Jack Mathews

Where good satire is drawn with a surgeon's scalpel, this comedy is done with a brush broad enough to paint - or, at least, hit - the side of a barn. But in the softer realm of parody, it has a good premise, a couple of funny performances and enough giggles for a reasonably good time at the movies.

A near-saving grace is Christopher Walken, perfectly cast as the creepy store clerk who gives Michael the magic remote, then follows him through life like a gleefully incompetent guardian angel.

Trying to resist Reese is like trying to resist Reese's Pieces: They're always the same but you can't help yourself.

The real trouble is at its core, with an over-the-top performance from Sedgwick that borders on Baby Jane campiness.

Crowe was going for something magical in all this, but the film is so affected and mannered, so preciously in love with itself, that it's painful to watch. Scenes go on and on, and when you think the movie's over, it goes on and on some more.

It's no Runaway success, but Gere and Roberts still glow.

The title doesn't hint at the unsavory mess the film actually is.

Shot in Morocco with hand-held cameras, the movie has the urgency of a heart attack. Clearly tilted against the war, and heavy on explanatory dialogue, it paints a bleak picture of a desperate country that is being exploited by extremists at the expense of the despairing citizens. The situation is dire.

That Williams occasionally comes close to the author's layered spirit is a tribute to his passion. But the film fails on a number of levels. First, it is what it is: the prologue to a story that covers four(!) decades.

Hawke, who is very good as the young man's estranged father, had best stick to what he does best.

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.

I love golf, history and good stories, and I found this to be among the most boring, flat and cliched sports movies I've ever seen.

A string of sketches. Some are better than others -- or, at least, less bad -- but they exist as extended, stand-alone jokes within an enveloping framework.

There is no excusing date rape, but the revenge conceived and executed by Rosario Dawson's Maya in this revolting, amateurish drama is something you might only wish on Osama Bin Laden.

There's no question Carnahan has an eye for composition, an ear for dialogue and a sense of pace that, if put to better use, could make an audience beg for relief. But the characters in Smokin' Aces are about as lifelike as the occupants of vehicles destroyed in a car-safety test.

The standout in the cast is James Todd Smith, whose acting talent may soon persuade him to shed his adolescent stage name of LL Cool J and concentrate on mainstream film roles.

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

Sometimes, movies would work better if you couldn't see them.

Where's the levity, you ask? There is none, or rather, there is none that Manuel can perceive.

In the funniest and, coincidentally, most "Jackass"-like scene in Todd Phillips' School for Scoundrels, a planned game of paintball gets off to a bad start when the players begin shooting each other at point-blank range.

I have not read the Anne Tyler novella from which the movie is adapted, but it is clear from the earliest scenes that Evie and Drumstrings are of a different generation from 37-year-old Taylor and 36-year-old Pearce.

This may be the best-looking film in the series; certainly, the Paris setting, with a climactic battle among the girders of the Eiffel Tower, keeps the visuals interesting. Better you buy a postcard.

A deadly script.

The movie falls apart toward the end as it enters "Eyes Wide Shut" territory, but until then, it's fun to see bookworms cast in the James Bond mode.

Beyond the cliches, there's something deeply offensive about the way Hostage exploits our empathy for children in peril.

A guy flick, but I can't imagine many male viewers actually identifying with Elliot or his friends. The depression would be unbearable.

The only thing to be said for it is The Rock. I've never seen the guy wrestle, but as a movie action hero, he's the real deal.

Almost corny enough to be hip.

Its noisily inappropriate pop-rock score overwhelms its meager subplots about British class conflict.

Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting.

Gaudi Afternoon, adapted from Barbara Wilson's novel, is a setup for a smart ensemble comedy, and the cast delivers in hilarious deadpan style.

Offers a dazzling showcase for Samuel L. Jackson.

What's here is a glimpse not into how far people will go to win a reality TV show, but how far greedy writers and producers will go to degrade, debouch and enrich themselves.

It all comes together at the end, logically and with a twist. But it's not a game that allows the audience to play along. When the story is controlled by whatever memories the writer and director choose to put in the characters' heads, you're always on the outside looking in.

The Village is Shyamalan's weakest story, and its ending - whether or not you're surprised by it - is a genuine clinker.

