Desson Thomson

Fails as the big-screen romance it wants to be. The main problem: There's only one heart between the principals, and it beats solely in Chow's chest.

The story, which feels more like a sprawl of television episodes than a film, is a little tedious to sit through.

It is, however, a baby boomer's treat to see Faithfull, romancer of Mick Jagger back in the day and a pop siren in her own right, show her qualities as an actor. One is hopeful she'll find her way to other, better projects.

If you go to this, anticipate neither an endearing Quaid-Ryan vehicle nor a fully satisfying art film. By trying to satisfy opposing demands, Kloves misses the spirit of both and is left only with flesh and bone.

If Amazing Grace serves its most superficial purpose -- to educate the viewer -- it's hardly compelling viewing.

It's a fascinating story but not so fascinatingly told.

It canters along, content to follow the Rules of Cute and Fuzzy Horse Movies.

This movie is a mixed repast: good food and wine laced with enough misanthropic poison to turn any stomach.

Revenge was supposed to be the one that really socked it to us, about Anakin's almost biblical fall from grace. But the movie never rises to its powerful occasion.

Gets bogged down in sentimentality, while its wheels spin futilely in life-solving overdrive.

An overextended, episodic disappointment.

In drama, and just about everything else, almost is never enough. Which is why Martian Child, about the growing bond between an adult and child, never reaches us.

Occasional clumsiness is easily coated over by the movie's overarching goodwill.

It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.

Does a masterful job of building menace until about halfway through.

There's a certain midnight-movie attraction to Lowenstein's unencumbered madness in "Dogs." Until it all gets encumbered, that is. He tacks on an ending almost worthy of Nancy Reagan -- if she'd stayed this long with the movie. Suddenly there's a Just Say No consequence to this Kind of Lifestyle. It changes the whole cast of the film (suddenly we've been watching a message picture), and it doesn't conclude the movie so much as rip the plug out. [22 Jan 1998, p.N23]

The humor, which made the first movie appealing to more than just TV kids, is far less adroit.

The movie gradually peters out.

It's the feelings, the tears, the laughter, the stuff that makes Gene Shalit stand up and cheer. It's showboating time and if that's what you want, the "Magnolias" gangplank lies before you.

The racial angle becomes the tiresome basis of almost every joke.

Watchable, certainly. It should have been so much more.

Nothing more than an over-designed lobster pot. After following the beckoning twists and turns, you're left trapped and more than a little disappointed for getting in so deep.

Kettle of Fish, starring Matthew Modine as a commitment-skittish saxophone player, is a warm-spirited romantic comedy, but it tends to have a squawky pitch.

If there's any moral to this sorry story, perhaps Lee's stealth-message is it: Even when it's not about race, it is.

Parents can vaguely console themselves, however, that amid the kiddie pollution available on Saturday morning TV, the Turtles rank slightly better than the rest. At least they care about each other and fight crime for other than fortress-destroying, fascistically gratifying reasons. And maybe, just maybe, this will make them curious enough, one day, to check up on the real Michelangelo.

Its title may ring with pun and promise, but Stoned is a flat riff on Jones's short life. You'll get the highlights but no sense of what made him special -- or what really haunted him.

Kid 'n Play who just lit up House Party, are practically snuffed out in Class Act. This low-burning caper spends so much time with plot business and bubblegum advice, it forgets about the funny thang. The likable rappers never get to show their stuff.

Amid the violence, the one-liners ring out. Nobody speaks for real. It's as if they all know they're in a movie.

Unfortunately, "Youth" becomes so lost in its own conceptual, convoluted vortex, it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Coppola proves that even the best of our film artists can lose sight of what this medium is all about: entertaining, enlightening and including its audience.

Rather like the faltering way Dennis runs the race, Pegg the performer insists that we keep watching, ever hopeful for a decent gag. And we spend most of our time thinking back to movies that better showcased his talents, such as "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz."

Only fitfully amusing. More often, it feels like a mediocre attempt to reprise the central elements of the infinitely funnier "Napoleon Dynamite."

Ultimately, SLC Punk! doesn't have enough dimension to maintain dramatic interest.

