David Sterritt

A number of good actors, including Kevin Kline and Susan Sarandon, are utterly wasted in this idiotic story, which can't make up its mind whether it's a comedy or a drama. [17 Jan 1989, p.10]

Joseph Zito directed this cheap exercise in hate, suspicion, and mayhem. [06 Dec 1984, p.50]

What's the point of the picture, except to allow Kutcher fans occasional peeks at acting talent he usually keeps hidden?

As dopey as its heroes, and the cast's admirable energy isn't enough to keep the story punching through the final round.

Sam Firstenberg directed the mindless mayhem. [15 Nov 1984, p.47]

One thing is certain: It's a bomb trying to be a hit, and at that it'll never succeed.

Davis contributes his usual dignity -- not easy when you're playing a character who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black -- but it's not enough to save this silly thriller-comedy.

The star's over-the-top energy isn't enough to make this hopelessly vulgar, numbingly repetitious farce worth watching.

The story is irresponsible and the filmmaking is awful.

Romano tries hard, but it takes real big-screen talent to draw laughs and emotions from material as flimsy and formulaic as the script.

So vulgar and incoherent that even Hackman's gifts can't score a touchdown.

In sum, Van Helsing is yet another video game disguised as a wide-screen epic. Here's hoping the box office drives a firm wooden stake through its hokey Hollywood heart.

The film tries to revive the sort of good-hearted optimism associated with Frank Capra classics of the 1940s era, but pictures like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" were never so simplistic, syrupy, or tedious to sit through.

Surely it couldn't be meant as dramatic realism! But it is. And amazingly, the movie gets worse as it goes along.

Talking dogs were cute, once. It's a tad disconcerting, however, when a canine starts lip syncing to the voice of Carl Reiner so it can complain about flatulence.

Downright awful.

A private eye enters a horrific world of degrading sex and bottom-feeding pornographers.

A total lack of chemistry between the stars -- neither of whom is particularly good at romantic comedy in the first place -- and you have a promising package that grows steadily less lovable as it goes along. Down with this movie!

Creepy.

Violent and vapid, but the visual jolts may please horror buffs.

The junior Giannini, who has inherited Giancarlo's handsome looks, portrays his mercurial character with energy and flair. Madonna doesn't. Indeed, it's hard to remember the last time a certified celebrity gave a performance so monotonous, unimaginative, and all-around tiresome to watch.

This fact-based drama is very well-meaning but also cloying, sentimental, and simplistic. Gooding's fake-toothed grin deserves an Oscar for best makeup, though.

Stiller strives to be a wild and wacky villain, Vaughn endeavors to be a likable and average hero, and both fall flat on their faces, like everything else in this unspeakably stupid comedy.

This movie has promising ingredients. But you'll leave wanting much, much more.

In short, it's dull, derivative, and as lifelike as a heap of historical figurines. Few will remember this Alamo for long.

Like a nincompoop version of "The Usual Suspects."

The filmmakers seem well in control of their chaotic material, but what can be said when the movie features wall-to-wall teenage alcohol abuse.

I found much of it as emotionally rigged as a crooked horse race.

The concept of dueling negotiators has strong dramatic potential, but Gray seems more interested in gimmicks and gunshots than in the psychological face-off between sharp-witted foes.

The action is snappy and quick, but why does this youth-targeted adventure pit white male heroes against a trio of villains comprising a black man, an Asian man, and an ugly woman?

This noisy, disorganized story is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, and self-indulgence from beginning to end.

Hop away from this one fast!

Breillat is a smart, serious observer of sexuality's often disruptive role in human life, but this existential drama is sadly pretentious.

South Korean melodrama uses a unique location, dominated by fishermen's floating huts, as the background for an overheated story that grows steadily more grotesque and unpleasant as it proceeds.

Muddled screenwriting and uninspired directing.

A lovestruck Californian kidnaps a neighbor's dog as a way of getting her attention.

The violent story is long on nastiness, short on credibility.

The slasher-movie genre may never die, but can't its perpetrators think up variations more clever than this by-the-numbers rehash?

Brody has offbeat charisma, but it's no match for the corny dialogue he's given here, not to mention the "Wild at Heart" snakeskin jacket he wears.