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

Not since Philip Kaufman's 2000 "Quills," the story of the Marquis de Sade, have we had so debauched a literary and movie hero, and Johnny Depp plays him with the relish of an actor who has made odd-ball characters his specialty.

You never know what these people are going to say or do, but you're pretty sure it will be whatever they want to.

There isn't a scene, an action or a character that rings true, yet the narrative summary of the events that inspired it is a matter of record.

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.

Rent the original. It tells exactly the same story, with a better cast and with special effects that are as good or better.

It might have been a marketing nightmare, but if Lopez and Tyler had switched roles, it would have been a better movie.

Davis choreographed another rash of spectacular action sequences, but Chain Reaction is doomed by a premise so simple and so absurd, it's easier to sympathize with star Keanu Reeves (poor guy, his career was going so well) than with his character. [2 Aug 1996, p.F8]

Pie 2's greatest asset is the rare, infectious amiability of its cast of characters and the actors playing them.

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.

There's only so much meaningful interplay you can get out of a beachful of slackers and some tanning oil.

I don't know why Redford and the white-hot Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco, but the give-and-take between them is the film's sole pleasure.

The story, adapted by Dean Georgaris, doesn't come within a light year of science-fiction plausibility, and after a while Woo gives up trying to sell it and reverts to the action choreography that made him a master of Hong Kong martial-arts movies.

Whatever it was in Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth that drew Francis Coppola out of a 10-year retirement to make a movie, the result is the year's most bizarre novelty item.

Moore is as gutsy an actress as there is today, and I'm not sure I've seen a star as dressed down for a psychological unpeeling since Jessica Lange in "Frances," in 1982, or farther back, Olivia de Havilland in 1948's "The Snake Pit." It's strong stuff.

Too often crosses the line between good melodrama and rank cliché.

"Love" would be intolerably boring were it not for the frequent injections of humor, thanks largely to Hector Elizondo as Florentino's uncle, and for Bardem's ultimately winning performance.

Jelski's dialogue is razor sharp and she got a terrific performance from the relatively inexperienced Gummersall, who runs a gamut of emotions and holds the screen like a seasoned star.

It could do without any kind of love story, let alone the one it got.

There are a couple of surprises in the I-can't-believe-they're-doing-this vein, but mostly, "Pie 3" is an aimless charade of doggy poo, latex breasts and really, really bad language.

A Christmas headache looking for an audience.

The last act, when the movie falls apart like a cheap toy, is both a deus ex machina and an anticlimax.

This is as cheesy and irrelevant as political documentaries get. Horvath, who is openly critical of the invasion of Iraq, makes game of a handful of Iowans and Nebraskans who are either too dumb, too drunk or too uninterested to have an informed opinion about it.

It's impossible to overstate the silliness of all this, but it would still be a decent Halloween trick - if it were Halloween.

Offers a passably entertaining bridge between empty-headed summer fare and fall awards hunting.

What Haggis obviously wants to explore is what the war in Iraq is doing to the humanity of our soldiers there. By approaching it indirectly, he simplifies it to a degree that I expect will anger many Iraq veterans.

Creepy in 1980, Cruising is almost macabre now, knowing that most of the young men involved in rough, unprotected sex then began dying of AIDS shortly afterwards.

A ghetto horror movie that sets up some decent scares before becoming so amused with itself, it's a wonder we don't hear the crew laughing.

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

Cage is a wonderful light comedian; were someone to remake "It's a Wonderful Life," he'd be on the short list for the role of George Bailey. And Leoni is Donna Reed, reborn.

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

Brody does have a mesmerizing presence and is the only reason to see a film that likely would have gone straight to video if he hadn't won that Oscar for "The Pianist."

The film is at its worst, however, when Daredevil takes over. That's partly because Affleck, a handsome fellow with possibly the most inert film presence of any actor since Sonny Tufts, looks ridiculous in Daredevil's red leather pantsuit and horned mask.

The story of the victims on the road is harrowing, but the tale of the kind cop and the teenager with an attitude is a string of big brother clichés.

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

The Intended is well-intended, but it is also the dreariest, most uninvolving movie I've seen this year.

At the end of her spontaneous date, she says it's been the best night of her life. It will not be one of yours.

Anything, Steven, anything would be better than making us watch the same movie again.

