Typically hollow and patchy, the script is low par for the course, the acting close behind. Where it's a cut above the rest is in the work of Yugoslavian cinematographer Bojan Bazelli: His outdoor shots, both day and night, are superbly lit and cleanly shot, as if this were an A film. And with Marcus Manton's crisp editing, Pumpkinhead looks three times as good as it is.

It is a middling gun play that asks and answers the persistent question: Whither testosterone?

Last Christmas labors to turn the genre on its head and say more than your typical feel-good holiday flick. Somehow, Kate and Tom’s story still finds a way to play out in painfully predictable fashion.

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.

Unfortunately, this isn't a role that requires an actor with Freeman's gifts -- in effect, his brilliance is irrelevant. The film is more a compilation of well-calculated cues than the presentation of a story, and all that the star is called on to do is hit his marks and prompt our responses. Avildsen, who sharpened his mastery of audience expectations on "Rocky" (which won him an Oscar) and the "Karate Kid" films, has a huckster's talent for keeping his audience on the line. This is not to take away from what Avildsen has done here. The movie is carefully and sometimes impressively laid out -- it's well "told." It's just that the skills he displays are not really those of a filmmaker -- or at least not one whose interest in his story goes beyond how to pitch it.

A slight, yet inoffensive tale, inspiring little more than a shrug, thereby making it hard to either wholeheartedly endorse or strongly criticize.

Don’t Let Go manages, at times, to generate a nicely weird “Twilight Zone” vibe, but fails to sustain it, as it also runs into some of the same problems that plague movies of this ilk: If you tear the fabric of time by altering what has already happened, it can be difficult to sew it back up straight.

Great Balls of Fire, like "La Bamba," is thin on the meaning of the life in question, but big on '50s Billboard nostalgia. It's lightweight archaeology, a bent American Bandstand biography. Something has slipped away from McBride, Quaid and Fields: the truth, the heart, the soul. All that's left is the hip.

Donner never quite gets the tone right, and the pace is positively stuporous. The horses gallop, but the film barely canters. [15 Apr 1985, p.B2]

To Greenwalt's credit as cowriter, there are funny lines and some situations that held promise. But his direction is early "Brady Bunch," with a daub of Ridley Scott's Chanel commercials for further inspiration...Despite the director, the cast is decent, with Fred Ward of the "Right Stuff" in rare comic form as Lt. Lou Fimple, a vice cop who finds both his wife and his daughter undone on lover's lane.

Director Geoffrey Wright, who also wrote the script, is thoroughly ambivalent in his storytelling. It's in his deft filmmaking that Wright slips: By whipping up a visceral ride through a tunnel of hate, and by making several characters likable, he creates a parable of race and rage that offers no moral position.

An agoraphobic's nightmare, it's a condescending view, and maybe one that's totally off base. [23 Sep 1983, p.21]

The movie proves a curiously harmless pet of a black comedy: It barks and snaps at you in fitfully funny ways, but it's essentially tame, pipsqueaky and more than a trifle antiquated. [05 Nov 1982, p.D1]

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

The level of humor, of course, is familiarly low -- with nothing more deadly than the Crypt Keeper's puns ("Frights! Camera! Hack-tion!"). As for the gore, let's just say the demons are slimy, heads do roll and bodies are ripped asunder

A heady blend of beefcake, derring-do and jingoism, their adventure is not merely action-packed, but well-built to boot.

Whatever good intentions were brought to bear in Cruella are lost in an overlong, awkwardly shaped mash-up of coming-of-age drama, caper flick, action adventure and fashion world sendup.

Unless you're a Van Damme or martial arts fanatic, you're more likely to be thinking: No, merci.

"Wakanda Forever” winds up feeling hopelessly stalled, covering up an inability to move on by resorting to repetitive, over-familiar action sequences, maudlin emotional beats and an uninvolving, occasionally incoherent story.

A sort of “Me, God and the Dying Girl,” the movie is well-made (if slow) and features an attractive cast and a lot of amiable (if bland) religious pop-rock.

