There's one thing worse than a movie with two Jean-Claudes: A movie with two Jean-Claudes and bad fighting.

Some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high.

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

It seems that Andy and Lana Wachowski have never lost that childlike ability to dream. But they also haven’t mastered the grown-up power to rein it in. The story they tell in Jupiter Ascending could probably occupy an entire television season. There’s way too much here for one movie to hold.

Isn’t Statham’s best — or most brutal — work, but it’s not bad.

It's clear this sequel (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) doesn't have the same smartness (I speak relatively) of the original. Nonetheless, "Saw" fans can still look forward to involuntary incineration, wrist and throat slashing, bullets through brains and the bashing of someone's head with a nail-festooned club.

It isn’t unusual for a good premise to have a faulty execution. The Benefactor suffers from a conclusion that feels inauthentic to the real perils of addiction, as well as to its own story. The only remarkable thing about it is Gere, who really should stick to filmmakers worthy of his talent.

A kind of landmark of exquisite bad timing. And that's the most intriguing thing about it. [6 June 1986, p.D3]

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.

The driving drama of such a desperate situation is lost in the movie's casting silliness.

Still manages to one-up its predecessor, 1997's unintentionally campy "Anaconda."

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.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

Crass, dumbed down and stickily sentimental, it's a flavorless confection that clearly had too many chefs tugging at the taffy.

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]

For a suspense drama, Impact is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances.

A Ninja turtle soup of computer gimmicks, karate chops and kiddie Confucianism.

A rambling wreck from computer tech and a helluva souvenir –- that is, for those interested in artifacts representing the American movie at its worst.

Although the new version, which stars Keanu Reeves, is likely to make audiences pine for the meta-irony of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," it's not a complete failure.

Spiral, which involves the hunt for a serial killer by the police force of a nameless metropolis, is a thriller, a mystery, a police drama, but it hews closely to “Saw’s” grisly curriculum.

A conceptual train wreck, with half an idea scattered like disaster debris all over the screen.

Riveting in its low way. It traffics in imagery profoundly disturbing.

This film does other power-of-dance movies one better by downplaying the dancing and underscoring what its brethren often lack: a compelling, wrenching and wonderfully inspiring story.

All this stuff is probably right. It's just that the director, Victor Salva, underscores his points with thunderous obviousness and manipulates us through ham-handed plot gambits.

Getting teens to look past the superficial may be a noble goal, but when they're staring at the pretty but talentless Pettyfer, it's a hard lesson to take seriously.

"Wolverine" is full of angst, and yet has had virtually all the soul wrung out of it in an effort to create a live-action cartoon. But cartoons are rarely so unwieldy, or force a director -- in this case, the largely unsung Gavin Hood -- to juggle so much impossible plotline.

Visually, Brick Mansions is a duller and more conventional film than “District B13,“ which was, if nothing else, a sourball-flavored form of eye candy.

The film isn’t awful. There are moments of handsome cinematography and occasional effects that both frighten and impress.

It's neither amusing nor exciting enough to ensure a long-running franchise.

The audience hasn't the slightest idea what is going on.

A magical child movie in which the child is magical, yes, but the movie is not.

Exorcist II seems to have evolved out of delusions of cinematic grandeur shared by Boorman and writer William Goodhart. It's obvious that they wanted to contrive a metaphysical thriller that would be astonishing and spiritually inspiring, but their thought processes are so muddled that the movie degenerates almost instantly into a confounded shambles. [18 June 1977, p.B1]

As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.

Even likable actors can’t obscure the fact that, holy gods on Mount Olympus, this thing is a slog, a movie that dutifully hits its plot points involving prophecies and fleeces without evoking a whiff of spirit or imagination.

It's a moralistic muddle with only one message: If Disney wants to make movies about Germans, it should restrict its efforts to German shepherds.

A stupid and violent delicacy, congealed nachos and Mountain Dew for the Beavis-and-Butt-head set.

