Thanks to a few sweet father-daughter moments and a relatively direct plot, this entry is a notch better than some even-more-febrile recent efforts such as “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” But overall it’s another lackluster blockbuster.

Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.

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.