The Monuments Men often lets the schematic gears show, succumbing to threadbare formula and sentimental cliches rather than taut, sophisticated drama.

The compulsively watchable Owen makes for an ideal leading man of both action and angst. The film's eye-popping set piece, a shootout at the Guggenheim Museum, is an extravagantly choreographed valentine to philistines everywhere.

Betsy's Wedding is white cake and warm bubbly, not an unsuitable marriage, just a tepid one.

Rudderless is a competent, well-acted melodrama, yet in scope and ambition it has the modest and serviceable scale of the small, not silver, screen.

It's too long to be great and it's too square to be great and it's too loud to be great and it finds homosexual effeminacy too funny to ever be called great, but I can't imagine anyone coming out sadder than they went in.

The three actors excel in their roles, and director Matthew Saville gives additional insight into the men through small yet informative details.

Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.

The new movie adorned with this sure-fire title happens to be a tacky and disreputable attempt at a sophisticated comedy about women writers.

Triple 9 feels more like a collection of good scenes than a novel, propulsive whole. Viewers are apt to be entertained by the film’s visceral pulp pleasures, but left apathetic when it comes to its instantly forgettable genre cliches.

Stenberg and Robinson are enormously appealing young actors, but charisma only goes so far in a story that manages to be, as directed by Stella Meghie (“Jean of the Joneses”), sterile and wildly far-fetched.

Talking-head interviews interspersed with reenactments reminiscent of cheap true-crime shows are the filmic equivalent of a polo shirt and khakis: blandly acceptable but uninspired.

Wendy Wasserstein brings a dull pen to this literary adaptation, which shows none of the bite or savvy of Stephen McCauley's novel.

Enormously visually appealing, even if the story itself is almost unrecognizably bloated.

Clearly well timed with Lenten reflections on sacrifice, service, suffering and responsibility. But it offers an equally relevant — and inspiring — portrayal of principled steadfastness and spiritual integrity in the face of a petty, corrupt and tyrannical leader.

An uncommonly warm, relaxed little movie, the kind they call a "feel-good film," but without a cloying artificially-sweetened aftertaste.

Based on "Romeo and Juliet" the way a martini is "based" on vermouth.

And even though the jokes keep on coming, not all are side-splitters. But before it's all over, they will have viewers howling at one or more pants-wettingly silly moments.

A glittery but dunderheaded murder mystery.

Forget Tad Hamilton -- this is really a 90-minute date with Kate Bosworth.

You can't make an epic about a mouse.

It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.

Ponderously cliched and predictable. [19 July 1996, p.N33]

Swedish director Daniel Espinosa isn't as adept at chase scenes as "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass: We sometimes lose track of who's supposed to be where and which direction the bullets are flying.

Nivola and Breslin make a terrific mismatched pair in a film that often resembles a mash-up of "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere," which may account for why it too often feels derivative and contrived.

Schemel's life story contains many interesting pieces - growing up as a lesbian in a conservative rural town, battling a lifetime of drug addiction, spending years in proximity to Love - but Hit So Hard often finds her as an extra in her own film.

Epic in its ambitions and often visually and emotionally strong, the film nevertheless suffers from a confusing narrative and a style of computer animation that blurs the lines between the real and the animated in a way that evokes the discomfiting artifice of “The Polar Express” (2004).

It’s difficult to believe a word of Labor Day, but then again you don’t have to in order to luxuriate in Winslet and Brolin’s bubbling, steaming chemistry.

There's style and humor, but the visual excess overwhelms the weak plot. [29 Apr 1983, p.17]

Despite the story’s familiarity, its star manages to turn its many tropes into a winning formula.

The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.

For all its playfulness, the new RoboCop can’t help but lack the novelty of the original’s jolting mixture of dumb-smart irony and visceral pulp.

A film that manages to avoid the dreary, Wikipediaesque literalism that plagues so many biopics while obliquely evoking the man and his era with textures, atmosphere, mood and tone.

