Flower can’t quite nail the necessary tone, aiming for dark, but missing the comedy.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.

You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."

Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.

Though Philip Haas's digitally shot film has the firsthand immediacy of such nonfictional docs as "Iraq in Fragments" and "Gunner Palace," its dramatic template feels disappointingly secondhand.

McCarthy is not (yet) a celebrated director, but The Prodigy may change that. As with his under-seen debut film “The Pact,” his greatest asset here is his patience, followed by his evocative use of light, shadow and negative space. He’s a filmmaker who recognizes that the buildup is more fun than the payoff, and he manages to generate suspense with seemingly little happening on the screen.

The Legend of Billie Jean is trashily manipulative and utterly preposterous, so much so that, until the end (when it begins to sour on you), it's a thoroughly enjoyable hoot. Add a splendid cast and good air conditioning, and it's a perfectly mindless way to spend a muggy summer evening.

The humor, which made the first movie appealing to more than just TV kids, is far less adroit.

With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies delivers what its title promises: a little romance and some undead villains, plus a bit of comedy. But this overly busy riff on Austen’s winning formula doesn’t justify all the tinkering.

Surrogates takes an interesting idea -- the triumph of technological convenience over grimy, workaday life -- and buries it under clumsy exposition, unconvincing action sequences and a by-the-numbers conspiracy plot.

You want to know if The Running Man is a good-time macho show, right? Stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice (same director -- Paul Michael Glaser). Sure there's blood spattering and bullets riddling and Big Boys Banging Biceps. But through the dry-ice haze, Running Man is surprisingly boring.

The result has a cobbled-together feeling. The Force is not strong with this one.

The Rhythm Section was directed by Reed Morano, who did a nice job with the first few episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but who seems a bit self-indulgent here.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

No one will ever credit Snatched with discovering new comic territory. But it earns its share of laughs by covering some well-trod ground.

A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.

A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.

The only way a self-absorbed treatise like this can get any kind of audience (not to mention distribution) is to cast famous people in it.

Even the staunchest of golfheads must know they're watching a cut-and-trite accounting.

If you're going to make a gross-out comedy you can't just be gross. You've got to be to be funny as well, or the movie will be DOA. Which is why Eurotrip should be toe-tagged and shoved into the deepest and coldest of video vaults.

In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.

Wilson’s portrayal of Nargle/Ross isn’t so much a performance as an impersonation. It’s a thin coat of paint, in other words, covering up some serious cracks in the storytelling.

If its made-for-TV sensibility explains its chaotically blobby shooting style, it doesn't clarify a plot so painfully padded that it looks for laughs in strange digressive asides regarding bratwurst and coffee.

Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters. The ill-mannered, unkempt, foulmouthed and hot-tempered title character of Hesher is just such a walking contradiction.

Shamelessly catering to fans of the original film, while giving them nothing new, its story and humor are also inexplicably calibrated for a much younger demographic than those old enough to have seen the first film when it came out.

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

I found it a rough night at the flickers.

In Adrian Lyne's latest monstrosity, love takes on money -- and loses. Not necessarily in the story, of course. This is a Hollywood movie. I'm talking between the lines.

There's more waiting than lightning in Waiting for Lightning, a nonetheless watchable-enough documentary about the preparations leading up to professional skateboarder Danny Way's historic 2005 attempt to sail over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.

Before it veers off course, The Rooftop is lively, funny and colorful... Too bad Chou decided to shoehorn the gangster genre into a movie that would have worked just fine as a mere comedy-romance-fantasy musical.

As the movie wears on, the plot points become increasingly far-fetched, and what started out as a moody if by-the-book thriller becomes increasingly silly. All the while, Roberts gives her all.

Depressing as it is dull as it is dumb.

Yet as good as she is, the actress is little more than the framing device for this polished and morally provocative — yet hardly pulse-pounding — tale, loosely based on the life of English spy Melita Norwood.