In this case, director David Michôd — working from a script he co-wrote with actor Joel Edgerton — doesn’t make the material distinctive or provocative enough to merit a second, far more dramatically inert go-round.

It’s both a success and a shortcoming of Britt-Marie Was Here that the flashbacks to her younger years, and the discovery of what happened to her more free-spirited sister, represent the film at its fullest emotional capacity.

This anti-feminist parable is both a labor and a pain.

My Zoe is well acted and well filmed, yes, but the storytelling, in which Delpy stitches together mismatched parts like a Dr. Frankenstein, is its weak suit.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

Languidly paced and prettily crafted, it's certainly a scenic adaptation of Golding's novel. But while it's been brought up to date, there's certainly nothing new under this tropical sun. [16 Mar 1990, p.B7]

Heroism, however real, doesn’t, by definition, make The Last Full Measure a great movie. Juicing up a fine story, and then hammering away at its point makes it one that doesn’t appear to trust either its source material or its audience.

Riddled with labor rhetoric, this coal-dusted tragedy wavers between well-acted propaganda and historical burlesque. Rambo's reactionism seems almost subtle by contrast.

Herzog has nothing of lasting value to offer the vampire tradition. His Nosferatu is at best unintentional, fitfully risible camp.

By the end, the film deteriorates into a combination sensitivity session and pep rally.

In the end, family ties are re-strung, but the morals remain annoyingly at loose ends.

Sinbad, one of show business's sunniest souls, brings much-needed buoyancy to this somewhat soggy tale of kindred spirits. [30 Aug 1996, p.F06]

This is fun and there are few kids who won't have a good time of it. But it's no Honey, I Shrunk . . . The first movie was more interesting and inventive, with the tiny kids facing the jungle terrors of a giant lawn and the aerial attack of a zeppelin-sized bee.

Rookie of the Year is a wholly benevolent but banal baseball fantasy aimed at Little Leaguers with dreams of reaching big-time fields.

On the one hand, it's a diverting entertainment for children and young adults; on the other, it's a ludicrous fantasy about a war whose complexities cannot be contained by facile metaphors.

That’s the real, and somewhat obvious, lesson here, in a lovely yet flawed confection that might be summed up by two words: beautiful nonsense.

Director John Schlesinger bolsters the rickety script with cameras that spin like Linda Blair's head. If you don't get spooked, you'll at least get dizzy.

Fright Night is really "Fright Lite," a film promising more than it delivers, and even that delivery is so late in the game that you may want to arrive fashionably late and skip what passes for plot development and concentrate on Richard Edlund's special effects. [05 Aug 1985, p.B3]

Most gratifying — if also gruesome — are the many examples of Battaglia’s powerful photographs of Mafia victims. Although black-and-white, they are deeply disturbing, and it is easy to imagine that Battaglia found the work difficult. Imagination is necessary, because Battaglia herself doesn’t provide the deep introspection you might expect.

Though the actor (Walken) does little more than stroll through the film, he creates such an immediate sense of electricity that everyone else seems dim by comparison. Angels, devils or cops, they just aren't in his league.

Stands out for its earnest effort to entertain without commenting on itself or the modern world.

The mere presence of the adorable baby star, in fact, seems to throw the whole film out of whack, making the picture play more like an inadvertent comedy than a thriller.

It’s hard not to imagine that there could have a better version of this movie’s premise: one that upped the cultural satire, while still having fun tossing low-key, cheeky references at the audience. In the end though, disappointingly, Free Guy only plays itself.

Essentially, this is a film about humans as victims of alien abuse, a mediocre look at helplessness.

Wachowski seems to be at war with her audience, rewarding them with deep-cut callbacks one moment only to roll her eyes at the entire enterprise the next.

One of the worst ideas in Murder on the Orient Express was the repeated reenactment of the murder scene. Death on the Nile compounds this vulgarity by visualizing almost every speculation Poirot entertains about his fellow passengers. The redundancy of it all becomes ridiculous. [29 Sep 1978, p.D1]

Judgment Night is regrettably familiar fare.

