Carrie Rickey

Overwritten, over-designed, and too clever by 200 percent, the film does offer the pleasure of actors enjoying themselves.

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.

Not a movie, it's a museum catalog of gorgeously rendered portraits and landscapes. What a crashing disappointment.

Harmless, mindless and shameless.

The actors, individually fine although they appear to be in different films, tread warily on each other's turf, like Martian and Venusian making adjustments for an alien gravitational field.

While Stealing Harvard may be a chucklehead comedy, Lee is oddly touching and funny. Mostly because, unlike Green, he's not aggressively trying to make us laugh.

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

It's a crudely entertaining argument for redeploying the U.S. military into our schools. [19 Apr 1996, p.05]

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A case of a yummy yarn spoiled by cheesy visuals.

I watched this movie thinking that it used the idea of taking a chance on cards as a metaphor for taking a chance on love. I was dead wrong.

Despite a terrific performance from Shane West, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crash, Secret is a chronology, not a biopic.

Brosnan, who finds the truth in his character, is quite affecting. And Mulligan, gamely defining a surprisingly undefined young woman, is like a sunbeam piercing the gloom.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Claustrophobic and overwrought, Jailbait is an unpleasant excursion into gay panic mitigated somewhat by performances that are hard to shake.

Whenever Andrews - that incarnation of the sensible and the sensitive - glides on screen, PD2 sparkles.

Don't blame Kline. This most thoughtful of actors is trapped behind the lectern of a film that spouts contradictory lessons it can't reconcile.

At the film's inconclusive conclusion, the filmmakers strand Erica and Sean in the moral twilight.

The 3D effects are of a gimmicky 1956 vintage, with hands thrusting from the screen to give the illusion of reaching out and touching the audience.

As doggy movies go, this one gets two paws out of four.

Much as I gnashed my teeth during 27 Dresses, I genuinely enjoyed the warmth of Heigl's and Marsden's confident ease. While both might be a few minutes past their star-is-born moment, these troupers with more than 30 years of professional work between them have never shone so brightly. It may sound contradictory, but loved them, hated IT.

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

Short, sour and scabrous, Bosses is that paradoxical thing: a situation comedy where neither situation nor comedy is particularly effective where nonetheless Jason Bateman is sidesplitting, as is Colin Farrell in a supporting role.

Edgeless as a marshmallow and twice as syrupy.

Did I laugh? A handful of times. Did I cringe? For 101 minutes.

If there's going to be a "Rush Hour 3," the filmmakers need more of the Ziyi/Sanchez women warriors to punch up the sagging cross-cultural buddy humor of the Chan-Tucker partnership.

The film's recycled nature is most evident in director P.J. Hogan's attempt to marry the farcical hijinks of an "I Love Lucy" episode to an addiction scenario that would not be out of place in "The Lost Weekend."

The only likable characters are ebullient Omer (Sam Golzari), a show-tune-loving reluctant Iraqi suicide bomber who comes to the O.C., and earnest William (Chris Klein), an American GI wounded in Iraq, who are mirror images.

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

A curious screwball "noir," doesn't so much bend established genres as blend them into an unappetizing cocktail, where they curdle before pouring.

Alas, the conceit of a double-dating Grandson and Gramps does not produce a great many laughs in this cringeworthy film.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

A raunchy spoof of the disaster-movie lampoon Airplane! - does everything to get the laugh. And in the way that a broken watch is right twice a day, a shotgun comedy like this one occasionally hits its target.

Mazel tov, Adam, for having three movies released in five months. You should maybe spend more time on the next one?

It's a parable as timely today as when it was written. But except for Paymer as the boss who ultimately expresses empathy for Bartleby's pain, the performances are so stylized as to be drained of human emotion.

The question is not whether Murphy can do anything. He can. The question is why he would want to make a movie as squirmingly unfunny as Norbit.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

Ultimately, the values and the CGI are good, but the acting is broad and the chipmunks aren't really differentiated. What happened to Alvin, the rodent counterpart of Dennis the Menace? Was he declawed in the translation to CGI?

Shrek the Third isn't a movie, it's the extension of a brand.

What redeems the film...is that for every nonstop explosion, there's a hilarious burst of Reynolds' nonstop patter.

Suffers from "Bridget Jones" Syndrome but without that movie's charms.

As in "An Education," Scherfig's settings are unshowy, imparting period flavor without overwhelming what is, ultimately, an underwhelming film.

Less the blistering satire it imagines itself than a blustering, bloody, blundering melodrama about bottom feeders nibbling each other.

A script with the most underdeveloped characters and spectacularly realized visuals since "Titanic."

Mildly diverting and utterly dispensable.

There is much of interest in Baumbach's pictures - the confident handling of actors, the introspection, the terra-cotta and teal-painted walls. But what do you call a comedy of manners that's not particularly funny? [19 June 1998, p.04]

The best that can be said about the movie is that it's harmless and mostly charmless. The Clone Wars is to Star Wars what karaoke is to pop music.

