Gary Thompson

The movie works best when it falls back on plain old acting. Merritt Wever is sweet presence as the hobby shop worker and gentle soul who understands Mark’s obsessions, and appreciates his art. Her scenes with Carell are the movie’s least technological, and its best.

If HGTV and Lifetime had a TV channel baby, it would produce movies like The Intruder.

The action is frantic and brutal, and the movie itself has an ugly tone.

if I want to know what Will Smith looked like in his 20s, I can always return, happily, to Men in Black.

No neuralizers needed for Men In Black: International — you’ll forget you’ve seen it not long after walking out.

Who wrote this -- Oliver North?

In its last moments...Aardvark finds a groove.

The fact that it’s a Razzie contender, of course, is no reason not to see it. In fact it could be an inducement — Razzie movies can be quite fun.

Frankenheimer and company, perhaps realizing they were making a bad movie, have taken steps to make "Dr. Moreau" gloriously bad, with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter. [23 Aug 1996, p.44]

The movie also trumpets hometown values, and makes fun of the way Liam’s wealth and fame have insulated him from simple pleasures of small-town life (underlined by director Bethany Ashton Wolf’s cozy visual presentation). The movie pokes fun at his materialism, when it’s not indulging in it.

The picture is apparently intended to mimic the bleak futurism of Blade Runner, but with its cheap look, punk styling and dirty-looking restrooms, Johnny Mnemonic looks more likes a bad East Village nightclub. Furthermore, Longo's staging of action sequences is bland, and he doesn't seem to understand character development at all. [26 May 1995, p.36]

Kin positions itself as a B-movie cobbled together from sci-fi favorites of the past, and so we grant the movie wide latitude to be goofy. It's meant to be out there. Even by those lax standards, though, Kin tries the patience.

The internal logic of the movie is complex, confusing, and as a result the movie is not very much fun.

As a symbiote, Brock/Venom is sometimes funny, and for a while the movie finds a rhythm that seems to suit director Ruben Fleischer, best known for Zombieland.

Wilson and Hathaway don’t click. The characters feel as if they were workshopped separately, and efforts to combine their comic energy on screen fall flat.

There is mismatch of tone and content throughout The Kitchen, which is never sure how to pair its lurid turns of plot with its intersectional feminist ambitions.

I give Elba enormous credit for maintaining a straight face — he and Taylor account for the movie’s few good moments — but the silly script seems to have awakened the dormant ham in McConaughey.

In an effort to work all of these characters into the plot, the movie has become incomprehensible, though I doubt anyone will care, since the movie is one big blizzard of karate chops, and that seems to be the point. [23 Dec 1994, p.33]

Whatever slim chance this picture had of emerging as the sports version of "King of Comedy" evaporates amid a muddled plot and a thoroughly unconvincing feel-good ending. [19 Apr 1996, p.42]

The movie sometimes gets airborne, but with an obvious strain that hurts an airy fantasy like "North." [22 Jul 1994, p.31]

The point of this enterprise is to put the slinky, husky-voiced Fiorentino into compromising positions with as many men as possible and to provide director William Friedkin (The French Connection) with an excuse to stage three long chase scenes. Seems like everybody got what they wanted out of this thing except for us. [13 Oct 1995, p.48]

Stories about the way men and women negotiate sex, power, money, work and relationships — Anastasia ends up working for a company Christian owns — should make the Fifty Shades trilogy relevant and exciting. They are, somewhat mysteriously, the opposite of that.

A wishy-washy exploitation movie, which doesn’t show any real verve until the climax.

It's formatted entertainment aimed at undiscriminating children, full of stale little bits like music video interludes, and obvious rehashing of Home Alone situations in which Culkin's resourceful character outsmarts adults. [17 Jun 1994, p.57]

One of the worst Christmas comedies in history and certainly one of the worst pictures of the year, Trapped in Paradise is a movie with exactly one laugh. [02 Dec 1994, p.77]

Bay makes a lot of familiar moves here.

It's rare that a movie so cleverly conceived is so poorly executed.

Eye for an Eye reaches campy zenith when Field, newly energized - dare I say empowered? - by her martial arts and weaponry skills, turns into a tigress in bed, frightening her husband. [12 Jan 1996, p.28]