The worst mistake is the screenplay, which not only cuts everything into superficial pieces but fails to make authentic moments of anything. In the end, White Oleander isn't an adaptation of a novel. It's a flashy, star-splashed reduction.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a tad too precious. One of those movies that wants to address life's quaint wackinesses, it's full of characters who are quirky, lonely, bizarre or retarded. There's something intensely earnest about the project. But there's something equally manufactured, starting with the casting of Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis.

Although this film about a zebra who aspires to win horse races has a marvelous premise, it slows to a mediocre canter right out of the starting gate.

There's grist here for a genuinely stirring film. But writer-director Bruce Beresford -- who created the screenplay from interviews with real-life World War II prisoners (who also performed music for the Japanese) -- reduces everything to its most uninteresting banality. [18Apr1997 Pg. N.44]

A blithely unfunny, low-budget comedy from director Barry Levinson.

If any element takes us through the movie, it's him (Depp).

Aiming to blur the distinctions between truth and illusion, it simply blurs its own effectiveness by relying on predictable and not particularly convincing mystery-thriller formula.

The movie loses all authority, despite wonderful work from cinematographer Peter Menzies and composer Patrick O'Hearn. In screenwriter Daniel Pyne's hands, every character becomes a disappointment. Even Dafoe loses his zest as the movie progresses.

Another sentimental mushfest disguised as a movie.

Its main purpose -- and no, you are not experiencing ocular breakdown -- is spiritual.

Feels so slight and pointless.

Never transports you to another place and time, as it intends to.

Unfortunately, the film, written and directed by Sue Kramer, starts with a distinctly uncomfortable moral baseline: How exactly is any audience supposed to identify with a character whose relationship with her brother borders on the incestuous?

It's not often you find a movie as exciting and awful as Rumble in the Bronx. But the sole aim of this so-bad-it's-funny action picture is to introduce Jackie Chan to American audiences. In that narrow sense, it's completely successful.

A little too shopworn and pokey to be more than a respectable European diversion.

The longer I take to review this movie, the more the absurdities loom. So let me finish before I think about the story's stupidly plotted structure or recall how tiring it was to watch apes perpetually pushing humans to the ground or sending them pirouetting into the air.

All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.

Despite a subject of immense potential -- the movie's surprisingly uninvolving.

It's been gunned before -- and so much better.

Should have never made it up the distribution aisle.

Talk Radio, despite its collective intensity, is itself just another unenlightening late-night call-in session.

Throughout, Garner retains a permanent grimace, as if persuasive acting can be achieved by contorting cheek muscles and pouting lips. It's not just depressing to watch; it's tiring. We want to tell her to relax -- for our own relief.

Forgettable the instant it strafes your retinas.

This latest project, a murder mystery scripted by Aaron (A Few Good Men) Sorkin and Scott (Dead Again) Frank, is bilge water.

John Schlesinger, who directed Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man, knows how to weave edge-of-the-seat tension. But Mark Frost's screenplay, based on Nicholas Conde's occult mystery novel The Religion, is a haphazard affair of implausibility and pseudo-Voodoo.

For horror fans who appreciate a bit of craft with their second-rate experiences -- Paul Haslinger's fear-mongering score is terrific for what it's worth -- this might merit a future late-night rental.

Keeps you hanging on until the very last moment, not because it's scary, but because you can't believe that's all there is to it.

In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.

Nobody likes a fixed fight, except the backroom boys making the deal. Which is why The Break-Up may have its share of laughs, but isn't much fun.

There's so little authenticity between them, it destroys the story's most crucial element: the love between father and daughter. And finding the gold becomes our only reason to watch.

Even Thompson, the one you look forward to watching, is disappointing.

A Sidney Lumet movie is loose. It's a big vehicle, loaded with the usual artistic statement. But Running on Empty is coasting downhill fast.

Uneven, not particularly inspired comic thriller.

The movie, a frenetic, explosive experience full of car crashes and gun battles, is original and exhilarating. But more often, it's so overwhelming, it'll make you want to watch "Die Hard With a Vengeance" for peace and quiet.

The story may be based on real events, but most of it feels patently false.

Makes the mistake of including too sweeping a scope in too small a movie and with too few resources.

The trouble is, since few characters are fully developed, it's hard to care who's doing what to whom and why.

