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.

Music redeems an at-risk teen in Urban Hymn, a social-problem melodrama whose other major characters don’t fare so well.

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

The romantic drama is painfully contrived and insistently predictable.

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.

If there's an amnesia movie worse than Overboard, it slips my mind.

Writer-director Danny Strong’s feature debut embodies the very phoniness that the author — and his signature character, Holden Caulfield — railed against.

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.

Simultaneously earnest yet maudlin, Te Ata lacks the one thing its subject is said to have possessed: a gift for storytelling.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

Slickers II is grounds for a stampede -- away from the theater.

A lowbrow comedy so irreverent it could almost be considered a subversive indictment of law enforcement, not to mention lowbrow humor. Almost, that is, if it were remotely funny.

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

The movie is like a game of musical chairs that runs too long. And since Muschietti has few scare tactics at his disposal, the film loses its capacity to frighten.

Presumably, there's a poignant story to be told about the love between 19th-century poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. But Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse, a pretentious, flat affair, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine, is not the film to pull it off.

Like most plays transferred to screen, Oleanna still bears traces of grease paint. Actually, all the cold cream in the world wouldn't make this verbose material in the least cinematic -- not that Mamet has put much effort into adapting the original anyway. Most of the action takes place in the professor's office. Luckily, it has a window through which we, like bored grade schoolers, can escape from time to time.

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.

Brad Silberling, a TV director (Brooklyn Bridge, NYPD Blue) making his feature debut, obviously is out of his element in this grandiose extravaganza of sets and effects. Still, that doesn't explain the inert performances of Moriarty and her henchman, Eric Idle, and sundry other supporting characters. Much of the blame belongs to Sherri Stoner, Deanna Oliver and the many ghost writers who created this ghoulish hash of teen romance, father-and-child reunion and monster mash.

There’s very little to say about The Road Movie. That’s because there’s very little to The Road Movie.

The first Crocodile picture -- which went on to become the most profitable foreign film ever made -- wasn't great entertainment, but it was light, companionable and essentially inoffensive. Compared with the sequel, though, it looks like a masterpiece.

Despite such flashes of originality, the whole thing has the air of a cynical, low-quality knockoff of something that wasn’t very good to begin with.

Marshall and screenwriter Andrew Cosby went overboard with their R-rating, introducing so much gore and profanity that it, quite frankly, gets dull. The flat performances and incoherent story do not help matters.

It’s easy to see why Cameron and Rodriguez might have been drawn to the story. At its core, however muddled, there are classic sci-fi themes of class and what it means to be human. So it’s baffling that the film goes to such lengths to show Alita’s sheer brutality.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

Director Roger Donaldson may have started out aiming for intentional thrills, but ends up with unintentional comedy as his characters do and say the darndest things.

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

The story is bloated and, despite flashes of imagination, overly familiar. And the dialogue, peppered with well-worn catchphrases.

A slow, talky and only faintly moving meditation on mortality and memory.

The privileged protagonists of Truth or Dare are neither interesting nor likable. They don’t even seem worthy of the academic degrees they’re getting.

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.

Recommended only to moviegoers so indiscriminately fond of the Panther series and starved for belly laughs that they consider it a privilege to watch director Blake Edwards sort through his old footage and sweep up after himself. If your indulgence is less than open-ended, this lame attempt to scrape a "new" feature out of a filmmaking backlog is likely to seem more deplorable than diverting. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

Edwards persists in the missing-person subterfuge in Curse while avoiding the blatant outrage of recycling old footage under false pretenses. He's shot new footage this time, but that technicality hasn't prevented it from feeling depleted and secondhand. [17 Aug 1983, p.B6]

Russell is an inoffensive Mel Gibson clone here. But Stallone is an unlovable lummox, preposterous because he takes himself so seriously. Even when he attempts to laugh at himself, his quips fall like clods on coffins. His bravery is braggadocio. Let's hope this will be the last of Tango.

Walas' animatronic Robo-Fly is as clumsy as both Stoltz's Martin and the film's script, which resorts all too often to clever computer graphics and video-flashbacks.

It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.

Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest. [U.S. theatrical release]

The Entity may be the least catchy title in movie history, and for the first tedious hour or so this curiously indecisive account of supernatural sexual intimidation remains in an expedient and exasperating rut: writer Frank DeFelitta and director Sidney Furie seem fixated on the rape scene from Rosemary's Baby. [09 Feb 1983, p.F11]

In a light-hearted way, it portrays the Allies as children, their leaders as collaborators, a Nazi POW camp as boys' summer camp and the conflict as color war. And what's more, the Allied team gets so excited that they would rather win the game than escape from their captors. The whole concept is so outrageous that it hardly leaves time for one to consider the details. [31 July 1981, p.17]

Some sort of combination of a teen-age Bewitched and a Police Academy for department stores.

A ridiculous rabble-drowser with the heart of a bully and the soul of a thief.

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.

The director tries to infuse Shock and Awe with the taut procedural drama of “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight” or “The Post.” But he winds up demonstrating just how difficult it is to make shoe-leather journalism entertaining, much less artful.

Unfortunately, it has no story. Toys is deader than a doornail.

A film of admirable ambition but vexingly uneven execution.

Too clever for its own good.

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.

Gary Sherman, the film's cowriter and director, has set up a showcase for scary effects, and some of them are rather nice, in a grisly sort of way. It's clear that Sherman knows how to engineer this sort of thing. What's also clear is that without some semblance of an actual movie around them, these pyrotechnics really start to get on your nerves.

There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in The Aftermath, an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story.

The end result is a movie that feels oddly detached, especially considering the raw intimacy of Leigh’s previous films.

The film's inconsistencies, inaccuracies and disjointed editing can be explained by Lee's untimely death; the producers had to piece the movie together from the available footage. But what's the excuse for the other wretched performances? [25 May 1979, p.39]

By and large the film seems humorless, the reflection of exhausted or snide entertainers. [21 June 1978, p.B13]

Although III claims seven times as much action as ever before, the movie is still so boring that even the love interest (Robyn Lively) leaves early. She's no Kung Fool.

As for the conflict, it's hardly riveting and often it's downright silly. The sets and effects betray their downsized budget. And the Japanese bashing is less artful than in Rising Sun, though just as obnoxious.

If the first sequel was a photocopy of the original, this second sequel is a tracing of a photocopy. It's the same business twice removed, and twice diminished.

Think twice about taking very young children — or even some susceptible adults — to this at-times shocking, if less than graphic, gloom-and-doom fest. But the worse sin is: It’s boring.

It’s unfortunate that the tribute to veterans that is so much a part of the movie’s marketing turns out to be little more than a framing device that’s dispensed with for most of the plot.

Disney just doesn't know when to give up on a dead project, which is the only thing that accounts for the studio's scene-for-scene remake of Little Indian, Big City, a French farce the corporation dubbed and released exactly one year ago. (It sank faster than a canoe full of Fantasia hippos.)

An unimaginative boy-and-his-mammal saga with only tenuous connection to the old television series of the same name.

A case study in how Hollywood can make a complete mess out of what was previously a marvelous film.

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

The Aeronauts is the second film this year by Harper to get a U.S. release, after “Wild Rose.” That film was excellent, with strong music and an effervescent star turn from newcomer Jessie Buckley. This one is, at moments, exhilarating — but not much else.

This is a small film with some big-ish names in it: Jeffrey Wright plays Stuart’s boss; Taylor Schilling is his love interest; and Gabrielle Union is a TV reporter. But it topples under the weight of its unwieldy themes.

Good intentions only go so far, especially when they mask tawdry melodrama. Even the best movies push emotional buttons, but they work because viewers become wrapped up in the story. This one is so manipulative you can hear the gears grinding — until they lock up.

