Gimme Shelter has a lighter touch than you might think. Yet there are times when its attempts at wringing drama out of real life are more strenuous than is strictly necessary.

With summer comes theaters filled with superheroes, sequels and forgettable family fare. In the last category, we find Judy Moody.

Don’t expect to see a great film, or even a very good one. Whether you discover a meaningful channel with which to continue your walk with the film’s protagonist, however, is strictly between you and your god.

The twist is, yes, audacious, even daring. It’s full of risk and defiance of expectation. So half a star for that. Steven Knight, you’ve got some nerve. But none of those things mean that the movie works.

Cinema-as-shoplifting is okay, as long as you still get the feeling it's for a greater good. But that's something The Tourist is sorely missing.

Too infuriatingly quirky and taken with its own style to get down to telling a story.

This latest, utterly gratuitous chapter in the saga of the wisecracking reptile hunter will add nothing to the ever-dimming reputation of the Subaru pitchman.

Now and then sputters to comic life but more usually wheezes along.

It's like a ferret on crystal meth that belatedly discovers ecstasy, and it's a tiresome trip either way.

So primitive, it must have been written in lizard blood on animal skin.

The only reason you'll feel any wrath is because you shelled out 12 bucks for this steaming bucket of half-baked plot, cliched dialogue and disappointing 3-D special effects.

This mishmash of styles, genres and tonal shifts makes for a dizzying pastiche best described in terms of the many movies it references throughout its nearly 2 1/2-hour running time, from “Little Big Man,” Buster Keaton’s “The General” and the Monument Valley-set canon of John Ford to “Dead Man,” “Rango” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

In Evan Almighty, Mr. God goes to Washington. Frank Capra, stop rolling in your grave. At least they cared enough to steal from the very best.

No, it's not a great movie. It is, however, an interesting one.

With all due respect to Cook's novel, another book - the Bible - teaches us that on the seventh day, God gave it a rest. Seven Days in Utopia should have followed His lead.

Charlie St. Cloud, like its star Zac Efron, is a gorgeous, unblemished thing. Both would be much improved with a tiny flaw or two.

Like an elaborately decorated wedding cake, the kid-friendly Walking With Dinosaurs 3D may leave you wondering how something so stunning could end up being so bland.

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

The movie winds up a casualty of schmaltzy, patronizing sentiment on the one hand and overweening ambition on the other.

A longwinded, predictable scenario.

When a burning rat is the funniest thing in your movie, I think you're in big trouble, even in Miami.

I can't recall the original, or even if I saw it or not. But this variation certainly makes its points effectively, in what must be a more superheated milieu.

Unfortunately for the makers of Tuff Turf, the plot's as hokey as they come; the dialogue is dreadful ("Life isn't a problem to be solved, it's a mystery to be lived!"); and kids in 1985 are just too sophisticated for such juvenile tripe. Right kids? Right? [1 Feb 1985, p.19]

Essentially, Chuck & Larry is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.

There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.

It's a like a film made by people who don't really care, for an audience of people who don't really care. It stars Tim Conway and Don Knotts, who are not exercising their legitimate comic talents beyond one expression each: Conway crosses his eyes, and Knotts makes his eyeballs disappear upwards. [13 July 1979, p.25]

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

[A] scatterbrained imitation. [15 Oct 1993, p.D7]

The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly and stings like a B-movie.

The movie is small but sensational. I don't know what writer-director Frank E. Flowers might lose by trying to take his career international, but he has real talent.

A film that, in attempting to ridicule the Bush administration, finally just settles for being ridiculous itself.

In Mercury Rising, the mercury may rise but pulses never do. A promising thriller with tough guy Bruce Willis wearing an ever-more radiant tapestry of bruises on his face, the film ultimately surrenders to the entropy of stale plotting and familiar formula.

So dull and awful, you actually wonder if this is some kind of Andy Kaufmanesque in-joke, a deliberate attempt to douse the spark that made the original film so enjoyable.

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.

A 90-minute theatrical release from Nickelodeon Productions that, if anything, should have aired as a half-hour Nickelodeon special.

There's nothing terribly surprising about Special Forces, a moderately gripping action flick about a group of commandos on a mission to rescue a pretty blonde who has been abducted by the Taliban. Nothing, that is, except that it's French.

