Desson Thomson

William Shakespeare would need a sense of humor to view Jean-Luc Godard's "King Lear" without getting steamed up in his bodkins.

The movie, which is deadly slow and full of Japanese-bashing, is also an undisguised merchandising promo.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

Slickers II is grounds for a stampede -- away from the theater.

It's a kill movie, the filmic equivalent of a hate crime.

One thing's for sure about Amos & Andrew: It ain't no "Thelma & Louise."

There are a few sight gags that might amuse the kids, but for the most part, the computer-generated effects are highly disappointing.

There isn't anything here you haven't seen already in It's a Wonderful Life and a thousand other wish-list movies. Writer/director James Orr doesn't even do you the favor of speeding through the unoriginality.

In Big Adventure, Pee-wee's gadgety bike was stolen, and the dramatic interest rode on finding it. Big Top contains three rings' worth of people and livestock, but the interest is no-show. You'd be better off going to the circus. Or the zoo.

An unimaginative boy-and-his-mammal saga with only tenuous connection to the old television series of the same name.

Presumably, there's a poignant story to be told about the love between 19th-century poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. But Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse, a pretentious, flat affair, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine, is not the film to pull it off.

Unfortunately, it has no story. Toys is deader than a doornail.

A second-rate romantic comedy.

Never did sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll seem more shopworn and routine.

It's a soap opera posing as moral outrage.

Seems to avoid any kind of edgy, precedent-making attitude, some point of view that feels charged, divisive and consequently alive.

With no real comedy to enjoy, it's torture to watch Diesel undergo a predictable change from emotionless soldier to loving family man. Makes you want to spit out your pacifier in disgust.

It sinks so deep and fast, you don't even see bubbles on the surface.

A cold, protracted and unemotional affair.

In Chaos Theory, Reynolds's performance is taut, crabby and tense. And his beard and glasses, which intensify those already narrow eyes, suggest a mad bomb-builder rather than a hapless soul with whom we can identify.

The exuberance of the Rugrats seems nullified by the effete quirkiness of the Thornberrys.

The film oozes sentimentality, soap-opera bathos and clumsy cribbings from the Frank Capra book of small-town values. Those are its good points.

It just doesn't work...This isn't a blend of modern and classic so much as a collision.

This movie just doesn't match its predecessors.

The movie doesn't have the energy to be truly horrible. It's too muted and enervated. But it's a somewhat tedious thing to sit through.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

You'll be rooting for these people to get slaughtered out of sheer boredom.

Although the movie has its moments, it's a tearjerker that jerks too hard.

Hollywood Homicide is about murder, all right: the wholesale slaughter of anything funny, original or even vaguely logical.

The suspense is laughably absent.

That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."

Essentially a dumb guy's day in Heaven. The movie's retrofitted with stunts, fights, explosions, drugs, babes and cars -- not necessarily in that order.

At best, the movie is a problematic chamber piece; at worst, a misdirected, slightly misanthropic pretension.

A fascinating premise. And yet, the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, never quite blooms.

May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.

There are some very funny passing lines, but the movie's too uneven to enjoy.

There were moments when I thought Gone in 60 Seconds might be a passably entertaining movie. I figure those moments, strung end-to-end, would total 30 or 40 seconds.

Feels like a manufactured Asian "Chocolat," which drives the label 'art house movie' even further into mainstream banality.

This movie is about the worst thing Chan has done in the United States.

Why sit through a lesser imitation, when you could just rent "Heathers" and those other movies for a far more enjoyable time? Drop-dead bitchery? Been there, done that.

The script's a plodder, and the acting's unbearably stilted. The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

It's hard to tell if this thing's serious or parody and, if it is parody, whether or not it's intentional. Is it a winky joke, for instance, to have lightweight performer George Hamilton as Pacino's business attorney, or just ridiculous casting? Hamilton's performance points to the latter.

All fire-and-brimstone bunk, a tired compendium of involuntary crucifixions, grim messages carved into human flesh, fly buzzings, ominous choral chants on the soundtrack and at least one head twisting.

There's no question the movie's entertaining. But the blatantly schematic depictions of black and white, liberal and hawk, and other tiresome dichotomies turn A Time to Kill into the moral equivalent of a cockfight.

Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.

Best news: over in 87 minutes.

This movie is all pretty faces and six-pack abs, but no characters. All surface and no soul. Come to think of it, the surface isn't so darned hot either.

Penn, who also wrote the script, burdens the story with so many self-indulgent side developments that he loses emotional drive and Freddy's desperate obsession gets lost in the shuffle.

But when mechanical plots are a drama's main engine, we look for something else to divert us, preferably good comedy. That's in short supply, unfortunately. And it's no fun to sit through the movie's retread Woody Allenisms.

Fractured, tentative, oh-so-artsy and very much in the style of Wong's previous Hong Kong-set boy-meets-girl movies. But this time, the effect is contrived: a star-driven pseudo-indie affair that will please neither celebrity worshipers nor cineastes.