Paquet-Brenner has assembled a talented cast.... Yet he elicits mostly unmemorable performances from just about everyone involved.

Extremities pretends to be a serious movie, and in a film culture where women are routinely exploited and revenge is taken blithely, it is, at least, a departure. But we don't learn anything about men and women, or revenge, from "Extremities" -- we just watch people score debating points, to the tune of J.A.C. Redford's stale TV-movie score.

This new Fame, whitewashed for the kids, leaps into a catchy rhythm at the start.

An intriguing idea for about two seconds.

The movie is still a routine Hollywood high school morality play.

Its heart is vaguely in the right place.

Watching the Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland, the latest of the teddy superstars' animated movie escapades, is like being pelted mercilessly for 75 minutes with Lucky Charms. It's nonfatal (unless you have a sugar problem, in which case you're likely to lapse into a coma), but it's not exactly my idea of fun either.

An Innocent Man isn't an inspired piece of filmmaking, but it is tightly focused and efficient, and on its own modest terms it is effective.

If we lived in a just universe, Captain Ron, a farce filmed in and around the Devil's Triangle, would simply have vanished into another dimension. But we don't and it didn't.

This a sweet, mostly cute story about the importance of the people we’re related to, peppered with some fairly broad and not especially hilarious yuks.

The second half of the film -- that is, everything after the dubious wife-swapping -- is as mindless and sloppy as the first half is sharp.

In striving for a combination of grit and grandeur, Leterrier misses a chance to make the kind of camp classic that could have endured for generations. Instead, it's a muddled disappointment.

Sloppy compendium of filthy jokes and lowbrow sight gags.

Despite flashes of brilliance, Why Him? is perfunctory and boorish, the sort of film that already has begun to fade from memory before you’re too annoyed by it.

Kato's often the best part of the movie. Britt calls him a "human Swiss army knife," and he's right; Kato is not a sidekick, but a fully formed hero who's full of surprises.

Clumsily written and numbly performed comedy of yammers.

The rare film that is capable of offending both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton.

Ought to be called "Hook, Line and Stinker."

In the Cannon Films esthetic, the only good Ninja is a dead Ninja, and the bodies certainly fly fast and furious here. Okay, it's silly, but maybe you were expecting Tess of the D'Ubervilles? And from a director named Sam Firstenberg?

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.

Need for Speed is a piece of auto-collision pornography that weighs down its car-flip-and-massive-fireball money shots with a preposterous plot involving vehicular manslaughter vengeance.

In the end, “Nutcracker” is a delightfully old-school diversion. The plot may not always hum with the clockwork precision of one of Drosselmeyer’s mechanical toys, but like a music box, it nevertheless plays a sweet tune.

What really sells this three-hanky tear-jerker -- and there were a lot of women buying it during a recent screening -- is Lane's steely and vulnerable performance. Like Tinker Bell, she almost made me believe in fairies. Almost.

The movie’s most piercing barbs are left for the tech world and the inevitability that our phones will make zombies of us all. Does that make the Boss Baby franchise a bold cinematic bet? Not exactly. But as a safe play for parents and kids alike, it’s tough to complain about the return on your investment.

At nearly two hours, the movie feels bloated. It could easily lose 30 minutes, give or take, and live. It would still not, however, live up to its title.

Riklis isn’t heavy-handed here, and even when the film’s plot grows a little unlikely, its tone is never sappy.

Though Kidman delivers a workmanlike performance, the story manages to be soppy and ploddingly dull, told via a screenplay that drives home the fact that it’s not really about momentous events, but momentous feelings.

That none of the protagonists earns the audience's sympathy is more likely a failure of the real-life characters rather than the actors, who deliver fine performances -- especially Rhys, who seems to be channeling Richard Burton channeling Dylan Thomas at his most manipulatively loutish.

Unfortunately, Provoked possesses the tiny production values and schmaltzy music of a prime-time special, despite its ensemble of terrific actors.

