Tough guys snarl at each other or dive out of the way before some explosion reduces their biceps to gymboy tuna. Van Damme still talks like a Belgian choirboy. But he’s physically awesome, of course. He can do things with his body that it hurts to even contemplate. If nature intended for men to do the splits or high kicks, boxer shorts would not have been invented. As for Rourke, I am convinced he’s made entirely of leather. He is essentially a boxing glove with a heartbeat.

Director James McTeigue was much more successful capturing graphic novelist Alan Moore's mood in "V for Vendetta" than he is conjuring the bone-chilling suspense of Poe. But viewed as simply another Hollywood thriller, The Raven builds up a decent head of steam as time runs out for our hero's imperiled fiancee.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a pointless and untimely lampoon of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from the increasingly creaky spoofmeister Mel Brooks. A predictable onslaught of bad taste and worse jokes, it mostly targets not the conventions of action-adventures but the sexual preferences of the merry men, who are variously referred to as pansies, fagalas and fruits. Brooks fills in the spaces with broadsides derogatory to women and the one interest group you can readily afford to offend on film -- blind folks.

In the hands of a less amateurish director, The Philadelphia Experiment, now at area theaters, might have emerged as an ingratiating sleeper. [09 Aug 1984, p.D6]

Girl 6 is such a mundane, flat comedy.

It would be dishonest to claim it isn’t funny. The laughs may come in fits and starts, usually by way of sight gags and set pieces, but they do come. And then they go.

The movie was nicely shot with flashy graphics to explain the data that does exist. But in the end, this film will persuade only those who already believe.

Where the movie sabotages her, though, is by insisting that all she really wants is to be like everyone else.

The Hangover Part II offers absolutely nothing new to fans of the first film. In fact, once the comfort of familiarity has worn off, they may well feel as baited-and-switched as the patrons of one of the sketchier clubs the boys visit.

Follows familiar formulas and characters, both brightened by a bit of wit and good performances from the two leads.

Firmly ensconced among the forgettables in Stiller's career, a generic romantic comedy of the one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B variety.

Adapted from Valerie Martin's psychosexual novel, this maudlin film transforms the legend of Jekyll and Hyde into a talky romantic love triangle. [23 Feb 1996]

Illustrates the law of returning diminishments.

If anyone can sell the idea of ... some psycho "Sherlock Holmes," it's Samuel L. Jackson.

Directed by Vincent ("A Map of the Human Heart") Ward, who is either a genius or a crackpot, and derived from a long-ago novel by Richard Matheson, the film is overproduced and underpopulated, with either characters or ideas.

Better than the ubiquitous PBS show in some places, not as good in others. [03 Apr 1998, p.N53]

Music video director Simon Brand makes an impressively taut debut with Unknown, a nifty little psychological crime thriller that suggests a "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" for the postindustrial age.

Like a dream you’ve half forgotten by the time you get to the breakfast table, it’s neither good enough to make much of an impression or bad enough to completely forget.

Firefox may sound bright, hot and racy, but it browns out. Eastwood has an energy crisis as director, producer and star. [18 June 1982, p.15]

Strip away the trite character beats, rote plot points, random dream sequences and other narrative padding, and “Batman v Superman” comes down to the actors, their characters and whether they can sustain interest over the long haul. The answer is yes, if they wind up in the hands of filmmakers blessed with authentic imagination rather than serviceable technical chops.

With a bench this deep, This Is Where I Leave You should have been a comedy of contemporary manners as wickedly funny as it is poignant. In the hands of Levy, it’s become just another forgettable example of low-stakes Hollywood hackwork at its most bland, banal and snipingly belligerent.

It's a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon that lasts 154 minutes rather than just five, and it's as exhausting as it sounds.

The humor is rigorously unoriginal and it all feels a bit like minstrelsy, a freakish, ritualistic nod to things your grandfather might have found funny.

For the most part, the film's a bewildering disappointment.

One singularly unbecoming character, who should, by rights, forever remain a "singleton."

"Nerds" is erratic -- more gags work than don't, but more situations don't work than do. There are some great throwaway lines. [10 Aug. 1984, p.23]

Though the actor (Walken) does little more than stroll through the film, he creates such an immediate sense of electricity that everyone else seems dim by comparison. Angels, devils or cops, they just aren't in his league.