Some routines are funny, it must be said. But more often than not, you'll be groaning with painful recognition rather than actually laughing.

She (Madonna) really ought to be tried for impersonating Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Or playing a second-rate Hitchcock mystery blonde -- she's even named Rebecca.

Even by its own standards, the movie becomes increasingly macabre and ludicrous as Anne's machinations get the better of her, and everyone, including the audience, is left feeling shattered, shaken and vaguely unclean for having participated in all this.

A well-intentioned, reverential but unenlightening portrait. It pays tribute to the artist. Yet it doesn't scrutinize him.

After a promising beginning and an amusing middle, the movie gets stuck in limbo.

Despite an appealing, even ingenious premise, "Scorpion" is another quippy but uninspired comedy.

Tracy is Tinseltown's annual celebration of everything that's wrong with itself: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the Hollywood "fun" assembly-line method of copy-cat mediocrity, etc.

Here's my favorite part: It's only 87 minutes long. But for the most part, this movie is just another bland, fair-to-middling vehicle for two emerging, fledgling stars.

An adolescent romance that isn't smart enough to mirror "When Harry Met Sally" or crudely amusing enough to get close to "American Pie."

The humor works beautifully until Marshall decides to beat the comedy over the head and drum us, once again, with this relentless message: "Mentally challenged people in love say the darndest things!"

The scenes of destruction-apart from being great to watch-provide much-needed relief from these people's unidimensional banalities.

It's a warm bath experience, soap-sudsed with sentimentality, improbability and other storytelling misdemeanors.

Enough to make any thinking person want to shoot a hole in the screen.

The film feels inauthentic, a cardboard version of other epics that's cast for distribution to various world markets.

Monte Merrick's script is an unspectacular, cliche-riddled voyage from start to finish, with everyone lugging their own tote-bags of facile character idiosyncrasies.

There is so much violence, as gangs kill gangs, or gangs kill cops, or the predator kills all of them, that it's hard to watch without the brain succumbing to self-protective numbness.

With the exception of Burton's jolting sight gags (I may never recover from the vision of Parker's head grafted on to the body of a chihuahua), the comedy is half-developed, pedestrian material. And the climactic battle between Earthlings and Martians is dull and overextended.

There isn't enough magic in the bag this time. Although Parkes and Lasker produce a set of primates guaranteed to charm the upholstery off the theater seats, there is little else.

Edwards wants to leap deliriously between gender roles and stereotypes. But he treads on every possible corn, from heterosexual to lesbian.

Feels more like an overblown TV special than a grand theatrical release.

Unaccompanied Minors, a sort of junior league version of "The Breakfast Club," never achieves the universal appeal of John Hughes's 1985 film about youth and authority.

A darkly interesting distraction but not much more.

Winter Passing is one dull, extended encounter session among hackneyed characters -- although Deschanel gets the most points for almost imitating a human.

Trust me, you'll want to leave these people to get on with their tedious scams alone.

Spouses Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger -- the latest flavors of the month to tie the knot -- slum their way through a glam-noirish extended video. Amid director Roger Donaldson's pseudo-atmospherics and the ersatz Thompson fare hacked up by screenwriters Walter Hill and Amy Holden Jones, they shoot guns, plan heists, talk tough and make love in silhouette.

This is definitely a family trip to stay home and skip.

If a hero is one who perseveres and never gives up, this is one Hero that should have quit when it was ahead.

The best thing about Murder at 1600? Speed of exposition. Directed by Dwight Little, who made Steven Seagalís "Marked for Death," this thing whizzes from one unbelievable story point to the next. Your suspension of disbelief appreciates the momentum, if nothing else.

While Phenomenon attempts, tritely, to ascend into mind-blowing significance, it also plummets into a pit of sentimental mush.

If your teenage sons are looking for heroes, send them to Toy Soldiers. Even if they're not, send them anyway. They'll probably enjoy watching a judge being thrown out of a helicopter. Too bad the judge didn't take the script with him. Most reasoning adults will probably reject this far-fetched clash between American preppies and Colombian terrorists.

The documentary never gets more than skin deep. It rarely delves into the troubling regions that are the very orchards of documentary.

The special twist-which Paramount Pictures has implored critics not to divulge-redefines the story completely. It also ruins everything.