His screenplay for Beautiful Creatures is sharp and witty, considering the needlessly complicated source material. His cast is stellar, and the chemistry between his young stars magical. But too much of rest of the movie, like Thompson’s monstrous mother, is an unholy mess.

The result is an unusual movie about acceptance, tolerance, support, sex and fun among a group of longtime female friends who meet for three weekends within a year. Women viewers are not likely to be surprised by their conversation; men may be.

Let's not waste any time: This movie is just awful. Prime problem: Josh Kornbluth, the chubby, wild-haired, bug-eyed star.

Meyers seems content to make a nice movie about nice people doing their best to be nice to each other despite one or two not-nice things that happen along the way. That’s all very nice, but not particularly the stuff of potent or rousing entertainment.

An utterly pointless remake of Sam Peckinpah's hair-raising road movie. Updated and dumbed down, this anemic variation on the bloodier 1972 original is primarily an opportunity for those vast legions of Baldwin-Basinger voyeurs. You know who you are.

The Age of Adaline works best as a simple story of boy meets girl; girl falls in love; girl mulls whether or not to reveal that she’ll stay young forever. Everything else is just a lot of unnecessary noise.

A film of admirable ambition but vexingly uneven execution.

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

Uncle Buck is competent comedy, a bit simplistic, a bit stale, no gremlins, no gushiness, no surprises. A Hughes movie offers the kind of reliability you expect from major household appliances or a good set of radials.

The movie simply delivers too many colorfuls for its own good, none of whom establish a true emotional identity, and thus it isn't moving, it's busy. Busy, busy, busy.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has pomp and scale; what it lacks is something essential -- a sense of Once Upon a Time wonder, the exultant, heady thrill of legend.

For a moment, the movie tries to be about something deeper — some existential epiphany, perhaps. The book didn’t deal in platitudes. It was content to be lightly educational, but mostly just entertaining. The movie aspires to be more than that, only to reveal how much less than that it really is.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom finds another way to grow: by making its plot much, much bulkier. In doing so, it commits the worst possible sin: It makes dinosaurs boring.

It's more a brave movie than it is a good one, but at least Singleton has faced the unknown. And he deserves credit for the attempt.

The stars of First Descent aren't particularly memorable, or even likable. At their worst, they come off as cocky, self-absorbed Peter Pans; at their best, they're sweet but shallow.

Destined to be forgotten in the wasteland that stretches between the actor’s best work and his worst, this dumb-but-not-dumb-enough, simultaneously heartwarming and disheartening film features layer upon layer of wedding-disaster clichés (complete with a trashed cake).

The movie is a little crude for the subtlety of the emotions it plays with.

For all this potential, and the appealing presence of Nicolas Cage and newcomer Adam Beach, Windtalkers remains almost obstinately flat.

This is a downbeat, indulgent and self-consciously quirky little movie.

But it's Roberts's memorably comic performance that is the most distinguishing aspect of the movie. As the gawky professional companion, she's ticklishly appealing.

If Refn is trying to skewer our cultural fixation with youth and good looks, his blade isn’t up to the task. The Neon Demon attacks, but indiscriminately. It’s sharp-looking but dull, hacking and plunging every which way, yet drawing no real blood.

Depending on how you take your twee — sparingly or, as is the case in this preciously concocted tale of English misfits, slathered like marmalade over a crumpet — it will either delight or quickly cloy.

Top Gun is basically "An Officer and a Gentleman" with less spirit and depth. But it's still fine formula movie-making -- like a feature-length "Be All That You Can Be" commercial. It's got lots of loud music, hot colors, heat-seeking missiles and other pointed objects. Real men squint into the radar's gleam below deck, while real men hunt MiGs upstairs. [16 May 1986, p.29]

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy promises to take off every so often, but the material proves too slight for buoyant fancy. [16 July 1982, p.C1]

It seemed to me that what Eddie and the Cruisers aspired to do was certainly worth doing. The problem is that it finally lacks the storytelling resources to tell enough of an intriguing story about a musical mystery man. [30 Sept 1983, p.E2]

Let's Spend the Night Together is a disappointing souvenir, at best a sweet substitute for the many who couldn't catch the Stones live. The Stones' status has always excused their shortcomings, so this film won't shake the believers. But it won't convince the skeptics, either. [12 Feb 1983, p.C1]

Heroism, however real, doesn’t, by definition, make The Last Full Measure a great movie. Juicing up a fine story, and then hammering away at its point makes it one that doesn’t appear to trust either its source material or its audience.

