Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

Ultimately, it's hard to decide which is more deadly, the action or the dialogue. [26 Dec 1981, p.D5]

Ninja III quickly falls off track.

This interpretation is overly reductive, I’ll admit. But once the thought had implanted itself in my brain, I could not shake it: These ladies are going to war over a couple of bangles (Kamala’s word, not mine). There’s a lot of fighting, and the fate of the world is said to hang in the balance. But when you look at the screen, all you see is a bunch of people trying to grab some shiny things from one another.

The title, of course, leads one to expect the long-awaited movie version of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but the actuality is closer to tattered but dopily diverting remnants from The Karate Kid, Road House and Rocky IV. [14 Nov 1989, p.E3]

With Elvis, Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

The route of the film, like Lucy’s drive home, is preordained — a Google Maps version of a plot, with absolutely no surprises.

One is hard-pressed to isolate any feature of Now and Then that isn't stale from movie overtime and sentimentality. [20 Oct 1995, p.C17]

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

One gets the uneasy feeling that Jodie Foster is trying to tell us something that has nothing essential to do with Nell's plight. The movie is a coy, condescending vanity production. [25 Dec 1994, p.D6]

Writer-director Dearden, who earned his gruesome credentials as the screenwriter on Fatal Attraction, underlines his leading lady's lack of rudimentary skill by leaving the soundtrack full of dead air and amateurish articulation during numerous conversations. He's also repeatedly drawn to Hitchcock allusions that slip out of his grasp. [26 Apr 1991, p.E1]

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

Although Miller is excellent as the doomed teen, Wahlberg seems out of his league here, except in the actor’s rendering of Joe’s acute discomfort with public speaking and confrontation — which is odd in a movie that wears its heart, and its lessons, on its sleeve.

Mr. Nanny, a dumbed-down variation on Kindergarten Cop, uses the same ingredients that made the (only slightly) classier Schwarzenegger comedy a hit: A muscle-bound galoot, hired to protect young kids, puts them in even greater jeopardy while he slam-dances with the villains. Those ingredients don't blend well in Mr. Nanny, and they sure leave lumps.

It’s wholesome but starchy fare: a story of sacrifice and good fortune that feels less like a movie than a marketing vehicle for the power of divine providence.

The movie leaves us, like J.D.’s family, with only a mounting pile of baloney excuses for bad behavior.

With pulpy material to begin with, the film's ham-fisted, novice director Robert Longo seems to be the major incompetent. [25 May 1995, p.M24]

Another product from Industrial Light & Magic, this fire-breathing, soaring creature is a technical wonder to behold. But they've skimped on everything else. The script douses the movie's fiery potential and director Rob Cohen soaks all remaining embers with his cheap, made-for-TV direction.

This cinematic triple-decker sandwich is so overstuffed with baloney and cheese it ought to come with a pickle on the side.

Like so many recent films — “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Belfast,” “The Fabelmans,” “Empire of Light” — Babylon wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn.

When they part ways at picture's end, Marlboro's parting words are "Vaya con Dios," which translates as "Go with God." I'd put it differently. Go, the both of you. With God or without, but by all means, go.

You’ve got to give Wheatley credit: In the Earth is like nothing else you’ve seen — although some might wish it were a little less, er, original.

Full of incident, heartbreak, secrets and betrayal, The Affair and its choppy formal structure don’t do justice to an enormously appealing cast.

It ain’t worth the price of admission, but it is, in one of the drowsiest, dullest summer movies ever, a bit of an eye-opener.

The scenery of wind-and water-eroded mesas and stone archways is lovely, but the voice performances are largely inert and unremarkable. Other than the risky shenanigans of the PALs, which ought to give any parent pause, so is the film.

Unfortunately, The Columnist doesn’t live up to its initial promise: What might have been a trenchant cultural critique couched within poisonously playful genre exercise becomes an indulgence in undifferentiated rage for its own graphic sake.

There isn't anything here you haven't seen already in It's a Wonderful Life and a thousand other wish-list movies. Writer/director James Orr doesn't even do you the favor of speeding through the unoriginality.

It would be hard to reduce filmmaking to its basics more than Fire Birds does. It's more video game than motion picture -- the first coin-operated movie.

While it's obvious that Stanley has seen a lot of genre films, he's not yet learned how to make one, though his shortcomings are less visual than dramatic and narrative; things look fast, but happen s-l-o-w. This Hardware needs a grease job.

Spaced Invaders is a slight, obvious sci-fi parody that would like to be in the same league as Spaceballs, but doesn't even deserve the comparison.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

When “Dominion’s” final 20 minutes play as a beat-for-beat re-creation of previous films’ set pieces, it becomes clear that Trevorrow and Co. have nothing new to say.

What starts out as a slick, streamlined delivery system for mayhem, carnage and quippery finally finds its inner Agatha Christie. For all its supercool posturing, casual cruelty and lurid overcompensation, “Bullet Train” was a cozy all along.

The most ghastly thing about the whole movie? The mainstreaming of these most outsider-y of outsiders.

The plot stumbles over genre cliches after a promising start and the whole thing becomes lamentable. As an indictment of a techno-society in which too much information is available by computer, it's simply unconvincing.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells its story with sympathy, but too many quirks and try-hard flourishes. In the welter and spin of tics, voice-overs, set pieces, images, flashbacks and dream states, the man himself gets as lost as a kitten in the rain.

None of which would be a problem, if “Gucci” were half as much fun as I’m afraid about to make it sound. After all, who doesn’t love a good, tawdry scandal?

Despite clocking in at nearly 2½ hours, “I Wanna Dance” barely scratches the surface of its celestial subject and the figures in her orbit.