On the whole, Deadly Friend is a routine horror movie, poorly photographed (by old-time cinematographer Philip Lathrop) and poorly performed (with the exception of New York stage actress Anne Twomey, as Paul's mother).

Cadence might once have been pertinent, revolutionary or politically correct, but it's definitely out of step with the times

The Bronze is just another movie about overcoming arrested development. It’s not as funny as it tries to be, but, for a few, fleeting minutes, it leaves an impression.

The mawkishness is ultimately too formidable.

The movie is presented as the story of a man who hasn’t figured out who he is yet. But that’s not quite right. Instead, it’s a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up.

A mostly tedious, cheaply made shoot-'em-up from the always classy Dino De Laurentiis. [07 June 1986, p.D5]

The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights.

It doesn't help matters that The Libertine seems to unload every olde English cliche on file.

The first dumb-fun action movie of the summer season has arrived early with The Losers, a loud, loving homage to guns and testosterone based on a series of comic books about a renegade band of CIA operatives. How dumb is it? You might actually kill a few million brain cells just watching it.

May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

It doesn't take extra-sensory perspiration, as Ernest would say, to realize this undertaking is dumber than jaywalking at the Indy 500.

Every composite shot in Superman III appears to be a careless affront to the willing suspension of disbelief. The flying sequences are a letdown, the cataclysms are a cheat, and even the settings are often exposed as a chintzy hoot. [17 June 1983, p.C1]

Never transports you to another place and time, as it intends to.

The sparks don't fly -- they fall down and they can't get up.

I've got another portmanteau word for the movie: unbelievaballistic.

Performances feel too manufactured to be charming.

This is a modest documentary, actually made in 2002 but only now gaining national release, which celebrates Attucks and that particular team, but most important Coach Crowe, by all accounts a remarkable man.

The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers is hampered by a static structure that relies too heavily on a single voice.

Firehouse Dog goes into the marginally watchable category, aimed as it is toward the middlebrow family trade, preferably dog owners with their own Sparky slopping up the station wagon windows.

Although this film about a zebra who aspires to win horse races has a marvelous premise, it slows to a mediocre canter right out of the starting gate.

A sometimes entertaining flick that makes a lot of noise but doesn't have much to say.

Palmetto, directed by the German genius Schlondorff, who memorably brought "The Tin Drum" to the screen, somehow never quite finds the right line through the materials.

Wanted isn't quite the real Slim Shady of hip-hop comedies. But you might lose yourself in a few of its amusing moments.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s like several pretty good ones.

Slickers II is grounds for a stampede -- away from the theater.

The elephant, whose last film was Operation Dumbo Drop, steals the three-ring circus with its charming personality and an amazing 50-command repertoire.

The biggest problem, then, is the characters who populate the film. For the most part, they're one-dimensional caricatures.

Considering the clichd storyline and lackluster acting, maybe it's South Beach that deserves top billing on the "Revolution" poster.

The result doesn't really work. The music videos don't seem connected to anything, and there's not nearly enough about the actual victims of the trade. But it's a documentary with its heart and its outrage in the right place.

"Star Trek V" is a shambles, a space plodessy, a snoozola of astronomic proportions. The story is uneventful, the effects warmed over from "Star Wars."

The dialogue in San Andreas is lame, its plot both predictable and implausible, and the character development beside the point. Even Dwayne Johnson, that force of cinematic nature and rock-ribbed charisma, doesn’t have enough charm to dig this mess of a movie out of the rubble of cliche it’s buried in.

American Pastoral may tell the heartbreaking story of Swede Levov, but a firm grasp of who he is and what he means remains maddeningly elusive.

Throughout, Garner retains a permanent grimace, as if persuasive acting can be achieved by contorting cheek muscles and pouting lips. It's not just depressing to watch; it's tiring. We want to tell her to relax -- for our own relief.

Boasting a plot that's heavy on the magical shenanigans, this pretty and poetic adaptation of Shakespeare's play is a fantasia for the smart set, a literary novelty for anyone who wants to have fun without giving up food for thought. On that score, at least, it delivers, in spades.

The remake is directed by another slickster, the Irishman John Moore, who is no deep thinker (as his "Behind Enemy Lines" confirmed) but, like Donner, he's an able hack -- smooth, stylish, clever, soulless and a hoot. And so's his damned movie. And it is damned.

Nothing in Dad moves below the surface. When the inevitable tragedies come, they take their expected forms. And because we have at least some susceptibility and human feeling, we give the expected response. What we are responding to, though, is not so much the film as the issues it raises.