It's a frequent theme of bad children's pictures that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is the opposite of unspoiled childhood goodness,and here it is again, only weakly contradicted by the one pleasant actor in the film, Jack Soo, as an idealistic truant officer. It's as if kiddies' mindless escape films, unlike adults', needed to carry their own internal justification. [31 March 1978, p.15]

Zieff & Co. give it a game, good-humored try, but I don't think they're in jeopardy of being celebrated as inspired farceurs. [14 Feb 1984, p.D8]

Watching it leaves you feeling less buzzed than jittery and slightly nauseated. If the "Ocean's" movies were martinis, Contraband is a thermos full of coffee.

The story by screenwriter William Nicholson (“Everest”) jumps from one major episode in Robin’s life to another, but with none of those episodes delving into his interior life, Breathe remains a superficial tear-jerker.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

Gilliam does two things well: mud and trees.

It seems like a waste of talent, but worse still, Cesar Chavez squanders an opportunity to revisit a story worth retelling.

Because Cosmatos has put together a decent cast and a proficient crew, Leviathan is intermittently interesting, but it's a bad sign that the movie starts losing its punch when the monster shows up.

Thanks to its funny, attractive, emotionally on-point cast, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel puts the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement about life having no second acts. In fact, it goes one step further to question why on Earth anyone would stop at just two.

Please circle the sentence that most closely reflects your feelings: 1. To me, this scene sounds precious, cute, madcap, zany, lovable, heart-warming, poignant and funny. 2. I find this scene nauseating, despicable, moronic, simpering, formulaic, tacky and culturally dangerous.

Music redeems an at-risk teen in Urban Hymn, a social-problem melodrama whose other major characters don’t fare so well.

It's a highbrow romantic farce, without the laughs.

It feels more like a prosaic knockoff than a classically inspired original.

Due Date isn't pretty; in fact, it gets kind of ugly. But, at least in the eyes of certain beholders, therein lies its peculiar, bent beauty.

Lester doesn't have the sense of visual style that other directors, like Spielberg and Lucas, bring to their comic-book movies; harshly lit and sometimes amateurish, Commando doesn't last in your eye. And Lester doesn't pace his sequences, allowing the suspense to build -- it's all breakneck, and it tires you out. [04 Oct 1985, p.E3]

Simultaneously earnest yet maudlin, Te Ata lacks the one thing its subject is said to have possessed: a gift for storytelling.

Ultimately, How to Be Single feels reverse-engineered to justify its ending, which while admittedly gratifying, can’t accurately be described as happy. For that, it would have to be worth the contrivances, cliches and tedium that have gone before.

Tired conventions, hoary themes and obvious conclusions.

This summer Bullock is in the driver's seat of The Net, a sort of chase movie on the information highway from veteran producer-turned-director Irwin Winkler, and not only is the film a comedown, it's a far less flattering showcase for her talents as well.

When the danger subsides and the sparkless romance returns to the foreground, the vehicle comes sputtering back to earth with a thud, weighed down by the inertia of its leaden leading lady.

With The Baxter, Showalter's begging his way into the ranks of the safe and the mediocre.

Good camerawork only goes so far. Love drags on and on, alternating between arguments and intimacy, breakups and makeups. The movie never passes the authenticity test; if this is what sex feels like, we’ll all soon be extinct.

Too scary for very young children, yet too silly for most older fans of director Bryan Singer’s earlier forays into the Superman and X-Men franchises, “Jack” seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.

Still, if for the most part Death at a Funeral is as tame as the tasteful parlor where most of its action takes place, it manages to explode one taboo, in casting mostly black actors in roles originally played by whites.

