Not only dense, dark and deeply introspective, it's also as remote as it's chilly.

Rust, Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza’s slow-moving, sepia-toned homage to the American western, is the kind of respectable if unremarkable genre exercise that would have come and gone without much notice were it not for the circumstances of its making.

Judgment Night is regrettably familiar fare.

You can expect to fall about, snort and hoot, at times hard enough to hurt inner body parts that only doctors can identify.

This is a movie that knows its audience and realizes it doesn't need much of a story to hit that audience, literally, where it lives.

Ought to have been called "The Sap Also Rises."

A pooped, poorly executed buddy-cop comedy with more cliches than expletives.

An endless, virtually laugh-free pastiche of Aaron Sorkin by way of Aaron Spelling, Chasing Liberty features Mandy Moore trying so strenuously to be the next America's Sweetheart that she almost pops a vein.

A brain and a heart, two things that, along with a good story, believable characters and anything resembling style or flair, Pumpkin is fatally missing.

A largely laugh-free exercise in cliche.

This lethargic romantic drama forces chemistry where there is none and, worse, sells out its aspirationally cool, intelligent female protagonist with an endgame that she — and the luminous Dern — hardly deserves.

Ultimately the movie feels like an empty exercise. Sure, it’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. But when the one figure most worthy of our sympathy is nothing more than a beautiful blonde robot, what’s the point?

Another gate-crasher at the let's-do-a-mediocre-update-of-Shakespeare party.

Mad City is for those who haven't seen enough movies about hostage situations. It's also for those who haven't seen enough ponderous movies about media exploitation, or Dustin Hoffman's ongoing reliance on muttery method acting.

What's wrong with The 'Burbs? It's not funny. Why is it not funny? It's just not. Not remotely, momentarily, intermittently or otherwise funny.

While perfectly presentable and agreeable, especially if you are in an undemanding frame of mind, Krull remains a thin, dogged exercise in extravagant adventure. [03 Aug 1983, p.B1]

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

Both director and co-writer of Rascals redux, Spheeris coaxes artless performances from the picture's engaging ensemble of half-pint players.

Does Lurie have an ax to grind? And how. Yet if, to some ears, its high-pitched whine nearly drowns out the underlying story at times, why did so many in that preview audience seem deaf to it? Maybe that's Lurie's real point: A culture that feeds on violence -- in real life and on film -- has also inured us to it.

The performances are fantastic across the board, with Costner acting in his trademark low-key naturalistic style and Spencer as the picture of no-nonsense maternal love. But their efforts can’t make up for overly simplified characters, not to mention melodramatic exchanges that sound exactly like written dialogue.

The movie is humble as child's play, graced with the effortless comedy of Hanks and Ryan. They're as fresh and warm as summer peaches, but never sappy, thanks to the off-kilter honesty of Shanley's writing.

Though shot in four weeks on a low budget, Stephen King's Children of the Corn, while not on a par with "Carrie," sure beats "Christine," "Cujo" and "Dead Zone." It's terse, tense and the sound is effective as auditory terror.

There's an adult mentality throughout the film, and not a nice one. It gets all the smirking fun it can, then tacks on some quick sermonizing at the end. One minute sex is like a camp food-fight -- against the rules but everybody has a good time-- and the next it's the grown-up activity that leads directly to that other favorite grown-up activity -- depression. The accompanying adult had better be prepared to explain not sex, but "Do as we say, don't do as we show."

The character is again a lackluster after-thought, exploited by a new Universal assembly line that specializes in the serials manufactured for weekly television consumption.

A Night in Old Mexico succeeds when it comes to suspense, and the ever-evolving plot will keep viewers guessing. But the movie doesn’t have the same kind of emotional depth that Duvall and Wittliff managed to pull off decades ago. Worse, the dialogue often sounds stilted.

Mark Childress, who wrote the screenplay based upon his book of the same name, would have been better off leaving this Southern Gothic between two covers.

Unfortunately, apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.

About as funny as malaria.

You may have as much fun tearing it apart in its aftermath as you do watching it, but the fun is still genuine.

Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.

For all its boldness of concept and carnage, The Prowler is never entirely satisfying. There are too many missed opportunities to transcend the genre’s schlock, too many passages where nothing happens, too many scares that fall flat. Still, it’s an intriguing artifact of an earlier horror-movie era, one that toys with the idea of villains and victims while slashing the slasher formula to bits.