A sentimental kidfilm that only a parent could love. [22 Aug 1997, p.04]

What's on screen is a hash, though it may very well be the most comprehensive catalog of male erotic fantasies in one single film.

Essentially, the film functions as a holiday catalog, introducing fans to a new Pokemon whose effigy they can collect in trading cards.

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

Basically, it's a muddle.

Director Tim Story's film has two speeds: pedal-to-metal and screeching halt. The former is guaranteed to make the audience carsick, the latter to give it whiplash.

That this is a cautionary tale about any people who would wage war in order to win the spoils of oil and water? Your guess is as good as mine.

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

Suggests that one way women can fight male violence is by using the weapons of the alpha male: Marking one's territory and firing upon anyone who trespasses.

Fortunately, even when star and story are ineffectual, Fears' supporting players are all thrilling, especially Morgan Freeman.

Bad Company would just be another silly, intermittently funny, buddy comedy (Anthony Hopkins is Rock's training agent) were it not for a plot unlaughably close to current events.

An airless, bilious, endless pageant of pseudohistory.

Despite Angela's skills - and Bullock's charms - director Irwin Winkler's film is so pedestrian that his movie has all the thrills of a school crossing.

Despite the appeal of cobra-eyed Thornton and bunny-nosed Heder, Scoundrels trips early, and often.

Cutesy and formulaic and has the approximate depth of a cookie sheet.

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

Despite excellent elements - great actress, taut plot, slick visuals - Flightplan is like airplane food. No matter how good the ingredients the air chef has to work with, the entree inevitably ends up tasting like a Xerox of a facsimile of a meal.

Rian Johnson's film is a scam wrapped in a sham.

While Flipper doesn't exactly arrive dead in the water, the latest installment in that saga of America's most beloved bottlenose could be dubbed Flopper. [17 May 1996, p.03]

Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

Legacy is a two-hour light show with a lot of flash, a little style, and not one byte of narrative originality.

Is there a limit to this incessant princessitude?

The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown. The two story lines are not well-integrated.

It is diverting but insubstantial.

Individually, the actors are endearing. But together in this charmless Gary David Goldberg sitcomedy, inspired by the Claire Cook novel, they are as oddly paired as chalk and cheese.

One reason to see Rendition is for Naor's stunning performance as the torturer who is the one character aware of the political and moral contradictions of what he's doing. Every time he was on screen, he commanded it.

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

The million-dollar cast doesn't make the vulgar penny-ante jokes any funnier.

A movie where the action scenes feel like filler, the romantic leads have little magnetism, and, before long, its metaphysical underpinnings fall to pieces.

Like the kids in detention, The Change-Up wants to offend your sensibilities. It sets new records for scatological humor and profanity.

As slapstick, it is painfully slow, so much so that one can see every overstretched rubber band and frayed shoelace keeping the film barely together. [02 Dec 1994, p.03]

The good news is that it sees what a jihad looks like from both sides. The bad news is that it's not a very good movie, with three fine performances and two great sequences.

It's rare that a movie is so graceful and so gross.

Salvadori's choppy film never establishes a comic rhythm.

Half-baked, both in plot and execution, this spoof's for adolescent boys who find Minotaur private parts amusing and Queen Amidala in a chastity belt sexy.

Love Happens announces itself as a romantic comedy but doesn't speak the language of love. Instead, it trades in the slogans of self-help procedural.

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

The humor here is overcooked to the point of limpness.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

As Roscoe's parents, Margaret Avery and James Earl Jones emerge with drawers undropped and dignity intact.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

This is not the plot of your typical Ice Cube movie. It does, however, combine the plots of at least three John Hughes movies.

Perry and Campbell are charming despite this straitjacket plot.

Madonna the director deserves a script better than the one Madonna the screenwriter handed off to her. The movie is full of incidents that don't quite cohere into a story - kind of like a Power Point presentation without a throughline.

Filmmaker Roger Michell doesn't so much adapt Ian McEwan's fine novel Enduring Love, a surgically precise anatomy of romance and obsession, as eviscerate it and wave its entrails before the audience.

This is a movie that both parodies "The Sopranos" and aspires to its mordant humor. I don't think anyone -- not Tony Soprano, not Paul Vitti -- can have it both ways.

On the whole, the movie is more Cheez Whiz than wizardly.

It stars the striking Moss, that fierce beauty from "The Matrix," as the sternest, sexiest babe in space since Sigourney Weaver's Lieutenant Ripley.

You haven't heard anything until you've heard "Play That Funky Music" on the accordion.

A Kid in King Arthur's Court - more precisely A California Mallrat at the Round Table, in which a contemporary Little Leaguer time-travels to the 11th century and teaches Arthur how to chew bubblegum - works too hard for its occasional laugh. [11 Aug 1995, p.05]

Snow Dogs? "Snow Job" is more like it.