"Valerian” is an expensive, handsome but dozy invalid of a movie.

This earthbound tale has a poignant political message — and not a subtle one.

Live From New York! is a fun, not academic walk down memory lane.

Like the opium dreams that its eponymous hero becomes addicted to, this fragmented, trigger-happy account of Wild Bill Hickok's final years feels like a bad trip through every cheap western knockoff you ever had to sit through.

Shouldn't fool viewers into thinking it's anything but a pseudo-artsy piece of tripe.

Overall the movie is a fun peek at the birth of Lego bricks and their ever-evolving place in the world.

There are certain pleasures here, mostly in the cast of characters. Malkovich’s misanthropic egoist is chief among them. And Bullock makes for a fierce and relatable Mama Bear. But as for tension, there’s precious little.

Suffers from sluggish exposition mediocre direction and a one-closeup-after-another method of composition advertising the film's eventual retirement to the Disney TV series, but it probably salvages things with juvenile audiences by finishing fast. [5 Feb 1977, p.C5]

Between bad hair and tonal irregularity, the movie doesn't give you much to like.

Should have been a smart bit of cinematic froth but instead sinks like an overworked souffle.

Poor Roberts, pretty and perky as the day is long, hasn't a hoot in hell of bringing Julianne off. She's simply not actress enough, she doesn't have that suppleness that would enable her to sell the complexity of emotion, the jealousy, the irrationality, the meanness and the intelligence.

A brightly wrapped, ketchup-drenched mush-burger, it slides down the Zeitgeist esophagus like a slippery McPelican. You pay, you swallow, you drive home. You're left with nothing except, possibly, heartburn.

By turns fascinating, puzzling and troubling -- a deeply felt account of the varieties of religious experience but also a thoroughly uncritical apologia for fanaticism.

The result is a dusty-dopey Tex-wreck, a feeble excuse for a string of computer-programmed explosions and slow-motion death ballets. In director Walter Hill's shaky hands, even the blow-ups are boring. [24 Apr 1987]

This is a movie guaranteed to please crowds, if only because it insists on their affection so strenuously.

An all-star revue of some of the most physically stunning actors working in Hollywood, Think Like a Man is a pleasure if only on a purely sensory level.

Parents can vaguely console themselves, however, that amid the kiddie pollution available on Saturday morning TV, the Turtles rank slightly better than the rest. At least they care about each other and fight crime for other than fortress-destroying, fascistically gratifying reasons. And maybe, just maybe, this will make them curious enough, one day, to check up on the real Michelangelo.

Snitch is protein-and-starch filmmaking at its utilitarian -- and belly-filling -- best. Johnson brings the steak; Bernthal the sizzle. The father-son drama is served up as sauce on the side. But as long as the beef isn’t too overcooked, who needs the A1?

A serviceable, drug-themed crime thriller, made just a skosh more interesting by a handful of ingredients that give it a boost. Chief among them is its unusual premise. Instead of centering on the real-world scourge of heroin, meth, opioids or cocaine, it’s about a new drug — Power.

There are few surprises delivered in Skyscraper, an entertaining if middlebrow thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise its fungibility.

Aquamarine is better than nothing for its woefully underserved audience.

The film never wholly or satisfyingly engages with why Elizabeth becomes so convinced of Todd’s innocence.

Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.

You might call it a black comedy of errors, but the humorous side of the film is less well executed than Slattery’s impeccable creation of a certain neighborhood feel.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

The Final Countdown emerges from a round trip through this time-bending exercise flattened into a two-dimensional letdown. [01 Aug 1980, p.C7]

You'll probably have some laughs along the way in spite of your better instincts.

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

Risen turns out to be an intriguing, if ultimately frustrating, retelling of the familiar story, here reconfigured as a detective procedural.

Overall, the production has the polish and pace that producer/co-writer Luc Besson's work is known for. Any complaints about the lack of substance are pointless.

