Edward Guthmann

This is the downside of Roberts' giant success and her dazzling ability to charm: Every time she goes plain, as she did in the little-seen "Mary Reilly" and "Michael Collins," our princess simply fizzles.

Isn't some sober history lesson that bogs down in long speeches and tedious facts. It's about style, it's about fashion, it's about rock 'n' roll busting out in medieval France.

Beneath the handsome production values, the steady motor of Ron Howard's direction and the solid acting of Mel Gibson as a flashy airline tycoon whose son is abducted in Central Park, Ransom is pure poison: the kind of hang-'em-high rouser that feeds off our basest impulses and prods us into cheering the hero on as he commits grisly, retributive acts of violence.

The Distinguished Gentleman isn't much of a movie - it's a mess, in fact. [04 Dec 1992]

Numbskull cinema scrapes new depths.

The schmaltz is relentless in The Legend of 1900, the newest film from "Cinema Paradiso'' director Giuseppe Tornatore. It comes in waves, it leeches onto every surface and it turns decent actors into sticky-sweet fuzzballs.

A glossy piece of trash.

Girl 6 is glossy, technically proficient and a glib waste of time. Lee and his screenwriter goof around with phone-sex rhetoric ("I wanna service your juicy kielbasa''), but that gets tired quickly.

Noe isn't a graceful filmmaker. He wants to traumatize his audience, barnstorm us, make us pay in anxiety and sweat and scorched nerves for the ugly truths he wants us to swallow.

Nasty to women, cruel to old people and tosses in a cardboard gay couple for gratuitous laughs. It's also got one of those annoying soundtracks that lays rock music right over the dialogue -- as if it wanted to distract us from it.

Alan Bates and Charlotte Rampling are the brave stars of this pretty but sterile adaptation of the Anton Chekhov stage classic.

Too ludicrous to be taken seriously, but not entertaining enough to rate as camp.

Big, opulent and frequently wretched, Pinocchio is so bad that its American distributor, Miramax, opened it on Christmas Day with scant advertising and no advance press screening.

Never comes alive.

It's impossible to imagine why Lions Gate, the indie distributor that released "Monster's Ball," would bother with this garbage.

A lot of the acting is amateurish, and most of the plot feels like a rehash of a rehash. The music, written and performed in the spirit of L7, is small consolation.

A white-trash burlesque that springs from the notion that people chasing each other in cars and doing stupid things in motels are inherently funny.

It's a perfect fit for Williams -- a hunk of slapstick, a dose of schmaltz -- and yet he can't save the film, which is overproduced, mechanical and resoundingly unfunny.

Worse than dull. It's parasitic.

The movie is stiff and schmaltzy and clumsily directed.

The few bright moments in Housesitter are supplied by Martin, who works himself into a sweat trying to make this movie work -- he even squeezes laughs out of a wedding reception scene, when he warbles an Irish melody to his dad -- and by Moffat and Harris, who give their Norman Rockwell stick figures a bumbling, simple charm. [12 June 1992, p.D1]

A self-indulgent mess.

Cynical to an extreme, it doesn't illustrate its points but blasts them at us -- in italics, boldface and capital letters.

Instead of defining and spoofing its period, its attitude and its social barometer, Leave It to Beaver just stumbles about in a bland, irony-deprived suburbia that denies the movie any juice or bite and renders the Cleaver family even duller than it was.

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.

That's a few too many agendas for one film.

It's a sad sight when two big- name stars sink this low, especially when their demoralization and embarrassment are right up on the screen. [24 Aug 1991, p.C3]

In a movie as hackneyed and as dull as Evolution, the small favors of Duchovny's performance stand out.

Hollywood hit-making at its efficient, formulaic worst.

Numbing.

A glob of comedy, drama, action and suspense.

An earnest, ponderous epic that tries desperately to say Something Important about disenfranchised blacks and their Afrikaans oppressors, but never does. [27 March 1992, p.D7]

This is trash on a big budget, but trash nonetheless.

Dredges up every cliche about druggy, obnoxious dreamers on the fringes of Hollywood and assumes that said cliches have the power to shock and surprise.

What's lacking is an explanation for the relationship, and some insight into the origins of Rimbaud's art. The other big problem, aside from DiCaprio's twang, is his lack of chemistry with Thewlis. These are two fine actors, working in vastly different styles, who might as well be walking through different movies. At the end of the handsome, frustrating Total Eclipse, you'll be wondering who these two men were.

What is meant to be brave comes off as gimmicky and immature.

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

A wildly implausible thriller.

They try to make Beverly adorable, and the movie comes off strained and dishonest as a result.

Cheesy.

Self-serious, pointless and silly.

This is a sloppy hash of a movie, poorly directed and plotted in a way that looks as if it were improvised on the spot.

Knows its audience and doesn't stint on the flatulence jokes, poop jokes, leg-humping dogs and moments of homo-panic.

It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.

Numbskull entertainment.

A half-baked disappointment...never flies, never comes close to meeting its own expectations.

Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty draw everything in simplistic, overstated terms. The good guys are pure and spunky, the bad guys bellicose and one-dimensional, the conflicts stripped of nuance.

Might be a blast of ridiculous fun -- the way truly bad movies tend to be -- if it weren't so noxious and reprehensible.

It's a bitter pill to swallow, featuring a quartet of unsympathetic characters and an unrelenting air of misanthropy.

Dreadful teen comedy with a "Cinderella" theme.

The Thing Called Love should have been a nice, middle-key romance, with a few gentle digs at Nashville's fevered, wildly competitive country-music scene. Instead, it's a hapless, well-intentioned mess -- running in half a dozen directions at once, looking half-planned and semi-improvised, and featuring a skittish, overly mannered performance by Phoenix. [16 March 1994, p.E1]

In concept alone, Ravenous is anything but appetizing, but in execution it's worse than you'd imagine.