J. Hoberman

Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.

Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."

10 on Ten is less illuminating than pedantic, as well as tediously self-absorbed.

The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]

A lackluster screwball comedy.

Director Lee throws cold water on his own overheated fantasy scenario by having Mackie mope through every scene. What's fascinating is how She Hate Me perversely trumps its own perversity.

Hollywood Homicide knows it's a dog, and it ain't too proud to beg.

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.

Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.

The script is worse than slack, and despite its lurid premise, Bully doesn't have "Kids" tabloid immediacy.

From the end to the beginning--or is it from the inadvertently ridiculous to the would-be sublime?--Noé's stunt is an exploitation movie with a gimmick, not to mention a vacuous philosophy.

An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.

Mesmerizingly bad filmmaking.

Even sillier than it is cynical, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a tiresome tale.

The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity.

This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.

Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.

A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.

Like a visual concussion.

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.

An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.

It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.

Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.

This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.

Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.

The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]

This ponderous, didactic weepie aspires to "Titanic" stature even if the only ship it sinks is itself.

That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.

The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.

A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.

Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy.

Grim going.

The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.

A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.

Very Bad Things is a guy film, and, as such, it's a dog. The gross-out humor lacks edge, the guilt never kicks in, and the outrages are predictable. It's one flat brewski.

All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.

Home Room is badly acted and, running well over two hours, often mind-numbingly ponderous. Depressed rather than hysterical, it's in every way less clever and more literal-minded than "Zero Day."

The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.

Peaks with its opening scene.

Never quite becomes unwatchable.

Less awful than inert, Claire Dolan comes across as a willfully bad movie.

The Phantom Menace is simply a billboard for itself. Anyone who sees it will be experiencing it for the second time. The hype was not about the movie, the hype was the movie.

Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.

A largely mind-numbing experience.

Has little to offer beyond muzzy kismet and generalized amnesia, a bit of National Geographic and a lot of cocktail jazz.

Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.

Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.

This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]

Niccol has no gift for comedy. His ongoing exploration of modern celebrity results in an industry satire that's less funny than half-empty and hyper-designed.

Sodden mess, a mutation-invasion movie that passes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!" going south.

Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."

An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.

See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.

For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.

Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.

A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.

An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.

Crudely remaking the 1932 Universal original.

A tediously childish exhibition.

Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.

The film seems dimly aware of its own ridiculousness, but it lacks the constitution for self-mockery.

The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.

None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins.

As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.

The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.

Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.

Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.

The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.

At once simple-mindedly didactic and utterly chaotic, Steal This Movie! is interspersed with fake headlines and botched history.

The new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas.

The Allen persona has always blurred the distinction between his art and his life. Still, one would scarcely expect Allen's attempt to satirize daily life in the National Entertainment State to be this tired, sour, and depressed.