In the end this “Song” — whose payoff may leave you thinking, “Are you kidding me?” — doesn’t so much crescendo as collapse in on itself, an orchestral work that peters out in a trickle of silly, sour notes.

One wonders if such a story is worth recycling. [16 June 1978, p.18]

Wickedly funny.

The movie itself may be a species of Montezuma's revenge.

Piddling spoof.

Sparse and implausible screenplay.

That's the problem with the whole movie, which lies halfway between poker-face documentary and broad farce.

With its charming character animation and inventive art direction, The Grinch is a vast improvement over Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of the same story.

Its cinematic flair nearly overcomes the awkward story.

Its toxic recipe consists of prurient exploitation steeped in dankly pretentious imagery. [01 Jun 1992, p.D4]

The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.

Got it. Drug companies are evil, and gay people are discriminated against. But these Hollywood pieties can't paper over Schrader's maddening indifference to explaining exactly how the bad guys have been pulling the strings during the previous hour and a half. [14 Dec 2007, p.WE33]

There's nothing wrong with gag-based comedies -- that's what the Sennett comedies were, and that's what "Airplane!" was, too -- but the gags in Better Off Dead aren't all that inventive. Oh, Better Off Dead has its moments -- in particular, a Chinese drag-racing duo who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" -- but it's mostly the usual gross-out fare: inhaling Jello through a straw; fat kid; girl with dental retainer; sticking Q-Tips in nose, ears, mouth. [17 Oct 1985, p.B10]

The final destination of A Five Star Life is well worth the wait, but the service is so slow that some viewers may check out early.

A slight, modestly funny comedy.

As a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, “Cabrini” fulfills its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It’s a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.

The new story is decidedly, deliciously dark, veined with thin layers of Burton’s trademark macabre sensibility, which adds texture and tartness to the inherent charm of the story (at heart, one about the parent-child bond and the possibility of the impossible).

Just when you’re about to write off your investment in Criminal Activities, the third-act dividend pays off, in spades.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

The rift that opens between Bea and the two combatants feels somehow terribly contrived. From there until the requisite happy ending, the story loses some of its emotional weight, if not its humor.

As a persona of epic polarities, [Harrison Ford] animates this muddled, metaphysical journey into the jungle.

A very engaging trip along the cutting edge of America's funny bone.

Put another movie on the barbie, mate; maybe it'll be better.

Delivered with the kind of English aplomb that PBS audiences around the country have come to know and love. It must be the accent.

It’s an air-kiss of a movie, one that places a non-contact peck on either side of its subject’s mouth, then breezes off before a serious conversation can begin.

One detects flickering intentions of enlarging on the formula material -- especially in the byplay between the actors playing narcs -- but the prevailing mood of the entertainment is decidedly bargain-basement. [11 Oct 1979, p.D15]

If the family dynamics feel perfunctory and too-neatly resolved by the end of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal of stymied creativity, exacting taste and sensibilities too bold and well-judged for an uncaring world manages to be funny and uncompromising in equal measure.

Is “Operation Fortune” a cure for the blues? No. It’s an appetizer for better things to come, an amuse-bouche at best — at worst, a placeholder meal of cinematic comfort food, tiding us all over until it’s summer blockbuster season again.

Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.

You have to wonder whether writer and director Steve Conrad, who wrote the films "Wrestling Ernest Hemingway," "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," had something more hefty in mind before Harvey and Bob Weinstein came aboard and marketed his movie as a laugh riot. Regardless, it's not the stuff of lighthearted summer comedy.

What's missing in Quigley Down Under is precisely what is missing in its star. Selleck is a skilled light comedian -- he's at his best delivering a wry put-down to a British officer -- and he handles John Hill's bantering dialogue deftly. But for all his burly authority, Selleck lacks dynamism on screen. There's no danger in him, nothing unresolved or mysterious. He's likable, but something of a lug.

What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

Creation is fatally weakened by an excess of pathos; in a Darwinian universe, it would be quickly swallowed up by a leaner, fitter movie.

At first, Father of the Bride is so funny, it's almost sublime. The rest of the movie, alas, is regrets only.

