Carrie Rickey

It fails as a gripping home-invasion thriller.

What has Campbell wrought? An intermittently amusing, interminable affair that for sheer ugliness and a scenery-chewing performance by Peter Sarsgaard has a certain Camp appeal.

A case of when bad scripts happen to good actors. Given its similarities to a bygone sitcom, one might call it "Friends" without benefits.

Hiring this sensitive fantasist (Gondry) to make the superhero saga The Green Hornet is like hiring satirist John Waters to make "Rambo." Hard to think of a more mystifying mismatch of filmmaker and material.

"Zis is not verking! Zee glitter cannot overpower zee artist!" That, in a sentence, sums up what is wrong with this picture.

Six guys and a gal who flatline on arrival. Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since “Wild Wild West.”

Verhoeven's most deeply disturbing film yet.

Johnny Mnemonic may aspire to be Blade Runner. It succeeds only in being a parody of Flipper. [27 May 1995, p.D09]

It may not be the worst war epic ever made - that probably would be "Battlefield Earth" -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

If all you ask of a movie is that it have scenic stars and some scenery (here the Sierras of California substitute for the Rockies of Wyoming), then Flicka is adequate. Me, I expected some conflict, some resolution, and a horse that took me on a wild ride. This one really never gets out of the gate.

Alas, this joyless affair doesn't have a clou.

Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

Apart from Williams' presence, director Christopher Erskin's feature debut isn't worth the price of submission. It's not a road trip; it's a road trap.

Scenery rushes by, noise blares, characters pop up wearing new costumes that they couldn't possibly have had time to change into as they eluded their adversaries.

With its first-person-shooter perspective and gun-andrun narrative, this one’s for the PlayStation crowd. It’s not a movie. It’s an adrenaline pump and purveyor of raw carnage.

A supremely silly eco-thriller with aspirations to Dances With Wolves. [22 Feb 1994, p.D03]

Proves a theory first advanced in the movie "Repo Man": The more you drive, the stupider you get.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

Combines fingernails-on-blackboard audio agony with bamboo-under-fingernails physical torture.

Not only do they (Gere and Ryder) lack chemistry, they lack physics, zoology, botany and geology.

While "Boogie Nights" was a dirge for the death of pleasure (which coincided with the death of the porn-film industry), Wonderland is death warmed over. Literally.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

If there were a truth-in-titling law, the movie would be called "3000 Bullets to Brain Death."

Old School has all the ingredients of an uproarious campus comedy, but it lacks a boisterous short-order cook who could whip up a food fight or three.

Plays like "Sixteen Candles" meets "Beetlejuice." Yet for all the film's frantic pace, this plot plods, even for 'tweens at whom this suburban-girls-take-Manhattan fantasy is obviously targeted.

Perfect Stranger is the Egg MacGuffin of whodunits, a cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

No doubt conceived as an underwater version of "National Treasure," Andy Tennant's film plays like a Three Stooges movie with scuba gear.

As a western, American Outlaws is an utter failure. As the basis of a "Mad TV" parody, it is an unintentional hoot.

The wrestler carries himself with decency and without self-seriousness, the qualities that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. Austin deserves better material than this. So do we.

Tennant aims for a contemporary version of "The Thin Man," wedding the banter of sparring spouses with sleuth work. To say that he falls short of the mark is understatement.

It would seem that Allen and screenwriters John Quaintance and Jessica Bendinger couldn't decide between making a movie about the summer that 'tweens become teens or "Scenes From a Mal"l for the MTV set.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

To paraphrase one of the few memorable lines in the movie, "Even stink would say this stinks."

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

Though Hilton may be a model, if her work in Hottie is any indication, she is no actress.

So bad you're nostalgic for "Gigli." So painful you need an epidural. So mindless you'll lose yours wondering, "What were they thinking?"

The "Golden Girls" with gats.

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

Ice Cube possesses real screen presence, and it's a shame to see him squander his talents here. He and Epps made me laugh in "Next Friday." They made me squirm here.

The execution is so dumbed-down, so dumbfounding, that sophisticated moviegoers might confuse it for outtakes from "Spy Kids 2" and "XXX."

An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.

A casualty of its own clumsy storytelling.

Maybe Waters set out to prove Karl Marx's observation that all great events happen twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce.

Both the sex and the battle sequences here look like football plays drawn by an NFL coach and shot by the wide receiver's mother. Usually, even when I don't like a Stone film I admire its frenzied energy, but the editing here is as lethargic as the compositions are perfunctory.

A stunt that fails.

Those who want something more substantial from a movie than a vid-game script with centerfold appeal will not find it in this noisy, bone-crushing survivalist flick inspired by the Game Cube diversion.

As artistic achievements go, Mona Lisa Smile is strictly a paint-by-numbers affair. No shading. Little in the way of perspective. To call it one-dimensional would be an act of charity.

I laughed once.

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

Nothing wrong with the syrupy romance Here on Earth that a megadose of insulin couldn't fix.

Mighty Joe Young is a movie only an 8-year-old could love. How cheesy is it? Well, it leaves the ooze of Velveeta in its wake. [25 Dec 1998, p.4]

So stupid, so stupefying, so stupendously bad.

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

The film's one realistic performance is that of Dakota Fanning as Lucy, whose child's shame, fear and resourcefulness ground the movie in recognizable behavior. She breathes air into this suffocating enterprise.

The unintentional effect of movies like Bless the Child is that they are enough to make agnostics out of true believers.

Getting Even With Dad desperately panders to the youth it hopes to attract. [17 Jun 1994, p.03]

Screenwriters Nicole Eastman and the "Blonde" team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith provide dialogue that has the propriety of the locker room.

Evolution devolves to the sight of a colossal alien expelling flatus over Arizona. So that's why this movie stinks. Play that flatulent music, white boy.

A groaningly awful romantic comedy.

An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb.

An unlikable and excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

One possible explanation for My Favorite Martian, a picture so bad it's unwatchable, is that moviemakers are from Mars and moviegoers are from Venus. Not since Howard the Duck has a comedy tried so desperately hard for so pitifully few laughs. [12 Feb 1999, p.17]

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

If Sweet November were a puppy, it would have rabies.

Happily N'Ever After carjacks "Cinderella" and puts her wicked stepmother behind the wheel.

It pains me to tell you, But really, it's true: The Cat in the Hat Is a piece of dog doo.

Tedious and incoherent thriller.

I would have told you that its title refers to recreational vehicle. Having seen it, I now know the initials stand for reeking vulgarity.

Has to be the sorriest excuse for a reprise since "Highlander — The Final Dimension."

A high-end version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" set in the rarefied bistros, boites and brokerages of Yuppie Manhattan in the 1980s.

It's hard to say with certainty whether it's insufficient plot or insufficient interpretation that's responsible for Travolta's waxwork performance.

All things are possible, Julie-san, Miyagi constantly encourages his young charge. All things may be possible, Miyagi-sensei, but not this movie. [10 Sep 1994, p.D9]

At 116 minutes, this third installment lumbers along like a serial killer in shackles.

Rarely has sex on screen been so aggressively anti-erotic.

Hostage may well be the first action flick cited both for child abuse and audience abuse. In a singularly sadistic and degrading way it has something to offend everyone.

Aja's stomach-churning remake (produced by Craven) follows the original with frightening fidelity, amping up the barbarity from a nine (on the 1-10 scale) to a 12.

Sappy script. Cheesy supernaturalism. Tired satire.