The mixture of tension, yuks and horrific violence at times reminds one of nothing more than a poor man's "Pulp Fiction."

Feels patently inauthentic.

Let's face it, some people find butt and bathroom comedy funny. And some don't.

The film oozes sentimentality, soap-opera bathos and clumsy cribbings from the Frank Capra book of small-town values. Those are its good points.

According to the press kit, "Producer Daniel Melnick's personal stamp on films has always been to avoid the obvious, the cliche'." Uh, Dan . . . you lost your stamp.

This is a movie you can like a lot if you accept that it's not going to approach things in a conventional manner. [22 Jan 1998, p.B7]

A lamebrained American remake of the classic, bitter French farce "Les Comperes," Fathers' Day offers sporadic laughs of the lowest kind -- the old outhouse-bites-man thing -- but some conspicuous idiocy as well.

9 Songs inadvertently proves just how limited experimentation for its own sake can be.

The romantic drama The Vow looks like the kind of annual Valentine's Day staple that arrives just as calls start flooding flower shops and chocolate bonbon displays invade your local CVS.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, has constructed a work that suffers from the same tunnel vision as other movies of this ilk.

Only fitfully amusing. More often, it feels like a mediocre attempt to reprise the central elements of the infinitely funnier "Napoleon Dynamite."

Even Monáe’s magnetism can't elevate Antebellum above roots that are firmly planted in the blood and soil of pulp exploitation, shaky liberal earnestness and rank opportunism.

After paying good money to take your family to see this film, you may be dealing with some anger-management issues of your own.

After evoking only warm smiles in its first half, Le Chef ultimately veers into farce.

More mood piece than drama, Equals ultimately benefits from the scarcity of exposition, because the story’s details make little sense.

Plodding and predictable, and a big disappointment.

“Spider’s Web” may have its flaws, including a bit of villainous motivation so oversimplified it makes Dr. Evil’s thought processes look like Einstein’s. And yet despite Lisbeth’s makeover, there’s still something cool, complicated and compelling about this “Girl.” Lisbeth may be stuck in a silly movie, but she’s nobody’s victim.

For all the wacky, taboo, parodic situations that MacGruber plunges into, the film seems content to simply point at its hero, yell "What a schmuck!" and leave it at that.

As a comic actor, Allen's palette is limited to varying degrees of beige. He is not only boring, he's obnoxious and narcissistic. Where's the ASPCA -- the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences -- when you need 'em?

Think twice about taking very young children — or even some susceptible adults — to this at-times shocking, if less than graphic, gloom-and-doom fest. But the worse sin is: It’s boring.

For a quick ticket into the world of extreme sports, the sky-high, adrenaline-gorged stunts captured in X Games will make any spectator gasp, wince and brace with fear.

Benefits from affecting performances from a gifted cast headed by R&B heartthrob Usher Raymond.

This film isn't so much a sequel to the original "American Pie" as a reduction of it.

The movie doesn't have the energy to be truly horrible. It's too muted and enervated. But it's a somewhat tedious thing to sit through.

Relentlessly beautiful and wholly annoying.

Plays like an empty but diverting beach read. Your brain recognizes that the dialogue, for example, doesn't come from any place that remotely resembles relationship reality.

The problem with this movie is the problem with most Renny Harlin movies: There's an excessive amount of excess -- a mind-numbing plurality of firearm battles, vehicular explosions and brutally frank sexual talk.

The secrets that are revealed, to the extent that a viewer is able to make out what they are, remain murky, even to the end of the movie.

Instead of a hearty chowder of emotional highs and lows, first-time director Alexander Janko, who also adapted the script, settles for a diluted, Campbell’s-Soup version of getting one’s groove back.

The pleasure we take from Medicine Man comes not only from the actors or the engrossing progress of the narrative, but from every aspect, including Donald McAlpine's ravishing cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith's luscious score.

The movie gives some depth to its misfits, and ultimately sends the valuable message that nobody should be ashamed of who they are.

Wish I Was Here touches on some timely themes and does so with an artistic vulnerability.

So what makes this 2012 Total Recall superior to the Arnie model? For starters, there's an actual actor in the starring role.

Hardly out of the driveway before director Penny Marshall loses control.

Robert Redford does everything but wear a crown of thorns as the selfless war hero of The Last Castle, a heavy-handed military prison melodrama.

