"Lost" star Matthew Fox pitches in with a strong performance as a coach who, by the laws of whimsy, didn't take the final flight home and had to struggle with survivor's guilt.

After all, it isn't every kid's movie that wrestles with the subject of faith in a higher power, or sin, or the afterlife. And it isn't every kid's film that can do it so entertainingly. Sure, that's heavy stuff if you're looking for it. But it doesn't spoil the great, great fun to be had in Narnia - or the magical spell it casts - if you're not.

With the exception of a few choice words from Haddish, Landscape With Invisible Hand lacks the kind of steady humor and energy that would otherwise keep the story afloat.

The screenplay by John Aboud, Michael Colton and Brandon Sawyer has a fizzy, pop-culture pizazz, tempered by a distinctly vaudeville sensibility. It’s smart, but not brainy; dumb, but never inane.

But this unsavory stew is just plain overcooked.

Another ultra-stylized movie-about-movies by the Cannes-winning Coen Brothers, Hudsucker is clever but cold, a heartless mechanical gizmo. The actors rattle around tinnily like shiny marbles inside its cavernous sets and hollow script.

A movie that’s visually stunning and often poetic, but also leaves too much unsaid.

Despite all the swooping and spinning and swinging in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield looks less like a kid having fun than like an actor entangled in a corporate web that, at least for now, he can’t escape.

The topic certainly suits the times, but the director's approach is as alienating as it is old-fashioned.

Still, if the movie is mediocre, the history it represents is not. For that correction to our collective Western amnesia, then, Annaud deserves some special award.

New Suit is devilishly good fun.

The actors haven't much to do. It looks like everybody needed the work. [10 Jan 1986, p.21]

Subway begins as the world's greatest car stereo commercial and ends as the world's worst concert film. In between is a muzzy tale of doomed love; and when doom lowers its boom here, it feels awfully like relief. Rarely has the excitement of an opening sequence been so quickly piddled away. [22 Nov 1985, p.B7]

Every element of the movie feels fabricated, from the stilted conversation to the ­all-too-convenient obstacles the movie keeps throwing in the path of progress.

Onstage, Rent is a series of power surges, but in the movie the songs leave you flat.

Sign oath in blood promising stars they will not have to bother creating characters and can just coast on old tricks.

Cheesy, strident, ridiculous and sometimes disarmingly, stupidly funny, Renfield doesn’t go for the jugular as much as give it a playful and quickly forgotten love bite.

Suspect doesn't provide even the most basic pleasure that we've come to expect from thrillers -- it's doesn't get our pulse racing. For most of it, we're stuck in what must be the ugliest courtroom in the history of movies, and after a while, it becomes a drag on your spirits.

As gratifying as it is to see forgotten history brought to light, it’s disappointing, too: There’s an epic story to be told within Free State of Jones, but this white-knight tale isn’t it.

Uneven, ambiguous and unnerving, “Sharp Stick” undoubtedly has a point to make. What that is, precisely, might be subject to debate.

During the movie's awww-inducing conclusion, those of you who are allergic to cuteness - or to Jim Carrey - might want to look away.

All in all, A Good Woman retains ye olde Wilde's zing, his sense of pace and place, but most of all his snappy one-liners, and it finds a new way to showcase them brilliantly.

A film that reduces everything and everyone in its well-worn path to a pretentious trope and, in its final Grand Guignol moments, high camp.

The movie is so tepid and inoffensive: It reminded me of a '70s Disney live-action product, with clean-scrubbed "hippies" like Johnny Whitaker chafing harmlessly under the wise ministrations of Suzanne Pleshette, whose job was to keep the kids in hand.

Director Richard Loncraine (“5 Flights Up”) wisely gets out of the way, for the most part, letting his cast breathe life into the limp cliches that have been woven by screenwriters Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft.

Tender also is an apt description for the gently heartwarming tone of this appealingly low-key, faded Kodachrome coming-of-age story, capably directed by Clooney from a screenplay by William Monahan (“The Departed”).

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

Any film that dares to cast the bat-chewing heavy-metal legend as a gentle, ceramic reindeer named Fawn is okay in my Bard book.

Blind faith, I’d say, is beside the point here. As with all the films in the Conjuring universe, — really exorcism films in general — sitting back and enjoying the ride, to whatever bowels of heck it might take you, is enough.

Between this film and last summer's "Horrible Bosses," Aniston's coyness - starring in explicit movies without having to be explicit herself - seems to be becoming her stock in trade. It's not a particularly commendable one, and Wanderlust does little to disprove that she's still a star more suited to TV rather than the big screen.