A sexless seriocomedy that would be a bust without the support of Burt Reynolds and Ving Rhames. The pair bring a much-needed lift to this tale of a mother at the mercy of the system. Without them, the movie is mostly a showcase for the star's personal trainer.

Like the jokes, the brothers' rapport seems recycled from childhood. Sheen and Estevez are hardly working.

Dick Tracy is an ambitiously vainglorious effort, expensive, beautifully appointed, but at its core empty as a spent bullet. It asks us to read these comics without a grain of salt or a pinch of irony.

The film as a whole is a little like one of those inflatable love dolls -- a reasonable facsimile, but nothing like the real thing.

This classic comedy of errors is over-structured by cousin-writers Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel and mechanically laid out by director Jim Abrahams.

There’s a nugget of . . . maybe not wisdom, but something gristly worth chewing on here, if you have the stomach to stick your hand into gaping intestines, pull it out and wipe off the blood. I wouldn’t call it food for thought, but it gives “Forever” a slightly higher nutritional value than some of its predecessors.

"Created Equal” doesn’t offer many insights, at least not in a deeply satisfying way, as to how and why he has changed.

A curiously overextended spoof of the cliche's of Hollywood's hard-boiled mystery melodramas of the 1940s. [21 May 1982, p.B4]

The movie's very smoothness may set viewers up for a letdown. It's a low-key exercise in genre suspense and romance that fails to generate a high level of excitement or deliver classic dynamic thrills. [06 Mar 1981, p.C1]

Despite handsome performances by Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges and a good supporting cast, Jagged Edge isn't a movie -- it's a director's exercise. [10 Oct 1985, p.C12]

Well, cloddish as it is, Tank doesn't put any obstacles in the way of separating the good guys from the bad guys. And while you might justly call it stupefying, it's never boring. [28 Mar 1984, p.B17]

Despite the Sybil-like plot (and questionable Rambo mentality), there's something watchable about it all. Weird it is, flop it ain't.

Spiral, which involves the hunt for a serial killer by the police force of a nameless metropolis, is a thriller, a mystery, a police drama, but it hews closely to “Saw’s” grisly curriculum.

Visually bland, well-meaning salute to the brotherhood of man.

It claims to offer a new formula for comedy, but a lot of filmgoers will probably prefer the classic kind. [30 Aug 1985, p.N23]

The movie has an engaging surface, but it's all surface -- it's like watching an outsize TV.

Despite a nice performance by Dern, Smooth Talk never gets better than its good intentions. Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie is awfully short-storyish -- it meanders through its slight narrative, and the dialogue can be stilted and literary (it's meant to be read, not heard).

After Yang again demonstrates Kogonada’s mastery of form, framing and composition. But audiences will be forgiven for wanting to reach through the screen to mess it up a little, if only to inject some recognizable warmth and spontaneity.

We see the atmospherics, and hear them, but never feel the heat. Director Philip ("The Grey Fox") Borsos' style is too dogged to transform Mean Season into a true thriller, though it serves well as a message movie on what news is fit to print. [15 Feb 1985, p.29]

Despite all the talent, form triumphs over substance. Director Hugh (Chariots of Fire) Hudson clutches, and climactic scenes miss their mark. Greystoke is curious entertainment, less satisfying than Planet of the Apes, which begs the same question: noble savage or naked ape? [30 Mar 1984, p.21]

Cimino's instincts are right -- the movie is outsized, and it needs baroque dialogue; you get the sense that he'd recognize the right dialogue if he heard it. But when he actually has to come up with it, the result is a series of outrageous hooters: "I've got scar tissue on my soul"; "I carried the cross with you, in Brooklyn and in Queens."

The Razor's Edge gives us the quintessential '80s sensibility, Bill Murray, indulging a nostalgia for the '60s masquerading as the '20s. An adaptation of the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, this longtime pet project of Murray's will only disappoint his many fans.

Its elaborate and meticulously re-created period settings and moods prove far more interesting and diverting than the undernourished characterizations and love stories that flutter and sputter across the foregrounds. [19 Apr 1984, p.D6]

The possibilities are intriguing, but more might have been realized. [17 Aug 1984, p.23]

Some of director Alan Parker's compositions here are striking, expressionistic shots of dark shapes silhouetted against the blue light streaming through the asylum window. Then again, they're all the same -- after two hours, you're bored by them.

