Snitch is protein-and-starch filmmaking at its utilitarian -- and belly-filling -- best. Johnson brings the steak; Bernthal the sizzle. The father-son drama is served up as sauce on the side. But as long as the beef isn’t too overcooked, who needs the A1?

A serviceable, drug-themed crime thriller, made just a skosh more interesting by a handful of ingredients that give it a boost. Chief among them is its unusual premise. Instead of centering on the real-world scourge of heroin, meth, opioids or cocaine, it’s about a new drug — Power.

There are few surprises delivered in Skyscraper, an entertaining if middlebrow thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise its fungibility.

Aquamarine is better than nothing for its woefully underserved audience.

The film never wholly or satisfyingly engages with why Elizabeth becomes so convinced of Todd’s innocence.

Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.

You might call it a black comedy of errors, but the humorous side of the film is less well executed than Slattery’s impeccable creation of a certain neighborhood feel.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

The Final Countdown emerges from a round trip through this time-bending exercise flattened into a two-dimensional letdown. [01 Aug 1980, p.C7]

You'll probably have some laughs along the way in spite of your better instincts.

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

Risen turns out to be an intriguing, if ultimately frustrating, retelling of the familiar story, here reconfigured as a detective procedural.

Overall, the production has the polish and pace that producer/co-writer Luc Besson's work is known for. Any complaints about the lack of substance are pointless.

In the end this “Song” — whose payoff may leave you thinking, “Are you kidding me?” — doesn’t so much crescendo as collapse in on itself, an orchestral work that peters out in a trickle of silly, sour notes.

One wonders if such a story is worth recycling. [16 June 1978, p.18]

Wickedly funny.

The movie itself may be a species of Montezuma's revenge.

Piddling spoof.

Sparse and implausible screenplay.

That's the problem with the whole movie, which lies halfway between poker-face documentary and broad farce.

With its charming character animation and inventive art direction, The Grinch is a vast improvement over Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of the same story.

Its cinematic flair nearly overcomes the awkward story.

Its toxic recipe consists of prurient exploitation steeped in dankly pretentious imagery. [01 Jun 1992, p.D4]

The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.

Got it. Drug companies are evil, and gay people are discriminated against. But these Hollywood pieties can't paper over Schrader's maddening indifference to explaining exactly how the bad guys have been pulling the strings during the previous hour and a half. [14 Dec 2007, p.WE33]

There's nothing wrong with gag-based comedies -- that's what the Sennett comedies were, and that's what "Airplane!" was, too -- but the gags in Better Off Dead aren't all that inventive. Oh, Better Off Dead has its moments -- in particular, a Chinese drag-racing duo who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" -- but it's mostly the usual gross-out fare: inhaling Jello through a straw; fat kid; girl with dental retainer; sticking Q-Tips in nose, ears, mouth. [17 Oct 1985, p.B10]

The final destination of A Five Star Life is well worth the wait, but the service is so slow that some viewers may check out early.

A slight, modestly funny comedy.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

The new story is decidedly, deliciously dark, veined with thin layers of Burton’s trademark macabre sensibility, which adds texture and tartness to the inherent charm of the story (at heart, one about the parent-child bond and the possibility of the impossible).

Just when you’re about to write off your investment in Criminal Activities, the third-act dividend pays off, in spades.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

The rift that opens between Bea and the two combatants feels somehow terribly contrived. From there until the requisite happy ending, the story loses some of its emotional weight, if not its humor.

As a persona of epic polarities, [Harrison Ford] animates this muddled, metaphysical journey into the jungle.

A very engaging trip along the cutting edge of America's funny bone.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

Delivered with the kind of English aplomb that PBS audiences around the country have come to know and love. It must be the accent.

It’s an air-kiss of a movie, one that places a non-contact peck on either side of its subject’s mouth, then breezes off before a serious conversation can begin.

One detects flickering intentions of enlarging on the formula material -- especially in the byplay between the actors playing narcs -- but the prevailing mood of the entertainment is decidedly bargain-basement. [11 Oct 1979, p.D15]

If the family dynamics feel perfunctory and too-neatly resolved by the end of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal of stymied creativity, exacting taste and sensibilities too bold and well-judged for an uncaring world manages to be funny and uncompromising in equal measure.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.

You have to wonder whether writer and director Steve Conrad, who wrote the films "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway," "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," had something more hefty in mind before Harvey and Bob Weinstein came aboard and marketed his movie as a laugh riot. Regardless, it's not the stuff of lighthearted summer comedy.

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

Creation is fatally weakened by an excess of pathos; in a Darwinian universe, it would be quickly swallowed up by a leaner, fitter movie.

At first, Father of the Bride is so funny, it's almost sublime. The rest of the movie, alas, is regrets only.

A lot of this stuff is irresistible. In the early going especially, the movie's infantilism is snappy and surprising. But this is a great idea for a sketch, not a feature, and if Heckerling had resisted padding it out, it might have made a brilliant short. A comedy can ride only so far on high concept. It has to deliver the jokes, and this one doesn't.

No Small Affair is a good example of the revised teen sex movie, which centers on a Morose Young Man unimpressed by the wild life swirling around him -- he'll take romance. But even the facile crudeness of a movie like Porky's seems to have demanded too much of screenwriters Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy.

Working together for the first time since 2004’s “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Magee have reimagined Holm’s vision by scaling back the cynicism, softening the central character’s tragic backstory and dulling the black comedy. Yet it’s Hanks’s performance that sets this Hollywood remake apart from the original.

Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

This sequel to his earlier hit, Every Which Way But Loose, delivers exactly what it promises, namely lots of fistfights, car chases, booze, broads and country music, plus a dollop of the old Eastwood bootstrap philosophy ("Handouts are what you get from the government. A hand-up is what you get from your friends"). As for the comedy, it starts out with Clyde the orangutan defecating in squad cars, and goes downhill from there. [19 Dec 1980, p.23]

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

Karate Kid: Legends combines the best of all those sequels plus a 2010 remake — a simple underdog tale, appealing casts and crisply filmed action — to contribute a new and worthy chapter to the canon. It’s one whose ambitions meet, and occasionally exceed, our expectations.

It's a sweet but slight film whose undeniable appeal is largely due to the performances of its flat-out adorable leads.

A raunchy parody that's hip-deep in the mainstream it aims to rip, and sometimes does despite a glut of smug inside jokes.

Heavy Metal is one of the worst ideas ever to be translated into a movie. [8 Aug 1981, p.C10]

It's piddling -- a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs...its spirit rattles around inside it like a marble in an oil drum.

True to the profession it sets out to glamorize, The Accountant takes advantage of its share of creative loopholes — and manages to break even in the process.

Ice Castles has been shamelessly, and none too slickly, engineered to empty the tear ducts of customers primed to blubber at the sight of a Pavlovian cliche. [03 Feb 1979, p.D7]

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.

The bigger mystery is whether the models actually work. Though the Armstrong partisans in the film strongly suggest that they do, director Marcus Vetter struggles to convince the lay viewer.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.

The film is artfully shot with eye candy galore: sumptuous dresses, beautiful people and scenes from Pierre and Yves’s time in Morocco. But for all its visual stimulation, the story does little to awaken emotions.

Though it purports to be about the delights of disorder, “A Little Chaos” feels like yet another by-the-book period romance, only without the genre’s requisite spark between the main characters.

The Empire strikes out.

Beware of horror films that begin with a bad dream -- they usually go on that way as well. Case in point: Popcorn, which has several good ideas that, unfortunately, go unrealized.

An emotional thriller that is by turns contrived and impassioned.

The movie is like a Porsche outfitted with a lawn mower engine; there's not even enough juice to get the machine out of the driveway.

It's hard to take Predators terribly seriously.

On the upside, the movie could do something really positive for the cause of homeless pets: If audiences respond the way they should, dog shelters could be emptied in a week.

Telegraphs its every move. There are simply no surprises.

Morning Light, sailor's delight. All others be forewarned.

The lead character ostensibly is Coach Sam Winters, but the film never really focuses on the ethical compromises he needs to make and steers away from him. Thus, James Caan -- playing the coach -- appears in what amounts to a series of cameos. In fact, Caan seemingly just walks through his role, perhaps wondering how he got from "Brian's Song" to this thing.

Someone forgot to remind Duvall to write an ending.

Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.

What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.

Ender’s Game is more than a parable about bullying, or a disquisition on the concept of the “just war.” It’s also a rousing action film, especially in Imax.

Indian Summer would like to be to the '90s what "The Big Chill" was to the '80s. But something is missing, namely a superior cast, a more engaging group of characters, a far smarter, more focused script, and Lawrence Kasdan's expertly timed direction. This is a wan knockoff.

Though the film has its moments and Goldberg is a riot, Sister Act is far from inspired.

A funny, violent, rambunctious shaggy-dog story of a crime caper featuring an ensemble cast studded with colorful characters played by name actors. In other words, it’s more “Snatch” than “Aladdin,” which was only the latest of Ritchie’s misbegotten attempts to achieve mainstream respect by retelling someone else’s stories.

An offering so endearingly lame it seems to have missed the past 10 years' worth of special-effects breakthroughs.

Too highbrow for the multiplex and too literal for the hipsters, it's unsatisfying both as gothic camp and serious cinema.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

It's filthy, funny and kind of sweet, if not quite up to the level of Judd Apatow's oeuvre in the burgeoning field of R-rated comedies with heart. You will laugh and blush in equal measure.

In some ways, Mowgli feels like an origin story. There’s a slight but unmistakable suggestion of a potential sequel to its open-ended climax.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is uproarious and flamboyantly raunchy, utterly stupid yet also occasionally winning

I love a good story, too, but I prefer one that actually goes somewhere (although, as joy rides to nowhere are concerned, this one is a beaut).

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Viewers who aren’t in the mood for star-crossed love will prefer the slapstick and earthy humor, including a sequence in which three of the guys get pregnant. It’s another fine mess the resourceful monkey king has to rescue his comrades from.

The only real crime here is the debasement of a great film’s name.

O’Reilly’s ambitions notwithstanding, “Moscow” is uneven because of the inescapable nature of such interlocking narratives: some land better than others.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

The Bad Seed was a successful novel and Broadway play before it was made into a movie, and the melodramatic quality of much of the writing and acting betray these roots. But the movie's artful black-and-white cinematography still contributes much to making this a remarkably gripping chiller. [05 Apr 1987, p.Y6]

The Favor is a frisky, frank and funny female-buddy film - as if "Thelma and Louise" had stayed in the suburbs, making girl-talk about sex and satisfaction, married vs. single.

Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula.

21 Bridges will win no prizes for originality or twists. (It won’t win any prizes for anything, to be honest.) But it’s made well enough. Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo (“Avengers: Endgame”) are the producers, and Irish director Brian Kirk (“Games of Thrones”) knows how to keep an old jalopy like this well-oiled to get us across the finish line.