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.