The interludes of terror are strictly functional and literal-minded: If it's not a murder spectacle, it's a tease that anticipates a subsequent atrocity. [25 Nov 1983, p.C2]

You're obliged to take your fun where you can find it during this coyly coarse-minded, near-wreck of a musical, and there's precious little to be found watching the costars gather moss in each other's uneasy company. [23 July 1982, p.D3]

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

New World Pictures has been promoting the film not so much as a fright show but more as a campy romp (the comic trailer was more entertaining than the picture); unfortunately, it doesn't work very well on either level. [01 Oct 1985, p.E1]

True Stories is united not by narrative, but by Byrne's sensibility, and this is where it descends from being a boring piece of whimsy into something reprehensible.

There are certain pleasures here, mostly in the cast of characters. Malkovich’s misanthropic egoist is chief among them. And Bullock makes for a fierce and relatable Mama Bear. But as for tension, there’s precious little.

Although there are genuine moments of humor, they’re at odds with the increasingly ghastly measures taken by the three protagonists, as they succumb to power-hunger, paranoia and overkill.

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.

The director, J. Lee Thompson, was once a proficient craftsman. Not all that long ago he and Quinn were associated on the prestigious hit The Guns of Navarone. You can't help wondering what they, along with Mason and Neal, talked about between the takes of this howler. [29 Mar 1979, p.D15]

The way that conflict plays out is also surprisingly plodding.

The movie’s ending could be called a twist. But it’s really more of a belly flop.

Only the most committed Aster-pologists are likely to enjoy Midsommar at its fullest; others, meanwhile, may admire its handsome visual design and bravura performances without completely buying in to the alternately diseased and fuzzy fable at its core.

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

The absurdism wears gratingly thin in The Dead Don’t Die, whose deadpan tone gives way to tiresome, grindingly repetitive inertia.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

Vita & Virginia may be about two fascinating characters, but it’s also case of words, paradoxically, obscuring the real people who wrote them.

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.

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.

Killerman takes its influences — countless pulpy crime thrillers — and synthesizes them into an increasing rare thing: a movie that doesn’t aspire to any greater heights than where it lands: squarely in the middle of the August dumping ground.

Does not live up to the extravagantly wounded ferocity with which Travolta attacks his part.

The Funhouse begins with a lamely facetious reprise of the shower sequence from Psycho and slides steadily downhill there. [18 Mar 1981, p.B4]

There’s a lot of baloney — along with bodies — sliced up by the end, with Laurie bloviating about how Michael has come to “transcend” something or other. But there’s nothing transcendent, let alone new in Halloween Kills.

The Woman in the Window is the kind of film that could go places, but sadly never manages to get out the door.

With horrific wildfires scorching California, the timing of this firefighter comedy also seems off. It might inspire empathy, if only it were actually funny.

The story of an insurgent Indian woman certainly seems timely in 2019. Too bad the new account of her uprising, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, is as stodgy as a movie from 1958, if not earlier.

Even Monáe’s magnetism can't elevate Antebellum above roots that are firmly planted in the blood and soil of pulp exploitation, shaky liberal earnestness and rank opportunism.

King of the Gypsies gets caught in a paralyzing bind between sordid subject matter and ridiculous casting. Ostensibly a serious, compelling melodramatic chronicle about dynastic conflict within the gypsy subculture of contemporary American, the movie resolves itself lickety-split into a laughter. [20 Dec 1978, p.E1]

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

The movie is presented as the story of a man who hasn’t figured out who he is yet. But that’s not quite right. Instead, it’s a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up.

This is a surprisingly inept tale about an evil nanny and a killer tree that's right out of Jason's woods. Despite a prologue that aims to excuse subsequent plot deficiencies and a finale that's as absurd as you're likely to find in a modern horror film, The Guardian is simply ludicrous.

An unconscionable mess of unyielding crassness, from the overall tone, which celebrates gaucherie all the while it's saying that love is what really counts, to the sound mix, which makes most of the dialogue, which is larded with impenetrable slang, doubly impenetrable. [04 Jul 1986, p.C2]

Alternately claustrophobic and epic compositions can’t make up for the myriad story lines (including one frustrating red herring) and pacing issues that periodically lose sight of the stakes at hand.

Rebecca is nice to look at, inoffensive, competently executed and utterly unnecessary when once, it was so much more.

Bad Hair is a good idea buried within a scattershot, ultimately mediocre movie.