Edward Guthmann

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.

Feels so moldy and out of date.

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