It's depressing to see director Herbert Ross strain to fabricate an atmosphere of urgency around such perfunctory characters, events and crises. A minimal lyric can be finessed by stylish orchestration much easier than a minimal script can be finessed by streamlined composition and emphatic cutting. [18 Feb 1984, p.G1]

Dark of the Moon is capable of having a little fun with itself. In one scene, mini-Autobots watch "Star Trek'' on TV, not noticing that Spock has the same voice as Sentinel Prime, the formerly moon-stuck 'bot who's rescued and revived in order to play a major role in this installment.

It’s hard to get over the movie’s haunting atmosphere. It may be just another story of kids in peril, but this one’s particularly hard to shake.

While the frequent sex scenes are graphic, they’re also driven by vulnerability and long-buried desire. In this film, wordless encounters often reveal more about characters than conversation.

Feeble....Director Tony Bill tries to give Mitch Markowitz's script a spirit of madcap abandon but instead achieves a kind of forced hilarity that's neither funny nor liberating. [11 Apr 1990, p.D4]

Halfhearted and unsure. They want it both ways and in so doing, don't get it either way. Cute just goes so far. [22 Aug 1997, p.N37]

Disney just doesn't know when to give up on a dead project, which is the only thing that accounts for the studio's scene-for-scene remake of Little Indian, Big City, a French farce the corporation dubbed and released exactly one year ago. (It sank faster than a canoe full of Fantasia hippos.)

Eugenio Zanetti's set design is wonderful. But the movie isn't enough to make people check the shadows when they leave the theater.

There’s nothing sly about writer-director Le-Van Kiet’s scenario.

In spite of cliches as thick as stars in the sky, the price of admission to "The Mountain Men" may be worth almost as much as one 1830 beaver pelt.

The film looks handsome and expensive, building up a nice head of suspense before sputtering to a less than wholly satisfying conclusion.

A corkscrew of a thriller, has more twists than a tarantula with a permanent.

The museum sparkles, but the movie is awfully dull.

Killerman takes its influences — countless pulpy crime thrillers — and synthesizes them into an increasing rare thing: a movie that doesn’t aspire to any greater heights than where it lands: squarely in the middle of the August dumping ground.

Both terribly silly and a lot of fun.

Depraved, worthless piece of filth.

Unsullied is wholly underwhelming, with atrocious performances and plot twists so implausible that they would be funny in a film less tedious than this.

With its desensitizing blood lust, RoboCop 2 contributes yet another ugly note to this already demoralizing season of sadism. If things continue as they have until now, the body count at the movies may reach into the millions.

Eager to seem warmhearted and endearing, Author! Author! is frustrated by Pacino's conspicuous resistance. If anything, this uncharacteristic vehicle illustrates his inability to lighten up an emphatically gloomy, brooding screen presence. [19 Jun 1982, p.C1]

In the end, like virtually every other remake that has been released recently, it's polished and predictable.

Essentially, this is a film about humans as victims of alien abuse, a mediocre look at helplessness.

There's really nothing more here than you can find watching dreadful political advertisements and dreadful political talk shows.

Such a bizarre movie that it has completely occupied my thinking for days. Not because it's a good movie, mind you. It's more like the equivalent of a botched tooth extraction with a coat hanger. Some bloody shard remains stuck in an inflamed, fleshy part of my psyche, and it's going to take some serious tugging and tearing to root it out.

If director Michael Dowse took Matt and Tori out of the equation - which is to say, if he took out the main storyline - the whole event could have been a lot more fun.

It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.

This doggy flick, starring Matthew Modine, Nancy Travis, Eric Stoltz and Max Pomeranc, is one of the weirdest, most depressing family films ever made.

By the end, the film deteriorates into a combination sensitivity session and pep rally.

Dismal. Lame. Not funny.

For many, the story will pose an insurmountable challenge to even enjoy. But enjoyment it seems, is not Potter’s point. Yes, it is an unvarnished portrait of a mind breaking into fragments. Yet it is more than that, too.