Evita is a busy movie with an often noisy soundtrack that can get tedious and monotonous (particularly in the second half), but it's just as likely to sweep one away with its musical, emotional and historical momentum.

High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.

The plot, loosely derived from Madison Smartt Bell's "Doctor Sleep," is utterly stale. On their way to confront ancient evil, Strother and Losey keep tripping over timeworn cliches.

We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.

Mawkish, obvious and manipulative, “The Son” is, quite simply, a disappointment, from its pat setup to its equally false — and, quite frankly, cruel — resolution.

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note.

The movie is tentative, dramatically speaking...The most powerful moments come at the end -- documentary excerpts of Steve Saint, the son of one of the missionaries, and his friendship with Mincayani, the man who killed his father.

Hoodwinked makes a little sense. Too bad, then, it's so crummy.

For real sparks keep a look out for Jared Harris in a supporting role that injects a mildly diverting note of corporate intrigue into an otherwise unsurprising procedural.

What transpires is part heist flick, part Mission: Impossible-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s existential darkness.

Though it lacks the gloss, twists and star power of earlier Grisham movies, The Chamber does possess Gene Hackman's most cantankerous turn since the lowdown lawman he created in "Unforgiven."

Setting aside the puzzling marriage of source material and medium, “Paws” at least makes for a breezy summertime diversion. Contrived but cute, the movie deserves credit for its indictment of insularity, as well as a few hearty laughs.

May look good cavorting prettily on deck, but ultimately it deserves to walk the plank.

Surprisingly uninvolving, the least effective of Neufeld's Clancy-based movies. Surely he was not looking for this kind of film: one that bombs literally and figuratively.

A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.

The sort of clumsy undertaking that trips up everyone and everything in it.

Proof of Life isn't a movie. It's an overpriced scrapbook.

Easily the worst of the four movies drawn from S.E. Hinton novels to date, and that's saying a lot. [9 Nov 1985, p.G14]

A thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers.

Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.

The movie benefits from a stylish, high-gloss look, a hit-filled soundtrack and up-to-the-minute dialogue (there's even a Korean shop-owner joke) that feels winningly off the cuff.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.

In casbahs and desert villages, in kibbutzim and around the campfire, Spurlock has a way of getting people to open up, to use their real voices and express their real opinions, the likes of which never make it onto network news. That's his gift, and when he uses it, "Where in the World zzzzz-zzzz" opens up into a miraculous document.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

It’s the right kind of bonkers for the right kind of audience, a gaga genre hodgepodge that, not for nothing, taps Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as its showstopping anthem and reminds us of a truism, of both cinema and life: Adding a dog or two — or 60 — can make just about anything better.

Colombiana, though, doesn't quite qualify as a chick flick. The filmmakers were surely thinking of the guys when they arranged for Saldana to play many of her scenes in a cat suit, a bikini or lingerie.

Surely the dullest of Hollywood's many comic-book-derived summer movies, "Silver Surfer" is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica.

Most of the brights spots in Justice League involve Miller’s Flash — literally.

The "Twilight Saga" hasn't matured along with its heroine. In fact, the latest movie regresses a bit, delivering more filler, less feeling and crummier CGI than last year's "Eclipse."

Shockingly inert.

Flagging energy isn't the only issue here; Ford has become enslaved in his own cliches.

If Rogers moves through the film somewhat lethargically, Six Pack's bare-bones plot doesn't provide much inspiration. [20 July 1982, p.B4]

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

The movie's a floating longboat that ought to be ignited and pushed out to sea, Viking style.

Very funny in a way reminiscent of "Babe: Pig in the City."

This fairy-tale shtick, even when dressed up with a little class-war garnish, is hard to swallow.

Built with fine materials and boasts a gorgeous ocean view. Unfortunately the family dramedy's design is overblown and the construction is pretty flimsy.

Although the rest of the story plays out with melodramatic predictability, it's timely, not to mention refreshing, to see an affirmation of true love over hot sex, along with a reminder that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

In this toxic tale of young psychopaths in love, the stylish, often stunning visuals are ultimately outmatched by the repellent protagonists at the story's center.

