Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

Given these flaws, If Lucy Fell should be a chore, and yet I kept catching myself having a good time.

Well, it could have been good. But this goofy homage to Kiss fans gets dry mouth pretty fast.

Best of all is Keri Russell, who plays Adam Sandler's love interest and who brightens the tart rhubarb pie of her performance in "Waitress" with just a pinch of Disney sweetness.

A little more literary than lifelike, House of D is a story that feels too pat, and too perfect, for its own good.

A movie marred by a flaccid script, listless pacing, a plethora of cutesy-poo gags and Ray Romano.

My Favorite Martian never achieves anything that resembles farcical consistency, let alone farcical bliss, but it has enough playful nonsense scattered around a hit-and-miss scenario to rationalize a kiddie matinee excursion. [12 Feb 1999, p.C16]

Instead of prioritizing jump scares and game lore, as you might hope, the film leans into its gooey Hallmark center, focusing on underdeveloped relationships and predictable plot twists.

Class, a sexual disillusion acted out at the prep school level, would be represented far more accurately by the one-word title "Crass." [22 July 1983, p.C4]

Roger Spottiswoode's Air America is partly glorious, partly junk, but unfortunately not in equal parts.

The heart of the movie is in the right place. And although some of the acting from the younger stars comes across as amateurish, a few performances truly shine.

The one thing Edwards did right this time was to cast comic actor Roberto Benigni -- a big star in Italy -- as the illegitimate son of Jacques Clouseau, the accident-prone French detective who first appeared on the screen in The Pink Panther nearly 30 years ago. Benigni is enormously charming, a slight little fellow with a homely face that seems almost puppetlike and a flair for broad physical comedy.

An irredeemably transparent... DIRECT RIPPING OFF OF "SPEED."

Unnecessary and unfunny re-imagining of the classic satire by Jonathan Swift.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

Martial arts maven Seagal has long been on deadly ground with critics, and this, his directorial debut, is likely to keep him there.

An extremely boyish ode to girl power.

There Be Dragons is like fine wine, served in a Big Gulp cup. A little is very nice. A lot is way too much.

More thoughtful than its cookie-cutter marketing campaign implies, and better than its awful title promises, "Love Happens" is the rare Hollywood romance concerned with emotions other than love at first sight.

Although genuinely gripping — at times, uncomfortably so — the tale of Lena and Daniel’s efforts to escape from Colonia and expose its abuses suffers from a heavy-handed telling.

The movie isn't only boring; it's troubling:

Pytka's marginally successful at setting this gambler's fantasy against the Damon Runyonesque aspects of the horsy life.

North, which co-producer Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman adapted from Zweibel's slight novel, is awkwardly structured -- it's still in chapters -- not to mention mean-spirited and incredibly stupid.

Why did director Barry Sonnenfeld take on this project? Just to sully a fine comedic resume that includes "The Addams Family" and "Get Shorty"? And one last one: Which one of these levers do you push to send the RV careering off the mountain for good?

Hews closely enough to the Sparks pattern of romance and bathos that tears will flow as copiously in the audience as they do on screen.

There are some very funny moments in the movie, even for grown-ups, including a video of Will that goes viral. The absurd machinations of Will’s smarmy political adviser are also good for a laugh. But ultimately, Annie is so fixated on being current that it will never be more than a passing fancy.

I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.

About half a notch above disaster.

It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.

An insufferable piffle.

Isn't really a movie, it's only impersonating one.

What it possesses in heart and goodwill, it sorely lacks in narrative skill and artistic depth.

So stupid it makes "xXx: State of the Union" look like it was written by Nietzsche.

It's all good, stupid fun.

While Zhang is one of China’s greatest international stars, My Lucky Star is utterly provincial. It’s for Chinese viewers, plus those few westerners who revel in Asian hyper-cuteness.

An egregiously unfunny enterprise.

Essentially an extended cutesy session.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

It's a diatribe from beginning to end.

You can’t blame Will Smith for wanting to give his son a leg up in the business. Maybe one day Jaden will have his father’s career — and his ability to carry a movie. For now, it’s a little premature to ask him to bear the weight of this soggy, waterlogged “Earth” on his skinny shoulders.

If you're not rolling in the aisles, you're definitely in the wrong theater.

