It neglects, for one thing, to make any sense.

What passes for the movie's reality is interlocking episodes of ersatz ecstasy and angst -- a Cupid-governed "Crash" -- plus snippets of wisdom dispensed by Mr. Freeman's character.

The filmmakers can't keep the strands of their clumsy plot straight, but they create brilliant images and manipulate them with blithe abandon.

The movie is stifling, all right, and depressing in the bargain.

How you feel about Paul Haggis's new film may depend on your contrivance threshold.

A provocative but eventually dislikable two-part film that dares us to dislike it.

Mr. Murray and his co-director, Howard Franklin, who adapted Jay Cronley's novel for the screen, succeed mainly in illuminating what made them want to direct the material. At least this picture struggles to emit a few gasps of fresh air as it goes down. [19 Jul 1990, p.A8]

I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

Sometimes comes on like a NASA commercial; those logos loom gigantic on the IMAX screen. More troublingly, the film fails to explain how computer animations were combined with actual imagery from the missions.

This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.

Mr. Scott seems content to restage story beats and action scenes from the first film. Most cold-case sequels aren’t very good, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

A heavier-than-air adventure, set in Victorian England, that seldom rises above the level of elegant hokum.

The director Don Hall and his co-director and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (who last year collaborated on a slightly less mediocre Disney picture, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) seem to have put all of their effort into gaudy backgrounds, wacky gadgets and strange ancillary monsters instead of into dramatic urgency or conflict.

In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style.

An overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem’s life.

Tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.

Hoffman and Beatty are so tone-deaf they don't even know how to play the songs for deadpan humor. They seem old, white, and without shtick. [14 May 1987, p.26(E)]

Emancipation is tonally discordant, attempting to merge serious historical drama with the silly dynamics of an action thriller.

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.

Ghostface tends to veer from fiendishly brilliant to unbelievably thick depending on the writers’ limitations.

A general sense that things aren’t heading anywhere too exciting pervades this cinematic chunk of corporate synergy.

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.

The film should have been played for pure farce and is not, hence the head-scratching in which a viewer will engage before very few bodies are cold.

The sensibility of the earlier production has been transformed, despite Ms. Gadot’s continuing authority. Wit has been replaced by feverish caricature, feeling by sentimentality, and Wonder Woman is left with almost nothing to do for long stretches of a very long and disjointed story.

The star shouldn’t be blamed, though, for the failings of the direction and script. Here’s a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero’s default expression, which is painfully pained.

Written by Tim Smith, Keith Thomas and Arkasha Stevenson, and directed by Ms. Stevenson, The First Omen relies heavily on gory imagery, jump scares and shocking dream sequences to cover for its weak plotting.

None of the film's tropes — fancy camera angles, dark streets, persistent rain, psycho killers in doomy settings, Scudder trudging around the city on their trail — can hide the essential hollowness of a not-very-interesting revenge tale that takes a not-at-all-welcome turn into grisly, ugly horror.

A mawkish core remains, though, and the resulting disjuncture—between the film’s indie style and its sludgy sentimentality—makes the whole effort feel phony.