Don't even rent the DVD, it'll only encourage them.

Unfortunately, this film’s dark premise is drowned in whimsy and a forced childlike wonder.

The movie feels more like a thriller than a drama; it's paced like a thriller, building to a murder that never happens, exciting passions that are never unleashed, waiting for a crime to occur. The only crimes, however, are of the heart. Meanwhile, the movie knows exactly what it's doing, and does exactly what it intends, without making one false move.

Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan are the nominal stars of First Sunday, but it's Katt Williams who steals the show in this by turns trite and mildly amusing B-comedy.

Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

Sometimes the material's rather too gruesome for a family-oriented film, but as one HVTV intern says to the Devil, "It isn't the blood that bothers me, so much as the lack of subtext."

The Substitute is a sour experience—bloody, ugly and exploitative.

That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

There are no real surprises here, except maybe one. It would never work, Finley warns us, and it seems she might as well be talking about this cornball movie. But thanks to something ineffable — Redgrave, leprechauns, moondust, or maybe just understated performances from two appealing protagonists — Finding You kinda, sorta does.

Unfortunately, in the filmmaker’s narrative-feature debut, she takes the theme of betrayal and turns it into fodder for a sitcom, and not a particularly funny one at that.

The title (which translates, essentially, as "burned out") is an apt description of the film itself: a hot and smoldering shell.

Attention all units: Slapstick in progress in the vicinity of Police Academy. Suspects wanted for mugging the camera and possession of night shtiks with intent to incite a laugh riot. Please respond to this blues burlesque, a uniformly funny hit sure to have a long run. Its target audience -- those who can take their T&A with a grain of assault. Its plot -- a combo of "Animal House" and "An Officer and a Gentleman." Its stars -- a rainbow coalition of hot newcomers and dependable, unexpendable pros. [23 Mar 1984, p.23]

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

Has John Carpenter lost his mind or just his talent? On the heels of In the Mouth of Madness comes the director's rehash of the 1960 classic, Village of the Damned. Unfortunately, Carpenter simply makes a hash of it.

Jennifer Connelly is very easy to look at. Career Opportunities isn't. Go see the standee.

Owen Wilson phones it in with Drillbit Taylor, a by-the-numbers teen comedy.

An abominable, abdominal comedy. Aside from its tastelessness and dawdling pace, the movie’s chief problem is the lackluster chemistry between leading lummoxes Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

Its title may ring with pun and promise, but Stoned is a flat riff on Jones's short life. You'll get the highlights but no sense of what made him special -- or what really haunted him.

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

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]

Never was this funny a comedian in this horrible a movie.

Director Bruce Malmuth keeps the pace taut, the shots tight.

Sahara is a mediocrity wrapped inside a banality, toasted in a nice, fresh cliche.

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.

Don't go to "Into the Night." It will numb your mind. It will bore your soul. And it will cost you $5. [8 March 1985, p.25]

Desperation is the project's principal quality, characterizing everything from the misfiring jokes to the surprisingly distinguished cast.

Has its sinfully funny moments. Funny, that is, if you appreciate a certain cynical clamminess -- or Buck Henry seediness -- to your comedy.

Director Jeannot Szwarc could have done more with the action scenes, but he has a snappy sense of pace and comic timing. Blond, blue-eyed Slater brings an engaging sweetness to Supergirl; and she plays Linda with an awkward, gawky girlishness, subtly different from her Supergirl role.

David Lynch's disastrous film adaptation of Fank Herbert's science-fiction classic turns epic to myopic. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Well shot and edited, Death of a Dynasty is hardly a comedy classic, but it's frequently on target.

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

Tyldum...isn’t a dynamic stylist as much as a competent executor of what’s on the page. He gets Passengers to where it needs to go, which is a resolution in keeping with a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, no matter how much credibility it strains, or how many political and ethical quandaries it elides.

Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility.

The Secret Agent, with its hemmed-in shots, feels like a TV production; what is said takes precedence over what is done. Even in the writing department, Hampton founders. [06 Dec 1996]

Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.

