back in your seat, there's no escaping the sensation that all the action on the screen is taking place about three feet from your face. I loved it.

This frenzied sequel has all of the clank but none of the swank of the previous version.

The story leaves you snoozing with the fishes.

The movie's real star is the cinematographer, Elliot Davis -- his images carry more emotional freight than all the performances put together.

To the Arctic 3-D is an impassioned plea for action on global warming, and the passion is intensified by the music.

A mixed bag of a thriller that exploits two primal fears—of artificial intelligence, and precocious children.

The best that can be said of it: inoffensive.

At its best it’s entertaining in a quaint, late-’60s way, which makes it a pleasant summer surprise.

Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.

Go right ahead and skip this one at the Cineplex. You've got my word: It won't be on the final.

A film that tries constantly to amuse, but succeeds only fitfully.

A remarkably dislikable film, long on atmosphere -- I admired Dion Beebe's brooding cinematography -- and desperately short on vitality.

Productions can go wrong. Certain elements can fail to ignite or cohere. Bad stuff happens all the time, especially in industrial enterprises of this magnitude, but usually there’s some good stuff to dilute the debacle. Not here, though.

There isn't a milliliter of honest feeling from start to finish, and precious little comedy or romance.

Any movie that gives Helen Mirren a chance to shoot really big guns, wear an ermine astrakhan and channel Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth can't be all bad, and Red 2 isn't, though it comes close.

Thanks largely to Ms. Parker and to the delectable Zooey Deschanel as her anhedonic house-mate, the filmmakers still manage to squeeze some juice out.

The movie has the cartoonish realism of a Muppet movie. However, Mr. Herman is no Kermit the Frog, although he made me feel like Oscar the Grouch. [13 Aug 1985, p.1]

The possibilities of the dating game are endless and the potential for pain is great, yet the permutations of the movie's plot are predictable and repetitive.

Smith is only a rogue computer program, but this morbidly dispiriting movie makes him sound like a prophet.

The script, by Charles Leavitt, is dead in the water, and the drama is too, despite billowing sails and pods of whales. Instead of “Jaws” it’s a turgid “Tails.”

How much do I loathe this film? A lottico is putting it mildico.

You could make a case for this as a feature-film version of the FCC's fairness doctrine, but it feels more like a blandness doctrine, a pulling and hauling of the tone-deaf script, which is credited to Matthew Michael Carnahan, to the point of perfect vacuousness.

There's nothing wrong with the structure of Heartbreakers, but David Mirkin's direction is woefully clumsy -- and the movie's tone is nasty.

One of the strongest arguments yet for making sequels illegal.

A little humanity can go a long way to make up for a movie's shortcomings, and there's more than a little in Ladder 49, a surprisingly stirring celebration of heroic firefighters.

Basically a theme-park version of a tawdry tradition.

A godawful gothic horror flick.

It shouldn’t seem shocking, but the most interesting thing about this second Cruise-fired action film based on author Lee Child’s nomadic, ex-military hero is its action.

As bright as Ms. Cody’s imagination is, she deserves a director who understands comic tempo. Instead, the third act, which should be frantic, seems ponderous, with a clunky ending. Lisa Frankenstein may celebrate the undead, but it’s not lively enough.

Being more ambitious than most films in the horror genre, Halloween Ends also perhaps falls on the wrong side of the divide between being scary in a fun way and being distressingly plausible.

This movie seems proud, even smug, about recycling scraps from other fairy tales.

Mr. Dauberman, abetted by cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”), finds ways to make the Lot both anxious and dour, though the moods don’t always match up with the wobbly storytelling, or help set it on a purposeful path.

Malevolence is in generous supply throughout the film. Easy enjoyment is not.

Kevin Spacey's pinched portrayal of Quoyle as a scared palooka rarely transcends its own artifice.

A remarkably ill-advised remake.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard would have been much funnier because, on paper, Tom O’Connor’s script was probably a scream. What adds to the unevenness of the whole affair is a propensity for extreme violence that just seems incompatible with what is ostensibly a comedy.