A good idea and a stellar cast lost inside a sloppy script that mostly retreads last year’s laughs.

The movie is sincerely Christian in its outlook, while also a slapstick animal ’toon. It’s a mix that works only intermittently. But when it doesn’t pop, it thuds.

The repeated fake-outs even lead one to entertain the fond delusion that The Burning might be absent-minded enough to diverge into harmless farce and end up as a rehash of "Meatballs." Regrettably, once Cropsy strikes again, he can't seem to stop, and the movie keeps him company by going methodically beserk. [28 May 1981, p.D11]

Adolescents are too grown-up for this blasted nonsense.

There’s a lot of baloney — along with bodies — sliced up by the end, with Laurie bloviating about how Michael has come to “transcend” something or other. But there’s nothing transcendent, let alone new in Halloween Kills.

Will entertain the kids; not so much the grown-ups.

A film in search of a tighter edit and a stronger point of view. It meanders from scene to scene, calling to mind the images of leaking faucets and dribbling IV fluid that appear here in close-up.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.

Figgis depends on his considerable ability to evoke mood in a symphony of image, montage and music. But these scenes, watchable as some of them are (and I don't mean the Fall of Man Follies), don't accumulate into much more than abstract mush. [25 Jun 1999]

In the end, family ties are re-strung, but the morals remain annoyingly at loose ends.

A movie that possesses the stylized, lethal-Looney-Tunes slapstick we’ve come to associate with Coenesque humor, as well as the fiery, thinly disguised polemic of such past Clooney projects as “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a fun, if sacrilegious, first step in a franchise creation — one that observes the first commandment of storytelling: Thou shalt not be boring.

What a bummer! Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.

Clue is based on the popular Parker Brothers board game in which the players try to guess, well, whodunit, and where, and with what weapon. You leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.

Unless you're a Van Damme or martial arts fanatic, you're more likely to be thinking: No, merci.

The monster, an obvious HR Giger rip-off, looks completely different every time it’s onscreen; of course, it’s supposed to be continually mutating, but mostly it looks too immobile to be menacing.

Yes, Knowing is creepy, at least for the first two-thirds or so, in a moderately satisfying, if predictable, way.

The movie's flexibility with its own rules would be less noticeable if it were busy thrilling us.

Okay, the concept for the movie is admittedly lame, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with watching a passel of adorable pooches wrinkle their brows and bark while human voices come out of their mouths.

It's a light and breezy, recession-themed romantic comedy; "Up in the Air" without all the angst and introspection.

It's all as cliche'd as "A Summer Place," a better movie even if it was soap opera. For Keeps is a soapbox opera, and the slats are about to fall through. Writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue are as wishy-washy about their issues as they are their heroes. And they serve up the usual "you can have it all" scenario. After the teen-agers suffer with didies and postpartum depression, it's off to college to prepare for future careers. [16 Jan 1988, p.B5]

Memory is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

But despite doing its best to jiggle, giggle and ogle its way into a niche somewhere between "Heathers" and "American Pie," it becomes just another forgettable pastiche of sight gags and pop-culture references.

Possesses its share of modest laughs, many of them delivered by Ted Danson as Bridget's bemused husband. But director Callie Khouri (best known for writing "Thelma & Louise") doesn't bring the dash needed to make this a comic heist on a par with "Ocean's Eleven."

Moving without being melodramatic, War of the Buttons is a tale of the worst -- and the best -- that people of all ages are capable of.

Godzilla, go home.

Hilarious.

The movie turns out to be a little of everything yet succeeds only occasionally at anything.

The first Crocodile picture -- which went on to become the most profitable foreign film ever made -- wasn't great entertainment, but it was light, companionable and essentially inoffensive. Compared with the sequel, though, it looks like a masterpiece.

As the vengeful Candyman, Tony Todd remains both a tragic victim and a frightfully menacing supposition, enough so that you'll think twice before repeating that full Candyman mantra in front of your bathroom mirror.

It's a grim tale, and Back to 1942 doesn't pretend otherwise.