The idea is unabashedly silly, yet Monster Trucks is more involving than it sounds. Characters and conflicts are sharply defined, and director Chris Wedge handles the action with clarity.

Not surprisingly, everything feels begged, borrowed and stolen from other better movies, from Quentin Tarantino's exclamation-point violence to the slo-mo bullet trajectory shots from "The Matrix."

Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.

An aggressively stupid entry in the family-adventure genre from Jerry Bruckheimer.

Dickerson keeps things moving along briskly and the ensemble manages to survive Eric Bernt's "script" (Connell gets no credit). As for the dreadlocked Ice-T, he avoids the rap trappings of his previous film roles and is generally effective in his survival schemes.

Watching it is like being forced to listen to bad heavy metal music turned up to 11 while fat guys in Bermuda shorts compete in a puking contest in the john.

The film is not without its pleasures. Kidman and Firth lend the pulpy material a certain prestige, even if Strong comes across as simply another plot device (and a perplexing one at that).

Relentless formulaic fodder for the explosion-starved; it's loud, shallow, sexist and a complete waste of time.

The only laughs come from Vaughn, a master of ingratiation. Witherspoon is no Roz Russell or Lucille Ball. But she fills space nicely.

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 story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

The central story, in which Helms has to make up his mind whether to attend his sister's funeral, is too limited a conflict to hang a movie on. Ultimately, audiences will have to satisfy themselves with the collective presence of these actors and the movie's obviously good-hearted intentions.

A shameless, uneventful rehash of the classic Western "Shane," "Nowhere to Run" miscasts Jean-Claude Van Damme in the old Alan Ladd role -- an outlaw outsider gradually drawn into both unexpected familial warmth and predictably violent conflict with a greedy land baron...While it boasts better supporting actors and technical credits than other Van Damme projects, the film nonetheless founders, a victim of its own lugubrious pace and misguided efforts at turning the bulging Belgian into a romantic lead.

Despite its broad comedy, typical of “Dukes of Hazzard” director Jay Chandrasekhar, the film has some tender and wise moments. And even if you don’t get all the ethnic jokes, there’s plenty of family drama that anybody will recognize, no matter their background.

Laugh? I thought I'd never start.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

A piece of fluff as artificially sweetened as a fuchsia Peep, rises above these low expectations - but only barely.

Just a series of familiar scenes unfurling toward an inevitable conclusion.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

This is not a dreadful movie. Murphy fans may even find some comfort in watching their slim, witty, hot-headed hero safely returned to his familiar movie trappings. But anyone seeking a fresh characterization or clever plot twist ought not to buy a ride on this Murphy vehicle. With Metro, he's going nowhere fast.

A throwback to 1970s blaxploitation flicks, with a Latin accent, Illegal Tender would be a brassy, sassy guilty pleasure if it were more, well, pleasurable.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.

The most surprising thing about Some Body is that any film so lewd could be so thoroughly uninteresting.

Even the premise for this sputtering attempt at a picaresque farce seems to anticipate a vehicle prone to misfires and breakdowns. [12 Aug 1982, p.E1]

The movie features not one, but two precocious children, a cloying stock character that should be used sparingly, if at all. And much of the dialogue sounds fake, veering alternately toward cutesy and overly cerebral.

There are moments when the fanfic speculations of “Come Away” feel too forced and downright cockamamie; the plot, probably inevitable, becomes schematic and the near-constant state of magical thinking too sticky-sweet for words. But the enterprise is ennobled by Chapman's sense of style and a consistently strong set of performances, especially from Jolie and Oyelowo.

Power Rangers is good junk.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

A wham-bam encounter, it gives you everything you (presumably) want, sets itself up for another sequel, and it makes sure you don't recall a thing about it in the morning.