For all its intimations about finding one’s true self and the complicated setups for a big misidentification, The Pretty One is just another romantic dramedy.

Target depends on a few sleights of hand, all transparent; so transparent that you quickly forget about what's wrong with the movie and focus on its strengths -- particularly a quirky, adventurous performance by Gene Hackman. [8 Nov 1985, p.C1]

Co-directed by siblings and faith-based filmmakers Andrew and John Erwin, this down-the-middle crowd pleaser ultimately makes for a rousing enough portrayal of against-the-odds fortitude, pad-crunching gridiron action and good old-fashioned Midwestern decency.

Full disclosure: I am so not the target demographic for Five Feet Apart, a mushy, three-hankie weeper that is aimed squarely between the eyes of every 15-year-old girl.

Reynolds, known for the “Deadpool” movies, jettisons that character’s foul mouth in this PG-rated outing, yet he brings a similar, blunt-spoken charm to this sweet-at-the-center role.

Could be filed under "wacky misfire."

A hyper-violent, post-apocalyptic Western in the mold of "Mad Max" that can't make up its mind whether it wants to be corny or misanthropic.

A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and historic revisionism, Australia is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining.

Everything has been modernized except for the characters, and that's this movie's tragic flaw.

The movie is both exhilarating and depressing. The trouble is, I can't figure out which is more important.

Romero's film starts out well and clearly benefits from some higher-on-the-line elements, ranging from the cast to the cinematography of Tony Pierce-Roberts (A Room With a View, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge). But like too many King transfers to the screen, it falls apart in the last reel.

There's a thin line between some drag comedy and misogyny, and Girls Will Be Girls, a crass comedy in which all the women are played, with over-the-top abandon, by men, roars past that line.

Spends too much time being convivial and not enough time looking for the kind of real conflict that begets a good comedy.

Yes, it’s plainly derivative, but Dave Green’s debut feature is heartfelt and fun, particularly for children craving live-action films beyond big-budget superhero reboots and animated sequels.

It’s all in the name of comedy, and it mostly works, with a couple of exceptions, including an especially mean-spirited and somewhat violent tirade against a fan he met in an airport.

Like “The Intouchables,” Samba is loosely plotted and is at least 20 minutes too long. It seems ready to end half a dozen times before it finally does, with ironic payoffs for Samba and Alice that are too glib to be satisfying.

In the end, Viceroy’s House works, but mainly as a historical refresher on the 70th anniversary of Indian independence. As drama, it’s a reminder that truth is sometimes more affecting than fiction.

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

It will put some viewers in mind of yet another story with the same theme: "Pinocchio."

This kind of macho bantering quickly wears thin, too -- I guess it's not surprising that men who spend most of their time with other men would lard their conversation with taunts of homosexuality and allusions to male gonads, but it's not particularly interesting either. And as a storyteller, Carabatsos is no better than a competent hack. The plot is schematic, the characters are cliche's.

Todd Robinson's script, alas, drags White Squall down. As directed by Ridley Scott, with a surplus of intrusive music and some manic overacting, the movie dips into cliches. [02 Feb 1996]

What do we want in a sequel? Just a little taste of the original or a triple serving piled high? Dead Man's Chest opts for the latter. This Disney movie isn't a follow-up to the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" so much as its empty-calorie clone.

The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]

Screenwriter Robert Getchell and director John Badham (whose resume includes the fallen "Bird on a Wire") wouldn't know a believable moment if it hit them. Fonda's transformation to lethal weapon, her affair with Mulroney and the implied romance with Byrne are all lukewarm, lazily outlined conceits. There have been deeper human relationships in TV commercials.

The film’s subtly observed moments are more powerful than any of its technical wizardry.

And the action? It's especially hard to determine who's fighting whom in "Legends," because, well, because they are a bunch of owls.

If there's an amnesia movie worse than Overboard, it slips my mind.

Instead of gold-medal-winning, last-minute heroics, the movie weirdly becomes about the scandal of arbitrary gymnastics judges. Is it a movie or an episode of "Real Sports"? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

It's like Rambo's "First Blood," with an action hero in dog tags who doesn't talk much.

The actual movie is the cinematic equivalent of cheap Chinese egg rolls: all flour and cabbage shreds, maybe half a nibble of pork.

Terribly tragic, terribly romantic and, ultimately, terribly, terribly dull.

Unfortunately, the more traditionally drawn 2-D human characters are as flat, in every sense of the word, as can be.