Youngsters who love the shrieky singing and don't notice the tapioca of the story will probably get their money's worth. Parents: Bring earplugs.

A movie that can be smart-funny and astutely topical. But if what you're expecting is a start-to-finish laugh fest, beware: This picture takes some detours and never really figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

The Bodyguard is a classic of show-business hubris, a wondrously trashy belly-flop, proving that no amount of glittering sets and star power can save a story that should have been buried with McQueen.

Ironically, it’s Zemeckis’s reluctance to embrace theatrical artifice over attempted photorealism that prevents “Here” from hitting as powerfully as it might.

A noisy, impenetrable and totally nonsensical cogitation on the nature of firefighters and the sizzling "animal" they love...We just wish somebody would call 911 for boredom.

This Dr. Giggles has a lot of hearts and no brain.

Sitting through this is groan-inducing enough, but it's spiritually depressing to watch Djimon Hounsou, who deserves better.

The Sword and the Sorcerer is neither sharp nor magical. [07 Aug 1982, p.C2]

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

Neither Grint nor the hoax subplot are compelling enough to hold our attention. Perlman, on the other hand, is a commanding, if peripheral, presence, diverting the focus of the film from silly historical speculation to the tale of a damaged psyche.

Indeed it looks as if this otherwise straight-to-video endeavor, which was made in 2003, is being released only to cash in on Bernal's of-the-moment-ness in Hollywood.

The Wraith is essentially a wall-to-wall car chase that writer/director Mike Marvin attempts to enliven with TV commercial visuals, tough-guy dialogue and modestly inventive casting.

Mediocre, unmemorable comedy.

Yes, UglyDolls is a musical, and the peppy songs, while devoid of any subtlety, help tell the story, and are delivered with sincerity. Such ditties as Clarkson’s “Broken and Beautiful” celebrate body positivity and self-acceptance.

Don't blame the fellas. They're good when they're together, but that doesn't happen nearly often enough in this sporadically amusing script. [07 Dec 1984, p.39]

Even with its cyberspace connection, the story comes across as flat and tired, merely a pretext for the filmmakers' occasionally dazzling but ultimately numbing special effects. The world of Virtuosity may be spanking new, but the ideas are yesterday's news.

If The Kissing Booth 2 is watchable, viewers have Elle to thank; King remains the strongest component of a now-franchise that, quite frankly, might be beneath her.

As Above, So Below is inherently absurd, but it would be somewhat less so had it fully committed to just one of its ridiculous premises.

The Gunman may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.

An easy-on-the-sensibilities family film, Eddie Murphy practically assumes the easygoing manner of Mister Rogers, a character he used to wickedly lampoon on "Saturday Night Live."

Anemic, pretentious.

It's trivial and narcissistic and ultimately rather sordid.

This is for the pre-converted, certainly not the left, or even those who consider themselves detached observers.

Big Stone Gap suffers from some hokey moments, including an ending that’s both implausible and too heavy on the sap.

King and Romero -- the horror genre's equivalent of the daily double -- are back on the storyboard for 2, but with director Michael Gornick in charge, 2 goes nowhere slowly. Part of the problem is that King's short stories simply work better in print.

Despite the hackneyed script by John Posey, Legendary is not without merit, and the story works fairly successfully as a family drama between Cal, Mike and their single mother, played by the dependable Patricia Clarkson.

Possibly . . . no, probably . . . no, definitely . . . the worst rock film of all time. [24 Nov 1980, p.B11]

Your own final destination just might be the box office, to demand your money back.

Though Down Periscope is set in the age of the nuclear submarine, the jokes seem to date back to the time of the original battle of the ironclads.

Although The Other Woman nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted cliches about zip-less marriages, upper class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes.

Here, however, Atkinson may even outdo Cruise, with the comedian hurling his 63-year-old body into the service of comedy.

[Gere] seemed to be improvising his way from beginning to end, like he was disgusted with the actual script.

Relentlessly offensive.