If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

Lacks a crucial element of the heist subgenre: ingenuity.

To enjoy what's enjoyable in The Fighting Temptations, you've got to take in the music and shut out the words -- not the lyrics of the wonderful songs, but the dialogue stuffed into actors' mouths.

Movies like this have been around forever too. They're a normal condition of winter's doldrums, which, in the fullness of time, will pass.

Babes is the kind of comedy that makes you wonder what jokes are, exactly, and if what you just saw contained any.

What's remarkable here is the consistency of the mediocrity.

A great premise for a movie. Unfortunately, The War of the Roses is not clever, at least not very often. [14 Dec 1989, p.A20(E)]

Beneath the glitzy surface of Vox Lux — the title of one of Celeste’s studio recordings — lie deeper superficialities, so many that I found myself admiring the movie’s wild ambition while grinding my teeth at its pretentiousness.

I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.

Bourne used to be an anguished amnesiac. Now he remembers who he is, but this fourth episode of the franchise forgot to make him human.

For an animated feature, Scarlet is unusually ambitious: It’s a “Hamlet”-adjacent existential pacifist revenge parable. It contains lots of instances of its heroine stopping to wonder what everything means, which is another way of saying it’s ponderous and pretentious.

Even the Bollywood ending, a pleasant echo of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is intercut with darker reminders of dwindling days. Much of this sequel is clumsy, and awfully silly, but consistently shallow it is not.

Born on the Fourth of July would be merely a hilariously inept gathering of Vietnam War movie cliches. Instead it is an unrelenting series of dramatic blows; almost every scene packs violence, sleaze, screamed rage and an ear-splitting music with headbutt force. For someone who despises the military, Mr. Stone is quite bellicose. [21 Dec 1989, p.1]

How bad must a movie be to be good fun? How dumb to be smart? (Or, in the case of "Dumb and Dumber," how pretend-dumb to be surpassingly smart?) Whatever the case, Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't make the cut.

The film, which was written and directed by Todd Robinson, begins with those dreaded words “Based on a True Story,” meaning in this instance concocted from certain established facts, lots of unconvincing fiction and large dollops of sentiment into a disjointed tale that means to inspire us, yet manages against steep odds to be dull and emotionally remote.

Cuckoo brings up a lot of ideas but doesn’t organize them into anything like a satisfying resolution. As frenzy follows frenzy, it aspires merely to create a feeling of senseless chaos.

Angels & Demons is a serious slog. Still, it's an odd kind of a slog that manages to keep you partially engaged, even at its most esoteric or absurd.

A not-bad idea lurks inside this insipid story.

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

The movie . . . doesn’t have the smarts to embrace its own stupidity.

Comes to the screen missing subtle cues and crucial connections.

This movie needs a star performance at its center, and the director, Joe Johnston, doesn't seem to know it. His closeups dote on Mr. Mortensen's striking face, and on the actor's interesting inwardness, but he doesn't ask for, or find, the sort of zest that could turn laconic into romantic.

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

At its best, Ava DuVernay’s biographical film honors Dr. King’s legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him and his colleagues to action. The director and her screenwriter, Paul Webb, are less successful — sometimes much less so — at breathing life into the private moments that define King as an inspirational figure with human flaws, and a political as well as spiritual force.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.

Can't lift the double curse of too little genuine action, as opposed to quixotic events, and too many fancy words.

The shallow-seated problem with Murder by Numbers is that it's serious and doggedly intricate but not much fun.

It’s easy to see why Mr. Burton, an influential imagist in his own right and a collector of Keane paintings, was attracted to this saga of contending Keanes, and the result, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, is a study in yummy colors and period design. But I watched wide-eyed with dismay while the film turned as lifeless as the paintings.