Make no mistake: Black Adam proceeds with predictable action sequences, tiresome fight scenes and the now-requisite sacrifice of a major character. But it’s that seasoning of radical politics — the theme, expressed in the film as a question of whether freedom fighters should have to play by the rules of war — that gives it a bit of spice. Whether that’s enough to set Black Adam apart in a world that already arguably has too many superhero movies, is unclear.

"Created Equal” doesn’t offer many insights, at least not in a deeply satisfying way, as to how and why he has changed.

Although “G.I. Joe” is merely a movie based on Hasbro toys, the action -- the real point of all this -- feels just as lifeless.

Cinderella, the latest of countless adaptations of the centuries-old rags-to-riches story, is far less interested in enchantment than in dismantling the entire sexist, classist racket.

A scruffy but appealing light entertainment, the movie owes its unexpected charm to the fact that comedian and dog seem to complement and humanize each other. [09 Sep 1980, p.C3]

This time, Eastwood has traded in his magnum for a Chevy pick-up truck and crime-ridden city streets for a netherworld of highways, honky tonks and trailer parks. But there are still enough bodies smashed - automotive and human - to keep his followers happy. [22 Dec 1978, p.20]

It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

It’s exhausting. It’s also not particularly funny or engaging.

I'm guessing even die-hard "Clerks" fans will find this only-in-America stuff only partially satisfying, like something they gorged on at the Eatery, then wished they hadn't.

The upshot is that the film is technically superb and quite enjoyable as long as you don't bang your head against the plot.

In general, if it weren't for the good will we feel toward the actors, the movie would be intolerably feeble. It's nearly intolerable as it is. The only other plus is Stewart Copeland's jaunty, percussive score. It's this sort of thing that's giving maternity a bad name.

While it's obvious that Stanley has seen a lot of genre films, he's not yet learned how to make one, though his shortcomings are less visual than dramatic and narrative; things look fast, but happen s-l-o-w. This Hardware needs a grease job.

An invigorating blast of cinematic adrenaline.

It's uninspired and insipid all the way.

The loudest, trashiest, stupidest, cheesiest celebration of ritualized male aggression of 2004.

Lacks that outrageous effrontery that might have socked it to its intended audience.

If her career as director somehow doesn’t pan out, Meyers-Shyer would make an excellent fairy godmother.

Smokey and the Bandit II -- is a premeditated embarrassment. It seems to prove that entertainers who discover a successful formula may not have the foggiest notion of how to protect, duplicate and sustain it.

Russell is an inoffensive Mel Gibson clone here. But Stallone is an unlovable lummox, preposterous because he takes himself so seriously. Even when he attempts to laugh at himself, his quips fall like clods on coffins. His bravery is braggadocio. Let's hope this will be the last of Tango.

Less intriguingly convoluted than concussed into lifelessness, “Marlowe” is the cinematic equivalent of a word salad: It parrots all the right lines while striking all the right poses, without saying much of anything at all.

Beltrn, for his part, makes a solidly believable Garca Lorca. The problem is with the man with whom he's obsessed. In Pattinson's performance, we never see what Garca Lorca sees in Dal.

The Rookie is like one of those maddening, waking dreams when you spend the whole night thrashing in bed while tediously repetitive images batter your racing brain. But at least morning comes. This movie, directed by Eastwood, never ends.

Although it frequently misfires and occasionally keeps firing away on empty satiric chambers, Student Bodies is a likably sarcastic and knowing assault on the cliche's of horror movies. [11 Aug 1981, p.C10]

The people of 2022 may “release the beast” by slaughtering their fellow Americans. In 2013, that’s still what we go to the movies for.

It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.

It's sheer piffle, a disingenuous romance with Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino that's all sap and no sizzle.

Anyone who doesn't smile is probably either too adult to count or too dead to care.

The effects are generally good, and those Cenobites are definitely not the kind of folks you'd have over on New Year's Eve. Still, it's odd that the most intriguing, and threatening, items in the film are those darn puzzle boxes.

Hart is clearly working overtime; there’s nothing effortless about his histrionic delivery, but it works.

