It's interesting to see how a potent premise -- those among us who behave like aliens probably are -- can sustain, more or less, an erratic, disjointed sequel.

A tatty but good-natured time-passer.

The production certainly looks sumptuous, and certifies Mr. Hartnett as a mainstream movie star. But the script is frequently impenetrable, the pacing is ponderous, and the film noir style can't conceal a crucial piece of misconceived casting.

As a comedy “Killing” is simply dead.

The carnival is loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining.

To its perverse credit, “Venom 2,” as it’s being called, manipulates its audience with all the tentacles it can deploy, most of them cheerfully ridiculous, although a climactic battle between Venom and Carnage is the dreariest face-off since the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel duked it out in Zack Snyder’s 2016 “Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice.”

Ms. Stone. She alternates between two expressions here: sullen, and aghast. Then again, if you were listed on the credits as the co-producer of this violently dull piece of shlock, you'd look that way, too. [16 Feb 1995, p.A12]

If glum were good and bleak were best, Hart's War would be a standout.

When Kevin Spacey takes center stage, our planet really does seem bright.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.

Ever so slightly defective in the area of coherence; it plays as if it should have been written by a committee but they didn't bother to convene one.

Mr. Statham, the specialist in English tough guys who was so affecting in "The Bank Job," has more to offer than The Mechanic has the grace to receive.

Congrats to Mr. McConaughey, usually a beanpole, for making himself unfashionably fat. The movie, though, is thin, if semi-clever, the synthetically exuberant tale of a rogue’s journey from rags to riches and back again.

The film may be pretty to look at, but this passion project isn’t likely to generate much of it.

For all its sporadic philosophizing and belated stabs at romance, Live by Night is cold and inert at its core. That’s really the long and short of it.

Not since the thunderous digital onslaughts of "Jumanji" has the big screen seen such too-muchness.

At many points along the way I wanted to wash my hands of Scotland, PA., but then this sly, silly comedy got me smiling again.

Earnest but deeply flawed.

Mr. Liman handles each plot beat maladroitly, piling one utterly absurd contrivance or coincidence upon another.

Movies often turn on slender notions worked up to look like full-fledged ideas. Once in a while, though, a notion will be fertile to begin with, a self-renewing source of delight. That's the case with Luc Besson's Angel-A.

An odd but agreeable little comedy.

The movie is a relentlessly intense, grotesquely overblown and numbingly long account of extraordinary heroism on the part of six American security operators in the midst of horrific chaos.

Ms. Mirren and the film do us all a service in declining to paint Meir as a legendary figure but instead observing that although she was a strong leader who can rightly be credited with saving her country from annihilation, crisis forced her to make grueling decisions whose psychic burdens she bore heavily.

Terrific performers doing what they're often forced to do, overcoming sorely flawed material.

It's a movie devoted to showing it, shaking it and selling it with huge zest and self-delight, a movie that raises MTV-style dada to the status of superheated mama, even though, toward the end, it wears awfully thin rather than svelte.

Now the two men are back, along with Irene. But she vanishes all too soon in this overproduced, self-enchanted sequel, and so does the spirit of bright invention that made the previous film such a pleasant surprise.

There’s an old Broadway joke about a musical being so bad that you walk out humming the scenery. Six Minutes to Midnight is a spy thriller, not a musical, and it isn’t bad at all; the factual history it was based on is fascinating. Still, the scenery was what stayed with me most vividly.

The potential for an interesting sci-fi spectacle is there, at least at the start, but Tron: Ares does nothing with it.