Despite its hopeful title and a warm inland location, this dawdling family dramedy proves as sodden as a bed-wetter's mattress.

Represents such a professional nadir for each of its principals that you wish better for them in the new year.

Without a doubt, mainstream moviegoers will be revolted by the nastiness of it all.

Its collection of one-liners and amusing situations could put you in a diverting spell. A studio-generated romp about three 17th-century witches who create havoc in present-day Salem, Mass., it's full of big-crowd laughs (thanks mostly to Midler) and suspense.

It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier.

Dear Nicholas Sparks, There's no easy way to say this. But with Dear John, the latest of the five films made so far from your sentimental, best-selling novels, I think our relationship is in trouble.

Unfortunately, "Youth" becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Coppola proves that even the best of our film artists can lose sight of what this medium is all about: entertaining, enlightening and including its audience.

In the final scene, the filmmakers nearly succeed in turning Suu Kyi into an Asian Eva Peron, down to the outspread arms, tossing an orchid to her worshippers.

A galactic slump of a movie that stuffs its travel bag with special effects but forgets to pack the charm.

There’s nothing wrong with a good cry at the movies. But a bad cry is emotionally manipulative and, well, just mean. A Dog’s Journey is the latter.

Visually bland, well-meaning salute to the brotherhood of man.

Vita & Virginia may be about two fascinating characters, but it’s also case of words, paradoxically, obscuring the real people who wrote them.

If nothing else, the movie reminds filmgoers just how difficult it can be to pull off the multi-thread approach. Sometimes it's possible to take a spool of yarn and, with care and consistency, knit a stunning creation. 360 looks more like what happens when a cat gets ahold of the ball.

It's a brisk, colorful, infectiously charming but instantly disposable Hollywood entertainment. It's fun, like watching kids play dress-up in the back yard -- nothing more, nothing less.

Recommended only to moviegoers so indiscriminately fond of the Panther series and starved for belly laughs that they consider it a privilege to watch director Blake Edwards sort through his old footage and sweep up after himself. If your indulgence is less than open-ended, this lame attempt to scrape a "new" feature out of a filmmaking backlog is likely to seem more deplorable than diverting. [18 Dec 1982, p.C4]

This would have made a fascinating film if Freedomland were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

With a premise as cavalier as this, perhaps director and co-writer James Wong could have found a tone more original than post-Wes Craven cynicism. Instead, he panders to viewers, allowing them to take gleeful comfort in the destruction of the stupid and doomed.

It’s Southern-fried “The Blue Lagoon” meets “Murder, She Wrote” — and topped off with a sprinkling of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

While the plot is thin and there's little action till the big blow some 60 minutes into the film, a volcano offers a greater variety of thrills than your basic cyclone ever could.

The kind of bland, generic, high-concept midsummer comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."

Stephen King is a novelist, not a screenwriter. Which may be worth remembering on the admittedly slender chance that you go to see Needful Things for its dialogue, which is by turns cheap, cute, histrionic, profane and derivative.

The actors can’t compensate for a story that ultimately sputters.

Lush, extravagant, sad and touching, Love in the Time of Cholera still feels weirdly insubstantial when all the febrile passion has abated. Like a fever it breaks, passes and is forgotten.

Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt, is a near-death experience: Time seems to stop as we stiffen in our seats and the actors all whisper as if they're at a wake.

Nathan Wang's score borrows blatantly from "The Natural" and is slathered on thick in all the big emotional scenes. They establish the right nostalgic mood, but it's broken with that loud "ping" of a metal bat every time a kid gets a hit.

The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.

It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir. What it all means, of course, I have no idea.

If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third American Pie installment, you'll have a good time.

But just as Pee-wee Herman's films are vehicles for his shtick, Elvira is mostly Elvira wisecracking and busting out of her dress. She's fun, a Transylvania Valley Girl grown up into the Queen of the Bs, but after 96 minutes you may start thinking more fondly about those '50s and '60s camp classics she's usually interspersed with.

Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.

Experienced horror fans will probably stay one step ahead of the game, but it's still a nice ride.

What we have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos.

There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in The Aftermath, an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story.

Unaccompanied Minors, a sort of junior league version of "The Breakfast Club," never achieves the universal appeal of John Hughes's 1985 film about youth and authority.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

The script's a plodder, and the acting's unbearably stilted. The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

Watching it, you feel as if you're being hammered to death with champagne corks.