The script boasts more writers than the computerized menagerie's got megabytes, but they haven't come up with much variety or humor in what is essentially a string of catastrophes.

Mild pleasures are available in Mr. Woodcock.

This cinematic triple-decker sandwich is so overstuffed with baloney and cheese it ought to come with a pickle on the side.

Call it a Christmas miracle, albeit a minor one: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel isn't entirely awful.

A ridiculous rabble-drowser with the heart of a bully and the soul of a thief.

I suppose there's not much point at this late date to complain about how all movies look and sound alike today, how dull stretches in the story are pumped up with loud music, how handy, so-called "comic" hooks (one character has a flatulence problem, another will do anything for sex, another will do anything for money) have taken the place of characterization, how directors don't even try anymore to create a real milieu. [15 Feb 1986, p.G6]

The Christian-themed Where Hope Grows wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who’s in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment. It’s a soft sell, to be sure, but it’s salesmanship all the same.

Making a scintillating feature directing debut at the age of 30, Mastroianni reveals a special knack for juxtaposing funny and frightening stimuli, recalling De Plama and Steven Spielberg at their most provocatively amusing.

Another film about . . . a cretinous, grating loser.

The mind will be starved for subtlety, wit and substance.

If you only live twice, spend both lifetimes avoiding it.

Don't even rent the DVD, it'll only encourage them.

Unfortunately, this film’s dark premise is drowned in whimsy and a forced childlike wonder.

The movie feels more like a thriller than a drama; it's paced like a thriller, building to a murder that never happens, exciting passions that are never unleashed, waiting for a crime to occur. The only crimes, however, are of the heart. Meanwhile, the movie knows exactly what it's doing, and does exactly what it intends, without making one false move.

Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan are the nominal stars of First Sunday, but it's Katt Williams who steals the show in this by turns trite and mildly amusing B-comedy.

Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

Sometimes the material's rather too gruesome for a family-oriented film, but as one HVTV intern says to the Devil, "It isn't the blood that bothers me, so much as the lack of subtext."

The Substitute is a sour experience—bloody, ugly and exploitative.

That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

There are no real surprises here, except maybe one. It would never work, Finley warns us, and it seems she might as well be talking about this cornball movie. But thanks to something ineffable — Redgrave, leprechauns, moondust, or maybe just understated performances from two appealing protagonists — Finding You kinda, sorta does.

Unfortunately, in the filmmaker’s narrative-feature debut, she takes the theme of betrayal and turns it into fodder for a sitcom, and not a particularly funny one at that.

The title (which translates, essentially, as "burned out") is an apt description of the film itself: a hot and smoldering shell.

Attention all units: Slapstick in progress in the vicinity of Police Academy. Suspects wanted for mugging the camera and possession of night shtiks with intent to incite a laugh riot. Please respond to this blues burlesque, a uniformly funny hit sure to have a long run. Its target audience -- those who can take their T&A with a grain of assault. Its plot -- a combo of "Animal House" and "An Officer and a Gentleman." Its stars -- a rainbow coalition of hot newcomers and dependable, unexpendable pros. [23 Mar 1984, p.23]

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

Has John Carpenter lost his mind or just his talent? On the heels of In the Mouth of Madness comes the director's rehash of the 1960 classic, Village of the Damned. Unfortunately, Carpenter simply makes a hash of it.

Jennifer Connelly is very easy to look at. Career Opportunities isn't. Go see the standee.

Owen Wilson phones it in with Drillbit Taylor, a by-the-numbers teen comedy.

An abominable, abdominal comedy. Aside from its tastelessness and dawdling pace, the movie’s chief problem is the lackluster chemistry between leading lummoxes Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Paul W.S. Anderson, best known for the “Resident Evil” franchise and 2011’s “The Three Musketeers,” creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. It’s enough to make you want him to ditch the story altogether.

Its title may ring with pun and promise, but Stoned is a flat riff on Jones's short life. You'll get the highlights but no sense of what made him special -- or what really haunted him.

The Woman in the Window is the kind of film that could go places, but sadly never manages to get out the door.

