Short on dramatic energy, Must Love Dogs settles for a cheerful drone.

Swamping the audience with Michael Giacchino’s oceans-of-syrup score, IF expects viewers to cry at the end, but if so it’ll be due to regret at wasted time, or possibly from hyperglycemia.

All that's missing is wit and humanity.

Here she accomplishes something her father has done many times: making two-thirds of a reasonably compelling supernatural thriller. But that’s like saying the “Agony of Defeat” guy had two-thirds of an excellent ski run before things went amiss.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

When director Richard Attenborough isn't mangling dance numbers, he's focusing on a love story expressed almost entirely by means of close-ups of moony faces and teary eyes. [12 Dec 1985]

It should be said right off that this provocative off-black comedy, starring the Gen-Xer’s dream cast of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, is not for everyone. And the people it is for will have to be in the mood.

Something of a shambles -- a shambles about a shambles -- but bound for big success and deservedly so.

A not-bad idea lurks inside this insipid story.

They can give the film’s characters physics-defying acrobatic skills. But they can’t provide anyone much motivation.

I can't say anything nice about Flipped, a painfully clumsy adaptation of a tween novel by Wendelin Van Draanen.

Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.

Talk about tin ears. Black or White comes off as the product of clouded eyes, sour stomachs and addled brains.

Downey is undone by a woefully amateurish production that, sadly and ironically, looks like a cheap TV show.

My problem is that the lack of narrative structure deprives the film of any suspense, and without suspense the film eventually collapses from its own heat like a soufflé that has been in the oven just a few minutes too long.

The performances, under Mike Newell's direction, range from conventional (Ms. Roberts) to dreadful, and the script is as shallow as an old Cosmo cover story.

Ms. Wood, who made a potent impression two years ago as a naïve adolescent led astray by a sophisticated and psychotic classmate in "Thirteen," has the whip hand this time around -- and she's wonderfully persuasive. She needs a movie to match.

The movie on the whole is joyless. Whatever Works doesn’t.

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness.

If less is more, Uncharted must be a masterpiece. It’s bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless. The exception is Tom Holland, but what’s he doing in a slapdash action adventure adapted from a videogame? Making money, of course—gamers will flock.

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.

Except for one terrifically adroit sequence in a subway, there is nothing understated about The Invasion. With all the shoot-outs, the screaming, the chases, collisions and fireballs, there isn't much time for storytelling.

The only rewards, and they are real albeit insufficient, involve watching Jane Fonda in full cry and Catherine Keener in a quieter fullness of feeling.

Good fun -- more fun than in the original -- punctuated by some lines of admirable awfulness.

The battles to save the world are generic/titanic; the villain is a bloodless bore with a boom-box roar; and the screen, like the ragged story, is chockablock with such underdeveloped overachievers as Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash.

Before Firewall crumbles into foolishness, Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany make an oft-recycled plot look like a stylish model that just rolled out of a showroom.

Mr. Brooks manages to be deeply loathsome -- no small feat for a film that's shallowly amateurish.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

Mark Andrus's script is built on soggy sandstone, and Irwin Winkler's bulldozer direction keeps unearthing toxic epiphanies. That's not to say the movie isn't occasionally moving, as well as exasperating.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

The movie stands as a genuine offense against the venerable and indispensable institution of satire.

The IMAX print I saw was so murky as to make you give thanks for the few scenes shot in simple sunlight, the 3-D wasn't worth the bother, and never before have I wanted to chloroform an entire orchestra.

The psychodynamics may well be sound, but the problem is that Léa and François, whether in or out of bed, are much more appealing than Roland and Vanessa. The camera is in the wrong room.

An abomination.

Ms. Blanchett can do no wrong, and does none here, though the movie around her, a popcorn-worthy sequel to the 1998 "Elizabeth," often lapses into opacity or grandiosity.

The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy.

It's beautiful to watch, but it doesn't cover very much ground. Sumptuously appointed, meticulously detailed, the film sallies forth - and sags. [06 Apr 1995]

At a time when so many movies look alike, and studio productions sometimes look aggressively ugly, here's a quirky vision at the intersection of sci-fi and romance. Upside Down can be beguiling if you're willing to invert disbelief.

Less magical is the blind adherence to formula evident in most of Taken 2. As they might say in the advertising department, it's an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. But it could have been much more.

With a refreshing absence of earnestness, the movie mainly spins out many variations on a theme: Easy Street begins and ends on Capitol Hill. [03 Dec 1992]

By all that's unholy, this third edition of the high-emission franchise should have been at least as awful as the second one was. (The first one was good fun.) Yet it's surprisingly entertaining in its deafening fashion, despite the absence of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, the co-stars of parts one and two.

Its tone is unquenchably pretentious, and its scale is overblown.

A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.

The situation in The Situation is grimly photogenic, yet persistently opaque.

Still, human doesn’t leap to mind, even though Ms. Lively works hard to inject blood in the veins of her feminist avenger. The Rhythm Section isn’t a human movie. It’s as cold as the waters of that loch, and nowhere near as lucid.