A movie that’s not a disaster, but not particularly distinguished; a movie that, in the end, will wind up being as forgettable as its own bizarre publicity.

Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” — a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons. Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz — a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup — wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.

All too faithfully adapted by Kenneth Branagh, the film is the last thing that one would expect of a contemporary highbrow version of this ageless horror classic. It is, in a word, dullsville.

What can you say when a video game is more exciting and entertaining than the big-budget feature film it inspires?

Luck takes things that are intangible — in this case, random felicity and affliction — and imagines them as palpable. It doesn’t quite work.

Studio 666 is either a delightful lark or a mystifying waste of time: Your pleasure will probably depend entirely on how you feel about Grohl.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

Here, Willy's pure spun sugar, with none of the complex ingredients that make a movie soar: relatability, humanity, foibles.

Its clumsy, inert storytelling seems less interested in converting nonbelievers than in convincing us of Wahlberg’s piety.

One thing's for sure about Amos & Andrew: It ain't no "Thelma & Louise."

What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.

Styles’s flat performance delivers the fatal blow to the film’s uninspired depiction of mid-century homophobia, forbidden love and long-simmering resentment.

In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.

Mack & Rita feels, paradoxically, both too short and overlong. It could have examined the theme of aging much more deeply. Alternatively, it might have made a nice short film about a young person who becomes a senior citizen for a night. As it is, it’s a story that doesn’t need to be told and isn’t told very well.

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Although the performances are strong and committed — especially Qualley’s — the movie is little more than a conversation between two people who are constantly, maybe even constitutionally, full of it.

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

Directed by Mary Harron from a screenplay by John Walsh, the thoroughly unengaging film is a remarkable achievement, but only considering the misspent potential of its juicy source material.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a mostly flat, flavorless cocktail of a sequel that tries to replicate the fizz of the 2012 original by stirring together elements of a getting-her-groove-back love story with music-video-style production numbers, lessons in female empowerment delivered with all the subtlety of a TED Talk and the kind of let’s-put-on-a-show energy that went out of style in 1940, has — despite those flaws — its moments.

Watcher in the Woods represents a botched effort by the Disney studio to locate a suitable opening somewhere within the flourishing genres of supernatural and horror fantasy.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

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.

It’s all played for laughs, which fail to materialize in a story that milks easy cliches and stereotypes about Italians, pasta and sexual double-entendres, with icky dialogue about “spicy sausage” and the like.

What should have been a light summer romp is rarely funny, never scary and a boring mess.

In this wildly uneven melodrama by writer-director Zach Braff, no member of the talented ensemble cast is entirely able to navigate its messy plot. That a few actors do manage to stay afloat for occasional breaths of air seems like a divine miracle.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

Curiously flimsy and forgettable.

If the formulaic film ever finds its audience — and it’s all too clear that there’s a market for this kind of slickly produced, hindbrain pulp — the best that can be said for it is that the ending (devised by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer) is perfectly poised for The Beekeeper 2.

Like the original "Care Bears Movie," Care Bears Movie II is nothing but an insidious feature-length toy commercial. But since Funshine Bear has taught me to look on the bright side, I will admit that the animation in the sequel is of a higher quality.

The ending of Foe is not the problem. It’s the beginning and the middle that feel phony: at once as calculated and as uncanny as ChatGPT.

It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.

There are no gambles in this crossbreed of sports movie and doggy drama that dutifully — and lazily — stays on course from beginning to end. Heartstrings are tugged, dogs are adored and it’s all inoffensively inspirational.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.

Shyamalan the elder makes suspense-horror dramas that either give a half-baked idea a fully baked cinematic treatment or vice versa; Shyamalan the daughter’s first feature-length film is just half-baked all around.

You know how a pop song from a moment in your past can bring that moment back to life in colors, smells, memories and emotions? “The Greatest Hits” takes that idea and literalizes it right into the ground.

With Love Hurts, 87North has gone farther south than ever, churning out a muddled, mean-spirited action comedy that manages to feel slack and listless despite a flyweight run time of only 83 minutes.

If you’re already a subscriber to Apple TV Plus and have absolutely nothing else to do, “The Instigators” is worth a look.

If “Parthenope” is a love letter to his hometown and its subject an embodiment of the city’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions — beauty and decay, religion and hypocrisy — the whole thing comes across like a deranged mash note, more off-putting than seductive.

Despite what the singer/actress says, there’s not much to scream, let alone clap, about here.

Between its verisimilitude-killing caricatures and hand-waving montages, “Unstoppable” is all too easy to pin down as a by-the-numbers misfire.

Even with a gimmick engineered to orchestrate endless bursts of Looney Tunes-style hyperviolence, “Novocaine” lives up to its name, all right — a tedious action-comedy so numbingly bland, you feel the pain of its 110-minute run time even as its protagonist can’t feel a thing.

The film has the whiff of easy paycheck. It looks glossy but is empty. It sheds light without gaining insight.

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins.

The speculative ending is actually the most intriguing thing about “The Alto Knights,” more interesting even than De Niro times two. And yet the film’s climax nevertheless fails to raise much of a heartbeat in this boglike slog through a momentous moment in murderous mob history.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

Brax’s knuckles may be perpetually bared, but his heart’s always in the right place, which “The Accountant 2” spares nothing to remind us, even while the mayhem escalates into sheer outlandishness.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

Although Fleischer pulls a few clever tricks, such as when his camera angles work to deceive viewers alongside the handful of French policemen chasing the Horsemen through Thaddeus’s eccentrically designed mansion, most of the film is underwhelming.

Even with all these familiar funny folks -- Jon Lovitz, Kathy Bates, Dan Aykroyd, Kelly McGillis, John Ritter, Faith Ford, Alan Arkin and more -- "North" seldom raises more than a chuckle.