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]

Never was this funny a comedian in this horrible a movie.

Director Bruce Malmuth keeps the pace taut, the shots tight.

Sahara is a mediocrity wrapped inside a banality, toasted in a nice, fresh cliche.

A sort of “Me, God and the Dying Girl,” the movie is well-made (if slow) and features an attractive cast and a lot of amiable (if bland) religious pop-rock.

Don't go to "Into the Night." It will numb your mind. It will bore your soul. And it will cost you $5. [8 March 1985, p.25]

Desperation is the project's principal quality, characterizing everything from the misfiring jokes to the surprisingly distinguished cast.

Has its sinfully funny moments. Funny, that is, if you appreciate a certain cynical clamminess -- or Buck Henry seediness -- to your comedy.

Director Jeannot Szwarc could have done more with the action scenes, but he has a snappy sense of pace and comic timing. Blond, blue-eyed Slater brings an engaging sweetness to Supergirl; and she plays Linda with an awkward, gawky girlishness, subtly different from her Supergirl role.

David Lynch's disastrous film adaptation of Fank Herbert's science-fiction classic turns epic to myopic. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Well shot and edited, Death of a Dynasty is hardly a comedy classic, but it's frequently on target.

In all it wastes time, talent -- not least of all Reynolds's -- and money on an obscure mission. [30 Jul 1997, p.C02]

Tyldum...isn’t a dynamic stylist as much as a competent executor of what’s on the page. He gets Passengers to where it needs to go, which is a resolution in keeping with a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too, no matter how much credibility it strains, or how many political and ethical quandaries it elides.

Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility.

The Secret Agent, with its hemmed-in shots, feels like a TV production; what is said takes precedence over what is done. Even in the writing department, Hampton founders. [06 Dec 1996]

Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.

The idea is unabashedly silly, yet Monster Trucks is more involving than it sounds. Characters and conflicts are sharply defined, and director Chris Wedge handles the action with clarity.

Not surprisingly, everything feels begged, borrowed and stolen from other better movies, from Quentin Tarantino's exclamation-point violence to the slo-mo bullet trajectory shots from "The Matrix."

Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.

An aggressively stupid entry in the family-adventure genre from Jerry Bruckheimer.

Dickerson keeps things moving along briskly and the ensemble manages to survive Eric Bernt's "script" (Connell gets no credit). As for the dreadlocked Ice-T, he avoids the rap trappings of his previous film roles and is generally effective in his survival schemes.

Watching it is like being forced to listen to bad heavy metal music turned up to 11 while fat guys in Bermuda shorts compete in a puking contest in the john.

The film is not without its pleasures. Kidman and Firth lend the pulpy material a certain prestige, even if Strong comes across as simply another plot device (and a perplexing one at that).

Relentless formulaic fodder for the explosion-starved; it's loud, shallow, sexist and a complete waste of time.

The only laughs come from Vaughn, a master of ingratiation. Witherspoon is no Roz Russell or Lucille Ball. But she fills space nicely.

A lowbrow comedy so irreverent it could almost be considered a subversive indictment of law enforcement, not to mention lowbrow humor. Almost, that is, if it were remotely funny.

The story is as predictable as a campfire song. Each of the friends has one core problem to fix, but the film is really about the meandering path to enlightenment, which takes frequent detours for food fights, pillow fights and pottery classes with a lot of awkwardly erotic squelching.

The central story, in which Helms has to make up his mind whether to attend his sister's funeral, is too limited a conflict to hang a movie on. Ultimately, audiences will have to satisfy themselves with the collective presence of these actors and the movie's obviously good-hearted intentions.

A shameless, uneventful rehash of the classic Western "Shane," "Nowhere to Run" miscasts Jean-Claude Van Damme in the old Alan Ladd role -- an outlaw outsider gradually drawn into both unexpected familial warmth and predictably violent conflict with a greedy land baron...While it boasts better supporting actors and technical credits than other Van Damme projects, the film nonetheless founders, a victim of its own lugubrious pace and misguided efforts at turning the bulging Belgian into a romantic lead.

