Both a snore and utter tripe.

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

None of this is by way of saying that Cats is bad, per se. In fact, some of the songs are pretty toe-tapping at times.

Kids should be reasonably diverted for a couple of hours, but odds are they'll have forgotten the whole thing by the next morning.

The premise of the movie deserves better.

It's cheap-looking (dinosaurs and other beasts here look like CGI loaners from Spielberg), deeply mediocre and predictable.

Filmmaker Paul Flaherty apparently has never so much as given a friend directions to his home.

Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

Size vanquishes both substance and subtlety in the overhyped, half-cocked and humorless resurrection of dear old "Godzilla."

For all the nice turns, this movie can't decide whether to focus on undergraduate fun and fantasy or the tensions of the workaday world. As a result, the film fails to deliver its promised exploration of the last week of summer, when some people find themselves with no way to turn back, and no place to look forward to. [01 Oct 1984, p.B3]

Despite the plentiful blood-letting, it's all staggeringly inconsequential. The Evil That Men Do trivializes a timely theme -- human rights abuses. [25 Sep 1984, p.C1]

A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.

A gooey romantic comedy that sticks to everything except its principles.

Dull and unimaginative, Chetwynd treats his characters with such reverence that they might as well be saints in striped prison pajamas, martyred for the sake of some robotic patriotism. At least, his villains stand out from the host of underdeveloped heroes. Boob journalists, a doofus peacenik actress and a Cuban goon -- Michael Russo, who seems to think he's playing a pimp on "Miami Vice" -- add the unintentional comic relief.

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

Troop Beverly Hills is a dog of a movie, one of those nasty little yappy dogs with fancy hairdos, pedicures and pedigrees.

Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]

Beyond ­middle-schoolers, it’s unclear who would enjoy this derivative, cliche-filled exercise in horror lite.

From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.

Weekend at Bernie's is an unfettered but uninspired one-joke movie.

There's a lot of ski footage here, but most of it is pretty standard beer commercial stuff. And the characters are on about the same level. Writer-director Patrick Hasburgh may know something about skiing, but he knows nothing about people. Or storytelling. Or filmmaking.

This time-travel scenario is by now shopworn, and the normally riotous Lawrence, a manic and gifted clown, is hamstrung in his efforts to eke humor from the anemic script.