There are a couple of good things about the film, chief among which is Land's naturalistic performance. But the overall sense of it, heightened by a folk-guitar score so spare it feels like part of the soundtrack is missing, is not one of poignant minimalism but emptiness.

A mite too hard to follow for most of the kiddie crowd who'll want to see it.

Weitz co-directed the wonderful "About a Boy" in 2002, but in "Dreamz" -- a tediously facile satire -- his comic instincts fail him.

Anyone who actually believes in dybbuks and other ghoulies will find The Possession terrifying. For the rest of us, the movie is a cleverly constructed, well-paced piece of hokum.

On Stranger Tides feels as fresh and bracingly exhilarating as the day Jack Sparrow first swashed his buckle.

By the Sea is dazzlingly gorgeous, as are its stars. But peeling back layer upon layer of exquisite ennui reveals nothing but emptiness, sprinkled with stilted sentiments.

If a movie can be said to snore before your eyes, Damien sustains an ungodly, unstimulating buzz. [13 June 1978, p.B1]

The biggest surprise is that “A Minecraft Movie” ends up feeling more necessary in an era of depreciating art appreciation. Like Garrett, this movie may be tacky and loud, but it also makes a great point.

Despite the decent performances, the script by first-time screenwriter Toni Hoover (who reportedly Googled “how to write a screenplay” after deciding to chronicle the story of her blinded football-playing friend) swings from flat to overly sentimental, while Baker’s rookie direction is predictable and occasionally confusing.

The movie itself is a tad overheated. In the lurid, swampy, yet almost perversely engrossing follow-up to director Lee Daniels's "Precious," the temperature is set to "sizzle." Ironically, it could have used a little more time in the oven.

Unforgettable borrows elements from film noir, Lifetime movies and slasher flicks and updates them for the Internet age. But this forgettable thriller will simply make you remember other, better films.

Ought to be the subject of an obituary, not a review. A creepy film noir modeled on Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," it was a stinking stiff on arrival.

Only mildly exciting as it grinds toward its conclusion, Sniper falls apart in the last reel as writers Michael Frost Beckner and Crash Leyland dispense with credibility by turning the rebel and drug lord's forces into the Keystone Kartel, invoking a Magic Bullet and attempting an Oliver Stone denouement. Unfortunately, director Luis Llosa is no Oliver Stone.

A crass physical comedy of unrelenting irrelevance with a gag or two amid the many other examples of bad taste, extrapolating toward infinite on the theme of remote control reality.

An arresting, often riveting film that is fascinating to look at but not nearly so interesting to watch.

Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.

Pride and Glory would be risible if it weren't so reprehensible.

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

Jefferson in Paris is nevertheless a disaster, intellectually infuriating and thoughtlessly racist.

The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.

In Upside Down, writer-director Juan Solanas takes the gimmick about as far as it can go, rendering the metaphor of longing and separation in effective, and richly visual, terms. If anything, however, he goes too far.

A sequel every bit as clumsy, ham-handed, outlandish and laughable as the original was sleek, tough and efficient.

This Hollywood Pictures production (basically, a Walt Disney adult venture) culls every Capitol-corruption cliche in the book for the dullest 90 minutes Murphy has ever appeared in.

The main reason to see Step Up 3D is for the high-energy dancing and innovative camerawork, and on those points it delivers.

Alien Nation wants to be "In the Heat of the Night" as science fiction, but it's neither morally instructive nor prophetic. It proves a lumbering marriage of action and sci-fi that alienates both audiences. It's too dull for one and too dumb for the other.

Haphazardly conceived, phlegmatically paced, lazily filmed and punctuated with gratuitous moments of sexual and scatological slapstick.

A masterpiece of mediocrity,

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

Friday the Thirteenth meets Saturday Night Fever. Good and promising actors -- people who deserve a better film the next time -- are too numerous to name. [16 Aug 1980, p.D2]

Flower can’t quite nail the necessary tone, aiming for dark, but missing the comedy.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.

You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."

Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.

Though Philip Haas's digitally shot film has the firsthand immediacy of such nonfictional docs as "Iraq in Fragments" and "Gunner Palace," its dramatic template feels disappointingly secondhand.