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 fragmented, episodic feel and a conclusion that seems both remote and remote-controlled.

Other than the terribly miscast Posey, the cast is solid, with Dukakis wrenching the heart as a mother tested to the max by her son's request. But the movie didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

The star of this overachieving trifle is not Kidman, it's Paul Rudnick. The New York playwright and screenwriter ("In & Out") has taken a pair of dated watermarks from the '70s - Ira Levin's horror novel and its faithful 1975 movie adaptation - and turned them into a broad, feverishly fey parody.

Despite some emotional dips and a see-it-to-believe-it load of schmaltz at the end, The Bucket List is mostly a joy ride with good company, and the actors obviously were having a high time on their traveling boondoggle.

The movie has a terrible premise compounded by a lame script and the miscasting of its surfeit of talented stars. You have to wonder why Dobkin, whose last film was the hilariously raunchy "Wedding Crashers," would be attracted to this tame material.

Trapped does have a fine ensemble of actors and, except for what may be the most outrageously idiotic and improbable ending in a few years, is not that bad a movie.

Tamahori attempts to cover the ludicrousness of the story with a wickedly fast pace and sensational action set pieces. And in a film more than an hour and half long, events do whiz by.

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.

Among the year's biggest disappointments.

Despite a relatively paltry $40 million budget, Stormbreaker has the sheen and special effects of a Bond movie, and the ambition as well.

It's beautiful to look at, and marvelously edited, but it's hard to know exactly what he's getting at. [28 May 1999]

The cruelty of the law has been better demonstrated with news stories, and unless you're a Californian with two strikes against you, I don't know why you'd want to do this movie to yourself.

Sadly, a film about betrayal is ultimately betrayed by the film maker's own lack of conviction.

What we need to remember, what Black Hawk Down reminds us, is that there are no safe missions when you're chasing bad guys. Especially when you have to chase them down a hole.

Oddest-of-the-year romantic comedy.

If it weren't for retro-gartered Milla Jovovich, I don't know why anyone would want to survive the virus that is turning humans into zombies and destroying the Earth in Resident Evil: Extinction.

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

You can guess how it all ends, but getting there is a repetitious parade of put-downs and smackdowns that suggest you can't go home again - not when your mom's sleeping with a monster from your past.

Star-packed fiasco.

Gets the proportions all wrong -- too much magic, not enough realism.

Mexican soap opera star Bárbara Mori may be the most beautiful woman to grace an American screen this year, and female viewers may feel similarly about her male co-stars Christian Meier and Manolo Cardona. But a telenovela with three gorgeous actors is still a telenovela.

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.

Both a madcap comedy and a cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse. But it's not funny or smart enough to work as either one, let alone to strike a balance.

The good news here is that Woolley and his writers have taken the mystery surrounding Jones' tragic 1969 death as their main interest, and have adopted as fact the long-cherished rumor that the blond rocker's drowning was a case of murder. It may be speculative history, but at least it's a story.

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.

Eisner is not remotely up to the challenge. Spending millions on action scenes does not mean you get them right.

What's good about the idea is that it triggers the kind of debate we would be having over Iraq if there was a draft. What's bad about it is that the three main characters in Robert Malkani's script - anti-war lawyer George (Chris Klein), gung-ho cab driver Dixon (Jon Bernthal) and sissy novelist Aaron (Elijah Wood) - are not interesting, either as individuals or as three amigos.

The film's asset, in a walk, is Bening, whose comic timing puts Shandling to shame.

Might be thought of as "Memento" for people who didn't get "Memento."

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

The whole movie is some kind of joke, a sick one to be savored by a certain segment of the movie audience. You know who you are.

It's a good thing Jaume Serra's House of Wax wasn't shot in 3-D like the original 1953 horror classic - Paris Hilton is in it and she doesn't have a third dimension.

An awkwardly executed, tedious and -- a near impossibility for a Holocaust movie -- emotionally uninvolving bore.

The course of Martha's relationships with Lina and Mario holds no surprises, but the performances of Gedeck and Castellitto, like the work of a great chef, make something special out of something very ordinary.

James Siegel's best-selling thriller Derailed is a perfect commuter book that has become the most imperfect of movies.

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 just a setup for another bad sight gag that ends up where the script itself belongs, in the trash.

Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.

