David Newman

This is turning into Eddie Murphy's creature feature summer, but if you had to pick between the actor playing an animal or simply talking to them, "Dr. Dolittle 2" is not the film to choose.      Yet even if it wasn't burdened with an addiction to...

"Are We There Yet?" gets nowhere. Its star Ice Cube remains characteristically amiable, but this thuddingly miscalculated comedy is way beneath him. The filmmakers clearly intend a family comedy about the lengths to which a guy who doesn't like kids will...

You could call "Ice Age" "'Shrek' With Frostbite" or "'Monsters, Inc.' on Ice," and you wouldn't be far off. That's how closely this new computer-animated film duplicates and combines the plots of its predecessors. No, this tale of interspecies...

"Scooby-Doo," the 2002 live-action feature derived from the animated TV series, found the Mystery Inc. gang solving supernatural goings-on that plagued the Spooky Island theme park outside their hometown, Coolsville, U.S.A. At the opening of "Scooby-...

Every so often a comedy comes along that's so flat, pointless and grimly unfunny that you have to ask yourself: What in the world happened to Eddie Murphy's career? First there was Walter Hill's "48 HRS.," still one of the best, most diverting and only...

Friday February 3, 1995      By all rights "Boys on the Side" should be a howler. It has the kind of high-low concept that sounds like a parody of a post-"Thelma & Louise" bond-a-thon--and, at times, the film * plays like a parody.      Whoopi...

Monday January 29, 1996      "Big Bully" is the right story in the wrong mold, raising more questions than it is prepared to deal with. Its makers try to shoehorn into the family comedy genre a decidedly dark--and actually quite pertinent--story about...

Friday June 28, 1996      Tasteful, subtle and sophisticated are a few of the words that aren't going to be applied to Eddie Murphy's version of "The Nutty Professor." But funny, funny is something else again.      Messy, raucous, crude and...

Friday August 2, 1996      The deliciously dark stories of Roald Dahl have made for some refreshingly morbid children's movies ("James and the Giant Peach" being the most recent example). But there's such a thing as over-milking the nightmare.      ...

Friday June 7, 1996      The Ghost Who Walks. The Oath of the Skull. The Skull Cave. Devil the loyal wolf and Hero the spirited white stallion. Everything about "The Phantom" is pleasantly old-fashioned, the opposite of avant-garde and cutting edge....

Arnold Schwarzenegger is in so much trouble in Brian Levant's "Jingle All the Way" that Phil Hartman, playing a smarmy neighbor, exclaims, "You can't bench-press your way out of this." Given the leaden nature of the material, Schwarzenegger probably...

Friday July 28, 1995      As a pleasing family adventure-comedy, "Operation Dumbo Drop" is as familiar as its setting is unlikely: Vietnam, 1968. Even more unlikely, however, is that it was inspired by an actual incident in which some Green Berets...