The most persistent question asked at When Do We Eat? will probably be "When do we leave?" This abrasive Passover comedy-drama is extremely difficult to sit through, and if its makers weren't all Jewish, it would be considered anti-Semitic.

The movie is intermittently amusing, particularly when the American human part of the cast (Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love Hewitt) are off-screen, the longer and farther the better.

The action sequences are cloddishly orchestrated. And for the most part, the movie simply doesn't make sense.

It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.

Sometimes the punch lines land and sometimes they don’t, but overall the result is pleasantly nostalgic.

As a thriller, Wisdom is dull; as an examination of a terrorist's psychology, it is, paradoxically, both overly detailed and unilluminating; and as a meditation on the nature of fame in America today, it is portentous in the gloomy manner of what college catalogues call an "all-night bull session." On the other hand, Moore springs to life whenever she's given a good sarcastic line to deliver. And if you stick around till the end, because your date wants to get his money's worth or whatever, there's a doozy of a car chase.

Clearly targeted at Christians looking to reaffirm their faith. Its chances of crossover success with the secular crowd seem remote, given the dramatic shortcomings.

H.G. Wells did it better. This movie spends so much yawn-inducing time on variations of the same combat scenario that its final showdown feels rushed.

Child's Play 2 is an inevitable sequel that's not as good as its progenitor, but better than most movies with the numbers 2 through 8 in their titles. Thin plot-wise, it caters to an audience apparently amused on the first go-round by the antics of a foul-mouthed doll named Chucky.

This movie isn't a thriller, it's an insomnia killer.

A grisly, depraved and wholly uninvolving exercise in empty mannerism.

Even if you’ve never heard any of this back story — let alone anything about Mine That Bird — the outcome of the film is never seriously in doubt. That leaves filmmaker Jim Wilson in the predicament of having to entertain us by showing how the horse and his handlers get their act together. Unfortunately, 50 to 1 never really does that.

The Bye Bye Man had a relatively modest budget, and it shows in the special effects, which tend to be more funny than scary.

Despite the Sybil-like plot (and questionable Rambo mentality), there's something watchable about it all. Weird it is, flop it ain't.

Speaking of the script, questionable motives and unbelievable decisions are relatively small potatoes compared with the Sputnik-size plotholes.

The most objectionable thing about Only God Forgives isn’t that it’s shocking or immoral, but that it’s so finally, fatally dull.

If you're looking for some good family interspecies entertainment, take the little ones to see "Stuart Little 2" again; in the meantime, you might want to crawl into your cave and sleep through this one.

A piddling non-adventure with Louis Gossett Jr. as a namby-pamby sidekick. It's Gung-Ho and Gunga Din, in yet another variation on the "Raiders" theme.

The movie loses many opportunities for stronger emotional resonance — the Sonic the Hedgehog films succeed far better because of their strong focus on character relationships. Yet, while watching this movie, I was reminded of the beginning of cinema.

Folks, I really feel that seeing this one for you is the movie critic's equivalent of jumping on the grenade to save your lives. Send me medals.

It's about women, but as written and directed by a man, it appears to make no emotional sense at all. It treats women like idiots.

A thinly written, hoarily cliched story that serves mostly as connective tissue between the movie's chief draw, its dazzling dance sequences.

There's not much adventure on these high seas. This buccaneering boondoggle is more like a slow voyage aboard the PMS Pinafore. [22 Dec 1995, p.C06]

Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

All in all, the picture goes down fairly easily, and by any estimate it's an improvement over other Pryor nonconcert films such as The Toy or even Brewster's Millions.

The movie is pretty unabashed about the all-but-corny sentiment: Each of us has something to give.

Irving is a generalissimo of literary assault techniques, shameless about shifting his emphasis from, say, the lewd to the sanctimonious on a moment's notice if he perceives an emotional advantage, particularly one lending itself to convulsive moral indignation. [17 March 1984, p.C8]

The movie's half over before it really starts to whack at the funny bone.

Never asks its target audience of self-referential baby boomers and their littles bundles of joy to take it more seriously than it takes itself.

It couldn't be any less revolutionary in style. It is straighter than a guitar string.

If you think it's worth it to sit there for 97 minutes for three or possibly four laughs, then you are beyond help.

In the end, He’s All That is not all that — not even a little bit of that.

I would call the movie a trainwreck, except it’s really four or five separate trainwrecks.