A shell of a romantic fantasy festooned with characters inspired by and resembling those in the bar scene in "Star Wars," the waiting room in "Beetlejuice" and the circus in "A Bug's Life."

It needed a star like Clooney at its center, and a character actor like Alan Rickman as Dr. Doom. You don't expect realism from a comic-book movie, but you do want the characters to seem larger than life.

Farrell plays all this as if he means it, but he seems slight in the role and without great physical presence. In a scene in which Alexander is roaring at his troops to rouse them to battle, he sounds like Mighty Mouse pretending to be Superman.

That's a lot just to justify a cute title, but cuteness is the engine driving the slight, obvious but occasionally very funny film.

My rule of thumb for manipulative movies: I don't mind playing the marionette as long as the strings aren't visible.

Unfortunately, what you'll remember most about the movie is its banal script and dialogue so ripe it almost laughs at itself.

The result is a movie that talks big, even walks big, but has no scale whatsoever.

Insipid, self-indulgent bit of art-house macabre.

The writers, and director Miller, an MTV veteran making his feature debut, are never able to mesh the film's contradictory tones. [11 Dec 1998, p.F14]

Hard to take stone-cold sober.

We wish other directors would keep Edward Burns busy acting so he wouldn't have time to make his own movies. This is his fourth since "The Brothers McMullen" and they get more tedious each time out.

A movie about healing that makes us want to scream out, ""Hollywood, heal thyself!"

A grab bag of sitcom jokes that work about 20% of the time.

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.

Rai's acting is frustratingly passive in Provoked, and the script is laced with prison and courtroom cliches. But the movie gets most of the facts straight and the flashbacks to the wife's abuse are harrowing.

You know a comedy's in trouble when the only laughter the audience can hear is coming from the speakers. There are other problems with "Man," notably its abrupt shifts from farce to romantic comedy to suspense thriller, and the near absence of a political edge.

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

You can't have as many twists and turns in a story as dot the i without testing the audience's patience, and losing it before delivering the punch line.

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

The movie is as unpleasant as its hero, and the film audience gets no more for its money than the customers at the Laughing Stock. Still, watching Whaley take Jimmy down his tortured path has some morbid appeal -- like a train wreck in progress.

Luc Besson, a sort of French version of Steven Spielberg without the intuition, has tried a lot of genres in his young career and has had his greatest success with slick action films like "The Fifth Element" and "La Femme Nikita." Animated movies for kids he should stay away from.

The movie - with some gamy sexual references, a one-night stand and a long look at a stud muffin's naked buns - targets an older female audience. They may see it as unbearably cute, filled with ridiculous coincidences and laced with performances that - like the obnoxious soundtrack music - overstate the mood.

You'd have to go back to Blake Edwards' "10" and Bo Derek to find a mainstream movie that spends more time gawking at a star's body - or a more cooperative and alluring subject.

Director Marcus Nispel, a rock video vet making his feature debut, knows how to ratchet up the tension. His remake is a far, far better-looking thing than the original. There's also more humor, especially in the over-the-top performance of drill sergeant-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey as the loudest of the inbreds.

This is clearly the Worst Performance by an Actress in a Death Scene since Sofia Coppola took a bullet for her dad in "The Godfather: Part III."

There are jolts galore in a movie stuffed with the basic tricks of the evil-spirit trade - banging noises in the attic, slamming doors and windows, spinning clocks, shaking beds, rabid beasts, disappearing children and the occasional moment of eyeball-rolling possession.

The Last Time feels like a script that was written backwards, as if the twist ending occurred to Caleo first and he then filled out a story to get to it. Fair enough, except getting there in this case is just no fun.

Watching Garry Marshall's Raising Helen is like eating a box of Forrest Gump's chocolates. You may not know exactly what you're going to get, but you can count on a high sugar content.

Paparazzi is for anyone who's ever wondered how good it would feel to knock down a photographer with his car and then back over him.

"Charlie's Angels," "Survivor," "American Gladiators" and "Girls Gone Wild" are just some of the bad influences on Hong Kong action director Corey Yuen's laughably silly adaptation of the video game DOA: Dead or Alive.

"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.

Plays like a long TV sketch, but with an array of characters, themes, subplots and situations just clever enough to keep it moving, and to give cover to its underlying cynicism.