The medium really is the message here, and it steals what there is of the show.

Starts out stylishly, and promisingly, but then coarsens into a silly parody of film noir.

It is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.

This is little more than a big-budget sitcom, with a guest appearance by Mike Ditka, who plays an unfunny version of himself as Phil's assistant coach.

Rather than a character rooted in some sort of reality-social, satirical, psychological, take your pick-Hesher is an abstract notion animated by false energy.

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

Against heavy odds, Mean Machine adds darker flavors to the plot without curdling it. Beneath the comic craziness is real craziness, and desperation. These goal-kicking, bone-crunching cons are both actors in and prisoners of their own horror show.

It’s a deranged story, one that offers all kinds of opportunities for examining changes in the state of artificial insemination, medical ethics, the ways in which the human body has been opened up like an evidence locker, and the catchup that legislation has to play with technology.

Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

The movie isn't all bad, and it's sure to succeed with its target audience.

Dud notions abound. So do belabored situations, misguided performances and ritual salutes to other films. Even the cinematography is ill-advised, since it’s literally off-color; warm tones meant to evoke romantic feelings come off as a jaundiced homage to Woody Allen, from whom many of this film’s tropes have been not-so-piquantly purloined.

For all its seriousness, though, Levity struck me as pretentious and intractably lifeless.

Predictably dumber than its predecessors, though that shouldn't get in the way of its profitability.

The real-life Arizona case was likely a lot less funny than Queenpins, which was adapted by the film’s directors and uses the comedic gifts of its lead actresses (reunited from both “Veronica Mars” and “The Good Place”) to remain both outrageous and entertaining without ever abandoning an undercurrent of sadness.

Nobody fares well in this movie about sibling rivalry, doomed love and fringed suede. [05 Jan 1995]

Alan Arkin does the best trick, bringing a dollop of humanity to the role of Rance Holloway, the magician who was young Burt's inspiration. Apart from Rance, the whole production is slovenly nonsense, photographed on the cheap with blaring ghastliness. Yet it poses an intriguing mystery. Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?

Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.

Reasonably entertaining time-travel romance.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Oz the Great and Powerful, like so many products of movie studios that have lost their way, is a Tin Man of epic proportions — bright and shiny, with no heart.

Todd Graff's would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief).

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker have been through a lot together. To be exact, "Rush Hour" "Rush Hour 2" and now Rush Hour 3. Are they tired? Perhaps not, but their antics and action sequences certainly are.

Some of it sputters, settling for smiles instead of laughs, and much of it flounders while the slapdash script searches, at exhausting length, for ever more common denominators in toilet humor.

Littered with low points -- lame comedy, dubious history, fumbling drama and a love story so inept as to make a pacifist long for war.

Choose to pass this one up.

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

It's a bad idea done disastrously.

The Legend of Tarzan, for all its anticolonialist posturing and eminently attractive co-stars, has a dead soul.

Stepping is everything in Stomp the Yard, and, dare I say it, a stepping stone to DJ's redemption. The movie itself is redeemed -- slightly -- by its almost touching devotion to the hoary Hollywood traditions of college movies with battling frats, as well as its earnest endorsement of education.

Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

Audacity can’t carry a drama that’s unequal to its subject in almost every respect. ( Brian Cox does what he can, sometimes admirably, to breathe life into the title role.)

The movie as a whole is nonsensical. And long. And slow. And head-poundingly loud as it culminates in slavering horror.

The movie itself is neither a catastrophe nor major.

The director Penny Marshall has a gently persuasive touch that keeps the movie's most brazen manipulations from being too offensive. [02 Jun 1994]

Ricky Stanicky is, per the Farrelly aesthetic, eager to offend, gleefully vulgar and takes every joke too far.

Every scene in this oppressive film has a theme or didactic purpose, but little life.

The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.

Lush romanticism, bloody action and a certain winking distance from the material keep Mr. Besson’s picture vivid if not quite compelling.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

To give the film its full due, the people who made it — the writer, John Swetnam, and the director, Steven Quale — got wind of a genuine trend and ran with it. Everyone on screen is busy filming everyone else. It's a shakier-camera version of "The Blair Witch Project" in the era of YouTube.

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

What was fresh and surprising in Las Vegas turns rancid and predictable in Bangkok.

In the not-so-grand scheme of such things, Along Came Polly is certainly harmless, and occasionally very funny. It's just not clever enough to keep you engaged.

Since Mary rarely gets to see any of the good stuff, neither do we; Dr. Jekyll hides most of his switcheroos behind closed doors. [23 Feb 1996]

Somewhat sluggish but reasonably scary.

Spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made.

This is one of those overworked and generally airless comedies with a sitcom premise that can't sustain life.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

In case you were holding your breath, Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones is still sweetly earnest, chronically overweight and swinging once again from lovestruck to lovelorn.

Fitfully amusing.