McCarthy is not (yet) a celebrated director, but The Prodigy may change that. As with his under-seen debut film “The Pact,” his greatest asset here is his patience, followed by his evocative use of light, shadow and negative space. He’s a filmmaker who recognizes that the buildup is more fun than the payoff, and he manages to generate suspense with seemingly little happening on the screen.

The Legend of Billie Jean is trashily manipulative and utterly preposterous, so much so that, until the end (when it begins to sour on you), it's a thoroughly enjoyable hoot. Add a splendid cast and good air conditioning, and it's a perfectly mindless way to spend a muggy summer evening.

The humor, which made the first movie appealing to more than just TV kids, is far less adroit.

With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies delivers what its title promises: a little romance and some undead villains, plus a bit of comedy. But this overly busy riff on Austen’s winning formula doesn’t justify all the tinkering.

Surrogates takes an interesting idea -- the triumph of technological convenience over grimy, workaday life -- and buries it under clumsy exposition, unconvincing action sequences and a by-the-numbers conspiracy plot.

You want to know if The Running Man is a good-time macho show, right? Stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice (same director -- Paul Michael Glaser). Sure there's blood spattering and bullets riddling and Big Boys Banging Biceps. But through the dry-ice haze, Running Man is surprisingly boring.

The result has a cobbled-together feeling. The Force is not strong with this one.

The Rhythm Section was directed by Reed Morano, who did a nice job with the first few episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but who seems a bit self-indulgent here.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

No one will ever credit Snatched with discovering new comic territory. But it earns its share of laughs by covering some well-trod ground.

A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.

A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.

The only way a self-absorbed treatise like this can get any kind of audience (not to mention distribution) is to cast famous people in it.

Even the staunchest of golfheads must know they're watching a cut-and-trite accounting.

If you're going to make a gross-out comedy you can't just be gross. You've got to be to be funny as well, or the movie will be DOA. Which is why Eurotrip should be toe-tagged and shoved into the deepest and coldest of video vaults.

In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.

Wilson’s portrayal of Nargle/Ross isn’t so much a performance as an impersonation. It’s a thin coat of paint, in other words, covering up some serious cracks in the storytelling.

If its made-for-TV sensibility explains its chaotically blobby shooting style, it doesn't clarify a plot so painfully padded that it looks for laughs in strange digressive asides regarding bratwurst and coffee.

Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters. The ill-mannered, unkempt, foulmouthed and hot-tempered title character of Hesher is just such a walking contradiction.

Shamelessly catering to fans of the original film, while giving them nothing new, its story and humor are also inexplicably calibrated for a much younger demographic than those old enough to have seen the first film when it came out.

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

I found it a rough night at the flickers.

In Adrian Lyne's latest monstrosity, love takes on money -- and loses. Not necessarily in the story, of course. This is a Hollywood movie. I'm talking between the lines.

There's more waiting than lightning in Waiting for Lightning, a nonetheless watchable-enough documentary about the preparations leading up to professional skateboarder Danny Way's historic 2005 attempt to sail over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.

Before it veers off course, The Rooftop is lively, funny and colorful... Too bad Chou decided to shoehorn the gangster genre into a movie that would have worked just fine as a mere comedy-romance-fantasy musical.

As the movie wears on, the plot points become increasingly far-fetched, and what started out as a moody if by-the-book thriller becomes increasingly silly. All the while, Roberts gives her all.

Depressing as it is dull as it is dumb.

Yet as good as she is, the actress is little more than the framing device for this polished and morally provocative — yet hardly pulse-pounding — tale, loosely based on the life of English spy Melita Norwood.

There's the scene in which Jacques, the French Canadian proprietor of the Power and Glory, tells Laura, "I am the Great Went," to which she responds, "I am the muffin." Jacques returns, "I'm as blank as a fart." Maybe all Jacques is saying is "I am full of gas." Certainly Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me seems to be.

Most action flicks would settle for thrilling violence and mayhem, in service of a utilitarian plot. “Angel” flips this formula on its head, delivering a surprisingly coherent story but with no discernible sense of fun.

Despite the flailing around, the picture fitfully accumulates a handful of modest highlights and silly brainstorms. [03 Feb 1984, p.E6]

Basically "Beaches" without Hershey and the salt water. This insipid suck-face-athon provokes the gag reflex.