A fairly nifty piece of suspense filmmaking, with a strong if relatively undemanding performance from Douglas.

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.

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

I don't know if it was intentional, but Drake seems to come out of the same sandy hole in which our troops found the cowering Saddam Hussein.

This ponderous romantic melodrama...passes like a day behind bars.

The best performance comes from Venora.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz Frenches this flimsy tale to death. No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.

The low-tech film looks like a kid's crude drawing, plays like entry-level Game Boy, and is about as nourishing as a Tootsie Pop.

The source for Jieho Lee's The Air I Breathe is an ancient Chinese proverb about the four cornerstones of emotion - love, pleasure, happiness and sorrow. But Lee and co-writer Bob DeRosa went 0-4 with their convoluted screenplay, making me thankful they didn't try to adapt the Seven Deadly Sins.

The material here, written by Ehren Kruger, is beneath banal, and the three leads are so miscast that it's like watching a dress charade.

"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.

Made for viewers old enough to appreciate a talking pooch but too young to read or write about it.

Director-writer Richard Ledes shows better command of 1950s period atmosphere than he does of either his subject or his cast.

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

Though a stickler might ask what's at stake in a fight to the death between two guys who are already dead, the hard-core fans aren't likely to be disappointed.

The author is not to blame. Published in 1999, "Be Cool" is hipper, cooler and better than "Get Shorty," but everything hipper, cooler and better about it is either missing from the film or camped-up beyond recognition.

He (Hogan) and the other backers of the movie are betting that Dundee has been gone long enough to make him seem fresh, or -- like that old uncle -- at least welcome.

Mostly a lazy string of setups and sight gags, of tongue-in-cheek confrontations between the two stars that barely amount to sketches.

Essentially a home movie, nicely shot but dull.

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.

Carell and Freeman are great together and Wanda Sykes' acerbic humor is perfect for her role as Evan's perplexed assistant.

Billed as an action thriller, it plays out as an urban-fairy tale version of "Bonnie and Clyde," with an ending suitable for a Harlequin romance.

Directed with his usual flair for the obvious by Dennis Dugan ("The Benchwarmers), "Chuck and Larry" has the nowness factor of a Polish joke. Does anybody laugh at this stuff anymore?

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.

Failures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them. This sequoia is very noisy indeed.

With any sitcom, the freshness is ultimately in the writing, and I think the jokes are better here than in Analyze This, and the actors are more comfortable together. I don't know if De Niro is softening or has lost his edge, but he now seems content mocking himself.

A by-the-numbers, let's-put-on-a-show quasi-musical that has absolutely nothing going for it, except Alba.

Preposterous, physically hideous paranormal thriller.

Overwrought comedy-drama.

The tragedy that separates the Good Crush from the Bad Crush is a cleaver that severs the film's relationship with reality.

The Bundy portrayed here doesn't have even the veneer of charm; he's a raving psycho, and watching him work, whatever the filmmakers' intent, is revolting exploitation.

Stole so many details from the earlier film, "The Hustler," that you have to think of it as either a bad parody or an unfortunate homage.

Has the integrity of good dialogue and enough of a writer's preserved craftiness to make it a worthwhile date-night attraction.

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.

An absolute mess with no coherent tone, story or point of view.

Blunt, alternately prurient, funny and depressing.

Given the lousy singing of Kirsten Dunst in "Spider-Man" and Drew Barrymore in "Lucky You," it's nice to report that Fisk - Sissy Spacek's daughter - shows real talent performing two songs here.

Lady, like all of Shyamalan's movies, is a slick production with consistently interesting visuals... But the story is so convoluted and ultimately preposterous that you're almost embarrassed by the earnestness of the actors trying to carry it off.

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

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.

As the latest in a never-ending chain of thrillers about young people lost and dying in a hostile land, John Stockwell's Turistas at least offers the visual benefits of exotic settings and a cast of barely clad hardbodies.

What might work as a narrative device in a novel - the spirit guiding readers through Nick's revelations - is just plain ridiculous in a movie.

Say a little prayer and save your money.

The film's pace is just plain wacky, moving with the haste of a receding glacier most of the time, but then jumping ahead as if Hartley hit the gas on a time machine.