The movie has a well-meaning message about love and loyalty being the bedrock of real family values, but its good intentions sag as the story trades its air of mischievous comedy for trite sentimentality, arbitrary plot twists, and enough maudlin melodramatics to sustain a tabloid TV series.

The story is mildly entertaining in its hackneyed way, but there's no excusing the picture's exploitative treatment of almost all the female characters.

The rest of Franco Zeffirelli's latest Shakespearean outing is so eager to be cinematic, with its peripatetic camera and souped-up screenplay, that it forgets to make sense.

Shallow and sentimental in the sappiest Hollywood tradition.

So stupid you'll wish you'd brought a duffel bag of your own.

Adam Sandler's creative songs and silly expressions on "Saturday Night Live" may have turned him into a celebrity, but this movie based solely on his antics doesn't work.

This boatload of clichés is strenuously unfunny.

Spoiled by its simplistic portrait of people from the Mideast as incorrigibly violent and untrustworthy.

What remains discomforting is their sheer failure to be funny.

Fiction and fantasy to evade reflection on the world we actually live in.

The story is inspirational in a superficial way, but the filmmakers focus so exclusively on their attractive heroine that the picture loses any real connection with Africa.

The plot is predictable, the characters are cliches, and all the actors look and sound like refugees from a movie Martin Scorsese would have made vastly better three decades ago.

It's astounding that the ingenious creator of "JFK" and "Wall Street" could make an epic on war and empire that's so utterly simplistic and unreflective.

It seems to have had the opposite effect on the director's taste, as she strives for new levels of raunchiness.

The results are unbelievably tedious, but Mansfield buffs may find it intermittently worthwhile.

Crass and soulless.

Perhaps they truly believe war is an inescapable aspect of human life. If so, why make movies that rub our faces in its horror? If artists have no antidote to war's evil or insight into the suffering it brings, their motive in depicting it must be merely to sensationalize its terrors and make money from the morbid fascination it holds for audiences. We deserve better.

Khouri's new picture takes all this talent and turns it into the kind of manipulative mush that Hollywood used to market under the condescending label "woman's picture" years ago.

There are a few clever lines and Cleese has some sensational moments, but that's not enough to make the farce seem fresh.

What ensues is a Halloween-style blood bath accompanied by graphic sex scenes.

Philippe Rousselot's carefully shaded cinematography looks great, but the screenplay is pretentious and there's little to applaud in the top-heavy acting by John Malkovich and Julia Roberts.

The movie's one good performance is given by the house, full of ominous inscriptions, inscrutable chambers, and fiendish machines. The human characters are played with various degrees of manic overacting.

As he showed in the recent "Catch Me if You Can," also a Hanks vehicle, Spielberg has little talent for emotional realism, not to mention psychological suspense. He should scurry back to "Jurassic Park" as soon as the next flight leaves.

The film means well, but each scene gets clobbered by sappy screenwriting.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

Everyone works hard, but the results are sadly short of style and personality or irony and intelligence.

The gimmick behind the screenplay is clever, but the filmmakers don't rise to the challenge they've set themselves, merely spinning two unimaginative stories for the price of one.

All the good points together can't make up for the film's mostly soggy acting, particularly by Sean Young and Matt Dillon in the leading roles, or for the technically inept way the voices have been dubbed over the picture - the characters sound like they're reading their lines from a phone booth. Even second-rate Hollywood movies generally have a certain amount of craft and professionalism, but there's precious little here. I say, kiss this one goodbye. [17 May 1991, p.13]

Preposterous plot, bad acting, and dialogue that provokes more laughs than shivers.

Travolta and Jackson have some effective scenes, but Nielsen is lacking in charisma, and James Vanderbilt's screenplay ought to be court-martialed.

The animals are cute and Murphy gives a lively performance, but as with his remake of "The Nutty Professor," the original is still the best.

Has amusing bits of social satire, but they're crowded out of the stable by lots of bathroom and barnyard humor.

Strains to be shockingly original but winds up as cheap and cheesy as its characters.

So sloppily made that it's barely coherent.

In short, this isn't a poignant drama about courage and imagination -- it's a contrived fantasy about courage and imagination.