Although Ryan is cannily cast against type, she doesn't bring much more than muttery incoherence and nudity to the role.

A Mexican movie in which the outcome is never in doubt, the scenes are endless -- sorry, we meant poetic-- and the false beard on the central character's face looks as though it could use a little extra gum.

There's nothing to recommend about this film except its sheer innocuousness. And Bill Murray's off-screen voicing as Garfield adds no "Robin Williams" element to the movie.

Doubling duties as director and cinematographer, Peter Hyams seems to have tossed the former for the latter. The Presidio, purported cop thriller, looks great. It is, in fact, less filling. The maker of "Outland" and "2010" infuses a San Francisco setting with evocative misty grays, but screenwriter Larry Ferguson's dull doings hang thicker than smog.

About as funny as malaria.

Let's wait for a movie where they do get it all right: story, acting and dancing. It'll happen, just not this time.

Awash in hackneyed old-time secrets and hydrophobic metaphor, never consumes us as it should.

A jarring amalgam of sitcom goofiness and uncomfortable ooginess.

The Rookie is like one of those maddening, waking dreams when you spend the whole night thrashing in bed while tediously repetitive images batter your racing brain. But at least morning comes. This movie, directed by Eastwood, never ends.

Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]

To introduce an archetype like this to western audiences -- as the world weathers culturally and religiously demonizing times -- may have been worth this whole flawed movie. Too bad the story didn't just start with him.

It's too bad the filmmakers didn't take a breath, look at the rushes and see what a comedic gem they had. With just a few tweaks, The Merry Gentleman could have made a wickedly funny parody of the over-earnest, lyrically hard-edged indie movie. But it's too late for do-overs.

Equally earnest and unconvincing.

Gets more operatically farcical (most of it unintentionally so) by the minute.

There's a little too much over-the-top drama, as well as superfluous detail, in this Icelandic film.

Fails because of its gratuitous rape and violence and also because of its pretentious and intellectually one-dimensional grounds, which make the violence at the end feel even worse.

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

Roll past this casino.

The kid chews up the scenery like a baby T-Rex, egged on, no doubt, by director Agresti.

Dull, plodding comedy.

Has so little going for it, you wonder if you've missed something.

Allen, who's a natural charmer, seems to be at half-strength here.

It may give many viewers a licentious flutter, but the highbrow ingredient -- although it desperately wants to be there -- is missing.

Intended as a fuzzy family fable, "August" plays more to the gag reflex than to the heart, especially when our little orphan starts playing the guitar like a virtuoso after what seems like a three-minute tutorial.

Becomes a strung-together collection of interesting, semi-interesting, boring and sometimes embarrassing (seemingly improvised) moments from the cast.

Dramatically and conceptually, the movie sits there, flat, naked and trying too hard with too little.

This comedy, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is as stalled as Fox's Porsche. It's too flat to be funny and too trite to be meaningful.

After introducing a provocative opening, the movie settles in for some pretty cheap scare effects, as well as by-the-numbers computer graphic imagery for the actual marauder.

There's only one problem with Betsy's Wedding. It's Alan Alda. But since he's the writer, the director and the father of the bride in the movie, that's a big problem.

But humans who live above ground, including horror fans, will find themselves only fitfully entertained and more consistently appalled.

Everything is tearful confessions, angry interrogations and breakups. But there's nothing underneath.

The actual movie is the cinematic equivalent of cheap Chinese egg rolls: all flour and cabbage shreds, maybe half a nibble of pork.

After 9/11, few of us look at terrorist acts casually. It's insulting to watch this grandiloquent pornography, using shock value and Hollywood cliche to evoke poignancy.

If you're going to make a gross-out comedy you can't just be gross. You've got to be to be funny as well, or the movie will be DOA. Which is why Eurotrip should be toe-tagged and shoved into the deepest and coldest of video vaults.

There's something secondhand about everything here. Hoge (this is his debut) seems to be mimicking the tone and fabric of other, better indie movies.

Has its moments. In fact, it has too many of them. At 2 hours and 20 minutes and with enough characters to take up a few floors at a big hotel, it feels about an act too long.

If ever there was a movie fit for permanent entombment, it's this sequel.

Maybe they should have called A Love Song for Bobby Long something more appropriately descriptive, such as "When Actors Imitating Southern Characters Go Bad."

As if aware that Congo is the least interesting adventure ever filmed, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (who once wrote a funny movie called "Moonstruck") tries to inoculate the activities with humor.

It's difficult to concentrate on the story. Not that there's much to concentrate on anyway.

It's too manufactured and deliberate to be persuasive.

Newman's cuteness aside, this movie feels long-winded.

It's hard to imagine an audience that won't break up in laughter at this bewildering mixed message: Enjoy this movie, but you really shouldn't be watching it.

So taken with its own love of cinema, it forgets to lead you down the necessary dramaturgical path to make you fall in love, too.

Too long winded and dull.

Head-scratchingly ordinary, given Schwarzenegger's need to prove he's still a virile (i.e., non-aging) action hero.

The mawkishness is ultimately too formidable.