A lot of this stuff is irresistible. In the early going especially, the movie's infantilism is snappy and surprising. But this is a great idea for a sketch, not a feature, and if Heckerling had resisted padding it out, it might have made a brilliant short. A comedy can ride only so far on high concept. It has to deliver the jokes, and this one doesn't.

No Small Affair is a good example of the revised teen sex movie, which centers on a Morose Young Man unimpressed by the wild life swirling around him -- he'll take romance. But even the facile crudeness of a movie like Porky's seems to have demanded too much of screenwriters Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy.

Working together for the first time since 2004’s “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Magee have reimagined Holm’s vision by scaling back the cynicism, softening the central character’s tragic backstory and dulling the black comedy. Yet it’s Hanks’s performance that sets this Hollywood remake apart from the original.

Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

This sequel to his earlier hit, Every Which Way But Loose, delivers exactly what it promises, namely lots of fistfights, car chases, booze, broads and country music, plus a dollop of the old Eastwood bootstrap philosophy ("Handouts are what you get from the government. A hand-up is what you get from your friends"). As for the comedy, it starts out with Clyde the orangutan defecating in squad cars, and goes downhill from there. [19 Dec 1980, p.23]

It doesn't seem like overstating things to say that Eros becomes steadily worse as it goes along.

Karate Kid: Legends combines the best of all those sequels plus a 2010 remake — a simple underdog tale, appealing casts and crisply filmed action — to contribute a new and worthy chapter to the canon. It’s one whose ambitions meet, and occasionally exceed, our expectations.

It's a sweet but slight film whose undeniable appeal is largely due to the performances of its flat-out adorable leads.

A raunchy parody that's hip-deep in the mainstream it aims to rip, and sometimes does despite a glut of smug inside jokes.

Heavy Metal is one of the worst ideas ever to be translated into a movie. [8 Aug 1981, p.C10]

It's piddling -- a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs...its spirit rattles around inside it like a marble in an oil drum.

True to the profession it sets out to glamorize, The Accountant takes advantage of its share of creative loopholes — and manages to break even in the process.

Ice Castles has been shamelessly, and none too slickly, engineered to empty the tear ducts of customers primed to blubber at the sight of a Pavlovian cliche. [03 Feb 1979, p.D7]

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.

The bigger mystery is whether the models actually work. Though the Armstrong partisans in the film strongly suggest that they do, director Marcus Vetter struggles to convince the lay viewer.

Fear is pretty much a cheap-thrills fix; the ideas, such as they are, function as window dressing. Still, cheap though these thrills may be, they are genuinely thrilling.

The film is artfully shot with eye candy galore: sumptuous dresses, beautiful people and scenes from Pierre and Yves’s time in Morocco. But for all its visual stimulation, the story does little to awaken emotions.

Though it purports to be about the delights of disorder, “A Little Chaos” feels like yet another by-the-book period romance, only without the genre’s requisite spark between the main characters.

The Empire strikes out.

Beware of horror films that begin with a bad dream -- they usually go on that way as well. Case in point: Popcorn, which has several good ideas that, unfortunately, go unrealized.

An emotional thriller that is by turns contrived and impassioned.

The movie is like a Porsche outfitted with a lawn mower engine; there's not even enough juice to get the machine out of the driveway.

It's hard to take Predators terribly seriously.

On the upside, the movie could do something really positive for the cause of homeless pets: If audiences respond the way they should, dog shelters could be emptied in a week.

Telegraphs its every move. There are simply no surprises.

Morning Light, sailor's delight. All others be forewarned.

The lead character ostensibly is Coach Sam Winters, but the film never really focuses on the ethical compromises he needs to make and steers away from him. Thus, James Caan -- playing the coach -- appears in what amounts to a series of cameos. In fact, Caan seemingly just walks through his role, perhaps wondering how he got from "Brian's Song" to this thing.

Someone forgot to remind Duvall to write an ending.

Sadly, the last 40-odd minutes are essentially one fight, pushed to the point of absurdity.

