Without a doubt, mainstream moviegoers will be revolted by the nastiness of it all.

Its collection of one-liners and amusing situations could put you in a diverting spell. A studio-generated romp about three 17th-century witches who create havoc in present-day Salem, Mass., it's full of big-crowd laughs (thanks mostly to Midler) and suspense.

It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier.

Dear Nicholas Sparks, There's no easy way to say this. But with Dear John, the latest of the five films made so far from your sentimental, best-selling novels, I think our relationship is in trouble.

Unfortunately, "Youth" becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Coppola proves that even the best of our film artists can lose sight of what this medium is all about: entertaining, enlightening and including its audience.

In the final scene, the filmmakers nearly succeed in turning Suu Kyi into an Asian Eva Peron, down to the outspread arms, tossing an orchid to her worshippers.

A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.

There’s nothing wrong with a good cry at the movies. But a bad cry is emotionally manipulative and, well, just mean. A Dog’s Journey is the latter.

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

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

If nothing else, the movie reminds filmgoers just how difficult it can be to pull off the multi-thread approach. Sometimes it's possible to take a spool of yarn and, with care and consistency, knit a stunning creation. 360 looks more like what happens when a cat gets ahold of the ball.

It's a brisk, colorful, infectiously charming but instantly disposable Hollywood entertainment. It's fun, like watching kids play dress-up in the back yard -- nothing more, nothing less.

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]

This would have made a fascinating film if Freedomland were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

With a premise as cavalier as this, perhaps director and co-writer James Wong could have found a tone more original than post-Wes Craven cynicism. Instead, he panders to viewers, allowing them to take gleeful comfort in the destruction of the stupid and doomed.

It’s Southern-fried “The Blue Lagoon” meets “Murder, She Wrote” — and topped off with a sprinkling of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

While the plot is thin and there's little action till the big blow some 60 minutes into the film, a volcano offers a greater variety of thrills than your basic cyclone ever could.

The kind of bland, generic, high-concept midsummer comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."

Stephen King is a novelist, not a screenwriter. Which may be worth remembering on the admittedly slender chance that you go to see Needful Things for its dialogue, which is by turns cheap, cute, histrionic, profane and derivative.

The actors can’t compensate for a story that ultimately sputters.

Lush, extravagant, sad and touching, Love in the Time of Cholera still feels weirdly insubstantial when all the febrile passion has abated. Like a fever it breaks, passes and is forgotten.

Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt, is a near-death experience: Time seems to stop as we stiffen in our seats and the actors all whisper as if they're at a wake.

Nathan Wang's score borrows blatantly from "The Natural" and is slathered on thick in all the big emotional scenes. They establish the right nostalgic mood, but it's broken with that loud "ping" of a metal bat every time a kid gets a hit.

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir. What it all means, of course, I have no idea.

If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third American Pie installment, you'll have a good time.

But just as Pee-wee Herman's films are vehicles for his shtick, Elvira is mostly Elvira wisecracking and busting out of her dress. She's fun, a Transylvania Valley Girl grown up into the Queen of the Bs, but after 96 minutes you may start thinking more fondly about those '50s and '60s camp classics she's usually interspersed with.

Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.

Experienced horror fans will probably stay one step ahead of the game, but it's still a nice ride.

What we have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos.

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

Unaccompanied Minors, a sort of junior league version of "The Breakfast Club," never achieves the universal appeal of John Hughes's 1985 film about youth and authority.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

The script's a plodder, and the acting's unbearably stilted. The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.

Still of the Night emerges as not only failed, synthetic Hitchcock but also failed, synthetic slasher and failed, synthetic love story. [18 Dec 1982, p.C1]

It isn't so much a movie as a superheated, highly conductive miracle substance for the pure transmission of masculine aggression and misogyny.

Exerts an unmistakable appeal, thanks to an absorbing story and fine performances from Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson.

It gets the bullet points of Sam Childers's life, but misses the target.

A sloppily structured, snoozily paced psychodrama about living in harmony with nature and all the rest of that tree-hugging hooey.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

The story often feels like a collection of (so-so) jokes, forcibly strung together in a tenuous narrative.

Chuck Norris fans will not be disappointed by Missing in Action, a bang-bang-you're-dead exploitation flick from the Cannon Group in which the action is rarely missing. [19 Nov 1984, p.C3]

Director Nimród Antal (“Predators”) does a serviceable job of keeping everything interesting and suspenseful, if not exactly fresh.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

Trust the Man quickly begins to feel hopelessly derivative of other, better movies.

Dependable entertainment for young girls.

If a movie can be said to suffer from low-grade depression, this one certainly seems to be, shuffling in its socks and bathrobe through a not-quite-two-hour running time with an attitude that is closer to grudging obligation than enthusiastic commitment.

The purpose of A Dog’s Purpose isn’t to solve philosophical riddles but to warm the cockles of dog lovers’ hearts. That, it does — as well as a wet kiss from a slobbery tongue can.

The jokes are lame, the set-up is stupid and Bullock, occasionally a winsome comedienne and here a co-producer, is annoying as heck.