The Awakening is nonsense, but with its posh British cast and colors drained to near-gray, it's very solemn nonsense.

The sparkly but flawed sequel to the couple's last caper. [13 Dec 1985, p.29]

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

There are three fine performances lost in this otherwise middling film. Alan Arkin makes a wonderfully gruff newspaper editor who does just about as much barking as Marley. Jennifer Aniston makes the most of the rather slender figure of Jennifer Grogan, creating a believably human picture of a career woman who gives it up for the kids. And then there's the dog that plays Marley.

THERE'S Big Trouble in Little China all right, as Kurt Russell wrestles his way through this kung-fu comedy adventure. It might have been a Raiders of the Lost Wok, but instead it's a bad marriage of martial arts and action spoofery, bungled by director John Carpenter working from the world's worst screenplay. [04 July 1986, p.N29]

The Hollars drives inexorably to a conclusion that feels as manipulatively mawkish as it is impossibly tidy, typical of a genre that too often tries to have it both ways. It turns out that happy families are all alike, even when they’re a little bit sad.

True to the film's name, there is one thing I couldn't hardly wait for, and that's the closing credits.

Set on the International Space Station, the movie “I.S.S.” is a modest but satisfyingly suspenseful thriller whose central conflict between the six members of the station’s half-American, half-Russian crew is precipitated by a decidedly earthbound crisis.

What was a steamy battle of wits in the novel looks more like a chemistry-free charade onscreen. Instead of character development the audience gets torture galore, whether it’s Dominika being doused with freezing water while naked and tied to a chair or a particularly sadistic character flaying someone alive.

It’s as affecting as drama as it is effective as horror. It wrenches, even as it unnerves.

Ultimately the movie disintegrates due to its own clumsiness. It's far too coincidence-driven to be believable.

Although Measure of a Man is less gut-wrenching than director Jim Loach’s only previous theatrical film, “Oranges and Sunshine” — about the cruel fate of unwanted children shipped from England to Australia during the United Kingdom’s mid-20th-century “child migrant” program — the British filmmaker shows himself to have an affinity for tales of the abuse of power.

Shot mostly in deeply shadowed interiors, the movie rarely makes effective use of its widescreen format. Indeed, it has a stagy quality and plays mostly as a series of theatrical exchanges between Gilles and Koch.

The Artist and the Model isn’t about much, other than female beauty. That theme is not exactly controversial. Chalk the tameness of the subject matter up to the period in which the film is set.

A premise is about all The Cutting Edge has, and what a tired one it is.

Fly Me to the Moon strains to achieve liftoff, sometimes quite amusingly. But in the end, it’s just too heavy to get off the ground.

Ultimately, The Guardian veers off into slobbery touchy-feeliness, and the tone becomes mock-religious, almost liturgical.

All in all, In Time is not just stylish but surprisingly substantial. From now on, you'll think twice every time you hear the phrase "rollover minutes."

The movie turns out to be something we’ve seen before: an underdog tale mixed with a redemption narrative.

The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.

It's like a PBS version of a movie of the week about child abduction, complete with histrionic, spit-flecked speechifying in quaint Irish brogues.

It's a love story, yes, but one whose sweetness is cut by honest performances, a sharply drawn supporting cast and a fairly serious, yet never self-pitying, tone.

A tarted-up but tedious reprise of the '70s TV series.

Its scope isn't broad enough to draw in the uninitiated.

This calculatingly adorable coming-of-age tale has its delights — chiefly in a modest, endearing lead performance from Anton Yelchin and an amusing two-handed turn by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as his parents — but feels more constructed than lived.

A startlingly inappropriate tragedy in the final act drives home the film’s pacifist message, while virtually ensuring that the youngest and most sensitive viewers will be left in a puddle of tears.

Although its final act is brutal, this Chinese crime drama also has elements of farce and romance.

Tomorrow is propelled by relentless action. Chase scenes are interrupted not by witty conversation or sexy conquests but by the rattle of machine gun fire.

Bolstered by good supporting performances from Kyra Sedgwick, Janeane Garofalo and Ritchie Coster, Submission is a handsome-looking film that aims to fulfill the most meek, well-behaved implications of its title.

White House Down never quite seems to decide what kind of movie it wants to be, although by firepower alone it qualifies as this summer’s most cartoonishly bombastic exercise in sensory overload (so far).

If for some reason you find yourself in a theater watching the martial arts adventure Man of Tai Chi...feel free to take a nap during the non-fight sequences.

This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.