Disjointed drama filled with one-dimensional characters and melodrama so Lifetime movie-esque that it careens into unintentional comedy.

The plot, in which Swank is given little more to do than guzzle Costco-size bottles of liquor and mope, proceeds in somewhat somnambulist fashion, generating surprisingly little suspense even when Paige confronts a suspect whose identity has been telegraphed throughout the film. This comes as a disappointment, at least for viewers who have watched a movie or two before.

At times, Rampage almost hides its problems. It’s just funny enough, just exciting enough and just visually impressive enough. What it never is, though, is anything more than just enough.

Hinton was still a Tulsa teen when she wrote the best seller (4 million copies in seven languages) in the mid-1960s. Her brain wasn't mucked up with adult equivocation, so she didn't get into those confusing gray zones. Great for her, but not for Coppola, who turns this long-awaited story into baffling mush.

A super-stoked action thriller

Babysitting, the directorial debut of The Goonies and Gremlins writer Chris Columbus, is a sweet-natured, adolescent variation on the big-city black comedy After Hours.

Offers up the kind of pleasures that only a summer movie can...The cast is good-looking, the soundtrack is loud, the plot is stupid.

Both lead players are appealing and attractive enough to make an otherwise tepid movie at least un-excruciating.

So rich in processed sugar, canned sentiment and schmaltz, I thought I was going to throw up.

Like too many genre directors these days, Ken Wiederhorn went for a mix of horror and comedy, and it's probably not his fault he succeeded mostly with the latter.

Paternity may not be one of the dumbest excuses for a romantic comedy that ever littered the screen, but it certainly feels like a numbing inanity while you're exposed to it. [3 Oct 1981, p.C1]

The screen writers have come up with a simple-minded scenario, true, but it is enlivened with enough laughs to make up for the shortcomings.

The plot is so similar to “The Big Chill” that it almost could be called a remake, except that it isn’t nearly as funny, it follows millennials instead of baby boomers and the characters tweet.

Higgins can't keep his mind from wandering. Foul Play never begins to make sense as a mystery - Dudley Moore and the 3-foot-9 Billy Barty, become the butts of grotesquely conceived and staged sight gags.

Isabelle Huppert and generic Steve Guttenberg prove incompatible costars in The Bedroom Window, a cockamamie mystery that finds these bi-continentals drawn together like, say, refrigerator magnets to styrofoam coolers. Yes, it's magic.

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself.

Ultimately, it is, like its conflicted hero, sweet and likable, and you wish it well.

There's lots of extraneous plotting -- which, however fact based, is handled in such a pre-fab manner that it feels phony.

It is the verdict of this court that it be led to a stockade reserved exclusively for cheap, pandering movies and duly shot.

Ultimately undone by its sheer busyness. The screenwriters never get the story to settle down, and it becomes a case of one damn thing after another.

So solemnly paced and deliberately performed that it seems to solidify before your very eyes.

An infectious albeit formulaic game of Cinderella football, this happy athletic romp seems to know just how wheezy it is, but the team grunts "hut, hut," and puts it right on the numbers anyway. It's "Hoosiers" with a pigskin pumpkin and a lot more sis-boom-bah.

A good story lurks somewhere in Queenpins, but Gaudet and Pullapilly take the easy way out at every plot point and with nearly every joke.

Legends of the Fall is a magnificent bore: a western saga lolling in its own immensity - its big music, its big scenery and, yes, its big hair

A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.

As nervy and well-made as it is, Cherry feels less personal than pageant-like, especially in a rushed and glibly perfunctory final sequence. It unfolds like an American dream that becomes a nightmare, before switching back again — just before we wake up and shake the whole thing off.

A handful of funny brainstorms can be found rattling around the slapdash confines of Ice Pirates. [03 Apr 1984, p.C6]

Belushi is fetching, though he plays a cliche'. But the movie would roll over and play dead without the talented German shepherd. Lassie was classy and Benji beguiling, but Jerry Lee is a four-legged Burt Reynolds, just made for fast cars and chase scenes.

Stretched across nearly two hours, it tells a story that would have been adequately laid out in a 30-second television spot.

