Dennis Lim

Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."

The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.

Makes the strongest case for retirement since late-period Roger Moore.

The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.

Dusted off for one more run-through, and for those who applauded "Titanic's" old-is-new ethos, the moth-eaten, barely breathing Anna and the King will serve as a slap in the face.

Director John Stockwell keeps the proceedings casual, and the film is admirably at ease with its dutifully trite plot and porn-worthy dialogue (most of which vanishes under the crash of a wave or the roar of a jet-ski anyway).

There's a certain satisfaction in recognizing that Harold -- even when he inevitably starts to feel, just like a human -- remains something of an a--hole.

There's no gold dust to be found here, just an awful lot of stick-on glitter.

Given that The Eye plays out without so much as a single new idea or real surprise, it's a testament to the Pangs' knack for composition and editing -- or Orange Music's merciless Psycho-tronic score -- that the movie goes boo as effectively as it does.

Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.

Luis Mandoki's brisk hack job pushes no more buttons than Connie Chung Tonight -- though, for better or worse, it's perverse enough to stage the traumatic event as a spouse swap.

Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.

A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.

A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.

The plot is muddy and quite beside the point. The almost meditative mood takes center stage.

Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."

French director David Fourier's six-minute mock-instructional free association, "Majorettes in Space," is alone almost worth the price of admission.

The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.

K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.

Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.

A feel-good, fatalist placebo.

It sustains its purplish, epic sweep by thrusting broadly etched characters into extravagantly hokey situations, and registers mainly as a flamboyant joke.

Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.

The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]

It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.

Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.