There's the scene in which Jacques, the French Canadian proprietor of the Power and Glory, tells Laura, "I am the Great Went," to which she responds, "I am the muffin." Jacques returns, "I'm as blank as a fart." Maybe all Jacques is saying is "I am full of gas." Certainly Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me seems to be.

Most action flicks would settle for thrilling violence and mayhem, in service of a utilitarian plot. “Angel” flips this formula on its head, delivering a surprisingly coherent story but with no discernible sense of fun.

Despite the flailing around, the picture fitfully accumulates a handful of modest highlights and silly brainstorms. [03 Feb 1984, p.E6]

Basically "Beaches" without Hershey and the salt water. This insipid suck-face-athon provokes the gag reflex.

Disjointed drama filled with one-dimensional characters and melodrama so Lifetime movie-esque that it careens into unintentional comedy.

The plot, in which Swank is given little more to do than guzzle Costco-size bottles of liquor and mope, proceeds in somewhat somnambulist fashion, generating surprisingly little suspense even when Paige confronts a suspect whose identity has been telegraphed throughout the film. This comes as a disappointment, at least for viewers who have watched a movie or two before.

At times, Rampage almost hides its problems. It’s just funny enough, just exciting enough and just visually impressive enough. What it never is, though, is anything more than just enough.

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush.

A super-stoked action thriller

Babysitting, the directorial debut of The Goonies and Gremlins writer Chris Columbus, is a sweet-natured, adolescent variation on the big-city black comedy After Hours.

Offers up the kind of pleasures that only a summer movie can...The cast is good-looking, the soundtrack is loud, the plot is stupid.

Both lead players are appealing and attractive enough to make an otherwise tepid movie at least un-excruciating.

So rich in processed sugar, canned sentiment and schmaltz, I thought I was going to throw up.

Like too many genre directors these days, Ken Wiederhorn went for a mix of horror and comedy, and it's probably not his fault he succeeded mostly with the latter.

Paternity may not be one of the dumbest excuses for a romantic comedy that ever littered the screen, but it certainly feels like a numbing inanity while you're exposed to it. [3 Oct 1981, p.C1]

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

The plot is so similar to “The Big Chill” that it almost could be called a remake, except that it isn’t nearly as funny, it follows millennials instead of baby boomers and the characters tweet.

Higgins can't keep his mind from wandering. Foul Play never begins to make sense as a mystery - Dudley Moore and the 3-foot-9 Billy Barty, become the butts of grotesquely conceived and staged sight gags.

Isabelle Huppert and generic Steve Guttenberg prove incompatible costars in The Bedroom Window, a cockamamie mystery that finds these bi-continentals drawn together like, say, refrigerator magnets to styrofoam coolers. Yes, it's magic.

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself.

Ultimately, it is, like its conflicted hero, sweet and likable, and you wish it well.

There's lots of extraneous plotting -- which, however fact based, is handled in such a pre-fab manner that it feels phony.

It is the verdict of this court that it be led to a stockade reserved exclusively for cheap, pandering movies and duly shot.

Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.

So solemnly paced and deliberately performed that it seems to solidify before your very eyes.

An infectious albeit formulaic game of Cinderella football, this happy athletic romp seems to know just how wheezy it is, but the team grunts "hut, hut," and puts it right on the numbers anyway. It's "Hoosiers" with a pigskin pumpkin and a lot more sis-boom-bah.

A good story lurks somewhere in Queenpins, but Gaudet and Pullapilly take the easy way out at every plot point and with nearly every joke.

Legends of the Fall is a magnificent bore: a western saga lolling in its own immensity - its big music, its big scenery and, yes, its big hair

A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.

As nervy and well-made as it is, Cherry feels less personal than pageant-like, especially in a rushed and glibly perfunctory final sequence. It unfolds like an American dream that becomes a nightmare, before switching back again — just before we wake up and shake the whole thing off.

