Despite this sporadic funny stuff and the enthusiastic cast members, "Zorro" degenerates into a ponderous trifle. By turns, Peter Medak's direction seems stuffy and scattered and Hamilton's Spanish and English accents keep getting lost on the soundtrack. [25 July 1981, p.C9]

It's a shame that the plot proves to be such a head-scratcher when so many elements of the film seem promising.

Horovitz may have made a questionable decision in adapting this particular play for the screen, but his casting was flawless.

The Devil's Own, which stars Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, is so epically awful, it's practically homeric.

This latest project, a murder mystery scripted by Aaron (A Few Good Men) Sorkin and Scott (Dead Again) Frank, is bilge water.

Anyone who's ever sat through a Neil LaBute film knows you can make a movie in which all the characters are unsympathetic, but this trio is uninteresting, to boot.

Despite the unforced humor and honesty in the performances of its young and talented cast, The Wood spends too much time wallowing in arrested adolescence to make you feel you've traveled anywhere.

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

The charismatic comedienne pulls the slipshod spy adventure Jumpin' Jack Flash out of the fire. [10 Oct 1986, p.N29]

This overproduced romantic comedy doesn't even qualify as fluff; it's flat, featureless plastic.

Rather than aim for the flagstick, “Happy Gilmore 2” seems all too content to lay up in search of one gimme putt after another.

What sets Four Good Days apart from the many other films of its ilk are Close and Kunis, who sharpen and elevate its well-worn contours with vivid performances that are honest and grounded. These are characters you can connect to, on both sides of the equation.

Agnes of God offers little besides its jury-rigged suspense. Oh, there are oodles of cigarette jokes -- Livingston is a chain smoker, Mother Miriam a reformed one -- till you wonder why the acknowledgment to Benson & Hedges in the closing credits didn't come above the title.

If “Parthenope” is a love letter to his hometown and its subject an embodiment of the city’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions — beauty and decay, religion and hypocrisy — the whole thing comes across like a deranged mash note, more off-putting than seductive.

Parading through most of the movie in a cutoff T-shirt and bikini briefs, Ricci takes the stereotype of the oversexed farmer's daughter to gothic extremes; Jackson's character, named Lazarus, is similarly drawn with oversize strokes.

Zem and Bourgoin are great, but the movie is too frivolous to win anything but a dismissal in the court of moviegoer opinion.

Elsa & Fred feels not substantial enough to bear the weight of its themes. It dissolves like cotton candy, making proper digestion impossible. The life it shows us is too sweet.

The movie Vulgaria is not one for the kiddies. Then again, the description "for mature audiences" doesn't seem right either. The Hong Kong comedy, a broad, cartoonish -- and decidedly filthy -- satire of moviemaking is as sophomoric as they come. It's also pretty funny, in an unapologetically over-the-top way.

The film’s likeable leads almost carry off a dark premise: that the love that strengthens this couple also makes them dangerous.

Blackhat is also one of the most visually unattractive movies I’ve ever seen.

It’s all kiss-kiss, bang-bang and backstabbing, with a twist that, while effective, leads to a denouement of questionable — and not entirely satisfying — moral reckoning. In some ways, Yardie plays out like a film noir, but with a strangely sweet ending, and without that genre’s deliciously bitter aftertaste.

It doesn't open up much new territory, except to eschew much of the dark, frank sexuality that has characterized such recent sexual coming-of-age movies as "Mysterious Skin." Instead, Bardwell offers a cheerful, if sometimes strenuously earnest, take on a subject that seems overdue for a lighthearted touch.

This isn’t a paint-by-numbers revenge plot. When the payoff finally comes, it’s as satisfying as it is perplexing.

The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.

One truly, madly, deeply satisfying creep-out.

A dramatization of the life of Christ that takes as its script a word-for-word translation of the Gospel according to John, the adaptation is not so much tedious as pointless.