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

Spasms of kung fu wire fighting, Spider-Man acrobatics, huge explosions and a lethal polo game can't replace the first film's beating heart and witty soul.

This fine and welcome piece of family entertainment, directed by Boaz Yakin from a script he wrote with Sheldon Lettich, gets to a sweet spot by way of a smart premise, patriotic undertones and a coming-of-age story that’s downright stirring.

The film, streaming on demand, brings old news that can’t hold a flickering candle to the events of our flabbergasting moment, and a clever twist doesn’t redeem long passages of gratingly broad and awkward humor.

Katherine Heigl carries 27 Dresses when all else fails, which it does with great regularity.

Boy Kills World should have stuck to gonzo comedy and been 15 minutes shorter. But Mr. Mohr exhibits the kind of flair for comic action that makes him an obvious choice to direct a big-budget Hollywood superhero epic.

The movie moves at such an agonizingly stately pace that by the end, side effects be damned, Henry's time-traveling gene starts to look mighty appealing.

The movie's leisurely, elegant setup makes its action payoff seem, by contrast, particularly mechanical, cynical and grotesque.

Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.

Spectacular? I guess, if you’re wowed by soulless CGI chaos. Thrilling? Not really. At the end, I was left feeling the way Kong does at the beginning: tired and bored.

What's so unfunny about peace, love and understanding? Plenty, it turns out. But for much of the movie, viewers will be asking themselves where the conflict is. And, by extension, the drama.

Unfortunately, the movie could use a bit of pachyderm memory, given its habit of flashing back to Tien's childhood with exactly the same footage used in previous flashbacks. Instead of the narrative being deepened, it keeps getting shallowed.

These are very small pleasures, indeed, that can be taken as gasps of air in a movie that unwinds for what seems like forever in a complete vacuum. [23 Jun 1994, p.A12]

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.

A very goofy movie that makes sense only to the screenwriter and his next of kin.

What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.

The film is much too long—the first couple of acts feel like an overture to the reunion of Sam, Scarlet and the lethal librarians. It is also, occasionally, hilarious.

This Flubbery fantasy won't win any prizes for elegant craftsmanship or originality, but it's entertaining, good-natured and a slam dunk to be a hit with young kids.

With all its misfires, though, and with a Strangelovian twist that's a dud, Big Trouble remains a reasonably pleasant way to spend an hour and a half and still get change.

Combines silly stuff about life in Los Angeles with buoyant energy, a couple of chases worthy of the Keystone Kops and quick-witted actors playing droll characters with obvious affection.

Grindingly tedious.

A misshapen semi-spectacle that seems to be simulating an epic, and getting away with it only occasionally.

What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.

Joyless and airless suspense thriller.

Directed by David F. Sandberg from a script by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan, “Fury of the Gods” makes no pretense of being anything but a comic free-for-all.

If you're looking for logic or finesse, The A-Team can be numbing. If you're looking for good cheer, hold out for egg nog at Christmas. But if you're a fan of causeless effects, consequence-free causes and digital Dada, let the silly times roll.

What I do know is that I was gripped for a while by the strength of Mr. Gibson's filmmaking, only to be repelled and eventually excluded by his literalist insistence on excruciation. There is watching in horror, and there is watching in horror.

Whatever possessed the people who made this film to believe its ponderous style would appeal to contemporary audiences? One answer may lie in a variant of the mostly true proposition that no one sets out to make a bad film. No one chooses ponderousness as a goal; it comes unbidden, with deadly earnestness.

Mr. Walken performs with a marvelously minimalist precision.

There weren't any surprises and that's what made it all so comforting. The bad guys got blown away, no questions asked, the snoopy journalists got their comeuppance. When Clint spends the night with his latest girl, you know it only because he wears the same suit the next morning. [21 Jul 1988, p.1]

One could argue that the target audience - black teenagers, Mr. Lucas has said - might be most receptive to a film that conveys history through contemporary entertainment. But this isn't contemporary entertainment, it's antiquated kitsch reprocessed by the producer's nostalgia for the movies of his boyhood. The story has been stripped of historical context - don't black teenagers and everyone else deserve hard facts? - and internal logic.