Despite its broad comedy, typical of “Dukes of Hazzard” director Jay Chandrasekhar, the film has some tender and wise moments. And even if you don’t get all the ethnic jokes, there’s plenty of family drama that anybody will recognize, no matter their background.

Laugh? I thought I'd never start.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

A piece of fluff as artificially sweetened as a fuchsia Peep, rises above these low expectations - but only barely.

Just a series of familiar scenes unfurling toward an inevitable conclusion.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

This is not a dreadful movie. Murphy fans may even find some comfort in watching their slim, witty, hot-headed hero safely returned to his familiar movie trappings. But anyone seeking a fresh characterization or clever plot twist ought not to buy a ride on this Murphy vehicle. With Metro, he's going nowhere fast.

A throwback to 1970s blaxploitation flicks, with a Latin accent, Illegal Tender would be a brassy, sassy guilty pleasure if it were more, well, pleasurable.

But the best thing about Jakob the Liar is that it's not "Patch Adams at Auschwitz."

Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.

The most surprising thing about Some Body is that any film so lewd could be so thoroughly uninteresting.

Even the premise for this sputtering attempt at a picaresque farce seems to anticipate a vehicle prone to misfires and breakdowns. [12 Aug 1982, p.E1]

The movie features not one, but two precocious children, a cloying stock character that should be used sparingly, if at all. And much of the dialogue sounds fake, veering alternately toward cutesy and overly cerebral.

There are moments when the fanfic speculations of “Come Away” feel too forced and downright cockamamie; the plot, probably inevitable, becomes schematic and the near-constant state of magical thinking too sticky-sweet for words. But the enterprise is ennobled by Chapman's sense of style and a consistently strong set of performances, especially from Jolie and Oyelowo.

Power Rangers is good junk.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

A wham-bam encounter, it gives you everything you (presumably) want, sets itself up for another sequel, and it makes sure you don't recall a thing about it in the morning.

Trash or treat? Halloween II is as dumb as its prequel. The Great Pumpkin isn't going to be pleased with this one. [30 Oct 1981, p.17]

Although it was held back by the studio for about a year, someone apparently came to the inevitable conclusion that no amount of ripening time was going to help this gimmicky and ultimately harebrained movie.

Clumsily under-written and feverishly overacted, it's as embarrassing to watch as it is perplexing.

Evolution is bad. How bad? Who cares? Do you ask how hot the fire is before running out of a burning building? No, you just run for safety.

Moses has staged one totally abstract, contemplative sequence of Erving practicing by himself on a playground court at night. The succession of slow-motion, overlapping dissolves of Erving gliding and dunking in solitary grandeur is a rather pretty abstraction, but it seems to stylize his prowess in a misleading way. The transcendant thing about Erving is that he's capable of performing feats in competition and in real time that the rest of us only dream of doing while playing one-on-none.

The story takes a couple of sharp turns, ultimately revealing that it isn’t a romantic comedy after all, but a shambling drama with a few mildly amusing pratfalls.

It's resounding bunk, candied over with the lush music of Johnny Clegg and hyped to death by director John ("Rocky") Avildsen.

Whether the lines are funny, tasteless or not-so-funny, Chase keeps popping 'em; whether the scenes are from "48 HRS." or "Beverly Hills Cop," screenwriter Leon Capetanos keeps photocopying them; and director Michael Ritchie (who also directed "Fletch") makes everything move along to a frenetic zydeco soundtrack. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself laughing at something. Unless you're dead, too.

The exercises are genuine, and so is the hardware. But the script undermines the sense of authenticity at every turn.

All the air has gone out of Rocky, something Stallone, who also wrote and directed, seems to realize -- he won't leave his movie alone. It's riddled with hapless gimmickry: zooms, slow motion, double images, freeze frames, embarrassing MTV-style montages, a noisy, aggressive sound track, and flashback after flashback to the movies that have gone before, in order to remind you why you're there, as if to insist, "See, this used be a good idea." [28 Nov 1985, p. E1]

Although her charisma is still undeniable, there’s also no denying that McCarthy is capable of much more than she’s allowing herself to do here. There comes a point when every force of nature starts to look just plain forced.