To watch Greendale is to understand everything about Neil Young. Like him, it's grungy, honest, disarming and unapologetically original.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

Being oneself is (or, again, seems to be) the theme of Wolf, which at times plays like a clumsy allegory about, say, the challenges faced by trans youth — there’s a poster on the wall of the clinic about “species dysphoria” — yet most of the time is simply a more generalized fable about finding your groove, your bliss, your true, inner self — and running with it (naked, if need be, and on all fours). If it’s an allegory, it trivializes whatever it’s allegorizing.

Thanks to the heavy synthetic hand of director George Roy Hill, the potentially charming aspects of the kids' infatuation curdle into syrupy gruel.

It’s not great cinema. It’s good at what it sets out to do. Which makes it great fun.

The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.

The Switch, to its credit, really is about a boy, who with the help of a sensitive, sad-eyed kid, stands a chance of becoming a man.

If you have a shred of idealism left, it’s hard to watch Citizen Koch without a mounting sense of despair and outrage over the influence that money has come to wield over modern elections.

Instead of a crackling good movie in which "The Longest Yard" meets, say, "The Bad News Bears," director Phil Joanou instead decided to make Gridiron Gang a lugubrious tutorial on the importance of being a winner.

Watchable, if cliched.

Preposterous, predictable, but excessively entertaining, this frenzied thriller draws both story and characters from such action classics as "The Fugitive," "Die Hard," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Silence of the Lambs."

Kandahar is very much a box-ticking exercise, with Butler playing the same kind of hero — perhaps literally the same guy — he has built a career out of.

If the movie is cheesy at times, it more often presents an understanding of life’s contradictions and compromises.

The Lake House has the sensibility of something conceived by Stephen King after an overdose of chocolate-covered cherries and valentine cards. In other words, it's sugary sweet and based on a premise that's just -- no other word will do -- ridiculous.

There's a powerfully creepy sensibility to Deadfall. But the way it handles the messiness of families -- a universal message given vivid metaphorical life in the blood and guts it leaves in its path -- is finally rewarding.

Clara's Heart has several pluses. There's the rapport between Goldberg and Harris, impressive in his screen debut. And it is a relief to see Goldberg working back into The Color Purple mode.

If you sit back and enjoy its mindless rhythms, you might have a good time. Just don’t try mining the lyrics for meaning.

The crime’s solution is fine and dandy, but it’s Poirot himself who most fascinates. This isn’t your grandmother’s Agatha Christie, in other words. It belongs to Branagh, heart and soul.

The movie feels stretched out and thin.

Serves as a fascinating exploration of racial and social prejudice; and an indictment of cultural miscegenation.

The movie's big action scenes, at times, make you forget you're even watching animation. There's an in-your-face sequence involving a runaway, crashing train that will make you squirm in your seat trying to get out of the way.

Zhao might have her eye on the nuances, but ultimately even a filmmaker with her sensitivity and vision can’t bend the Great Marvel Imperative to her will.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

It plods along dutifully, with the occasional zigzag into contrivance, tidy coincidence and outright preposterousness.

Clearly Oz sees Housesitter as a screwball caprice, but the Muppeteer-turned-director delivers a stale couple's counseling movie. The message -- if your partner is a deluded liar, then you might as well be too -- must have been thought up by Pinocchio.

The film is deeply flawed, and sodden with sexual moralism. But amid Hollywood products pasteurized from demographics and screening groups, the idiosyncratic vision of Ken Russell is a refreshing breath of foul air.

The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.

Cannery Row is expendable and creaky, a lavishly mounted antique.

Even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

“Murder” may lack urgency, but it does have style. The sets, the costumes and the vistas are stunning.

It can take a miracle to create a movie that's fun for kids and their parents. Luckily, Nanny McPhee has a little magic up her sleeve.

It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.

Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.