Why -- when there are so many funnier, smarter, more gifted performers who can't get arrested in Hollywood -- why, for the love of all that's good and holy, does Martin Lawrence get to keep making movies?

Howl and damnation, if this isn't just one long, stomach-turning drool joke.

A convoluted psychosexual thriller that promises the moon and gives us Bruce's butt.

Tooth Fairy is cute. Which is to say that Dwayne Johnson is cute. How could anybody with the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger (circa 1984) and the smile of Cameron Diaz not be, especially when dressed -- albeit briefly -- in a pink tutu?

With the exception of a few enjoyable action scenes, such as when Aeon and fellow operative Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo) flip and backflip their way across a lethal garden of bullet-spewing trees and spikes disguised as blades of grass, Aeon Flux is surprisingly draggy.

This Arthur is an exercise in time-travel tedium, a trip to the Land That Funny Forgot.

The film's premise is hopelessly ludicrous. Plus, though Patrick Dempsey is an agile light comedian, he's hardly plausible as a lady-killer. Patrick Swayze he's not. Alfalfa, maybe.

A boilerplate melodrama whose good guys and bad guys are so baldly drawn they could have been conceived by Friz Freleng.

Screwball romance, action picture. Summer movie.

Has the stink of man-musk all over it.

Consider the title your best advice.

The movie, based on the TV cartoon series, is exceptionally pleasant, and there's just enough humor to make it enjoyable for adults.

Functional but tiresome.

It really should be arrested for impersonating an interesting movie.

Shanghai is an exercise in retro glamour, alluring decadence and tough-guy posing, all of which it delivers in sufficient quantities.

An unconscionable mess of unyielding crassness, from the overall tone, which celebrates gaucherie all the while it's saying that love is what really counts, to the sound mix, which makes most of the dialogue, which is larded with impenetrable slang, doubly impenetrable. [04 Jul 1986, p.C2]

Rarely has an actress exuded such blank nothingness as Simpson, a one-woman vapid delivery system who sucks the energy and joy out of every scene she's in, like some freakishly well-endowed black hole.

If this is corporate synergy fired up to a terrifying new level, there’s still enough heart at the movie’s center to keep it from becoming all business.

An innocent comedic revenge fantasy that somehow manages to be sweet and wickedly satisfying at the same time.

The movie's chief crime against the planet, other than the sheer wastage of time, is the trivializing of the great Freeman. This actor has such dignity and depth and humanity, he almost makes the film watchable.

Abomination of a movie.

Even McAvoy’s reincarnation-obsessed Frankenstein can’t breathe vitality into this shallow adaptation, which careens from moments of horror to serious drama to attempts at comedy that don’t quite land.

Plot and narrative? Minimal. Confrontations? Endless. Surprises? None.

Like its brain-damaged protagonist, Criminal just shouts and shoots its way into, not out of, an oblivion of illogic, plot holes and emotionally unengaging scenery-chewing.

In an era of careful cost accountancy and focus-group testing, it's remarkable that a movie as truly, deeply, madly foolish as The Wicker Man escaped the asylum. But we must be grateful for the endless guffaws and gasps and outright stunned silences it unleashes on lucky audiences.

The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.

Sure, I laughed. Yes, I cried. But mostly I just wanted to throw up.

John C. McGinley from "Scrubs" gets to strut some of his comic stuff as the deranged builder, but he's the only passable feature in a property that should be condemned.

Kids sense when a movie is being noisy and frantic just to keep them distracted; these apes are overcaffeinated.

There are so many problems with Graffiti Bridge. The major one is that this "contemporary musical drama" stars and was directed by Prince, who also wrote the script and the score. This may be four hats too many.

There's no sense of perspective here.

Segel and Diaz are gifted and game comedians, with a lot of audience appeal. But Lowe clearly upstages them, consummating their Sex Tape — and making you want to roll over and have a cigarette — while there’s still one reel to go.

Tries so hard to be cool that it forgets to be alive.

Maestro is for people already aware of this history. For everyone else, this is pretty much invitation-only.

The movie is pure hound, but you'll want to catch Short's every pixilated move. He almost made me wish that the picture would never end.

Even in this conglomerate era of marketed, predigested mediocrity, this Disney movie slips instantly into the humdrum.

The movie insists that the fate of the world hangs on the actions of these people. If you buy that, you'll buy anything. [11 Dec 1981, p.31]

Pan doesn’t deliver on its own promise. The movie doesn’t so much enhance our understanding of the flying boy as it demonstrates how little thought went into crafting his back story.

