Edward Guthmann

It's a classy but downbeat spin on the most familiar of TV-movie formulas.

Jefferson in Paris is dull, sluggish and unfocused.

The Olsens' precociousness and sitcom-style mugging grate at first, but I found myself warming to their movie in its last half - thanks mostly to Alley, a crackerjack physical comic who's incapable of a flat or colorless note.

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

The film's aim -- to dazzle and inspire -- is sapped by Cruise's vein-popping, running-the-marathon performance.

Takes a long time getting started and doesn't hit its stride until Danny starts coaching a team of fellow cons -- think "Bad News Bears," just nastier.

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.

A wildly implausible thriller.

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.

Sci-fi has rarely been so playful.

Larger Than Life isn't as bad as it sounds, mostly because Murray is so likable and fundamentally incapable of not being funny.

A conspiracy tale of high-tech chicanery, Chain Reaction has better acting, better writing, more spectacular chase sequences and more genuine drama than all of this summer's blockbusters. It's also got Morgan Freeman, as good an actor as we have today, which easily qualifies it as the one action film you should see this summer if you see no other.

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

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.

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

Harmless enough, and its team of actors so frisky and enthusiastic that it manages to deliver a modicum of laughs despite itself.

Unfortunately, Raising Cain is largely a retread of De Palma's vintage thrillers from the '70s -- an extended self-homage that makes you wonder if his imagination got frozen in 1980.

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.

If your tolerance for Branagh's shtick and Woody's narrowness of focus is as low as mine, you can take solace in the director's joke on himself.

Plays like the cinematic equivalent of a paperback bodice- ripper with embossed type.

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.

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.

It's beautifully shot by first-time feature director Antoine Fuqua, whose eye for sensual surfaces, deft camera moves and elegant framing was refined with commercials and music videos

This movie has a sweetness at its core.

Dreadful teen comedy with a "Cinderella" theme.

A confounding and unsatisfying film.

It sets up two or three dozen satirical targets, hits the mark occasionally, but has trouble maintaining an even satirical tone or satisfying pace. Dawber, too, is unappealing in the female lead -- definitely outclassed by Ritter. I'd wager Stay Tuned will die an early death at the box office and find its real life, appropriately enough, in home video. [15 Aug 1992, p.C3]

The movie was written by Scott Yagemann, who taught seven years in the Los Angeles public- school system, and you can feel the rancor and bitterness he still carries.

Disappointing, pointless and repetitive.

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

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

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

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]

Consenting Adults is well-made, preposterous junk -- the kind of modestly effective thriller that delivers a modicum of thrills but insults its audience, over and over, to achieve that effect. [16 Oct 1992, p.C1]

Down Periscope makes a surprisingly successful launch, with plenty of brisk one-liners and a promising set-up. But after that auspicious opening, it sinks.

Sister Act 2 doesn't challenge Goldberg, but it's a marvelous showcase, nonetheless, for one of the screen's most likable personalities. [10 Dec 1993, p.C1]

Handsome and sincere but slightly awkward in its combination of entertainment and evangelical boosterism.

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.

Hollywood hit-making at its efficient, formulaic worst.

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.

As haunted-house thrillers go, Cold Creek Manor is more ludicrous than the average but at the same time more handsomely produced.

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]

An uneasy mixture of tragedy, satire, monster yarn and David Cronenberg creepiness, No Such Thing can't decide what it wants to be or how it needs to get there.

The best scenes are the ones that Fox shares with Tamala Jones, Wendy Raquel Robinson and the full-figured Monique as her sassy girlfriends. There's a ripe, crackling spontaneity when these women get together.

It's a bizarre hybrid: one part feminist screed, one part French art film and one part skin flick.

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

Jingle wants to warm our hearts and establish Schwarzenegger as a family man -- but devotes so much time to goony violence and broad physical comedy that the last-reel schmaltz feels hollow and tacked-on.

Efficient action thriller.

Feels so moldy and out of date.

Pryce is very good, but Very Annie Mary is a bit too eager to please.

Despite its posh trimmings, and Fiorentino's feline presence, Jade never rises above its limitations and never cloaks the fact that Eszterhas' dialogue and script are basically pulp -- minus the trashy fun that we've come to expect from the genre.

A messy, ambitious comedy.

Despite its technical defects and negligent production values, The Flip Side will probably appeal to a Filipino-American audience.

A pretty lame premise for a movie.

It may smell awful from a distance, especially if you have low tolerance for lowbrow humor, but up close this yarn about an unlikely golf star is fairly painless.

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.

Numbskull entertainment.

Self-serious, pointless and silly.

The movie is stiff and schmaltzy and clumsily directed.

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Granted, you don't expect much from a movie like this: azure seas and honey-dripped sunsets, perhaps, a little titillation and a few wicked laughs. But Robert Steadman's photography lacks the imagination of Almendros' work on The Blue Lagoon, and the rare erotic moments are no match for the dumbness of Leslie Stevens' script. [03 Aug 1991, p.C3]

Campbell and Edwards work wonders with the rocky, wide-open Oregon landscape, but none of their periwinkle-blue skies and sparkling shots of whooping cranes in flight can compensate for a film that aims high, means well, and ultimately fails its audience. [20 May 1994]

One of the year's funniest acts of malice.

It's tremendously entertaining, and probably worthy of repeat viewings.

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

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

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

Numbskull cinema scrapes new depths.

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

A mean-spirited comedy...that steals the rampaging-psycho-chick formula from ``Fatal Attraction'' and tries to make it funny.

Pokemon is over.

Numbing.

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

What we have here isn't a disaster, exactly, but a very handsomely produced let-down.

It's an interesting technique -- the blurring of reality and "movies" -- but Korine's objective is so narrow and mean, and his viewpoint so colored by smug, adolescent condescension, that Gummo comes off like a mean-spirited prank.

Cheesy.

Never comes alive.

A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.

Worse than dull. It's parasitic.

A glossy piece of trash.

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.

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.