I suggest you RSVP in the negative to this "Wedding" invitation, unless you consider yourself a friend of the obvious bride to be, Ms. Lopez. But even then, you'll have to focus on her presence, rather than the silly ceremony around her.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

Class of 1999 gets a D for dumb, dull and derivative, and so what if director Mark Lester, who made "Class of 1984" eight years ago, is borrowing from himself? The latter was just a punked-up version of the original rock-and-roll high school film, "Blackboard Jungle." For this new venture, Lester has simply tacked on elements of "Westworld," "RoboCop" and "Terminator" in a blatant attempt to enroll the action faction.

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

There are elements worth celebrating. The movie is thankfully less self-serious than the mopey “Twilight” films. The Mortal Instruments revels in its own camp. But there is plenty of room for improvement. The action flick is overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.

Unfortunately, The Man makes the mistake of assuming casting is all it takes to make a good comedy.

So loud, so long, so dumb.

A flagrantly vicious and broken-down murder melodrama that leaves recognizable fingerprints all over the place while making a chump of director William Friedkin. [13 Oct 1995, p.C16]

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

The story the film tells ruins the movie.

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

An hour and a half of real airplane turbulence is better than sitting through the bad, offensive material that makes up Soul Plane.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

Forsyth's script feels uncomfortably improvised, so almost all of the performances are hesitant and unconvincing. [06 May 1994]

People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.

Like a Boss is the perfect airplane movie: something that won’t distract you terribly much while you work the New York Times crossword puzzle during a long flight, periodically looking up at the screen when the 2-year-old in the seat behind you kicks the back of your chair. Oh well. At least that way you won’t fall asleep.

A retread of just about every rom-com cliche ever turned.

Lacking in both inspiration and ingenuity, it doesn't so much spoof the conventions of the genre as dumb down famous -- and in some cases, forgotten -- scenes from a slew of other movies.

Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.

Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and Irish director Pat O'Connor are absolutely out of their league, a couple of artists slumming, hoping to bring sensitivity to a genre that could well use it. But all they've done is make you appreciate the true value of the car chase.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Amusing premise, not-so-amusing execution.

A stunningly insipid romance, marks an all-time low for actor Zach Braff -- his "Gigli," if you will.

Extended scenes are dominated by heavy dialogue, while the lighter moments are relegated to montages of prancing across a beach, for example, which simply aren't that effective at buoying the drama.

If there is a Hell, Not Another Teen Movie will be playing for all eternity on every screen there.

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

The problem is quantity. There are so many action sequences related to so many story lines that midway through an epic fight, you might find yourself wondering what exactly started this particular battle and what the objective is other than destruction for the sake of it.

The plot is paint by numbers, which puts pressure on the comedy to deliver. But it doesn’t.

Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.

As dull as the decor in a Motel 6.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about I Love You, Beth Cooper is that the title is correctly punctuated. Beyond that, the movie is a disappointingly flabby teen flick.

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street.

There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.

The loudest, flashiest, silliest and longest blockbuster in a summer full of long, silly, flashy, loud blockbusters (long and silly "Transformers," flashy and loud "Wolverine").

Both a snore and utter tripe.

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

None of this is by way of saying that Cats is bad, per se. In fact, some of the songs are pretty toe-tapping at times.

Kids should be reasonably diverted for a couple of hours, but odds are they'll have forgotten the whole thing by the next morning.

The premise of the movie deserves better.

It's cheap-looking (dinosaurs and other beasts here look like CGI loaners from Spielberg), deeply mediocre and predictable.

Filmmaker Paul Flaherty apparently has never so much as given a friend directions to his home.

Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

Size vanquishes both substance and subtlety in the overhyped, half-cocked and humorless resurrection of dear old "Godzilla."

For all the nice turns, this movie can't decide whether to focus on undergraduate fun and fantasy or the tensions of the workaday world. As a result, the film fails to deliver its promised exploration of the last week of summer, when some people find themselves with no way to turn back, and no place to look forward to. [01 Oct 1984, p.B3]

Despite the plentiful blood-letting, it's all staggeringly inconsequential. The Evil That Men Do trivializes a timely theme -- human rights abuses. [25 Sep 1984, p.C1]

A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.