Trouble in Mind is something of a jumble, but never less than an intriguing one. It's an off-center romance, as unnerving as a half-remembered nightmare. [25 Apr 1986, p.D1]

Iceman proves an intriguing premise that is allowed or encouraged to go daftly astray. [13 Apr 1983, p.B10]

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]

The screwball side of All of Me cries out for a latter-day Howard Hawks. Alas, there is no latter-day Howard Hawks. Reiner is only a latter-day Reiner. [21 Sep 1984, p.C1]

Sayles is no storyteller; despite the verve of its language, The Brother From Another Planet eventually sags of its own weight.

Don't blame the fellas. They're good when they're together, but that doesn't happen nearly often enough in this sporadically amusing script. [07 Dec 1984, p.39]

A would-be endearing romantic entertainment that becomes an exercise in futility, Racing With the Moon concentrates a considerable amount of pictorial polish, acting talent and sincerity on a trifling amount of content. [24 Mar 1984, p.C1]

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.

Zieff & Co. give it a game, good-humored try, but I don't think they're in jeopardy of being celebrated as inspired farceurs. [14 Feb 1984, p.D8]

Pretty Pouters Kim Basinger and Richard Gere spit and spat and inevitably jump each other's bones in No Mercy, a standard-issue cop thriller that amounts to "Beverly Hills Cop" in a bad mood. It's the old you-killed-my-partner, now-it's-your-turn-dog-breath scenario, warmed over.

Tender Mercies fails because of an apparent dimness of perception that frequently overcomes dramatists: they don't always know when they've got ahold of the wrong end of the story they want to tell. [29 Apr 1983, p.B1]

Without a Trace provides little sustenance. It keeps serving up overprepared tidbits of torment when you'd prefer to get down to a main course. [04 Feb 1983, p.C4]

Clearly, The Octagon is no real threat to War and Peace or even Beau Geste, but it will appeal to those who are still in mourning for Bruce Lee, who like carefully choreographed fight scenes and who enjoy standing in front of a mirror looking at their muscles. [25 Aug 1980, p.B1]

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]

Writer-director Neil Jordan shows no knack for comedy, nor is he as kinky as he was on Mona Lisa, and kinky is what is called for.

52 PICK-UP is "Death Wish" for yuppies...But all the slime and grime can't camouflage the sameness of this standard, divide-and-conquer story.

A vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment.

This is a movie you can like a lot if you accept that it's not going to approach things in a conventional manner. [22 Jan 1998, p.B7]

Shazam! Fury of the Gods dutifully doubles down on everything that made the first film both charming and instantly disposable. But the heart and meta-humor that were so refreshing the first time feel static and stale in returning director David F. Sandberg’s more-of-the-same sequel.

The complications of international diplomacy have been ridiculously simplified -- a bare room with an obviously pasteboard view symbolizes Soviet duplicity. Scenes that ought to be suspenseful are put into flashbacks, so that you know in advance that the dangers were survived. [18 Apr 1980, p.19]

At heart, “Eurovison” seems content to be more dumb rom-com than sharp music satire.

As a celebration of ephemera, the movie is a mixed bag, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome.

The non-judgmental state, in which the wrecking of a family is treated like a natural disaster for which there is no human responsibity or possiblity of control, is also true to the spirit of the society the film depicts. But it makes the film, like the marriage itself, seem irritatingly thoughtless. [19 Feb 1982, p.4]

Certainly, disgust would be an appropriate response to this provocative but rather academic study of violence in the movies. Yet it's hard to work up much of a response of any kind to these casual terrors.

An absorbing but awkward union of the two-fisted boxing movie with the moist-eyed British memoir...Though rife with worthy intentions and great notions, this populist safari manages to be both patronizing and manipulative.

For Americans, the measured accumulation of detail can be frustrating. It's like listening to a story about someone you barely know and being forced to prompt the teller, "And then? And then?"