At its best, Queen is campy fun like the Vincent Price horror classics of the '60s. At its worst, it implodes in a series of very bad special effects.

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

While Scott's movie has a consistent aura, it lacks a consistent tone. What are we to make of the movie, gauzy as a mist-shrouded lake and brutal as "Lord of the Flies?"

A mostly charmless affair.

By no means is this a good movie, but it's warmed by the solar energy of its star, who surely deserves better than this formula empowerment flick.

While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.

George, director of "Hotel Rwanda," is better at directing actors than visual storytelling. Every time the camera tilted to suggest a character's shaken world or distorted worldview I didn't feel heartache, I felt headache.

So little time is devoted to developing characters that it's hard to share their hopes and fears.

Kids under 6 will dig it - though the alligators and wildebeests might scare them. Certainly they scared this groan-up.

A crude, cringe-worthy, and intermittently funny affair that triggers the gag reflex. I sincerely can't tell you whether I was choking with laughter or keeping from choking.

If the filmmakers had a script half as good as their special effects, Night at the Museum would be a must-see.

This is a star vehicle that stalls.

Most gaspworthy is that this raunchy, transgressive comedy about would-be adulterers turns out to be a hot, wet reaffirmation of marriage.

Because I Said So might have been sharper if it had focused on the mother/daughter relationship and didn't blunt its story with romantic comedy.

Her (Angela Ismailos) generic questions about the politics, economics, and aesthetics of film yield predictably generic responses from her subjects.

Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.

Duets is to movies what karaoke is to pop: a spirited attempt by non-pros.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

The miscast (or misdirected) Hilary Swank's Jeanne takes so little pleasure in coquetry and manipulation.

The overall effect is one of a sumptuously laid table where the main course is overcooked.

That a detente between the cliques is unthinkable, that they could never eat at the same table, is one of many assumptions that makes Sleepover such a downer.

Backwards - its title referring to the wisdom that life is lived forward but understood backward - has no forward propulsion.

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

To paraphrase one of its few laughs, it's a zombie movie directed by Vera Wang.

She may not be the most cinematic of film artists, but Heckerling will make you smile.

What ensues may be predictable, but the slapstick performances of Rudd and Bell are anything but. They court, they spark, and a few times they catch comic fire.

This mostly vulgar, but never explicit, comedy resolves itself surprisingly, revealing depth just when you think it's going to continue its skip across the shallows. In other words, Just Married might not be good, but it's just good enough.

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.

The extent to which The Princess Diaries succeeds is the result of how pretty Hathaway at first mimics, then internalizes, Andrews' essential majesty.

The twist of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy, is that its heroes, an entry-level investment banker and a brainiac pre-med student, are not dimwits.

A heartfelt, '70s-era coming-of-age story with a prologue and epilogue set in the present day, marks the filmmaking debut of actor David Duchovny, who also wrote the symbol-studded screenplay.

For those who want nothing more than a thorough scare, Gothika is effective. But for those of us who want some psychological insight with our frightfests, the film is sadly lacking.

Fails as drama but succeeds as a "When bad things happen to good firemen" procedural. It's sensitivity training for civilians.

Every time Problem Child gets an interesting edge, it loses it.

Contrived and schematic, Peter Chelsom's film is a mechanical bird that never takes wing.

Unlike the filmmaker's previous stabs at presidential biopic-ing and conspiracy theorizing - "JFK" and "Nixon" - this one doesn't have the luxury of historical perspective.

At its best, the movie is a catalog of doggy stunts.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

Although it would be understatement to call their characters unsympathetic, Van Der Beek and Sossamon play their parts with such doomed passion that they have some affecting moments.

Fast is a good quality in an action/adventure. But there is lightning-paced and then there is warp speed. Doug Liman's Jumper is the latter, a not-so-good quality in an action/adventure for the simple reason that the audience can't figure out what's going on.

What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.

How Depardieu rises above this nonsense about a girl who tries to make a beau more interested by telling him that her father is actually her lover is something that a physicist should explore. It defies gravity. [4 Feb 1994, p.04]

The result is two competing films, one about a failure's struggle to succeed in the Brigade Championships, the academy's boxing tournament, and the other about a quitter redeemed by military discipline. In the hands of director Justin Lin, the two story lines don't altogether merge.

There's no rhythm or rhyme to it. The subplots don't organically connect to the main narrative. It's a series of brightly lit tableaux in which we see the end result of an action but never the action itself. [18 Aug 1995, p.03]

I liked this movie better when it was called "Rock'n'Roll High School" and starred the Ramones and Mary Woronov.

The material is so charged that it threatens to electrocute any who would touch it. Yet from the moment that Bette Midler, as Bernice the bio-Mom, appears, she becomes the instrument of its emotional release, catharsis teetering on high heels.

Verhoeven's most deeply disturbing film yet.

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.

This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It fails as a gripping home-invasion thriller.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite.

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

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

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

Hot Rod never establishes its own personality.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

I laughed once.

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]

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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