And you thought the Mapplethorpe show was shocking....But then incongruity is fundamental to comedy, and at least "Ladybugs" has that, if nothing else, going for it.

It's hard to know who exactly Parental Guidance was made for.

Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.

This belabored charade of mistaken identities is guided by Herbert Ross, who has directed everything from The Sunshine Boys to Footloose. Apparently, he's decided to cater to younger moviegoers with this discordant mix of MTV imagery and classic farce.

It's astonishing how much intensity and focus these two have lost, but the picture itself is not all that bad -- if you can get the collapsing-career thing out of your head.

Despite some Cold War humor, the formulaic film is aimed squarely at the youngest of young children.

It's lame, corny, Ed Woodishly amateurish -- all of which is as lovable as the big lug himself.

It's saying something when Tom Arnold's performance is among the movie's highlights.

Intentionally defies categorization and explication.

It’s incrementally more fun than it is silly.

A few minutes of excitement can’t compensate for an hour and a half of unimaginative storytelling and dull characters.

The film's inconsistencies, inaccuracies and disjointed editing can be explained by Lee's untimely death; the producers had to piece the movie together from the available footage. But what's the excuse for the other wretched performances? [25 May 1979, p.39]

Those nostrils do a lot of Momoa's acting, to be honest. As right as he is looks-wise, Momoa falls short in attitude.

Although III claims seven times as much action as ever before, the movie is still so boring that even the love interest (Robyn Lively) leaves early. She's no Kung Fool.

If the ultimate goal is entertainment, then Lady in the Water enthusiastically rises to the task. In a movie laden with enough symbolism, shamanism and mythic lore to make Joseph Campbell dance a tribal jig, Shyamalan never forgets to have fun.

The best thing about awkward moments, after all, is that they usually pass quickly. And, blessedly, just as swiftly forgotten.

Death Sentence, directed by "Saw" co-creator James Wan, swings the pendulum too far. One day Nick is a mild-mannered nerd who spends his days making (and loving) risk assessments for his company; the next, he's Travis Bickle from 1976's "Taxi Driver."

Ninety minutes of Shock Treatment feels like a week in "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," a Quaalude interlude, a quart of Sanka laced with Valium. No jolt...Despite flashy lights, splashy sets and plump girls in tight white corsets, "S.T.'s" a bore -- a blatant try for teeny-punk bucks. It's a lesson for filmmakers: You can't force a cult film, they just happen. [28 May 1982, p.13]

Cooper and Lawrence do their best, but the material consistently works against them, from the overwrought dialogue to the never-ending plot twists in place of character development.

Cletis Tout is both in love with and able to laugh at the conventions it adopts, which is exactly where it goes wrong. It's just a little too self-satisfied.

A bungled screen version of Louis de Bernieres' cult novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin was doomed from the moment Nicolas Cage was cast as the "life-devouring," Puccini-loving hero.

The wanton fabulistas of Party Monster are as boring and insignificant as the very "normals and drearies" they so contemptuously deride.

The film might take its name from poker subculture, but it lacks all the urgency, single-mindedness and swiftness that the title implies at its most literal. Runner Runner is a bummer. Bummer.

When they part ways at picture's end, Marlboro's parting words are "Vaya con Dios," which translates as "Go with God." I'd put it differently. Go, the both of you. With God or without, but by all means, go.

Unfortunately, despite its adorable heroes, you’d have to be nutty to sit through The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, a largely unengaging modern-day animal fable.

Having ruled out humor, the movie emphasizes action and melodrama. Director Park Hong-soo, making his feature debut, handles the former with proficiency but little flair.

Flexploitation pure and simple -- nothing but savagery, sex and sinew.

An ugly commingling of old Westerns, Zen chic and kung fu movies...Full of gratuitous mayhem, head-bashing, gay-bashing and woman-bashing, Road House has a malicious, almost putrid tone.

The romantic drama is painfully contrived and insistently predictable.

Fast Food Fast Women is "Sex and the City" in Payless shoes. An incoherent jumble of characters and situations.

This David Spade comedy breaks an ankle, ruptures several knee ligaments and hits the dirt harder than a felled linebacker. Best thing you can do for this movie? Leave it writhing in the throes of forced humor.

It is the story itself that never achieves liftoff.