Clearly enamored with the endearing brand of drawly sarcasm for which Thornton has become known, the filmmakers aren't sure whether to paint Dr. P as an uncompromising villain or a mischievous teddy bear. The upshot is that Dr. P's most menacing aspect is Thornton's rather obvious hairpiece.

More American Graffiti suffers from a terminal case of the cutes. Made with the approval of George Lucas, the director of American Graffiti, and perhaps with his misbegotten collusion, More American Graffiti succeeds in making a blithe mockery of its predecessor. [03 Aug 1979, p.D4]

Is Meg Ryan going to play the goofy romantic gal forever?

As a whole, the film is a perplexing, dark and brooding exercise, which only makes its inappropriately cheery ending feel all the more slight.

If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

About the movie industry’s misguided belief that it can distract the audience from a film’s narrative weaknesses with little more than flash and spectacle. That con might have worked with the rubes once upon a time, but in case Hollywood hasn’t noticed, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Despite some mawkish dialogue, there's something to be said for leaving the theater with a smile. Can I get an amen?

At the risk of eternal damnation on the Internet, I admit to laughing at -- even feeling momentarily touched by -- Rush Hour 3.

The real problem with A Million Ways to Die in the West is one of editing. There are a million jokes in it, but only 500,000 of them are funny.

Levine brings a lot of visual style to “Mandy,” in addition to coaxing subdued, believable performances from his young cast.

The point is well taken, but, basically, Cradle is a long rapturous interlude of baby pictures, now and then reinforced with pointed pro-momma dialogue. Even with the politics, it remains just so much French Pablum. [09 May 1986, p.28]

Except for a few gory flourishes and several jolly special effects, Warlock is a surprisingly old-fashioned horror adventure that benefits from the superbly malevolent presence of Julian Sands as said warlock.

In this banal era of smart-aleck parodies and homages, Last Man Standing amounts to stylistic overkill.

In Chaos Theory, Reynolds's performance is taut, crabby and tense. And his beard and glasses, which intensify those already narrow eyes, suggest a mad bomb-builder rather than a hapless soul with whom we can identify.

Derivative dumpling of a romantic comedy about Irish sexuality.

Should have never made it up the distribution aisle.

This is not a fantastic movie. But there's more to it than just an MTV-slickified "Midnight Express" starring two young, photogenic stars.

Polanski, generally, has fallen farther than Lucifer, and into a more profoundly depressing hell, the hell of utter banality.

An endearing comic roundelay about the can't-commits.

Perhaps they should have called this "Bore-a, Bore-a, Bore-a."

The Marksman proves itself to be the cinematic version of comfort food: satisfyingly familiar but full of starch and empty calories.

In this case, the adage would go something like "material, material, material," also known as the Nicolas Cage Rule: Good acting can't overcome bad taste.

“Kingsman” is essentially a live-action cartoon, one that aims for an audible reaction and little else. That may not be the world’s loftiest goal, but whether it results in a gagging eww or a chuckle, it’s a plan that usually succeeds.

Dough never leaves any doubt about where it’s going or what it’s trying to say, serving up a recipe that we’ve not only had many times before, but we’ve had enough of.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

"Drive Trashy" would be a more accurate title for the first 45 minutes of this gore-spurting, sex-flaunting romp. And that's the good part.

This romantic melodrama ... doesn't even get to first base.

Despite melodrama that, at times, is enough to induce diabetes, there's enough wolf whistle in this sexy, scary romp to please anyone.

Producers David and Jerry Zucker have shown with "Airplane," "The Naked Gun" and "Top Secret" that they are inspired film parodists. Brain Donors suggests that they are clumsy plagiarists.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

Kidnap is a solid and economical piece of filmmaking. It just goes to show: A big budget isn’t necessary to make a big impression.

A not-quite-funny comedy that devolves into a tedious discussion of miracles and redemption.

Castro remains the star of the show. You can't stop watching him.

Uprising is loud, packed with impressive effects and propulsive — or as propulsive as a car with no brakes going downhill — but it lacks the heart of del Toro’s original.

As goofy as it is good-natured, “Good Trip” aims to entertain, not educate, as it presents a star-studded parade of celebrity reminiscences about taking hallucinogenic drugs. Mostly, it succeeds.

The Brothers Grimsby is fitfully, sometimes outrageously, funny. But Cohen’s shtick of showing the backwardness and stupidity of unprivileged characters is starting to feel lazy, not to mention classist itself.