“Chaos” might have been better had the filmmaker revisited his interview subjects now that we are deep into Trump’s presidency. But that would have required additional work. If the film is a testament to anything, it’s Stern’s laziness.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

It's a remarkable, if appalling, spectacle of self-abasement. But of course, that's Sandler's specialty.

Promises to speed up the pacemakers of grumpy old Republicans with its ruthless indictment of the unzipped presidency.

Lives up to Tarantino's imprimatur, both in its cheesy grind house aesthetic and its occasional forays into brilliant, bravura filmmaking.

Front Cover is weighed down by heavy-handed dialogue and a melodramatic score.

Despite this sporadic funny stuff and the enthusiastic cast members, "Zorro" degenerates into a ponderous trifle. By turns, Peter Medak's direction seems stuffy and scattered and Hamilton's Spanish and English accents keep getting lost on the soundtrack. [25 July 1981, p.C9]

It's a shame that the plot proves to be such a head-scratcher when so many elements of the film seem promising.

Horovitz may have made a questionable decision in adapting this particular play for the screen, but his casting was flawless.

The Devil's Own, which stars Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, is so epically awful, it's practically homeric.

This latest project, a murder mystery scripted by Aaron (A Few Good Men) Sorkin and Scott (Dead Again) Frank, is bilge water.

Anyone who's ever sat through a Neil LaBute film knows you can make a movie in which all the characters are unsympathetic, but this trio is uninteresting, to boot.

Despite the unforced humor and honesty in the performances of its young and talented cast, The Wood spends too much time wallowing in arrested adolescence to make you feel you've traveled anywhere.

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

The parodistic romantic comedy makes the fatal mistake of so much middlebrow satire: It becomes that which it mocks.

The charismatic comedienne pulls the slipshod spy adventure Jumpin' Jack Flash out of the fire. [10 Oct 1986, p.N29]

This overproduced romantic comedy doesn't even qualify as fluff; it's flat, featureless plastic.

Rather than aim for the flagstick, “Happy Gilmore 2” seems all too content to lay up in search of one gimme putt after another.

What sets Four Good Days apart from the many other films of its ilk are Close and Kunis, who sharpen and elevate its well-worn contours with vivid performances that are honest and grounded. These are characters you can connect to, on both sides of the equation.

Agnes of God offers little besides its jury-rigged suspense. Oh, there are oodles of cigarette jokes -- Livingston is a chain smoker, Mother Miriam a reformed one -- till you wonder why the acknowledgment to Benson & Hedges in the closing credits didn't come above the title.

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.

Parading through most of the movie in a cutoff T-shirt and bikini briefs, Ricci takes the stereotype of the oversexed farmer's daughter to gothic extremes; Jackson's character, named Lazarus, is similarly drawn with oversize strokes.

Zem and Bourgoin are great, but the movie is too frivolous to win anything but a dismissal in the court of moviegoer opinion.

Elsa & Fred feels not substantial enough to bear the weight of its themes. It dissolves like cotton candy, making proper digestion impossible. The life it shows us is too sweet.

The movie Vulgaria is not one for the kiddies. Then again, the description "for mature audiences" doesn't seem right either. The Hong Kong comedy, a broad, cartoonish -- and decidedly filthy -- satire of moviemaking is as sophomoric as they come. It's also pretty funny, in an unapologetically over-the-top way.

The film’s likeable leads almost carry off a dark premise: that the love that strengthens this couple also makes them dangerous.

Blackhat is also one of the most visually unattractive movies I’ve ever seen.

It’s all kiss-kiss, bang-bang and backstabbing, with a twist that, while effective, leads to a denouement of questionable — and not entirely satisfying — moral reckoning. In some ways, Yardie plays out like a film noir, but with a strangely sweet ending, and without that genre’s deliciously bitter aftertaste.

It doesn't open up much new territory, except to eschew much of the dark, frank sexuality that has characterized such recent sexual coming-of-age movies as "Mysterious Skin." Instead, Bardwell offers a cheerful, if sometimes strenuously earnest, take on a subject that seems overdue for a lighthearted touch.

This isn’t a paint-by-numbers revenge plot. When the payoff finally comes, it’s as satisfying as it is perplexing.

The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.

One truly, madly, deeply satisfying creep-out.

A dramatization of the life of Christ that takes as its script a word-for-word translation of the Gospel according to John, the adaptation is not so much tedious as pointless.