Powerful lead performances and the filmmaker's noble attempt at holding a magnifying glass over the Deep South's still-contentious race relations help The Grace Card edge closer to the realm of mainstream entertainment. It's not just a dry sermon in feature-length form.

The misapprehension about Brooklyn's Finest -- which was first shown at Sundance last year and has been heavily edited since -- is that it's a movie about police. It isn't: It's a movie about movies about police.

David Cronenberg's film version of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, is no more successful in solving it than any other versions of this fantastic tale have been.... "The Crying Game" it's not. [09 Oct 1993]

Warning: If you have seen neither “Unbreakable” nor “Split,” you may be utterly and irredeemably lost. Shyamalan cares not a whit about — and is probably incapable of making — a stand-alone film that will appeal to a general audience. This one is for the die-hards.

Between them, Clooney and Kidman would still need a third party to work up a personality. In fairness to both, they aren't given much to work with.

What's the difference between Feast and, say, "Alien" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," all of which share the same plot? Patience. Feast lacks it.

In a summer of surprisingly self-serious comic book movies" Lara Croft "stands out as being particularly humorless.

Cut-and-dried sci-fi thriller.

The movie's great fun, particularly for kids used to that satirically hard-edged kind of kid show.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

In short, Carrey's got nothing to bounce all that energy off of, not even a solid story line.

The movie has its flaws. Still, for anyone with a soft spot for the mute gaze of man’s best friend, it’s hard not to shed a tear — or two — during The Art of Racing in the Rain.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

This “Anaconda” never stops winking. Its juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

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

Technically the movie is flawless. One scene in Central Park, when Pacino confronts the murder suspect on a deserted rain-slicked path, is haunting and beautfully photographed. But that's hardly a reason to sit through the rest of this wretched film. [22 Feb 1980, p.19]

Donkey Punch is almost humorless, and there's no wink and nudge behind the mayhem to absolve us of taking its ugly, class-obsessed subtext seriously.

A hideously unfunny spy spoof with pretensions to social satire in its treatment of a lesbian relationship.

The film’s success is due to the twinkly commitment of the large and talented cast.

The movie, in short, rides on a revenge plot and a beauty-and-the-beast subplot, and there's some nice photography and production design; screen writer L.M. Kit Carson lends some Texas texture and funny lines. But mostly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is straight blood and guts. [23 Aug 1986, p.D11]

The books-trump-movies camp knows where this is headed: The film version - contains two characters and one narrative too many.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

It leaves audiences in a limbo every bit as torturous as the one the protagonist is in.

For anyone to enjoy this starchy, contrived exercise in vanity and product placement, it's best not to have read the book. In fact, it's best not to have read ANY book.

Most of the humor is sophisticated slapstick, which Depardieu mastered in the hilarious trio of Francis Veber comedies he did with Pierre Richard in the '80s.

Too much of Bones feels transplanted from genre staples like "Hellraiser," "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Evil Dead."

An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

Nothing more, or less, than a cheap, dirty grab at our Christmas spirit.

Enough to make any thinking person want to shoot a hole in the screen.

This is supposed to be funny? It was so depressing I almost started to cry.

Even Nanjiani’s endearingly funny turn isn’t enough to elevate Stuber above its own trite, lazy aspirations. He might drive away with the movie, he just doesn’t drive far enough.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

There is, however, a certain urgency to the action that will prevent most people from noticing the film’s flaws.

This is a movie that features not one, but two graphic mercy killings. Forget "127 Hours": Sanctum makes sawing off your own arm look like a minor penalty for the crime of spelunking while clueless.

In his new thriller, Raising Cain, director Brian De Palma addresses his most vivid personal issues -- his obsession with Hitchcock and twins, and the loss of innocence -- but he runs through them impersonally, as if the luster of his own obsessions has worn off.

If any one made a respectable effort to invest this story with authenticity or tension it is not apparent on the screen. Even the big spectacle, the demolition of a dam, is going to look unimpressive to moviegoers who've already been to Superman and seen the identical illusion depicted with far more skill. Force 10 is a mission that should probably have been aborted. Instead it's been allowed to abort on the screen.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

After interminable delays and unresolved digressions, we finally get to see some decent special effects, but hardly enough to warrant sitting through the entire film. [12 July 1988, p.D6]

So didactic that viewers are likely to feel less uplifted than lectured.

On the one hand, Beasts is a refreshing departure from the Michael Bay era: a sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes incoherent CGI fight fest structured around a story of family, found and otherwise, and starring a diverse cast. But it’s still, despite a few mildly grown-up jokes, a quintessential Transformers film in one inescapable way. It should come with a different sort of content advisory: No one over 21 admitted without their inner child.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

In Big Adventure, Pee-wee's gadgety bike was stolen, and the dramatic interest rode on finding it. Big Top contains three rings' worth of people and livestock, but the interest is no-show. You'd be better off going to the circus. Or the zoo.

The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.

By introducing silly elements into a serious endeavor, the filmmakers undercut their own movie. In the end, we're watching a somewhat exploitative movie about exploitation.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.