Even at its lamest and most entitled, this sequel will most likely please fans of the first installment, chiefly because Bateman, Sudeikis and Day are, admittedly, often very funny together.

The script is at once so undernourished and so obvious that you'll be convinced Cohen produced it via telegram: START MANIAC COP KILLS CIVILIANS STOP CLEANCUT GETS BLAME STOP WORLD-WEARY DETECTIVE FIGURES IT OUT STOP BODIES FALL STOP.

Another day, another inept homage to "Vertigo."

Shaft is also funny, with a sharp, fast-paced humor (though one transphobic joke is a tone-deaf clunker). And it’s always enjoyable to watch Jackson walking around while dropping f-bombs (and mother-f-bombs) all over the place.

Though it has clever moments, it doesn't come close to the polished animation, wit and originality of the big green guy (Shrek).

What's missing from this color-by-numbers screenplay is the bizarre touch of eccentric humor Sandler often lets creep into his comedies.

As is typical of the genre, the plot gets sillier as it unfolds, while the violence gets gnarlier.

It's fast, slick, stupid, violent fun and, despite the cynically high body count, without serious intention in this world.

This character was an abusive swine. Perhaps it would be best to let his art stand on its own.

Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]

A slight skateboard thriller that looks more like one of those Afterschool Specials on television than a bona fide feature film.

Sadly, Suicide Squad feels like a watered-down version of what could have been a stiff drink.

Barker the filmmaker resorts to most of the horror cliches he chillingly sidesteps in his writing.

Lee elevates herself from the lower echelon of mere international super-babedom to the loftier realm of pulp myth. She is "It" with an exclamation mark.

Lawrence's material runs between mediocre and offensive, and then he rescues it with his physical humor. He's at his best when he lets his face or inflection do the talking.

It's a clever plot with a minimum of the already tired standard kids-on-computers sequence and a maximum of silly face-to-face deflation.

Isn't just for music fans. It's more accessible than that, thanks to Joel Schumacher's bright direction and a few storytelling embellishments.

There are two dance-offs, multiple fat jokes and one sight gag using eye boogers, a heretofore ignored bodily fluid. These are the highlights.

Overstuffed, overlong and utterly uninvolving, this is a movie that feels as morbidly trapped as the poor little bird of its title. Rather than spread its wings and fly free, it stays frustratingly, eternally inert.

A comedy that looks like a documentary but plays like a horror film -- to parents of teenagers.

From the ongoing search to find new arenas in which Sylvester Stallone, against overwhelming odds, triumphs through exercise of the manly virtues, comes Over the Top, a movie about arm-wrestling. What's next? Crab soccer?

The result is a script so needlessly complicated that it defies comprehension.

There's only one thing to do with this "Bottle": Put a cork in it.

Bliss isn’t really all that interested in trafficking in the stuff of mass-market science fiction: the bells and whistles, in the form of nifty hardware, special effects and the like. Rather, Cahill’s latest film is an exercise in existential inquiry.

Its clumsy, inert storytelling seems less interested in converting nonbelievers than in convincing us of Wahlberg’s piety.

At times, the movie has the look and feel of the cheaply made late-night commercials that it mercilessly, and occasionally hilariously, mocks.

3 Days to Kill feels like two very different movies, neither of which is particularly good.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas isn't a movie about human nature at odds with itself, but a witless and unwitting mirror for Hollywood's worst instincts and onanistic conceits. [23 July 1982, p.11]

Hogancamp was a talented illustrator before the attack rendered him unable to draw. In retreating to a world of his imagination as a way to exorcise the demons that tormented him, he ended up creating real art. I’m not sure Zemeckis’s achievement rises to the same level, but this cinematic excursion to Marwen is almost certainly a trip to someplace you haven’t been before.

A limp and exceedingly uninvolving melodrama.

A handsomely made French musical that never really soars.