What it lacks in irony and suspense, Gilbert Adler's Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood makes up for in whimsy and cheeky self-assurance. The second feature to emerge from the long-running HBO horror show is a bawdy romp into vampire mythology, an empty-headed joyride into a crypt that resembles a costume party orgy. This is the version of "Dracula" that Bram Stoker would have written with the collaboration of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade over drinks at Hooters. [16 Aug 1996, p.F10]

Deep into Hollywood's Dumb Season comes one of its dumbest offerings.

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

There's great music and lovely settings, but the filmmakers have done little more with their subject than reiterate the Britannica's description of her.

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.

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.

The sex may be real, but the violence and acting are comically phony, resulting in something that, while intended to shock, merely revolts.

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.

[A] straight-to-video-quality mess.

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

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

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

Only sharp dialogue and a suspenseful buglary might have given this lame, quasi morality play some energy. It has neither.

The film's biggest problem is its psychologically false ending. Having created a complex relationship, Anselmo seems to throw up his hands at the end and admit he doesn't have a clue about how to resolve it.

As a movie on its own, it's simple monotony. Olyphant, affecting Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry voice, is about as menacing as Mr. Clean, and the action scenes - whether the weapons are fists, feet, swords or guns - fly past without any tension or suspense. Hitman is a miss.

Feels like a college knockoff of Billy Wilder's "The Apartment."

What sticks is a colorful, mesmerizing, at times breathtaking mess - it's like watching a bonfire on acid - and what slides to the floor is, well, you probably don't want to know.

The favorable three-star rating I'm giving the animated Pokémon: The First Movie is based at least partly on the fact that I expected to dislike it and didn't.

Their (Murphy/Wilson) exchanges and interplay are so campy and over the top that I kept expecting them to pull out frying pans and start bopping each other over the head with them. I Spy is one just Stooge short of homage.

This strikes me as the final nail in the franchise's coffin. I can't name an actor who could have made young Lecter as interesting as the older one, but Ulliel does not come close.

The result, at best, is a sweet failure.

To be avoided by anyone considering a vacation to anything wilder than a zoo.

The Czech Republic and Russia, the respective homes of Emil and Oleg, should sue.

This is a bad time for NBA fans in Boston. Just as their beloved Celtics are about to wrap up a dismal season, with nearly 50 losses and no berth in the playoffs, Hollywood comes out with a comedy about the Celtics that’s even worse than the team. And not half as funny.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

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]

A pretty run-of-the-mill B suspense movie.

Intermittently funny.

Travolta is the least of the film's problems. With a script by James Vanderbilt, whose first credit was for a movie about the tooth fairy ("Darkness Falls"), and directed by John McTiernan, last seen struggling with "Rollerball," Basic is a fundamental failure.

Nothing in the movie rings true, least of all its depiction of gambling, both in casinos and in the bookie world that ultimately drives the story.

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]

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.

Atoothless morality play.

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.

Though Morrow and Forlani are fine actors, they can't even fake a physical attraction between their characters, let alone orgasms.

Ken Liotti's script barely earns a C+.

There is really nothing wrong with Peter Chelsom's Town & Country that younger stars would not have solved.

In the expanding genre of quirky comedies, first-time writer-director Michael Clancy's messy, fitfully funny Eulogy is among the quirkiest.

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.

Has all the appeal of a video game without the joystick. All you can do is watch. It's noisy and moves fast, but if you can't play, why pay?

It neither mocks nor satirizes, it doesn't touch any social issues, and though it is about an election, there are no losers. For all those reasons, there aren't many laughs, either. Political comedy plays against tension, and there just isn't any.

Possibly the worst movie of 2007.

Why remake a horror film if you can't make it scarier?

Banderas has some very effective moments, but in his emotional scenes, Cristofer has him screaming his lines into Jolie's face with such a spritzing fury, she might have filed a union grievance.

Doesn't play on the screen. P.S. Your Cat is Dead is a stage-locked, two-character play on a static set, and though Guttenberg takes it outside for a couple of scenes, it remains that on film.

In 1939, when "Ten Little Indians" was published, Agatha Christie mysteries were the crème de la pop literature. Her fans depended on logic in her stories, and they got it. Mindhunters would have insulted their intelligence, and it should insult yours.