A handful of funny brainstorms can be found rattling around the slapdash confines of Ice Pirates. [03 Apr 1984, p.C6]

Belushi is fetching, though he plays a cliche'. But the movie would roll over and play dead without the talented German shepherd. Lassie was classy and Benji beguiling, but Jerry Lee is a four-legged Burt Reynolds, just made for fast cars and chase scenes.

Stretched across nearly two hours, it tells a story that would have been adequately laid out in a 30-second television spot.

Clearly enamored with the endearing brand of drawly sarcasm for which Thornton has become known, the filmmakers aren't sure whether to paint Dr. P as an uncompromising villain or a mischievous teddy bear. The upshot is that Dr. P's most menacing aspect is Thornton's rather obvious hairpiece.

More American Graffiti suffers from a terminal case of the cutes. Made with the approval of George Lucas, the director of American Graffiti, and perhaps with his misbegotten collusion, More American Graffiti succeeds in making a blithe mockery of its predecessor. [03 Aug 1979, p.D4]

Is Meg Ryan going to play the goofy romantic gal forever?

As a whole, the film is a perplexing, dark and brooding exercise, which only makes its inappropriately cheery ending feel all the more slight.

If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

About the movie industry’s misguided belief that it can distract the audience from a film’s narrative weaknesses with little more than flash and spectacle. That con might have worked with the rubes once upon a time, but in case Hollywood hasn’t noticed, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Despite some mawkish dialogue, there's something to be said for leaving the theater with a smile. Can I get an amen?

At the risk of eternal damnation on the Internet, I admit to laughing at -- even feeling momentarily touched by -- Rush Hour 3.

The real problem with A Million Ways to Die in the West is one of editing. There are a million jokes in it, but only 500,000 of them are funny.

Levine brings a lot of visual style to “Mandy,” in addition to coaxing subdued, believable performances from his young cast.

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

Except for a few gory flourishes and several jolly special effects, Warlock is a surprisingly old-fashioned horror adventure that benefits from the superbly malevolent presence of Julian Sands as said warlock.

In this banal era of smart-aleck parodies and homages, Last Man Standing amounts to stylistic overkill.

In Chaos Theory, Reynolds's performance is taut, crabby and tense. And his beard and glasses, which intensify those already narrow eyes, suggest a mad bomb-builder rather than a hapless soul with whom we can identify.

Derivative dumpling of a romantic comedy about Irish sexuality.

Should have never made it up the distribution aisle.

This is not a fantastic movie. But there's more to it than just an MTV-slickified "Midnight Express" starring two young, photogenic stars.

Polanski, generally, has fallen farther than Lucifer, and into a more profoundly depressing hell, the hell of utter banality.

An endearing comic roundelay about the can't-commits.

Perhaps they should have called this "Bore-a, Bore-a, Bore-a."

The Marksman proves itself to be the cinematic version of comfort food: satisfyingly familiar but full of starch and empty calories.

In this case, the adage would go something like "material, material, material," also known as the Nicolas Cage Rule: Good acting can't overcome bad taste.

“Kingsman” is essentially a live-action cartoon, one that aims for an audible reaction and little else. That may not be the world’s loftiest goal, but whether it results in a gagging eww or a chuckle, it’s a plan that usually succeeds.

Dough never leaves any doubt about where it’s going or what it’s trying to say, serving up a recipe that we’ve not only had many times before, but we’ve had enough of.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

"Drive Trashy" would be a more accurate title for the first 45 minutes of this gore-spurting, sex-flaunting romp. And that's the good part.

This romantic melodrama ... doesn't even get to first base.

Despite melodrama that, at times, is enough to induce diabetes, there's enough wolf whistle in this sexy, scary romp to please anyone.

Producers David and Jerry Zucker have shown with "Airplane," "The Naked Gun" and "Top Secret" that they are inspired film parodists. Brain Donors suggests that they are clumsy plagiarists.