There’s so much high-voltage fun running throughout this comic sci-fantasy -- engineered gleefully by director Luc Besson -- you’re hard-pressed to be unaffected.

This version may not break new ground, but it revisits familiar territory with a vibrant sense of style and welcome restraint. It exemplifies the kind of respectable and utterly unnecessary remake that now defines the Hollywood business model.

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.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

Central Intelligence won’t win any points for originality, but that doesn’t make it any less funny.

A didactic collegiate farce -- "Animal House" with pan-African politics, and an enormously embarrassing encore. Tell an inexperienced director he's a genius, and you create Dr. Frankenstein. School Daze, with its pompous patchwork plot, is an arrogant, humorless, sexist mess.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

You can't criticize it for false advertising.

If its heart-pounding romance doesn’t make you cry, its sorely needed sense of optimism will surely make you smile.

Despite flashes of brilliance, strong performances and innovative camera techniques, the film never rises above the schmaltz of an after-school special.

"Grease 2" is the most serendipitous sequel in recent memory. It is an ingratiating, jubilant improvement on a crummy original.

Director Jeff Prosserman's retelling borders on reprehensible, as he attempts to heighten an already powerful tale with a parade of needless bells and whistles, from flashy camera work to melodramatic reenactments. What a shame, because the story is truly astonishing.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

The movie updates Disney's blueprint without altering it in any meaningful way.

It's difficult to view Sudden Impact as anything more exciting or authentic than the action movie equivalent of drawn-out foreplay and faked orgasm.

The kind of statement that makes you feel like you’re watching a movie not about real people but about how eight years after #MeToo, we still haven’t figured out how to talk about it at all.

It's fists and feet that do the talking in Under Siege 2 and they prove eloquent enough.

The characters have an equally realistic appearance that's rarely seen in Hollywood productions these days

This biblical action drama that feels excessive in every way imaginable, from running time (nearly 2 1/2  hours) to melodramatic acting to the conspicuous amount of computer generation.

A low-horsepower chase movie with Charlie Sheen and D.B. Sweeney...Peter Werner, with plenty of documentaries and "Moonlighting" episodes to his credit, directs this out-of-gas look at the young and the mobile. What this movie needs is more macho, more moxie, more attitude. Fill it up, and make it high testosterone.

It's exactly like "Star Wars" -- if you subtract a good story, sympathetic characters, intelligence, wit and moral purpose.

In the end, The Devil's Double is one long balance sheet. On the plus side are the dueling performances of Cooper, which anchor the film. On the minus side is a seemingly interminable litany of violence, abuse and degradation. They cheapen the film by nudging it in the direction of a splatter flick.

Takes a turn for the dark side that will satisfy the franchise’s adult fans even more.

For those with no vested interest in this protracted and supernatural soap opera, but who do care about cinema, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2 will be, unsurprisingly, a silly and somewhat cheesily made waste of time.

A serviceable mash-up of sitcom and sports flick, 80 for Brady should please fans of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and/or Tom Brady. Everybody else might want to call a timeout.

It's foul, with so little left to the imagination that we get a look between his toes. [13 May 1983, p.19]

As an attempt to expose college athletics for what it is — a laughably lucrative hierarchy that relies on free labor by student-athletes to line the pockets of coaches, commissioners and other bigwigs — National Champions gets a notch in the win column.

Despite its obviously derivative elements and lack of flair in certain areas, notably writing and casting, the movie is at worst an entertaining redundancy, a brisk and diverting pastiche of familiar science-fiction adventure hokum. [24 Dec 1979, p.C1]