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.

Still of the Night emerges as not only failed, synthetic Hitchcock but also failed, synthetic slasher and failed, synthetic love story. [18 Dec 1982, p.C1]

It isn't so much a movie as a superheated, highly conductive miracle substance for the pure transmission of masculine aggression and misogyny.

Exerts an unmistakable appeal, thanks to an absorbing story and fine performances from Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson.

It gets the bullet points of Sam Childers's life, but misses the target.

A sloppily structured, snoozily paced psychodrama about living in harmony with nature and all the rest of that tree-hugging hooey.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

The story often feels like a collection of (so-so) jokes, forcibly strung together in a tenuous narrative.

Chuck Norris fans will not be disappointed by Missing in Action, a bang-bang-you're-dead exploitation flick from the Cannon Group in which the action is rarely missing. [19 Nov 1984, p.C3]

Director Nimród Antal (“Predators”) does a serviceable job of keeping everything interesting and suspenseful, if not exactly fresh.

The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash.

Trust the Man quickly begins to feel hopelessly derivative of other, better movies.

Dependable entertainment for young girls.

If a movie can be said to suffer from low-grade depression, this one certainly seems to be, shuffling in its socks and bathrobe through a not-quite-two-hour running time with an attitude that is closer to grudging obligation than enthusiastic commitment.

The purpose of A Dog’s Purpose isn’t to solve philosophical riddles but to warm the cockles of dog lovers’ hearts. That, it does — as well as a wet kiss from a slobbery tongue can.

The jokes are lame, the set-up is stupid and Bullock, occasionally a winsome comedienne and here a co-producer, is annoying as heck.

Powerful lead performances and the filmmaker's noble attempt at holding a magnifying glass over the Deep South's still-contentious race relations help The Grace Card edge closer to the realm of mainstream entertainment. It's not just a dry sermon in feature-length form.

The misapprehension about Brooklyn's Finest -- which was first shown at Sundance last year and has been heavily edited since -- is that it's a movie about police. It isn't: It's a movie about movies about police.

David Cronenberg's film version of David Henry Hwang's Tony Award-winning play, is no more successful in solving it than any other versions of this fantastic tale have been.... "The Crying Game" it's not. [09 Oct 1993]

Warning: If you have seen neither “Unbreakable” nor “Split,” you may be utterly and irredeemably lost. Shyamalan cares not a whit about — and is probably incapable of making — a stand-alone film that will appeal to a general audience. This one is for the die-hards.

Between them, Clooney and Kidman would still need a third party to work up a personality. In fairness to both, they aren't given much to work with.

What's the difference between Feast and, say, "Alien" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," all of which share the same plot? Patience. Feast lacks it.

In a summer of surprisingly self-serious comic book movies" Lara Croft "stands out as being particularly humorless.

Cut-and-dried sci-fi thriller.

The movie's great fun, particularly for kids used to that satirically hard-edged kind of kid show.

There's not enough story in it to fill a shoebox.

In short, Carrey's got nothing to bounce all that energy off of, not even a solid story line.

The movie has its flaws. Still, for anyone with a soft spot for the mute gaze of man’s best friend, it’s hard not to shed a tear — or two — during The Art of Racing in the Rain.

You Gotta Believe is an entry in the “heartwarming true story” genre, Little League subdivision, and it isn’t bad so much as resolutely average.

This “Anaconda” never stops winking. Its juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

An unimaginative boy-and-his-mammal saga with only tenuous connection to the old television series of the same name.

Technically the movie is flawless. One scene in Central Park, when Pacino confronts the murder suspect on a deserted rain-slicked path, is haunting and beautfully photographed. But that's hardly a reason to sit through the rest of this wretched film. [22 Feb 1980, p.19]

Donkey Punch is almost humorless, and there's no wink and nudge behind the mayhem to absolve us of taking its ugly, class-obsessed subtext seriously.

A hideously unfunny spy spoof with pretensions to social satire in its treatment of a lesbian relationship.

The film’s success is due to the twinkly commitment of the large and talented cast.

The movie, in short, rides on a revenge plot and a beauty-and-the-beast subplot, and there's some nice photography and production design; screen writer L.M. Kit Carson lends some Texas texture and funny lines. But mostly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is straight blood and guts. [23 Aug 1986, p.D11]

The books-trump-movies camp knows where this is headed: The film version - contains two characters and one narrative too many.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

It leaves audiences in a limbo every bit as torturous as the one the protagonist is in.