The Watch takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin. The tires may be in need of changing pretty soon, but for now the jalopy still runs.

Although audiences will admire the film's do-it-yourself energy and commitment, Poster Boy finally collapses of its own contrived weight, deflating just when it should soar into madcap -- or at least thoughtful -- satire.

It's a shame Allen fired her from that play. After all, then she might not have had the time to make this documentary.

Horror fans will twitch impatiently at those long stretches between killings. And audiences anticipating a feature-length "Girls Gone Wild" video will suffer withdrawal from the lack of loosened bra straps.

The littlest children in your house may find something to titter at from time to time, but based on the reaction of a young screening audience, it won't be often.

Perhaps there will be people who do laugh at Lawrence and Raven-Symon screaming in tandem, or mugging their way along every tortured mile of their road trip, or unwittingly joining a sky-diving club and having to parachute into Washington so Melanie can make her interview. Heck, it was all really funny when they did it on "I Love Lucy."

Unfortunately, Rhinestone is content to cackle and scratch around at such a dumb cluck level of facetiousness that what began as a "cute" idea degenerates into a moronic one. [22 Jun 1984, p.B8]

Tells us nothing we didn't already know, and it tells it over and over and over.

Rusnak, who was the second-unit director of "Godzilla," brings plenty of style to this ambitious yet utterly anticlimactic thumb-sucker.

If only The Reaping had the decency to be coherent.

So maybe some of this is hilarious. Heck, maybe all of it is. It will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not mine.

Unoriginal and woefully half-baked, Number Four plays out as such.

An exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

My only question is this: In the context of these by-the-book pratfalls, is it funny enough?

An ugly, unbelievable thriller, Striking Distance is a lame excuse for a few loosely connected chase scenes, full of macho piggishness, glaring inconsistencies and yawning plot-holes.

Something Borrowed clinches it: It is not okay to sleep with the fiance of one's best friend. What's odd, and ultimately icky, is how enthusiastically the film attempts to justify doing so.

As you might expect, the calculations here are on a much less sophisticated level. And by less sophisticated, I mean like counting on fingers.

The new Darn Cat moves faster, has a few more laughs, nonviolent villains who are barely seen, a never-ending car chase climax, and gives more than a passing nod to such phenomena as teenage discontent.

The performances take the movie to a higher level.

There's something so familiar and commonplace about this story and its characters...it's hard to get particularly thrilled.

Burke's face is impressively scaly, his head is adorned with shorn horns. He makes a great monster. If only he had a better movie to growl in!

The fourth film in the series, the newest installment has a new director, Chris Cain, and a female Kid, Hilary Swank, but otherwise it reprises the formula established by John G. Avildsen in 1984: A troubled teen conquers self-doubt and the local bullies with the help of an enigmatic karate teacher.

Triple the length of its cable television inspiration, Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood is triple the gore, triple the naked women, but not, alas, triple the fun. Comic takes on vampires have been done better, less bloodily and with more clothing, but always without the benefit of a wildly popular franchise like this HBO series.

With pulpy material to begin with, the film's ham-fisted, novice director Robert Longo seems to be the major incompetent. [25 May 1995, p.M24]

I spent a lot of time during the new Corey Haim-Corey Feldman movie, License to Drive, trying to figure out where it is set. Then it hit me. IT IS SET IN HELL! Hell, in this case, is a place where all the actors are named Corey. Where everyone is under the legal drinking age. Where everybody still breathes through his mouth and Oxy-5 flows like champagne.

A John Hughes movie without Pretty in Pink director John Hughes, sure makes you appreciate the teens' auteur. Frankly, Steve Rash, who directs this copycat comedy, another nerd-gets-the-cheerleader romance, isn't fit to wear Hughes' hightops. Rash only tinkers with adolescent angst, without the progenitor's empathy for his audience.

Walas' animatronic Robo-Fly is as clumsy as both Stoltz's Martin and the film's script, which resorts all too often to clever computer graphics and video-flashbacks.

As fantastical as all that sounds, the pleasure of Push comes from its glamorized grit, its no-nonsense pacing and the committed performances of the actors roughhousing in the gray area between heroism and villainy. It's pure popcorn, popped fresh, doused in butter and sprinkled with soy sauce.

Cinematographer Larkin Seiple’s fine camera work and Eli’s mystery weapon just don’t keep the thunking, derivative script afloat.