What's troubling about "My Mother" is not the way the sisters respond to the news, but the way that Paris and Fejerman have opted to make lighthearted comic fodder out of the daughters' responses.

Ender’s Game is more than a parable about bullying, or a disquisition on the concept of the “just war.” It’s also a rousing action film, especially in Imax.

Indian Summer would like to be to the '90s what "The Big Chill" was to the '80s. But something is missing, namely a superior cast, a more engaging group of characters, a far smarter, more focused script, and Lawrence Kasdan's expertly timed direction. This is a wan knockoff.

Though the film has its moments and Goldberg is a riot, Sister Act is far from inspired.

A funny, violent, rambunctious shaggy-dog story of a crime caper featuring an ensemble cast studded with colorful characters played by name actors. In other words, it’s more “Snatch” than “Aladdin,” which was only the latest of Ritchie’s misbegotten attempts to achieve mainstream respect by retelling someone else’s stories.

An offering so endearingly lame it seems to have missed the past 10 years' worth of special-effects breakthroughs.

Too highbrow for the multiplex and too literal for the hipsters, it's unsatisfying both as gothic camp and serious cinema.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

It's filthy, funny and kind of sweet, if not quite up to the level of Judd Apatow's oeuvre in the burgeoning field of R-rated comedies with heart. You will laugh and blush in equal measure.

In some ways, Mowgli feels like an origin story. There’s a slight but unmistakable suggestion of a potential sequel to its open-ended climax.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is uproarious and flamboyantly raunchy, utterly stupid yet also occasionally winning

I love a good story, too, but I prefer one that actually goes somewhere (although, as joy rides to nowhere are concerned, this one is a beaut).

It's not really a movie. I suppose it's what could be called a recorded behavior.

Viewers who aren’t in the mood for star-crossed love will prefer the slapstick and earthy humor, including a sequence in which three of the guys get pregnant. It’s another fine mess the resourceful monkey king has to rescue his comrades from.

The only real crime here is the debasement of a great film’s name.

O’Reilly’s ambitions notwithstanding, “Moscow” is uneven because of the inescapable nature of such interlocking narratives: some land better than others.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

The Bad Seed was a successful novel and Broadway play before it was made into a movie, and the melodramatic quality of much of the writing and acting betray these roots. But the movie's artful black-and-white cinematography still contributes much to making this a remarkably gripping chiller. [05 Apr 1987, p.Y6]

The Favor is a frisky, frank and funny female-buddy film - as if "Thelma and Louise" had stayed in the suburbs, making girl-talk about sex and satisfaction, married vs. single.

Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula.

21 Bridges will win no prizes for originality or twists. (It won’t win any prizes for anything, to be honest.) But it’s made well enough. Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo (“Avengers: Endgame”) are the producers, and Irish director Brian Kirk (“Games of Thrones”) knows how to keep an old jalopy like this well-oiled to get us across the finish line.

It’s a movie that’s all too happy simply to go through the motions when its star is clearly capable of busting bigger, more interesting moves. Luckily, there are other films in the sea. This is one that Lopez should have left at the altar.

The title character of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile may be a coldblooded reptile — in this case, one who sings — but never you worry: This family flick delivers enough pulse-quickening earworms and warmth to melt even the iciest of hearts.

The sense of goofy, if gory, good humor [Copley] brings to Hardcore Henry goes a long way toward mitigating the film’s tedious barbarity.

A film of modest ambition and workmanlike pacing, it breaks little new ground, either in form or content. Then again, that may be the point.

Even Strong's best efforts can't save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star.

A sort of empty hat. Patterned after such noir classics as "The Big Sleep" and "Chinatown," the film is written in an arch, self-consciously hard-boiled style by novelist Pete Dexter that comes close to parody.

A satisfying thriller as grimly professional as its efficient hero.

Within this structurally baggy weepie, at least two perfectly good movies fight to break free, one a provocative legal thriller, the other a melodrama.

So childish it seems to arrive in diapers, and that's not bad; it's good.

Decidedly low-tech and not always particularly coherent or cohesive.