Trash or treat? Halloween II is as dumb as its prequel. The Great Pumpkin isn't going to be pleased with this one. [30 Oct 1981, p.17]

Although it was held back by the studio for about a year, someone apparently came to the inevitable conclusion that no amount of ripening time was going to help this gimmicky and ultimately harebrained movie.

Clumsily under-written and feverishly overacted, it's as embarrassing to watch as it is perplexing.

Evolution is bad. How bad? Who cares? Do you ask how hot the fire is before running out of a burning building? No, you just run for safety.

Moses has staged one totally abstract, contemplative sequence of Erving practicing by himself on a playground court at night. The succession of slow-motion, overlapping dissolves of Erving gliding and dunking in solitary grandeur is a rather pretty abstraction, but it seems to stylize his prowess in a misleading way. The transcendant thing about Erving is that he's capable of performing feats in competition and in real time that the rest of us only dream of doing while playing one-on-none.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

It's resounding bunk, candied over with the lush music of Johnny Clegg and hyped to death by director John ("Rocky") Avildsen.

Whether the lines are funny, tasteless or not-so-funny, Chase keeps popping 'em; whether the scenes are from "48 HRS." or "Beverly Hills Cop," screenwriter Leon Capetanos keeps photocopying them; and director Michael Ritchie (who also directed "Fletch") makes everything move along to a frenetic zydeco soundtrack. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself laughing at something. Unless you're dead, too.

The exercises are genuine, and so is the hardware. But the script undermines the sense of authenticity at every turn.

All the air has gone out of Rocky, something Stallone, who also wrote and directed, seems to realize -- he won't leave his movie alone. It's riddled with hapless gimmickry: zooms, slow motion, double images, freeze frames, embarrassing MTV-style montages, a noisy, aggressive sound track, and flashback after flashback to the movies that have gone before, in order to remind you why you're there, as if to insist, "See, this used be a good idea." [28 Nov 1985, p. E1]

Although her charisma is still undeniable, there’s also no denying that McCarthy is capable of much more than she’s allowing herself to do here. There comes a point when every force of nature starts to look just plain forced.

Even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together.

The script is at once so undernourished and so obvious that you'll be convinced Cohen produced it via telegram: START MANIAC COP KILLS CIVILIANS STOP CLEANCUT GETS BLAME STOP WORLD-WEARY DETECTIVE FIGURES IT OUT STOP BODIES FALL STOP.

Another day, another inept homage to "Vertigo."

Shaft is also funny, with a sharp, fast-paced humor (though one transphobic joke is a tone-deaf clunker). And it’s always enjoyable to watch Jackson walking around while dropping f-bombs (and mother-f-bombs) all over the place.

Though it has clever moments, it doesn't come close to the polished animation, wit and originality of the big green guy (Shrek).

What's missing from this color-by-numbers screenplay is the bizarre touch of eccentric humor Sandler often lets creep into his comedies.

As is typical of the genre, the plot gets sillier as it unfolds, while the violence gets gnarlier.

It's fast, slick, stupid, violent fun and, despite the cynically high body count, without serious intention in this world.

This character was an abusive swine. Perhaps it would be best to let his art stand on its own.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

A slight skateboard thriller that looks more like one of those Afterschool Specials on television than a bona fide feature film.

Sadly, Suicide Squad feels like a watered-down version of what could have been a stiff drink.

Barker the filmmaker resorts to most of the horror cliches he chillingly sidesteps in his writing.

Lee elevates herself from the lower echelon of mere international super-babedom to the loftier realm of pulp myth. She is "It" with an exclamation mark.

Lawrence's material runs between mediocre and offensive, and then he rescues it with his physical humor. He's at his best when he lets his face or inflection do the talking.

It's a clever plot with a minimum of the already tired standard kids-on-computers sequence and a maximum of silly face-to-face deflation.

Isn't just for music fans. It's more accessible than that, thanks to Joel Schumacher's bright direction and a few storytelling embellishments.

There are two dance-offs, multiple fat jokes and one sight gag using eye boogers, a heretofore ignored bodily fluid. These are the highlights.