Jack Mathews

We're left with virtually no insight into the appeal of a movement that lasted 30 years.

For a much better film about a similar story, rent "The World's Fastest Indian," with Anthony Hopkins on a motorcycle.

Italian actress, writer and director Asia Argento's performance in the godawful Scarlet Diva is one of those bawl, spit, scream and vomit exhibitions that provoke admiring applause in acting classes and great gales of laughter in theaters.

Larry offers enough scatological humor to fertilize the wheat fields in the star's home state of Nebraska.

A record number of movie cliches are strung together for the otherwise forgettable boot-camp drama Annapolis.

This, the 10th and worst-written entry in the series, would have been better if it had followed Dreyfuss instead of Clouseau, or if Kline had been cast as Clouseau instead of Martin.

Possibly the worst idea for a movie this century.

September Dawn, written by an evangelical Christian, may be the worst historical drama ever made.

More than a bad movie, it's an anti-movie.

This is a "What were they thinking?"-size disaster, with the wrong actors in the wrong roles in a project that had no reason to be remade in the USA.

Ishii instills this unpleasantness with some Hitchcockian black humor.

A ponderously slow experience.

Warner Bros. quietly releases Hiller's latest film, Carpool, without advance critics screenings, without more than a whisper of promotion, without warning or apology to the lost souls who might wander in to see it.

Typical of road comedies, it's a pastiche of sketches.

The individual scenes are just random, uninspired riffs by Carvey or awkwardly flat cameos by the likes of Jesse Ventura and Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson.

The result, at best, is a sweet failure.

Eric Steel's documentary has more than a whiff of exploitation about it.

Fonda's performance is a perfect storm of histrionics, and she leaves nothing and no one standing.

Frankly, after watching writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's grim fantasy - the first leg of a trilogy adapted from the sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko - I'm still a little confused.

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.

Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.

The second half of Antoine de Caunes' Monsieur N., about the post-exile life and death of Napoleon, plays less like a movie than a suggestion for one. This is a great disappointment because the first half is very cinematic and very compelling.

The result is a performance that is neither funny nor empathetic, and the romance that develops between the dentist and the junkie patient is not strong enough to support the mystery.

This particular script is deplorable. It's a pure cribbing of Ron Bass' screenplay for "Sleeping With the Enemy," which was no prize itself.

Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.

If you approach this movie in the right frame of mind -- that is, with total contempt -- you can still enjoy it as a comedy.

Drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge.

Surely, Vinterberg was high on some inert gas when he embarked on it.

It doesn't strike a single note of authentic emotion.

If there is a casting agent in hell, ­Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry will soon put on their fat suits as Big Momma and Madea Simmons and show up as a tag team in a big-screen ­Wrestlemania.

Neither can I imagine many sane adults wanting to put themselves through this movie.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

Frenzied, gothic nonsense.

If "The Sixth Sense" was a bad movie redeemed by its surprise ending, Marc Forster's Stay is a seemingly good movie leading to a devastating letdown.

Jovovich, Besson's 24-year-old ex-wife, hasn't a clue how to project shadings, interior emotions, character or personality. Everything's in a full screech.

The only good thing about this on-the-fly, low-budget quickie is its Cape Cod setting and the in-focus cinematography of Ernst Kubitza. Very pretty. Otherwise, it is a speechifying bore.

So riddled with plot holes and implausible actions, you can't help feeling insulted by it.

The film is lovely to look at, but makes not a lick of sense.

This will qualify as a spoiler only for those who have never seen a really bad movie before.

A mindless, cliche-riddled action-cartoon, a blur of metal and fire and screeching tires, with bad dialogue, cardboard characters and a volume set so high, it makes the Indianapolis 500 sound like chamber music.

Chevy Chase looks tired, Pam Grier looks embarrassed, and pop star Iggy Pop gives a performance that -- if you can believe it -- is even sillier than his name.

While there is a great deal of laughter among the quartet, there's scarcely a giggle in it for the audience.

A lump of coal, sculpted from the kind of high-concept idea screenwriters find scribbled on bar napkins after nights of heavy drinking.

Really, women drag their husbands and boyfriends to films like writer-director Susannah Grant's emotionally bogus Catch and Release and I feel their pain. They should get a free Boys Night Out pass every time they make the sacrifice.

Not to be cruel, but the aspirations of the movie and its principals are so far beyond their reach" not to mention budget"that it arrives in theaters dependent on the kindness of strangers.

As much as I love swing, all I got out of Martin Guigui's murky, incomprehensible grade B romantic fantasy was a few twitches of nostalgia for the music.

It's 80 minutes of frantic mugging, of silly pratfalls and clown fights, of ideas lifted from other children's movies, design schemes from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and characters from Toys R Us, all patched together without an innovative stitch of its own. [22 Nov 1996, p.F6]

At the half-hour mark, Godsend falls off the edge of reason, veering wildly away from what seems the promising beginning of a drama about the ethics of human cloning and instead becomes the cheesiest of hallucinatory horror movies.

Toback is a smart guy with kinky tastes who has nothing left but to tempt actors into performing in his sex fantasies.

I have an idea for a Mars movie. When our first astronauts step onto the Red Planet, they discover that Martians not only exist but that they've hired Johnnie Cochran to represent them in a massive defamation suit against American filmmakers.

Creates a hellishly evil portrait of a police department in which every white cop is either a racist thug or an enabler, and every black cop a disgusted observer or crusading hero.

First-time writer-director Hunter Richards? London is even worse torture than it sounds. It includes flashbacks that actually demonstrate just how miserable a jerk the main character is.

Drop Dead Ugly is more like it.