Amanda Plummer is even more weirded-out than usual as a serial killer wandering through England with her sadly befuddled girlfriend. [10 May 1996, p.13]

The nasty, sometimes violent story was written by Christian Forte, a newcomer who is clearly under Quentin Tarantino's unpleasant spell, and directed by Kevin Spacey, an unusually gifted actor who doesn't yet show any special talent for filmmaking.

Uninspired thriller-comedy.

The comedy isn't quite as crude as it sounds, but there's not much of value here beyond a little lively acting.

Its main message is that everyone should believe and behave in exactly the same way. Groupthink wins again!

Cartoonish effects and overacting make this more corn than catnip.

Peter Segal's comedy has a few witty moments surrounded by a lot of silliness.

Moves at a lumbering pace, peppered with ungainly gags and dramatic moments with little emotional power. The ironic commentary on show-biz superficiality is sabotaged by Niccol's failure to make his own story seem real.

Lively, colorful, violent, stupid.

The special effects are extra special. The screenplay is idiotic, though, and Diesel speaks his dialogue like a Sylvester Stallone clone who never finished third grade.

Cumming's antic acting is the only asset of this boisterous comedy.

The movie is designed to show off Liotta's acting skills, but pointless mayhem and sheer nastiness crowd out any virtues it might have had.

Crash-lands as disastrously as the heroes and never quite recovers its wits.

The dialogue is dumb ('zilla has the best lines, "arrrrrggh" and "maaroarrr"), New York is waterlogged, and Godzilla isn't on screen enough.

The overlong comedy has few laughs and flirts far too much with racist, homophobic humor. A waste of a fine cast.

The only admirable aspect of the comedy is its insistence on the stupidity of racial prejudice. American moviegoers must be desperate to hear that message if they're willing to sit through so much ridiculous horseplay in order to receive it. [01 Jul 1993, p.12]

Sordid and sleazy, although the lead performances are hard to fault.

The bad thing about A Guy Thing isn't the talent of its stars but the warmed-over triteness of the material they're forced to work with.

Even the delightful Duff disappoints.

Norton's high-energy acting is the only element that saves the picture from being a total loss.

The plot is hamstrung by trite formulas, and there's too much violence and family tension for very young viewers. Shaquille O'Neal is likable as the title character, though.

Let's look at the bright side. If this movie bombs as it deserves to, we won't have to sit through "Analyze Those" a few years from now!

Strenuously unfunny sequel.

Perry and Hurley don't have much chemistry, and the story is so dumb you might want to sue it for stupidity.

I hate to sound per-Snickety, but this lemon of a movie is a sadly unfortunate event.

This sexually explicit South Korean drama aims more to jolt than to illuminate, but it illustrates an aspect of Asian cinema that globally minded moviegoers should know about as films from that region take on more international prominence.

Weak acting, even by Hoffman. Aniston is so far above this material she should never, ever have signed on.

This is a great subject for a movie, but Hollywood has squandered the opportunity, using it as a prop for warmed-over melodrama and the kind of choreographed mayhem that director John Woo has built his career on.

It will be interesting to see whether audiences embrace Mr. Diesel's barely controlled vigilante as warmly as they embraced Clint Eastwood's swaggering "Dirty Harry" and Charles Bronson's nasty "Death Wish" characters a few decades ago.

The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.

House of D, arrives in theaters this week, after debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. I'm sorry to report it's the opposite of impressive.

Viewers of that age may overlook the contrived situations and the awful acting, which consists mainly of frozen grins. Nobody else will.

David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject.

The dialogue is utterly inane, but the high-tech effects deliver the sort of thrills that disaster-film connoisseurs expect.

The film is a disappointment, and at more than two hours' running time, a very long disappointment.

The repetitious script -- cobbled together by no fewer than five writers -- shows interest in nothing beyond action-centered plot gimmicks and tame romantic shenanigans.

If the Warner Bros. wizards have it right, what a girl wants is to see as much of Amanda Bynes as she possibly can...It's not so great for the rest of us, since the film has nothing else to offer.

Can a mild-mannered toxicologist and an eccentric Alcatraz veteran stop him before it's too late? Learning the answer means sitting through more than two hours of violence, vulgarity, and all-around excess, served up with high-tech trimmings by director Michael Bay.

Mostly trite and tacky despite Robin Williams's strenuous acting.