We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.

Speaking of jail, "Shawshank"-the-movie seems to last about half a life sentence. The story, chiefly about the 20-year friendship between Freeman and Robbins, becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.

Too lightweight and streamlined to be memorable.

The film's depicted cruelties (the rape and disembowelment of a woman, a pillow suffocation of a boy after Poelvoorde has chased the terrified tyke through the house) grossly overshadow their satiric purposes.

Housesitter wants to please everyone a little, but nobody a lot. This low-achievement approach may guarantee success in the video stores. But on the big screen, it's fully exposed. For all Steve Martin's rubbery faces, and Goldie Hawn's watery-eyed expressions, the movie just sits there.

Just like "Bad Boys," only louder, longer and the stars get paid more.

How can you celebrate a movie in which Zellweger doesn't soar but simply avoids disaster?

With The Baxter, Showalter's begging his way into the ranks of the safe and the mediocre.

It is the verdict of this court that it be led to a stockade reserved exclusively for cheap, pandering movies and duly shot.

The movie is going to be fine for PG-ready audiences, assuming they don't have a problem with extremely predictable story turns.

Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Maura Tierney and David Koechner -- all talented -- seem amazingly zombie-like here. And Jackie Earle Haley, as a stoner fan of the Tropics, is more disconcerting than funny.

Even in his poorest work (i.e., this movie), director Jarmusch retains an appealing sense of experimentation. He fills his movies with those clumsy, unhurried moments between people. But in Night on Earth, with five vignettes to get through, he's forced to create faster, more sketchlike pieces. He's just not up to the task. Nor do performers Winona Ryder, Isaach De Bankole, Roberto Benigni and others pick up the improvisational ball.

I suggest you RSVP in the negative to this "Wedding" invitation, unless you consider yourself a friend of the obvious bride to be, Ms. Lopez. But even then, you'll have to focus on her presence, rather than the silly ceremony around her.

A movie that jumps between two worlds can be a powerful experience, as any fan of "The Wizard of Oz," "Back to the Future" or "The Terminator" can tell you. But this phoned-in epic is simply a celebration of the inauthentic.

The movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.

An increasingly ridiculous hybrid of sexy romance, murder mystery and psychological mumbo jumbo, it's another bad spin on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," with plummetings from high-up places, repressed guilt and love for a mysterious woman. But its watchability is more attributable to comic relief from Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren and others than the ballyhooed steam between Willis and March.

For the most part, the movie's a bland disappointment, on many levels.

We know the story will conclude with a crescendo of frozen-north hallelujahs. Cheering is endemic to Disney. They can't help themselves.

For those who simply want to drink in the northern Italian countryside and Tyler's physical details, it's quite an experience. But as a story, Stealing Beauty (which Bertolucci wrote with Susan Minot) is a misbegotten, sentimental reunion with old European cinema.

The plot becomes so overextended, as Reeves and Hopper wage their endless public transportation battle, even the hardest Die-Harders will consider leaping off way before the final stop.

Isn't appropriate for any innocent child -- assuming such lovely creatures still exist. But boys and girls who enjoy surprise attacks in their entertainment (of the aforementioned toilet variety) are going to have a blast. Sad but true.

Sentinel is a medium-dumb thriller that starts out with momentary promise but gets progressively sillier.

The relation between Constantine and its source material is, at best, superfluous.

Emotions in this film operate on a made-for-TV level; they don't engage you.

It is likely to disappoint more people than creator George Lucas would have liked.

Without a compelling story at the center, this is just a mediocre MTV-Wagnerian fantasy.

Screenwriter Robert Getchell and director John Badham (whose resume includes the fallen "Bird on a Wire") wouldn't know a believable moment if it hit them. Fonda's transformation to lethal weapon, her affair with Mulroney and the implied romance with Byrne are all lukewarm, lazily outlined conceits. There have been deeper human relationships in TV commercials.

Some of it is funny in a Zucker brothers slapstick way. And as the Man's geeky lieutenant, Chris Kattan has some amusingly kooky business. But there's not enough to sustain the comedy. Ultimately, the movie's short running time becomes its finest quality.

