Everything is utterly unbelievable; it's Blackboard Jungle without a moral intelligence, Rock and Roll High School without a soundtrack. Sitting through it is like paying for detention on a sunny day. [14 Oct 1982, p.D15]

We know the story will conclude with a crescendo of frozen-north hallelujahs. Cheering is endemic to Disney. They can't help themselves.

The direction has a fluid, no-nonsense authority, and the performances by Harris, Phifer and Cam'ron seal the deal.

Although the acting is committed and sometimes stirring, most of the characters are about as one-note as the biblical archetypes Martin wants to get away from in the first place. "The Name of the Rose" this ain't.

Nobody hits the jackpot here, certainly not filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, whose audacious, empathic first film, "Twin Falls Idaho," showed such promise.

Out to Sea is out to brunch: It's got too much on the table, but if you look carefully and show some patience, you can pick out the odd treat. [02 July 1997, p.C10]

Not content with simply stoking rage and self-righteous superiority, McKay dares to infuse Don’t Look Up with an authentic, unironic sense of grief.

Sketchy but often entertaining.

I’m on to you, Spurlock. There are holes in your story about five lads who don’t appear to ever drink, smoke, fight, curse or partake in romantic dalliances of any kind. At least, not on screen.

Shakur is superb, as I said, but so is Belushi. Initially a kind of glowering Bozo whose very sleaze is seductive and whose efficiency is attractive -- he's very Dirty Harry-like in his solutions to criminal problems -- he drifts off, almost banally, into the most repellent of all evils, the criminal sociopath masquerading under the flag of authority and using the system to hide his tracks. He stops being funny and merely becomes horrifying.

Pereira goes in for lots of time shifts and split screens, piling on the contrivances like so many costume baubles when a single string of pearls would do.

What Men Want avoids some of the pitfalls of gender-flipping, given how loose its connection to “What Women Want” is. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. It would make a perfectly fine airplane movie. Or maybe save it for the bachelorette party.

There are worse things than being trapped inside a computer game with Olivia Wilde. In Tron: Legacy, the loud, long and less than wholly satisfying sequel to "Tron," that's the bittersweet fate of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the computer-nerd hero of both the 1982 sci-fi cult classic and its high-tech, 3-D update.

Dramatically and conceptually, the movie sits there, flat, naked and trying too hard with too little.

Neither smart nor exciting enough to justify the effort.

The movie covers too much ground with too little detail. It manages to be convoluted, complicated, incomprehensible and maddeningly thin all at the same time.

Nicotina skitters between dull and forced, this despite the use of split screens, jaunty music and the personable Luna.

As monotonous as Muzak, and when it comes to the plot, both bewildering and trite.

Here's the thing about the new The Thing. It isn't as satisfying as the old "The Thing." And it's nowhere near as enthralling as the vintage "Thing," which inspired every other "Thing" to follow.

Silly and slapsticky, Love in Space is too busy devising absurd set pieces to develop the characters or make their mutual attractions plausible. That makes it much like recent Hollywood rom-coms. It seems Chinese filmmakers have learned more than just a few phrases from American movies.

As a piece of filmed entertainment, The Fifth Estate shows why things like authorial point of view and visual sensibility are so essential in bringing such stories to life. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, “The Social Network,” this film doesn’t have much of either, and the weakness shows.

The script is well stocked with snappy put-down humor, including on-target jabs at Dan Quayle, Jerry Ford and George Bush. But director Peter Segal loses his light-comedy touch after the first hour and makes an unfunny mess of the final, crackpot chase sequence.

Steve Barron, who directed "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," "Electric Dreams" and a mess of music videos, understandably can't seem to whip up any enthusiasm for the project. Nor is he able to inspire this large, listless cast of zombies.

The mediocre screenplay (by Tom S. Parker and Jim Jennewein of The Flintstones) is a more sober version of Arthur, with elements from Our Gang, North by Northwest and TV's Gilligan's Island. The filmmakers seem to think of their movie as a fiduciary fable, but they're not quite sure about its moral.

At best, the filmmakers are guilty of wholesale confusion. For lamentable example, the plot degenerates into a hopeless tangle of loose threads and discarded hooks, beginning with the initial vicious teaser, which identifies Pam Grier as a drug-crazed prostitute who guns down a pair of unwary young patrolmen in their squad car. [7 Feb 1981, p.C1]

A cut above the usual hack 'em up, and perhaps even a hack above the usual cut 'em up.

An aggressively crass - and not especially funny - trip down memory lane, an attempt to recapture the sweetly ribald magic of the earlier film. As anyone who's ever attended a class reunion can tell you, it almost never works.

Sentinel is a medium-dumb thriller that starts out with momentary promise but gets progressively sillier.