To watch Greendale is to understand everything about Neil Young. Like him, it's grungy, honest, disarming and unapologetically original.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

Being oneself is (or, again, seems to be) the theme of Wolf, which at times plays like a clumsy allegory about, say, the challenges faced by trans youth — there’s a poster on the wall of the clinic about “species dysphoria” — yet most of the time is simply a more generalized fable about finding your groove, your bliss, your true, inner self — and running with it (naked, if need be, and on all fours). If it’s an allegory, it trivializes whatever it’s allegorizing.

Thanks to the heavy synthetic hand of director George Roy Hill, the potentially charming aspects of the kids' infatuation curdle into syrupy gruel.

It’s not great cinema. It’s good at what it sets out to do. Which makes it great fun.

The “Insidious” franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.

The Switch, to its credit, really is about a boy, who with the help of a sensitive, sad-eyed kid, stands a chance of becoming a man.

If you have a shred of idealism left, it’s hard to watch Citizen Koch without a mounting sense of despair and outrage over the influence that money has come to wield over modern elections.

Instead of a crackling good movie in which "The Longest Yard" meets, say, "The Bad News Bears," director Phil Joanou instead decided to make Gridiron Gang a lugubrious tutorial on the importance of being a winner.

Watchable, if cliched.

Preposterous, predictable, but excessively entertaining, this frenzied thriller draws both story and characters from such action classics as "The Fugitive," "Die Hard," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Silence of the Lambs."

Kandahar is very much a box-ticking exercise, with Butler playing the same kind of hero — perhaps literally the same guy — he has built a career out of.

If the movie is cheesy at times, it more often presents an understanding of life’s contradictions and compromises.

The Lake House has the sensibility of something conceived by Stephen King after an overdose of chocolate-covered cherries and valentine cards. In other words, it's sugary sweet and based on a premise that's just -- no other word will do -- ridiculous.

There's a powerfully creepy sensibility to Deadfall. But the way it handles the messiness of families -- a universal message given vivid metaphorical life in the blood and guts it leaves in its path -- is finally rewarding.

Clara's Heart has several pluses. There's the rapport between Goldberg and Harris, impressive in his screen debut. And it is a relief to see Goldberg working back into The Color Purple mode.

If you sit back and enjoy its mindless rhythms, you might have a good time. Just don’t try mining the lyrics for meaning.

The crime’s solution is fine and dandy, but it’s Poirot himself who most fascinates. This isn’t your grandmother’s Agatha Christie, in other words. It belongs to Branagh, heart and soul.

The movie feels stretched out and thin.

Serves as a fascinating exploration of racial and social prejudice; and an indictment of cultural miscegenation.

The movie's big action scenes, at times, make you forget you're even watching animation. There's an in-your-face sequence involving a runaway, crashing train that will make you squirm in your seat trying to get out of the way.

Zhao might have her eye on the nuances, but ultimately even a filmmaker with her sensitivity and vision can’t bend the Great Marvel Imperative to her will.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

It plods along dutifully, with the occasional zigzag into contrivance, tidy coincidence and outright preposterousness.

Clearly Oz sees Housesitter as a screwball caprice, but the Muppeteer-turned-director delivers a stale couple's counseling movie. The message -- if your partner is a deluded liar, then you might as well be too -- must have been thought up by Pinocchio.

The film is deeply flawed, and sodden with sexual moralism. But amid Hollywood products pasteurized from demographics and screening groups, the idiosyncratic vision of Ken Russell is a refreshing breath of foul air.

The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.

Cannery Row is expendable and creaky, a lavishly mounted antique.

Even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

“Murder” may lack urgency, but it does have style. The sets, the costumes and the vistas are stunning.

It can take a miracle to create a movie that's fun for kids and their parents. Luckily, Nanny McPhee has a little magic up her sleeve.

It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.

Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.

Electric Dreams can be trusted to provide some idle amusement, particularly from "users" cautious enough to keep both their demands and levels of resistance set at low-to-modest -- probably the ideal setting for summer moviegoing in general, come to think of it.

The script of Three Amigos (Martin's collaborators were producer Lorne Michaels and singer Randy Newman) plays like it was slapped together by a few friends with a tape recorder enjoying a charming weekend at the beach. You can't tell one amigo from another, the gags are silly (a "singing bush") and far between, the dialogue full of inane wordplay. Sample: "We could take a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda." "The lips would be fine."

Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.

There doesn't seem to be much purpose to it except a half-baked notion that the histrionics of the mentally insane (or a moviemaker's idea therein) are eminently cinematic. They aren't.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

Another Kevin Williamson triumph, a smart, sharply drawn genre film with a moral center and a solid cast of young actors to hold it.