Feels like "Alien" as directed by Jim Henson. And the suspense is restricted to mundane slasher-movie tactics, including the frequent use of a mobile camera (call it the ’condacam) that’s supposed to represent the snake’s point of view.

There's nothing to stir us, no scene to savor for life -- such as the father-son battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back." Back then, we were watching a classic, still the best film in the series. This time, we're watching just another "Star Wars" flick.

If it wasn't for some exciting roundball action, Shaquille O'Neal's hulking-dunking presence and a wonderfully guttural performance from coach Nick Nolte, you'd slither off the bench asleep.

The more the movie progresses, the more you realize how much Seinfeld's voice sounds like a droning bee -- the kind you want to swat away.

It's just respectable trash, and a dress rehearsal for better things ahead.

Despite all the life-threatening situations, warrior deaths and heroic feats, it's hard to get behind characters who feel like lazy archetypes.

The best thing about this movie? It's short.

One imagines that Bigelow's story conferences with ex-husband Cameron (maker of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "True Lies") and Cocks were free of such apparently anti-entertainment concepts as "character development," "predictability" and "believability." [13 Oct 1995, p.N44]

The trouble is, this is Hartley all over again. What seemed cutting edge and sharp in the 1990s -- the smart-alecky references to obscure filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Andrei Konchalovsky), the self-mocking tone in the actors' voices, the overall sense that this movie is subverting itself -- feels rehashed and old.

It's resounding bunk, candied over with the lush music of Johnny Clegg and hyped to death by director John ("Rocky") Avildsen.

Spike Lee had something in mind while he shot School Daze, his follow-up to the cult hit "She's Gotta Have It." Unfortunately it's still lodged behind his cranium. And the movie's out.

This is all about getting your life back on course before you can fall in love. Which isn't such a bad idea for a movie, as long as there's something more. Unfortunately, there isn't.

Ultimately, Brothers is a flashy, stylistic show of emptiness, intended to protest emptiness. But that's clear almost from the outset.

Director and co-writer James Marsh clearly thinks he has made a grim and telling satire about fundamentalist hypocrisy. But he and co-writer Milo Addica display such contempt for their characters and religious conviction in general, they reduce everything to one-note banality.

Despite a glut of luridness, the story line feels essentially flat, as Keitel stumbles through New York in an immoral, unchanging haze. It is only the strength of Keitel's performance that gives his personality human dimension.

There'd be nothing wrong with this if the film 'fessed up to its kitschy soul. Instead, it pretends to be the high-minded drama it's not.

The movie spares no effort to reach out to the crudest, youngest audiences it can.

The movie's gentle and friendly, but nowhere close to exciting. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved with this production --considers Snow Dogs anything more than phoned-in business as usual.

Never the magic charmer it sets out to be.

This adaptation of James Hadley Chase's "Just Another Sucker" isn't so bad you'd want to roast it over the coals, but it ain't much good either.

A frustrating update. Take away the comedy and you're left with a pallid version -- a sort of Reader's Digest condensation -- of the original.

A respectable effort that doesn't care to do more than course smoothly and effortlessly through familiar waters.

Made up of tiny, non-nutritious patties, this movie is a buffet of Hollywood nothingness.

For all the filmmakers' efforts, this project is something of an artistic albatross. It's a conundrum that doesn't get answered until a sort of help-the-audience Cliffs Notes final scene, in which we learn Everything. But by then, more than a few of us may be wondering, was it all really worth the trouble?

At its worst, which ends up being most of the time, the movie traps us in art-house pretentiousness, as we're obliged to follow the yearnings and abstract corruptions of the urban zestless.

But this whore-and-the-innocent friendship, set in Shanghai during the 1930s, is too trite to pull us in. And the gangster scenario around it (Bi Feiyu wrote the script) is similarly unconvincing.

Cutesy in the television sitcom sense.

This movie is a particular disappointment. Although The Seeker is in Walden's tradition of positive storytelling, John Hodge's script is guilty of downright goofy utterances on occasion.

Culkin's best comedy ever. If only this movie wasn't supposed to be a horror picture.

This is for the pre-converted, certainly not the left, or even those who consider themselves detached observers.

Unfortunately, Branagh and screenwriters Steph Lady and Frank Darabont (who also adapted The Shawshank Redemption) have created a story as badly patched together as De Niro’s Creature.

