Nothing more, or less, than a cheap, dirty grab at our Christmas spirit.

Enough to make any thinking person want to shoot a hole in the screen.

This is supposed to be funny? It was so depressing I almost started to cry.

Even Nanjiani’s endearingly funny turn isn’t enough to elevate Stuber above its own trite, lazy aspirations. He might drive away with the movie, he just doesn’t drive far enough.

It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

There is, however, a certain urgency to the action that will prevent most people from noticing the film’s flaws.

This is a movie that features not one, but two graphic mercy killings. Forget "127 Hours": Sanctum makes sawing off your own arm look like a minor penalty for the crime of spelunking while clueless.

In his new thriller, Raising Cain, director Brian De Palma addresses his most vivid personal issues -- his obsession with Hitchcock and twins, and the loss of innocence -- but he runs through them impersonally, as if the luster of his own obsessions has worn off.

If any one made a respectable effort to invest this story with authenticity or tension it is not apparent on the screen. Even the big spectacle, the demolition of a dam, is going to look unimpressive to moviegoers who've already been to Superman and seen the identical illusion depicted with far more skill. Force 10 is a mission that should probably have been aborted. Instead it's been allowed to abort on the screen.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

After interminable delays and unresolved digressions, we finally get to see some decent special effects, but hardly enough to warrant sitting through the entire film. [12 July 1988, p.D6]

So didactic that viewers are likely to feel less uplifted than lectured.

On the one hand, Beasts is a refreshing departure from the Michael Bay era: a sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes incoherent CGI fight fest structured around a story of family, found and otherwise, and starring a diverse cast. But it’s still, despite a few mildly grown-up jokes, a quintessential Transformers film in one inescapable way. It should come with a different sort of content advisory: No one over 21 admitted without their inner child.

For the most part, Daredevil doesn't take a single dare; it travels the road much trod, even if it's through the midtown air.

In Big Adventure, Pee-wee's gadgety bike was stolen, and the dramatic interest rode on finding it. Big Top contains three rings' worth of people and livestock, but the interest is no-show. You'd be better off going to the circus. Or the zoo.

The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.

By introducing silly elements into a serious endeavor, the filmmakers undercut their own movie. In the end, we're watching a somewhat exploitative movie about exploitation.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.

It’s all played for laughs, which fail to materialize in a story that milks easy cliches and stereotypes about Italians, pasta and sexual double-entendres, with icky dialogue about “spicy sausage” and the like.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels like the friend at a middle school sleepover whose mom forgot to pick them up the next morning. You know, they know, everybody knows: The friend has overstayed their welcome, but you’re still trying to make things fun.

Unfortunately, Bosworth couldn't act his way through the Seattle Seahawks and he's not likely to act his way into a film career based on this first outing.

Presumably, there's a poignant story to be told about the love between 19th-century poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. But Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse, a pretentious, flat affair, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine, is not the film to pull it off.

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s books. They may be, as some have noted, poorly written, formulaic and pretentious. But at least they hold a reader’s attention, in ways that this excursion — as sleep-inducing and rigidly predictable as a train ride — does not.

Despite numerous missteps and contrivances, Olvidados succeeds as an indictment of Operation Condor’s horrors.

There's lots of action, but the director must have had a bag over his head. And the stars are ducking more cliches than bullets. [18 March 1983, p.15]

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Endearing if slight, Superstar at least knows what it's doing the whole way.

Unfortunately, the VR special effects are few and far between in a film short on plot and long on derivation.