This is a surprisingly inept tale about an evil nanny and a killer tree that's right out of Jason's woods. Despite a prologue that aims to excuse subsequent plot deficiencies and a finale that's as absurd as you're likely to find in a modern horror film, The Guardian is simply ludicrous.

The privileged protagonists of Truth or Dare are neither interesting nor likable. They don’t even seem worthy of the academic degrees they’re getting.

KEN, KEN, KEN, not another Shakespeare, pleeeeeeez.

By its own deliriously rock-bottom standards, "Universal" ain't half bad. Of course, you have to be big on bloody slaughter, kickboxing, infrared gunning and impaired acting. But "Universal" executes its subtle-free mission with surprisingly watchable efficiency.

The Entity may be the least catchy title in movie history, and for the first tedious hour or so this curiously indecisive account of supernatural sexual intimidation remains in an expedient and exasperating rut: writer Frank DeFelitta and director Sidney Furie seem fixated on the rape scene from Rosemary's Baby. [09 Feb 1983, p.F11]

Oh, God! Book II revives that excruciating game of false piety in which Hollywood humorists grovel for brownie points in eternity by presuming to be God's chummiest press agents. [03 Oct 1980, p.C1]

Full of incident, heartbreak, secrets and betrayal, The Affair and its choppy formal structure don’t do justice to an enormously appealing cast.

While the funny, action-packed sequences are the best parts, they are indicative of the film’s main problems: an inability to focus and an overly complicated plot.

Luckily, a strong supporting cast makes up for the protagonists’ tepid interactions. The brilliant duo of Kevin Hart and Alan Arkin steal the show.

The movie based on Young's 2002 memoir is a good bit blunter. One early laugh comes at the expense of a pig urinating on a woman's feet at the BAFTA awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars. And it doesn't get much better, or much smarter, than that.

For all its faults, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 manages to just get by on pretty scenery and a meticulous inoffensiveness. What else is there to say but, “Opa!”

In the end, it all looks and plays like a $40 million version of a game you're more likely to enjoy on a computer.

Little kids at play have come up with craftier plots, better characterization and conceivably more spectacular effects -- provided their mothers let them play with matches.

It is a beautiful, moving tale, a love story even, sad without being schmaltzy, full of funny, knee-slapping moments and sufficiently thrill-packed without the usual padding of cheap thrills. Despite the dramatic imbalance, and the need for some fine-tuning in an otherwise sensitive script, Heroes, directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, remains a stunning film. [04 Nov 1977, p.11]

Lazily written and hopelessly miscast.

My Blue Heaven puts you in a stupor comparable to the one that comes on after Thanksgiving turkey. Written by Nora Ephron, it makes you long for the awful "Heartburn."

It's not new. It's not interesting. I wish it would go away.

Unfolds with all the entertainment value of watching somebody else play a video game.

It's as pretentious and wispy as its title.

It's difficult to know whom to root for.

A jarring amalgam of sitcom goofiness and uncomfortable ooginess.

When Vaughn is cooking, his films can be stylish, self-satisfied junk food. “Argylle” leaves the style out of the equation — it’s filmmaking as processed interstate fare, high in calories, low in fiber, tasty until you’ve had enough of it and then you feel sick.

It's got a little kick to it.

Much of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is simply despicable.

Doesn't anyone get sick of this same old routine?

Surprisingly amateurish attempt at cross-cultural comedy.

The gratuitous vulgarity is just one more reason that Scooby-Doo should never have left the pound.

PSTwo feels like an elongated Tales From the Crypt, though the annoying heavy-metal soundtrack sounds like seepage from Headbanger's Ball. The first time around, Lambert went for terror; this time, it's mostly hardy-har-horror.

Jigh class briefly gives way to high camp, which then itself dissipates to an anticlimactic thud.

Ricki Lake makes an appealing, though unlikely, fairy tale heroine in the derivative romance Mrs. Winterbourne: If only this stale trifle didn't call for the bewitching or pixilating, for the abracadabra of a Bullock or a Pfeiffer. For a Cinderella story, it's sorely without magic.

A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.

There were moments when I thought Gone in 60 Seconds might be a passably entertaining movie. I figure those moments, strung end-to-end, would total 30 or 40 seconds.

Audiences who have avoided the multiplex these last few years because of the garbage peddled there are the only ones for whom this overly familiar "Walk" will be memorable.