Director Mark Pellington (“I Melt With You”) at least recognizes that the setup is little more than a freakish showcase for Mac­Laine do her blunt-spoken-battle-ax thing.

In attitude, if not aptitude, Robert Pattinson in Remember Me comes across like a latter-day James Dean.

John Schlesinger, who directed Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man, knows how to weave edge-of-the-seat tension. But Mark Frost's screenplay, based on Nicholas Conde's occult mystery novel The Religion, is a haphazard affair of implausibility and pseudo-Voodoo.

Intriguing, if uneven, thriller.

This "Four" ain't so "Fantastic."

The question at the heart of Deliver Us From Evil, a garden-variety serial-killer thriller tarted up as an exorcism drama, is not whether good will triumph over evil. Rather, it’s this: What in God’s name possesses good actors to make dreck like this?

The real problem, when all is said and done, isn’t the movie but the man with the microphone in its spotlight. Despite two comedy consultants who worked on the film, De Niro’s Jackie never comes across as especially funny on stage (or especially likable off).

While some of the stories are interesting, the film is much longer than it needs to be. For his part, Salerno tries to get creative with solutions for the lack of visual stimuli, but most attempts fail.

If the first sequel was a photocopy of the original, this second sequel is a tracing of a photocopy. It's the same business twice removed, and twice diminished.

Much of the film's humor hovers around crotch level. If jokes about mental illness, terminal disease and sex with orangutans sound funny to you, go for it.

An inert, sloppily written melodrama as grim and featureless as its frozen Midwestern setting.

Like every other second of more than 10,000 seconds in Alexander, it doesn't engage in the least.

ROBIN WILLIAMS rises above the mediocrity of Harold Ramis' newest comedy, which features the cherubic improv comic as co-owner of a de'classe' Club Med. Even so, Club Paradise is lost. [11 July 1986, p.N31]

It never makes much sense.

Benign but forgettable sci-fi diversion.

As an example of smash-mouth environmentalism, you'd be hard-pressed to surpass Fire Down Below. As an example of right-thinking American compassion and concern for our precious natural heritage and all the fuzzy fauna and fernyflora of the great outdoors, it's extremely forthright. And as a movie, it's a piece of drivel...Ugh! What a distasteful, silly, egomaniacal movie. [6 Sept 1997, p.D03]

Rated PG, which must stand for "particularly gullible," it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for people who slept through American history class.

Shrink is no worse than the average Hollywood comedy. But it shows, more obviously than most, the bankruptcy of standard-issue American pop narrative, circa 2009.

“Dunjia” is exuberant and visually inventive, notably in the ways it incorporates text into the images. It also benefits from engaging performances. But the story is motley and not very involving, and the anything-goes CGI undermines the battle sequences.

Francis Veber's Three Fugitives, a heist caper, starts off with comic promise then limps all the way from the bank.

Anyone much taller than a Smurf may turn blue long before its 81 minutes are over.

Somewhere on the incoherent pu pu platter that is Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, a nifty romantic comedy congeals and shrivels, inexplicably untouched.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

"Out of the Shadows” isn’t going to win any awards, good or bad. Neither an embarrassment nor a triumph, it is nevertheless an improvement over the last film.

Although Kendrick’s pint-size dynamo once pushed the Bellas beyond their la-la-la comfort zone, she basically sleepwalks through this third go-round.

Wonderfully empowering to watch Petula and Dorothy turn the tables on their testosterone-crazed tormentors.

A snooze, despite all the sex and other gunplay.

Baldly manipulative, emotionally counterfeit melodrama.

From the Land of the Moon features a typical Cotillard performance, yet the romance, from French actress and filmmaker Nicole Garcia, manages to convey neither triumph nor tragedy.

Guaglione and Resinaro strive to find meaning in Mike’s struggle, even when the script and its conclusion all point to a message that is more senseless, even bleak.

Ernest Goes to Jail is directed by John Cherry, the adman who created the character. And hard as it is to admit it, Cherry is getting better -- better at making endearing an annoying pea-brained pitchman.