If you enjoy Sandler’s brand of obvious humor and don’t mind noticeable Sony product placements, this inoffensive sequel is, like its predecessor, just enough for a Halloween treat.

If you’re looking for that kind of moral-rich message, delivered with equal amounts of sincerity and syrup, congratulations: You may have found the mythical source from which all other malarkey springs.

Like one of the victims, Innocent Blood feels about five quarts low.

To paraphrase her infamous Oscar speech: You will have to like Sally Field, you will have to really like Sally Field, to sit through Two Weeks.

The cast is talented - the chemistry between characters is solid, comedic timing is impeccable and the actors seem to be having fun, which may prove contagious for audience members.

Biography, at its most useful, disabuses us from myth, but Churchill has no such ambitions. As both history and entertainment, it’s a drag.

But by the time Willis's character saves this considerably long day, it's filmgoers who will no doubt feel like prisoners, as a movie that promises to be a taut nail-biter devolves into the kind of silly, overblown climax parodied so beautifully by Robert Altman in "The Player."

One mediocre, ploddingly predictable film, loaded down with cheesy Hollywood tactics.

By the time the last out is called, the movie's shamelessness far outweighs its charms. Aimed at the minors, it's in a bush league all its own.

If the movie had any pace or energy, or even if the music were something other than tepid covers of songs, most of which were written before anybody in the cast was in rompers, then it might have been fun just to watch the actors strut around sexily onstage, living the rock life. But the thing just lies there. [15 Feb 1988, p.D4]

Who's Harry Crumb? might have worked as a 20-minute skit, but the script and the direction are both sadly undernourished, which is certainly not the case with Candy. He remains a jovial character actor, but asking him to carry any film on those broad shoulders is a bit too much. The laughs are few and far between, even with Candy resorting to occasional disguises, and the humor has a depressing sense of de'ja` ha-ha.

The screenplay, by the team of Joe Batteer and John Rice and doctored by Dan Gilroy, is standard issue, as insufferable in its situations as it is in its characterizations. Berenger, who tries to growl some life into his role, sounds as if he's been gargling cat litter, while McNamara shows off the work of his orthodontist a la Tom Cruise. For Eleniak, there's always Hooters.

If the story is fun — and it is fitfully, only after a protracted, sloggy set up — it’s a lot less so than either of the first two films.

More and more it seems that when all else fails, the director says, "Then let's make it zany." [09 Oct 1982, p.C11]

A movie that celebrates the life of the mind and the uniqueness of the individual but does so in glib slogans and is, itself, a sort of knockoff.

The ending of Foe is not the problem. It’s the beginning and the middle that feel phony: at once as calculated and as uncanny as ChatGPT.

The movie wavers in tone, occasionally lurching into supernatural fantasy, and withholds information in a manner that’s more annoying than tantalizing.

Starbuck was a funny and warm-hearted trifle. So is Delivery Man.

In Faster, it's a car, not actors, that drives movie.

The movie isn't mindless; it just has a mind that's a bit junky and muddled. And to their credit, Arnold and his collaborators haven't played it safe. Last Action Hero is a stretch. Unfortunately, it's a stretch that proves the star wasn't that elastic to begin with.

No darn good.

Schmaltzy.

Drowning in uncharted waters and way off-center in any world.

The episodes are too convoluted to get into.

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.

Manhattan Night gets by on the strength of its visuals and a few vivid central performances, but by the time we find out whodunit, it doesn’t really matter.

The sci-fi thriller Voyagers is grounded in very real current fears. But otherwise, it’s a bit of an airhead.

If it weren't for the good will that the stars have built up over the years, See No Evil would pass without notice; even with the stars, that's what it deserves. But these are ingratiating performers, even when working far below their peak. Watching them, you find yourself wanting to laugh even when the laughs are undeserved.

While the movie's star -- and ruler, and ship's captain, and grand poobah -- is Haneke himself, his actors are sublime.

A simple retelling of these stories would have been more dramatic, more effective and more powerful.

The story is bloated and, despite flashes of imagination, overly familiar. And the dialogue, peppered with well-worn catchphrases.

Dracula is one of the most confounding, and worst, movies I’ve seen in a long time.