Jack Mathews

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

Apparently, the show’s appeal is due to the good-heartedness of its undereducated anti-heroes, but their kind of dumb grows old fast.

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

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

By the end of Francois Gerard's plodding, uninvolving melodrama, his boredom will have nothing on yours.

A tormented dramatization of the exact same events, and it's as bad as the earlier film ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") was good.

Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.

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.

It's fitting that the kangaroo gives the most lifelike performance.

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.

"Filthy" may have been a better title for Dirty. The rough language is not just pervasive, as the MPAA's R rating describes it, it's assaultive. The violence is not merely "strong," it's incessant, sadistic and broadly unbelievable.

Boring is too active a verb to describe this minimalist psychological thriller.

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.

"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.

Among cautionary tales of gloom-and-doom, it may out-gore Gore, but it doesn't entertain.

Gets too caught up in its escalating violence and strained-to-bursting moral subtexts. It's the blood of souls drenching the screen, and it's a hideous sight to behold.

A ponderously slow experience.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.

A little Disney Christmas release that comes wrapped in used toilet paper.

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

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

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]

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.

Deuces Wild is the worst thing to have happened to Brooklyn since the Ice Age severed it from the mainland.

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

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.

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

The latest - and really last-minute - documentary hoping to affect the presidential election is a deceptively partisan view of the Iraq War.

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.

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

Frenzied, gothic nonsense.

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

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.

A stinker of epic proportions.

This is the biggest lowdown, rotten, disgusting, depraved sideshow in the megaplex. Check your brains, your taste and your self-respect right over there with the bearded ticket taker.

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

It's described as a black comedy, but you can forget the comedy part. There wasn't so much as a snicker at the screening I attended, though I may have heard a snore or two.

These are three characters in search of a moral pulse.

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload with Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Father Amaro comes off as another pedophile in a frock. You'd have to hose this guy down if he were driving a school bus.

A weak documentary. There's very little here to demonstrate the personality and leadership qualities that made Massoud both a legend and a martyr. Raw, sloppily edited, unfocused and without any sense of scale, it's personal journalism with its heart in the right place, and that's about it.

Vampire movies aren't what they used to be. How about a little mist, some shadows, some pale gray faces set off by stark red lips? Maestro, a little Transylvanian mood music, if you please.

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.

As an allegory of religious conflict, the '73 film is brilliantly constructed and ends with a punctuation mark that was shocking in its day. LaBute's movie attempts to shock, as well, and does: Given the names involved and the casting of Cage, it is shockingly bad.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

This is the kind of misfire that can take everyone down with it. It's not just bad, it's mean-bad.

But look up the word "slight" in the dictionary and you could find a still from this film.

The question is, can a Slovakian lawsuit against the filmmaker be far behind?

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

It took one novelist, one screenwriter and two directors - Scott McGehee and David Siegel - to cobble together this earnest nonsense, and if it weren't for 12-year-old novice Flora Cross, who plays its central character, all would be lost.

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.

Ishii instills this unpleasantness with some Hitchcockian black humor.

Two hours of the worst sort of sentimental sap.

Who knew that Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno could be unlikable? And yet, there they are, grating on each other's nerves (and ours) as strandees at Charles De Gaulle airport.

Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.

Desperate for a slice of Spanish soap opera? You might try this misguided romantic melodrama.

This is extremely dark and politically loaded material.

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.

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.

A personal documentary on a family member. The question is, who -- outside of friends and family -- would want to watch it? The answer...is ... beyond me.

There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where "Star Trek" finds itself on the time-space continuum.

An instant contender for cult status on the midnight-movie circuit, where lines like "Do we look like quantum wormhole specialists?" will be given the respect they deserve.

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.

Save your breath, and your money.

South Korean director Kim Ki-duk does a bizarre riff on the twisted macho ethos of abusing women until they learn to love you.

Perhaps this is just a bad performance by Bana; he's not shown me anything yet. But there's a more basic problem. If money is just a way of keeping score, and Huck doesn't care whether he's flush or busted, why should we?

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

If the point of this umpteenth posttraumatic stress drama is that war is hell, even years after it's over and you're sitting in a movie theater, Big Bad Love makes it.

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.

A ticket to this movie is a season's pass on that train - and you must complete every ride.

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.

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.

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

Shot with an annoyingly jerky hand-held camera, Virgin is a test to stick with, and despite the best efforts of Moss, it wore me out.

A shrill, amateurish two-character play that demeans women and leaves men with the quaint notion that the best way to a woman's heart is through enslavement.

As the story of a romantic office lump, Janice Beard resembles last year's "Bridget Jones's Diary." But it is a far, far lesser thing.

Only Stanley Tucci seems aware of the drop-dead stupidity of the plot, and acts up a storm of high camp as the narcissistic scientist.

Wretch of a B movie.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

Like a fragile Provence wine left too long in the sun, Ridley Scott's romantic comedy A Good Year spoiled somewhere between the publication of Peter Mayle's novel and this cockamamie adaptation.

Much talking, much sex, much to-do about nothing.

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.

There is just no tension built prior to the murders.

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]

For die-hard Ferrell fans, this could be the ultimate test. He has been playing variations of "Elf" for five years, and his antics have grown as stale as Jackie's socks.

Convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama.

Unremittingly bleak and hopelessly outdated parable of American race relations.

Clumsily merges fiction and reality, biography and musical fantasy, and breaks the fourth wall in a way that allows Spacey to lamely address his own miscasting.

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.

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

There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.

A fascinating contrast in lifestyles.