Hal Hinson

Usually, Ephron is one of the most reliable comic voices in the movies, but here her gifts seem to have deserted her. Though she shows her customary talent for smart one-liners, the spirit of the film is forced and desperate, as if she lacked faith in her gags and were trying to shove them down our throats.

Nothing in the first Gremlins came close to being as bad as these early segments in the second one, and because the concept is no longer fresh, and the suspense over what's going to happen is lost, we're ready for the filmmakers to get on with it long before they've finished setting the table.

If the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd comedy The Great Outdoor had a few more laughs we might be tempted simply to write it off as mediocre and let it go at that. But this woodland farce is just coarse enough, and unfunny enough, to achieve true awfulness.

A plodding, aggressive film that is neither engaging, disturbing nor funny.

[A] scatterbrained imitation. [15 Oct 1993, p.D7]

The movie is shot as if Bigelow wanted to take her audience to the very edge of sensory overload. Her pulsing, super-psychedelic images are edgy and invasive. They burn as they hit your retina. After a while, however, Bigelow's careening camera, the heavy-metal music and the flash cutting begin to make you feel hammered and abused. Though the movie is jammed with plot, nothing seems to happen. [13 Oct 1995, p.F01]

The director, Joseph Sargent, doesn't bring out any of the possibilities in the material -- not even the scary ones. And Michael Caine is wasted, though not completely. He manages to provide at least a little suspense, even if it's the extracurricular sort, by raising the question: Will an Oscar winner be allowed to become fish food?

Here, Lyne indulges more in misdirection than in direction; he's a magician turning a sleazy trick. But even his technical skill breaks down. The picture is garbled and cliched.

After the film's first few minutes I watched, neither entertained nor illuminated, with something close to total indifference... (Greenaway's) extravagances and attacks on taste seem less like the bravery of the courageous artist than the empty desperation of a charlatan.

Red Heat is poorly, or even indifferently, made. It's a joyless exercise, and too much angry resignation seeps in for it to be very funny or very entertaining.

Lethal Weapon 3 is pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon 2," which was pretty much the same as "Lethal Weapon."

The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

Humorless, charmless and flat.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

A leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted.

If, at odd moments, The Rock is better than tolerable, it is usually because of its stars.

It's time to find a new Bond. This one is tuckered out, spent, his signature tuxedo in sore need of pressing...Dalton plays a straight-faced, humorless, no-nonsense Bond -- all guns and no play -- and it makes for a very dull time.

What The Two Jakes makes us long for most is the earlier film.

Posse is a great idea for a movie, but rarely has such a solid idea been exploited with greater indifference or lack of imagination.

The movie is an orgiastic celebration of big, sloppy emotions; it's the film equivalent of "Feelings." And what we're supposed to take from it is a renewed faith in the indomitable strength of women. But with all this big acting and all these stars elbowing for space in front of the camera, the film comes across as something quite the opposite of what was intended, not a tribute to femininity but a kind of grotesque parody -- a corn-pone variation on "The Women."

It's mindlessly violent, profane and insultingly racist. It's also relentless, repetitious and tiresome, and leaves us feeling that a once-great director has run out of ammunition.

Once upon a time [Brooks] was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.

A phenomenally atrocious movie—so bad, in fact, that you might actually manage to squeeze a few laughs out of it.

The picture amounts to little more than an uninspired, almost perfunctory exercise in "big game" manipulations.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

A premise is about all The Cutting Edge has, and what a tired one it is.

What "Wild at Heart" feels like is a kind of housecleaning -- a disjointed collection of images and odd snatches of ideas that the director couldn't make room for anyplace else. They have no context, and as a result, no power to thrill or disturb.