Insipid, by-the-numbers romance.

A spoofy paean to cheerfolk that has more bounce per flounce than most tales about teen queens.

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

Stewart’s unexpected casting here, in a frothy action comedy, injects the movie with a shot of much-needed unpredictability. Of all the Angels, she works the hardest, ensuring that the movie isn’t forgettable.

A bucolic sex comedy in which Nicholson the director indulges Nicholson the star an orgy of coy monkey-shines in the role of a scruffy outlaw who enters into a marriage of convenience with a demure young woman who owns a ranch and a goldmine - expires right before your eyes from a terminal case of the feebles. Goin' South is the most flat-footed comedy to collapse on the screen since Nickelodeon.

The Amateur may be off to a rocky start as a spy franchise, but it scores one for the IT crowd.

The comedian’s wryly clownish antics as the preening, not-especially bright owner of several fast-fashion stores are in service of a story that feels sloppy and overly broad.

Did the original “Super Fly” need to be remade? Not really. The new film is a decent example of the barrage of reboots storming theaters lately, but that’s all it is: decent.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth"), the movie is heavy on hokum but easy to like, thanks to the spunky Schroeder.

Dark, dank, damp, grim, dingy and dour, Dark Water is a tasteful but unremitting bummer.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

It's not surprising that Punchline is mostly banal; it's constructed on a banality -- namely, that clowns suffer.

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]

The latest collaboration between ever-reliable Brit of Few Words Jason Statham and writer-director David Ayer — who teamed up more fruitfully on last year’s “The Beekeeper,” a revenge flick as wonderfully unhinged as its title — seems to belong to a bygone, channel-surfing era.

It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Laugh a little bit, but prepare to be overwhelmed a lot.

There's a little too much over-the-top drama, as well as superfluous detail, in this Icelandic film.

The result is cutesy but harsh, a hybrid of saucer-eyed anime and square-jawed angularity that brings to mind an edgier "Pokemon."

Shakespeare asked, "Or in the heart, or in the head?" It's not a new question by any means, but it's one that is given a fresh and refreshing adult twist by Decena's heady yet steady-handed Dopamine.

It's less a children's movie made for contemporary children than a children's movie made for people who still remember, and pine for, how children's movies were made 50 years ago.

A martial-arts ad­ven­ture with more video-game and comic-book DNA than the traditional kung fu flick, Tai Chi Zero is good, if empty-headed, fun.

Ping Pong Summer may not be an instant classic, but it knows its time and place. There’s a humble honor in that.

It's a fluffy, mildly inspiring, celebration of the hero leading up to his big moment.

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.

The films of Michel Gondry aren't for everyone, but viewers who vibe to his playful, cerebral, wildly imaginative sensibility might get a kick out of Be Kind Rewind.

What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb.

With Casa de Mi Padre, it's often hard to tell the difference between when it's making fun of bad movies and when it's being one.

Spielberg and Co. have finally made their Disney movie -- or better yet, their film version of a theme park at Disneyland. It's sort of like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "It's a Small World" rolled into one. It's a helluva contraption, and certainly one to be marveled at. It gives good ride.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

Race to Witch Mountain has Johnson, who lifts the script above its conventional cat-and-mouse stratagems with his buoyant wiseacre timing.

It's about as deep as electronic white noise.

Put the whole movie down to cartoonery...This is a drive-in theater battle of wills between the forces of evil and the forces of good.

The film is an effective, even heartwarming, tale of one man’s commitment to teaching that playing by the rules is more important than winning.

The film aspires to some sort of commentary about the modern problems of career-minded spouses. Shyer and Meyers are trying to tap a modern vein but they don't know where to put the needle; all they get is water. This is a film with Perrier in its veins. [28 Sep 1984, p.C4]

This lurid celebration of shock, schlock and the shamelessly perverse finds the 67-year-old grandfather of torture porn scraping the bottom of his admittedly limited creative barrel.

Handsome but stilted.

Becomes a strung-together collection of interesting, semi-interesting, boring and sometimes embarrassing (seemingly improvised) moments from the cast.

The kid chews up the scenery like a baby T-Rex, egged on, no doubt, by director Agresti.

The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Big, slick and showy. It is also undeniably effective entertainment.

At times, “Apocalypse” can be great fun, even if it doesn’t know when to hand its car keys to a friend and ask to be taken home.

Like Maxime’s roach-man, “Despicable Me 4” is a hallucinatorily imaginative yet overstuffed amalgam of unrelated elements.