So tightly constructed of clichés, stereotypes and chick-lit tropes that it's inert; no fresh air can blow in.

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

The production's penchant for contrivance is insufferable - not a single spontaneous moment from start to finish - and the boy is so precocious you want to strangle him. It's surely not the fault of Thomas Horn, the remarkable young man who plays him.

Can't hold a candle to Robert Altman's 1992 comedy "The Player." Both films present themselves as knowing views of the movie business, but Mr. Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, really knew.

Little more than a showcase for Owen Wilson's amiable shtick, and a showcase in the merchandising sense of the term.

Instead of growing from a sweet young thing into a strong woman who is Maxim’s equal, this bride stays scared and vulnerable until close to the end, when the script turns her implausibly into a sort of Nancy Drew doing detective work for the husband she adores. Who could have guessed that the film with a modern perspective on gender politics was the one made 80 years ago?

Hate is too strong an emotion to spend on such a clumsy, bloodless broadside against human foibles in general and American follies in particular.

Mr. Coen and Ms. Cooke’s plot is such a muddle that they more or less expect us to dismiss it. The interstitial moments and incidental comedy are meant to be the chief attraction here. Minus Joel Coen, however, the jokes are thin and tired.

What was once thrilling, inventive and funny is now desiccated and limp. The pertinent question, it turns out, is not “Who you gonna call?” but “Why did they bother?”

Almost every sequence contains references to other films. Spotting them is a pleasant distraction from figuring out the plot, an absurdly rococo structure that rivals the most flagrant befuddlements of “Inception” or, for that matter, the latter stretches of “Westworld.”

No need to belabor the awfulness of this film, a romantic comedy devoid of romance - instead of chemistry there's the flow of reverse magnetism - and lacking in comic timing, let alone comic content.

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

Parts of the film (which can be seen in select theaters and via video on demand) are so good that it’s a shame it strikes so many false notes.

The production as a whole is awfully clumsy, and Ms. Moretz, who is only 17, needs more help than she gets from the first-time feature director, R.J. Cutler.

I took it as a pretty piece of ephemera, and I must confess that I laughed a lot.

Secret Window has an ending that lets one of our most reliably interesting actors pull out all the stops. But getting there from a good beginning followed by a slow, repetitive middle is a test of resourcefulness for him and a test of patience for us.

Ms. Brown, who first came to our attention in “Stranger Things,” and for good reason, is surrounded by a cast that may have lost a bet.

It’s billionaire-glossy, as much an ode to consumerism as a study in sadomasochism; intermittingly titillating, with fugitive flashes of droll; and, bondage apart, a dutifully romantic tale of an old-fashioned girl who takes a particularly roundabout route to true love.

Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.

Even as a visual aid, though, The Da Vinci Code is a deep-dyed disappointment. Paris by night never looked murkier.

Mr. Urban has natural swagger and he’s the best aspect here, although that’s like singling out the most fragrant part of a swamp.

As long as this deity remains childish, materialistic and narcissistic, Jim's in his heaven and all's right with the world. It's when the story reaches for maturity, spirituality and altruism that the divine spark of comedy sputters and nearly goes out.

It's thanks to her (Leoni) that we stay tuned to Mr. Allen's comic premise long after it has gone from delightfully outrageous to off-puttingly preposterous.

Horns is uncertain in tone — most of its attempts at humor fall flat — and amateurish at best.

If the principal actors weren’t so watchable, the movie would be an outright bore.

Ok, so maybe you don't absolutely have to have a Y chromosome and be 14 years old (or have the mind of a 14-year-old) to appreciate the freshmanic humor that is Beerfest. But, oh, does it help.

It's not a good sign when a movie is called The Break-Up and you can't wait for the couple to split so they'll get some relief from one another, and give the audience some relief from them.