Mr. Mom has its share of bright lines and funny moments, but if you bring anything beyond trifling expectations to this role-reversal farce, starring Michael Keaton and Teri Garr as a couple obliged to switch homemaking and breadwinning duties, it will be difficult to avoid feeling shortchanged. [20 Aug 1983, p.C1]

With Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich gives us "Shakespeare in Luck." Make that "Dumb Luck": In this alternately entertaining and wildly ham-handed speculative romp.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

Stylishly gruesome and dementedly romantic, "Romeo" has its pervertedly funny moments, but in the end it's a bloody bummer that leaves a depressing aftertaste.

Clerks III is a movie for die-hard fans and die-hards only.

The caper isn't as passionate as the title suggests—in fact, it's facile—but Ryan and Kevin Kline, as her attractive opposite, are irresistible together.

Always is an unfulfilled promise, a plummeting dove.

Ultimately, SLC Punk! doesn't have enough dimension to maintain dramatic interest.

Even before it begins laying waste to the reputations of cast members, Firestarter is promptly exposed as a derivative embarrassment of a conception. What could be better calculated to illustrate King's recent decline than a "new" thriller whose devices have been poorly cribbed and patched together from "Carrie" and "The Fury"? As a matter of fact, "Charlie's Fiery Fury" would be a catchier bad title than Firestarter.

Though he is a master thief with a heart of gold, the new Templar has all the charm of one of those ladies behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

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.

An uneven look at the reclamation of a former child star, "Life With Mikey" has the strangely amiable feel of a cult movie for the peanut gallery. It's camp and cutesy all at the same time, like a kiddie-car ride down "Sunset Boulevard" with an aging Gary Coleman behind the wheel. Caught somewhere between a spoof and a celebration of child-powered sitcoms, it only hints at the real toll of being a has-been teen.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Yields the same sort of archetype and the usual results: De Niro's workmanlike in a dismayingly familiar role.

This flick has modest ambitions, but it delivers the goods in a fresh manner.

You can feel Hoodlum hungering to be bigger than it possibly can be. It wants to be "The Godfather" of African Americans, a vast tale of crime and heroism and nerve and ambition. But it tries too hard and ends up feeling spotty rather than deep. [27Aug1997 Pg D.01]

Some of the portrayals are over-the-top in their villainy, and the dialogue, acting and music all tend to be melodramatic. But all of the overt heartstring-pulling doesn’t add much. Given the awful calamity, the truth would have been enough to amp up the emotions.

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny.

There’s no rude humor, no sarcasm, no sharp edges — just a warm cuddle of a movie that does exactly what it sets out to do.

Writer-director Rupert Goold, here making his feature debut, fails to capture the chemistry and tonal complexity necessary to make this grim, often grisly tale anything more than a tragically lurid anecdote.

In addition to some trite set pieces, writer-director Dan Mazer serves up nothing more than conspicuous cynicism masquerading as comedy.

Despite a strong cast, striking locations and slick digital effects, the overlong movie lurches from chase to battle to soul-searching quietude — and then back again — in frustratingly generic action-movie style. It’s just one darn thing after another.

You can make a movie that’s both sweet and crass; just look at Judd Apatow’s comedies. But the mix doesn’t work here, maybe because both the vulgarity and the cheesiness are so amped up.

Last Christmas labors to turn the genre on its head and say more than your typical feel-good holiday flick. Somehow, Kate and Tom’s story still finds a way to play out in painfully predictable fashion.

The Shadow does have its moments, which include a googly-eyed mad scientist portrayed by Tim Curry, a smoking billboard for Llama cigarettes and an animated dagger capable of biting he who wields it. Of course, they too are crushed under the weight of this overproduced but underwhelming monolith.

Crowe clearly seeks to return to classic storytelling values with this sweeping-yet-intimate, serious-yet-swashbuckling, hither-yet-thither picaresque; that he succeeds only part of the time shouldn’t detract from the worthiness of his mission.

Isn't as novel as it hopes to be, but it gets the job done.

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.