Electric Dreams can be trusted to provide some idle amusement, particularly from "users" cautious enough to keep both their demands and levels of resistance set at low-to-modest -- probably the ideal setting for summer moviegoing in general, come to think of it.

The script of Three Amigos (Martin's collaborators were producer Lorne Michaels and singer Randy Newman) plays like it was slapped together by a few friends with a tape recorder enjoying a charming weekend at the beach. You can't tell one amigo from another, the gags are silly (a "singing bush") and far between, the dialogue full of inane wordplay. Sample: "We could take a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda." "The lips would be fine."

Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.

There doesn't seem to be much purpose to it except a half-baked notion that the histrionics of the mentally insane (or a moviemaker's idea therein) are eminently cinematic. They aren't.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

Another Kevin Williamson triumph, a smart, sharply drawn genre film with a moral center and a solid cast of young actors to hold it.

Insipid, by-the-numbers romance.

A spoofy paean to cheerfolk that has more bounce per flounce than most tales about teen queens.

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

Stewart’s unexpected casting here, in a frothy action comedy, injects the movie with a shot of much-needed unpredictability. Of all the Angels, she works the hardest, ensuring that the movie isn’t forgettable.

A bucolic sex comedy in which Nicholson the director indulges Nicholson the star an orgy of coy monkey-shines in the role of a scruffy outlaw who enters into a marriage of convenience with a demure young woman who owns a ranch and a goldmine - expires right before your eyes from a terminal case of the feebles. Goin' South is the most flat-footed comedy to collapse on the screen since Nickelodeon.

The Amateur may be off to a rocky start as a spy franchise, but it scores one for the IT crowd.

The comedian’s wryly clownish antics as the preening, not-especially bright owner of several fast-fashion stores are in service of a story that feels sloppy and overly broad.

Did the original “Super Fly” need to be remade? Not really. The new film is a decent example of the barrage of reboots storming theaters lately, but that’s all it is: decent.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth"), the movie is heavy on hokum but easy to like, thanks to the spunky Schroeder.

Dark, dank, damp, grim, dingy and dour, Dark Water is a tasteful but unremitting bummer.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

It's not surprising that Punchline is mostly banal; it's constructed on a banality -- namely, that clowns suffer.

There’s so much high-voltage fun running throughout this comic sci-fantasy -- engineered gleefully by director Luc Besson -- you’re hard-pressed to be unaffected.

This version may not break new ground, but it revisits familiar territory with a vibrant sense of style and welcome restraint. It exemplifies the kind of respectable and utterly unnecessary remake that now defines the Hollywood business model.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

Central Intelligence won’t win any points for originality, but that doesn’t make it any less funny.

A didactic collegiate farce -- "Animal House" with pan-African politics, and an enormously embarrassing encore. Tell an inexperienced director he's a genius, and you create Dr. Frankenstein. School Daze, with its pompous patchwork plot, is an arrogant, humorless, sexist mess.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

If its heart-pounding romance doesn’t make you cry, its sorely needed sense of optimism will surely make you smile.

Despite flashes of brilliance, strong performances and innovative camera techniques, the film never rises above the schmaltz of an after-school special.

"Grease 2" is the most serendipitous sequel in recent memory. It is an ingratiating, jubilant improvement on a crummy original.

Director Jeff Prosserman's retelling borders on reprehensible, as he attempts to heighten an already powerful tale with a parade of needless bells and whistles, from flashy camera work to melodramatic reenactments. What a shame, because the story is truly astonishing.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

The movie updates Disney's blueprint without altering it in any meaningful way.

It's difficult to view Sudden Impact as anything more exciting or authentic than the action movie equivalent of drawn-out foreplay and faked orgasm.

The kind of statement that makes you feel like you’re watching a movie not about real people but about how eight years after #MeToo, we still haven’t figured out how to talk about it at all.

It's fists and feet that do the talking in Under Siege 2 and they prove eloquent enough.

The characters have an equally realistic appearance that's rarely seen in Hollywood productions these days