Has its sinfully funny moments. Funny, that is, if you appreciate a certain cynical clamminess -- or Buck Henry seediness -- to your comedy.

Just a few more tweaks and Crossover could have been something special -- a truly terrible movie to savor for the ages. But nooo, this street ball movie -- has to settle for middle-of-the-road badness.

The movie makes an over-long deal about Jody's immaturity and never seems to get beyond it.

This movie's "Flashdance" on blades, an unending series of rock videos posing as a story. It's so slick, so loveless, so efficient, you almost take your hat off to the filmmakers.

The trouble with Goal!, which -- horror of horrors -- is the first of a trilogy, is that it's neither a persuasive story nor a satisfying display of soccer.

This movie, set in the '60s and starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Bob Hoskins, doesn't come of age so much as die of it. It's awash in mediocrity, waterlogged with innocuousness and redeemed only occasionally by sweet-faced Ryder.

But don't let a little gore, misogyny, factbusting, counterfeit hipness and screenwriter David ("Streamers") Rabe's public disassociation from the project get in your way. Enjoy Penn's actor imitations. Or Fox's raspy earnestness. Or scorer Ennio Morricone's sentimental mortars. Or a bafflingly anticlimactic final sequence in which veteran Fox appears to come to terms with himself with the help of an Asian woman and a dropped scarf. Is that what you call a wrap?

Williams is hardly at his comically inventive best. And the script (adapted by Chris Van Allsburg, and a string of others, from his book) pursues the least exciting avenues possible.

A violence-intoxicated, far-fetched, morally corrupt drama.

Strikes an unsatisfying balance between serious romantic texture and outright farce.

At what point in the movie is it too late to ask for your money back?

For the most part, this case, which includes a convenient last-minute taped confession and a lifeless Cher-Quaid romance, should have been thrown out of court.

It's brutal, horribly manipulative, and we've seen this stuff before in better pictures.

You are allowed to come up with a monster we haven't seen before.

Some of it is funny -- particularly the physical comedy. Most of it is not.

The film amounts to a harsh and perpetual assault on viewers' sensibilities -- not only because of its violence but because of its overall bleakness.

Flagging energy isn't the only issue here; Ford has become enslaved in his own cliches.

Overwritten, overextended and clunkily symbolic

The movie’s disappointingly straightforward, with no discernible flair.

I can only bestow this adaptation of Joanne Harris's bestselling novel with such faint praise as "pleasant" and "mildly disarming."

Tries -- and fails -- to evoke that whoa-did-this-really-happen edge.

Although the movie has a few interesting twists and turns, its mind-versus-mind conceit devolves into a mundane warden-versus-inmate conclusion.

Unless you're a junkie for mediocre rejoinders and insults ("I know loan sharks that are more forgiving than you," Leary tells Johns), this is one holiday party you'll want to miss.

A charming, spirited movie for cinephiles, or those who aspire to be. It's the kind of movie every kid in film school wanted to make but didn't have the father to produce.

The actors tend to think that everything they do in pursuit of character is great, wonderful and worthy of being shown. They're rarely accomplished enough to strut their stuff, nor assured enough to know when to hold back.

Although it has moments of charm and poignancy -- this is one of Glenn Close's best hours -- the scheme and scope of the movie are just too darned obvious.

Though Philip Haas's digitally shot film has the firsthand immediacy of such nonfictional docs as "Iraq in Fragments" and "Gunner Palace," its dramatic template feels disappointingly secondhand.

Perhaps the ultimate "Judgment" comes from Estevez, who observes: "Nothing about tonight makes sense."

Unfortunately, apart from Downey's convincing contribution, the movie feels too contrived, stagy and inorganic to draw any pleasure.

Paul Hogan has an easy plan: Simply be Mick Crocodile Dundee and the rest will follow. The rest is Crocodile Dundee II, and it doesn't follow so much as drag itself along like an alligator on dry land.

Another product from Industrial Light & Magic, this fire-breathing, soaring creature is a technical wonder to behold. But they've skimped on everything else. The script douses the movie's fiery potential and director Rob Cohen soaks all remaining embers with his cheap, made-for-TV direction.

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.