Critics are inclined to describe the action in films like "XXX" and Lee Tamahori's sequel, XXX: State of the Union, as "cartoon violence." I'll resist doing that out of respect for cartoons.

Dreadfully unfunny.

A one-joke idea...wears itself out almost instantly.

It's nonsense. Even when its big secret is revealed in the final moments, it adds up to nothing more than a dizzy, dark, hysterical waste of time.

Blakeney's script contains more hackneyed dialogue and misfired jokes per minute than would seem possible, and the result embarrasses every actor in it.

This documentary doesn't probe too deeply, and it presupposes that there is a general interest in Jeremy commensurate with his Q rating among the porn-renting public.

Stevens, an actor taking charge from the other side of the camera, and writer and co-star Breen are going for a romantic black farce, a darkly noble idea, but one that requires far more empathetic characters and funnier situations than they've created.

Excess Baggage, a scruffy romantic comedy about a despairing rich girl who hatches a kidnapping scheme to test her father's love, is an aimless waste, a star vehicle without a compass. It wants very much to be both funny and poignant, but is more often just noisy and pointless. [29Aug1997 Pg 14]

In these movies, it's always easy to figure out who's going to survive and make the killers cough up their own blood, but you still hope that the victims will go in the order of their performances -- worst actor first, etc. No such luck.

It's an interesting profile in self-destruction until the script becomes unhinged itself and has Laura doing things that are not so much outrageous as hilariously stupid.

There isn't a moment of genuine suspense or tension in the film, and the paltry laughs are supplied not by Murphy but by Hardison, whose character, a lowlife Brooklyn habitue forcefully turned into the vampire's bug-eating sidekick, spends the entire movie moaning about his decomposing body and embarrassing the boss with his earthy patter. [27 Oct 1995, p.1]

Bacon's performance in "Saw" creator James Wan's laughably extreme revenge thriller Death Sentence is six degrees of ham.

The salvaging operations, and the scavenging of B-52 parts for retail recycling and junk art that seem to consume most of the film take it to tedium, and beyond.

By the time the credits roll and a disclaimer informs us that there may, in fact, be a lost gospel of Jesus and that it is being suppressed by the Church, all we can think to say is, "Ah, shaudup!"

Showcased in 3,000 Miles are two of the longest, noisiest, bloodiest and most ludicrous shootouts ever staged.

"Quantum Bull-Bleep" would be a more apt title for the conclusions that the movie draws, but one concept was a revelation to me. One of the scientists said it's a fact that a single object can be in two places at the same time. I guess that explains O.J.'s alibi.

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

The Cave looks pretty cool - if you're into stalagmites, stalactites and that sort of thing -and the action is nonstop once they're in the hole. Unfortunately, there are no reference points in the dark to let us know where everyone is in relation to each other and to the monsters, and, therefore, there's little suspense.

I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks

Isn't a movie as much as it is a feature-length screen test.

History as filtered through the faux-liberal prism of Hollywood's dream factory, and an insult, I believe, to the people who actually carried the fight and endured the pain for civil rights.

About the only plausible element in the entire movie is bratty Vanessa's loathing of "Aunt" Mona, whom she sees as a vacuous over-reacher.

One of the ugliest movies I've ever seen. Even though it occurs mostly in the dark, the open flesh wounds are both graphic and implausible.

Never graduates above the boneheaded.

The movie is dismally organized, his (Keys) interviews are shallow and uninformative, and the project has a whole lacks a strong point of view.

A bad Altman impression of the L.A. rock scene.

The confusing time line of Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr's bizarre tale of sibling romance, murder and obsession is just one of its problems. The others are the romance, the murder and the obsession.

There's a reason filmmaking is considered a craft, and Hoge, a former teacher in a juvenile prison, cannot pull off what would be a tricky proposition for a skilled veteran.

Gere, who's credited with keeping the project alive for years, has never thrown himself quite so fully into a role, and Pellington tells the story without a hint of skepticism. I suppose he had no choice. If you're going to treat poppycock as history, you had better believe it.

Dalton, using a Scottish brogue coarse enough to take his tongue with it, is hootably bad, and Kathy Bates, playing Ma James, is pure ham.

With the exception of one masterfully choreographed - and improbably bloodless - martial-arts gang fight, the new version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days is one of the lamest remakes of a classic film I've ever seen.

No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can.

Del Toro ("Cronos") is a stylish horrormeister, and he has created an evocative, foreboding atmosphere. But only a fan of this kind of mayhem could find a way into the story.

It's a romantic comedy, though neither funny nor romantic. It's a ghost story, though not scary. It's a satire about publishing, but without teeth.

The upbeat brothers are full of sweetness and love, but the script is made of taffy, and if you can chew and laugh at the same time, you're welcome to it.

Exploits and trivializes public anxiety for entertainment and commercial gain. They've been doing it for years. But this little piggie didn't get to the market in time.

Ken Liotti's script barely earns a C+.

A fascinating contrast in lifestyles.

Ron Shelton's boxing pic is long on road work but strictly a flyweight.

An early and daunting contender for worst movie of the year, writer-director Irving Schwartz's amateurish melodrama stars a hollow-eyed Piper Perabo as a self-loathing young woman who has every reason to hate herself.

This is an execrable movie depicting the improbable events in the life of a young boy being intermittently raised by his crackhead, highway-hookin' mom (actress-director Asia Argento, with a face that makes Courtney Love's mug shot look glamorous), her plumb-nuts evangelical parents and a cartoonishly incompetent West Virginia social system.

Of this much I'm sure: It's an awful movie.

Takes the worst and most annoying elements of the first film and treats them like grand assets.

Greenebaum's tedious, film-school level exercise in self-indulgence and exploitation.