For anyone to enjoy this starchy, contrived exercise in vanity and product placement, it's best not to have read the book. In fact, it's best not to have read ANY book.

Most of the humor is sophisticated slapstick, which Depardieu mastered in the hilarious trio of Francis Veber comedies he did with Pierre Richard in the '80s.

Too much of Bones feels transplanted from genre staples like "Hellraiser," "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Evil Dead."

An insipid potboiler set against the far more enticing surf and sand of Oahu's North Shore.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

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.

Still, well-intentioned sappiness is something we can deal with; the lack of any genuine dramatic conflict is a more damaging shortcoming.

It's a package, plain and simple: stars plus a high-concept premise, stripped down, no options. No personality, either.

There just aren't many laughs in this slack dramedy, and what yuks there are are fairly low-wattage.

It’s not pretty, but it captures something that few cooking movies do: reality.

A numbingly unfunny romantic comedy. I hated every minute of it

A serious been-there-done-that number.

Too lightweight and streamlined to be memorable.

By the end, the film’s early promise has pretty much degenerated into routine pyrotechnics.

As Eleanor, Bonham Carter delivers a sweetly oddball performance playing a high-maintenance but fiercely determined grouch who is mostly impossible to like. Swank, for her part, is no picnic either: A former psychiatric nurse who discovered law later in life, her Colette is a largely charmless workaholic.

Parker the movie, like the man, delivers exactly as promised.

Wedding Palace boasts some neat moments.

It is this sense of real life blurring with make-believe that Allen's film is really playing with, like a kitten toying with a scared mouse. Back and forth he bats the subject, moving between reality, illusion and the imitation of reality with a deft touch that may bruise but never kills.

Unexpectedly likeable, thanks to the high-spirited performances of stars James Belushi and Charles Grodin, under the relaxed direction by Arthur Hiller.

There are a few laughs here and there. Most come at the expense of Ferrell, who plays the kind of hapless (and occasionally shirtless) straight arrow that the actor could turn out in his sleep.

A cold, protracted and unemotional affair.

Despite its impeccable acting and subtle backdrop of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Event lets its message overwhelm its emotion.

Only reason to watch this: the grisly reward Irving receives for being in this picture.

None of it appears to be well thought out, or thought through, and it's consequently never remotely believable.

The movie has an Austen-like plot about an Austen obsessive. And while Hess laboriously checks off so many familiar scenarios...the film doesn’t have so much of what makes Austen transcendent.

It's about learning to be human and, on that level, it's utter schlock -- cloying, manipulative and overcute. You could see it on another level, though -- as a comedy about an obnoxious houseguest -- and feel a little kinder toward it.

So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud.

This sharp left turn takes the films’ mythology in strange and not entirely satisfying new directions, including a crazy time-travel element.

The major problem with "For Love or Money" is its leads, since Fox is no Cary Grant and Anwar no Audrey Hepburn. Fox is sweetly engaging at times but he still seems too boyish to be convincing. And though he wheels and deals with flair, no romantic sparks fly between him and Anwar. Of course, as she proved with Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman," it takes two to tango -- and Anwar simply is too vapid an actress, a poor woman's Adrienne Shelly with a flat voice, wan looks and all too little presence.

Like "What the Bleep," this movie is a bit of a hodgepodge, blending an interview-driven documentary with a less remarkable story-based drama.

Despite a story line that covers such fraught historical events as 9/11 and the Iraq War, the movie is too tidy to ever really feel like a living, breathing thing.

Until betrayed by its essential docility, The Promise promises a fairly stimulating wallow in the tear-jerking depths. [10 Apr 1979, p.B3]

The overall sense, however, is of a movie coasting on an obvious and somewhat flimsy premise, to which no one thought to bring much else besides Nicholson and Freeman.

After the movie limps along for an hour and a half, Besson suddenly switches gears and does what he does best.

The high-school sports drama Crooked Arrows has two -- but only two -- original selling points: Its protagonists are Native Americans and the sport in question is lacrosse. That's something you don't see every day. Other than that, however, the film's moves are taken straight out of "The Bad News Bears" playbook.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

It's a hyper-violent buddy comedy. If you like that sort of thing -- think "Training Day," with laughs -- you'll love this.