Clumsy filmmaking and a hoked-up screenplay make this a strong contender for worst picture of the year. [13 Nov 1987, p.21]

The plot pants so hard -- that it makes less sense than the average pet-food commercial.

The acting is solid and the heroine's quirky dialogue is amusing for a while. But repetitious writing and a weakly constructed story turn the promising premise into a disappointing mishmash of crime, politics, and show business.

The basic plot of Thomas Hardy's great novel "Jude the Obscure" comes through accurately enough, but its sublime irony and sardonic wit apparently got lost in the misty English countryside.

Plenty of mad moviegoers will put this in their diaries as one of the worst pictures in ages.

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

MESSAGE Nuclear blackmail is a horrible crime but can be defeated by vigilant and courageous authorities.

Barry Levinson's filmmaking style is often imaginative. The story contains horrific scenes of sexual torture as well as sadistic killings and other disturbing material, though.

Tries to be daring and iconoclastic but winds up seeming as spoiled and childish as its main characters.

This is fatuous twaddle with a nasty, misogynistic edge.

A perfectly funny idea -- call it "Ms. Ditz Goes to Washington" -- that's never allowed to take on real comic life. I laughed exactly once.

A strong candidate for worst picture of the year.

Sadly it's been botched. Guess Who serves up such flat dialogue and stilted situations that it's hard to sit through.

Audiences may want their own speedy divorce from this irritating collection of stale jokes, pointless vulgarities, and warmed-over clichés.

Alas, the movie is less clever than its characters.

Een fans of Jay and Silent Bob may find the story too slender and the jokes too repetitive to be much fun.

The story is nonsensical, the filmmaking is monotonous, and the acting - aside from Marlon Brando's brilliant cameo as the cultist - is weak. [14 May 1997, p.14]

Santa Claus's bag couldn't hold as many clichés as the screenplay dishes out.

The movie's real spectacle is the sight of so many talented people slogging through such idiotic material.

Falls flat, with more "sound design" than delicious music, more slick film editing than graceful ballroom gliding.

Imagine a movie where every character is more self-centered than Ted Baxter in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" of old, add a caboodle of idiotic jokes, and you have some idea of this ugly, unfunny farce.

The result is a quickly paced, slickly filmed entertainment that's also as crude and rude as the PG-13 rating will allow. It's mighty mean-spirited too, aiming "satirical jibes" at everyone from black illiterates to white rednecks, from breakers of the law to enforcers of the law, from society's elites to society's dregs.

This superficial treatment makes so many dubious decisions - oversimplifying issues, for instance, so there'll be more time for high-flying emotion - that 1960s veterans may be moved to protest rather than praise.

The comedy is shamelessly stupid and flagrantly vulgar by turns.

Opium- addicted Allan Quatermain becomes none other than Sean Connery. At least he gives a real movie-star performance, which is more than the other gentlemen manage. Extraordinary? Balderdash!

Ron Shelton's romantic comedy has no more visual excitement than a televised golf tournament, but the climax is truly surprising, and there's solid acting by Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

A hodgepodge of violent action, ostentatious effects, and lunkheaded jokes, stitched together by a hackneyed plot. [01 Jul 1994, p.13]

Get cracking, filmmakers. It'll take a lot of doing to beat this creep-show for worst picture of the year. It's about a computer programmer who beats the devil in a series of spooky challenges. No fewer than seven directors worked on it, and it doesn't make any sense at all. [23 May 1985, p.25]

A dark comedy about a bachelor party gone awry, it is excessively violent, ghoulish, and gory. Very Bad Things is lack-of-taste taken to the extreme.

Arnold Schwarzenegger fights an outer-space monster in a third-world jungle. The monster never has a chance. Neither does the jungle. Neither does the audience. [19 June 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

Paying homage to drug comedies of the '70s, Half Baked is high on getting high and low on laughs.

This romantic comedy is so awfully misjudged and ineptly executed in every department that, while it isn't quite a contender for the "so bad it's good" category, this critic was nonetheless dabbing tears of laughter from his eyes.

Frankly, it's excruciating to watch.

Pauly Shore is less a comedian than a class clown, and his dim-witted mugging makes Jim Carrey's antics seem creative triumphs by comparison. Vapid, vulgar, and more to the point, not funny.

Numbingly violent action.