In Kansas, Andrew McCarthy and Matt Dillon have a way of taking pages of dialogue and making it sound like ... pages of dialogue.

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

Involves such a disturbing blend of unhealthy mother-son affection and physical pain that it gives new meaning to the term child -- not to mention audience -- abuse.

The movie is very loud. It is pointlessly loud, arbitrarily loud, assaultively loud.

Although there are genuine moments of humor, they’re at odds with the increasingly ghastly measures taken by the three protagonists, as they succumb to power-hunger, paranoia and overkill.

Boils down, in the end, to the age-old question: Career or life? That Post Grad draws a stark line between the two, and forces its heroine into an untenable decision, might be the most disappointing thing about a movie that never quite succeeds in capturing a generation adrift.

A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together.

St. Elmo's Fire is about people who go to lunch and feel nostalgic for breakfast. The latest kiddie angst movie, it's thin gruel for introspective whelps.

Schlocky, sluggish shoot-'em-up.

A special place in purgatory must be reserved for John Leguizamo, who produced and stars in The Babysitters, a loathsome slice of exploitation at its most cynical and crass.

Who would have thought that Super Mario Bros., the movie based on the popular video game, could be such a treat? There are some, I'm sure, who saw the end of civilization here. But relax. This movie, which was directed by music video whiz kids Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, is sweet and funny and full of bright invention. In short, it's a blast.

McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut.

It's got a lot of small movies bouncing around inside it, but there's no big movie on the outside.

Tony Scott's Revenge is fascinating for one reason only -- as an example of full-scale, mega-star perversity. The star, in this case, is Kevin Costner, and there's a willfulness in the extremes to which he's gone here to alienate his public. Costner pitches his performance at his audience like a dare, as if he were seeing how far out on a limb it's willing to climb with him.

For about 15 seconds at the beginning, the new MGM film Once Upon a Crime is a thorough delight. Then that adorable little lion stops roaring.

It's no worse than any number of other cookie-cutter slasher flicks geared for the slightly post-pubescent market.

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality... is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

A twentysomething comedy with a brain-dead script, unflattering lighting and 16 performers in search of a scriptwriter...[It] feels like one-sixth of an idea stretched to the breaking point.

The movie’s action sequences are both thrilling and idiotic.

A purgatory of low-budget interplanetary adventure.

Good ol' Fred loses any sense of playful shock he once possessed and turns into a generic figure meticulously manufactured to simultaneously gross and freak us out. It doesn't work.

So dull and formulaic, it ought to be leashed and led directly to the doghouse.

Luckily, life (just like the SAT) has its multiple-choice options. You don't actually have to watch this.

It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.

If Simon's desire to feed the better angels of our nature is admirable, it would be nice if he could do it with better movies.

An ineffective excursion that maintains a few direct ties back to the original film but never moves the story forward.

What's Your Number? ups the vulgarity, ladling it on top of a rom-com base so insipid and predictable that the only thing to keep you awake is counting the number of times that the script drops the word "vagina."

A sex romp starring Andy Griffith? Holy AARP! The good news is that the seemingly perennial TV fixture is still funny and sharp and folksy. The bad news is that he lost the bet, or whatever it was that got him into Marc Fienberg's smarmy, lackluster comedy.

The best movie derived from a violent computer game we've ever seen. You can take or leave that kind of qualified high-five, but, for us, it was a thoroughly entertaining experience. Think of bargain basement "James Bond" amped up into TV den-sittin', mouse-clickin' overdrive. But with human actors.

Ultimately, it's hard to decide which is more deadly, the action or the dialogue. [26 Dec 1981, p.D5]

A second-rate romantic comedy.

Lacks the spirit of the previous two, and makes all those jokes about hos and even more unmentionable subjects seem like mere splashing around in the muck.

An uninspired studio product that demands as little from the audience as it did from its writers, directors and actors.

Sphere, an unfathomable chowder of recycled science fiction and undersea thrillers, briefly bubbles with promise only to plummet into the murky depths. Weighed down by inconsistencies and pretensions, the tale founders like a stinky beluga.

The First Power tries awfully hard to combine two popular film genres -- the police thriller and the occult assault -- and comes up short on both ends.

An unoriginal warming over of a skimpy Japanese production that has been re-edited, rescored and rewritten for American tots and padded out to feature length with a plotless short called "Pikachu's Vacation."