Dear Wendy is absurd to the point of comic parody. Bloody as it is, it has no access to viewers' emotions, and its message - play with fire and you get burned - is too obvious to be provocative.

Has a lot of nerve making fun of Olivia Newton-John's "I Honestly Love You," as the choice of newlyweds fated for divorce in 12 to 14 months. The Wedding Planner should have such a shelf life.

Though its PG-13 rating allows for much cruder sex humor, the movie version of "Dukes" is nearly identical to the TV series in its corniness, in its incessant car chases and in its ogling of the posterior of cousin Daisy Duke.

Despite the movie's dramatic weaknesses, I was spellbound by the images.

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.

Though there are giggles here and there, the film is inexcusably unfunny.

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

This vulgar, equal-opportunity chick flick aims pretty low.

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

The results are often exciting and, except for occa­sional overacting by Calil, feels authentic. But the whole notion of exploiting a war and its victims to shoot a commercial feature is reprehensible.

Dark, grim, and cliched Orwellian satire.

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

Eddie Murphy's latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.

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

Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.

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.

I like the idea of a cybercrimes agent cracking cases through superior knowledge of the Internet. Marsh could be a great heroine for a continuing series. But Untraceable essentially forces its audience to identify with those who would be willing accomplices to torture and murder. To understate the point, that's not an audience-friendly approach.

The acting is more amateurish than Billy's diva act, and for all its ambitious editing, the film looks like something made in the Addams Family's attic.

The characters she (Ephron) invents are not very interesting, and aside from the always reliable Travolta, the performances are uniformly aligned.

Provides an intimate, nonpoliticized, uncensored and totally unappealing look at the lives of U.S. soldiers serving during a grim and uncertain period of insurgency.

Truly depressing commentary.

Becomes a very conventional suspense film, replete with virtually every cliche of the genre, some used more than once.

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

In the end, Phantom needed more human and less digital scale. The magic of "Star Wars" lay in Lucas' ability to play the human comedy in a fantastic future. With Phantom, he has brought the series to the brink of total artificiality, the future as a video game.

Shows what can happen when a bunch of good actors get together without adult supervision. They emote all over the place, banging into each other, talking too loud, knocking over furniture, wallowing in clichés and otherwise behaving like rank amateurs.

Out of place, out of time and out of its own cultural context.

Ill-timed "Hands" has a very limited grasp of comedy.

In trying to disguise his themes within the structure of a noir thriller, Parker was simply more successful at fooling himself than us.

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.

Possibly the worst idea for a movie this century.

Back to Wisteria Lane, Eva, and stay there until we call you.

Mattei's script was written in 1998, and the absence of any sense of the impact of 9/11 on New Yorkers is palpable. While watching "Love," I was thinking what great potential there was - still is - for a Manhattan "La Ronde" set in the days following 9/11, when strangers sought comfort from each other in spontaneous sexual alliances.

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

Turner's guileless amateurism stands in refreshing contrast to the rest of the performances -- stilted, self-conscious and sleep-inducing -- that fill this tedious 3-1/2-hour marathon, the Civil War in real time.

A hackneyed movie of zero social, political or dramatic consequence.

Nothing fails like bad horror. But it's not despicable. It is merely boring.

The film makers are so anxious to please their audience that they turn the last act into a preposterous cat-and-mouse game that nullifies the integrity of the story.

It's not honest, and it's certainly no solution.

Offers traditional cinematic gab about marital status, sexual orientation, nationality and degree of fulfillment.

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

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

So clumsy and unfocused that not getting it isn't half as bad as sitting through it.

The opening of writer-director Eric Schaeffer's sloppy, sporadically funny adult sex comedy Never Again shows how an undisciplined filmmaker can sabotage his best intentions.

So badly conceived and executed, its good intentions don't help.

Why Travolta is slumming in B movies is anybody's guess. (I'll take a wild flier: "Battlefield Earth"?)

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.

Truly weird and unworkable thriller.

On paper, the "rising stars" of Meiert Avis' low-flying romantic comedy Undiscovered are Steven Strait and Pell James, but the real star is Tyson the Skateboarding Dog.

The actual fights between the predators and the serpents are too silly to contemplate. Both shiny and metallic, they look like kitchen appliances fighting it out. That's when you can see them. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson ("Resident Evil") has created the darkest, if not worst, sci-fi movie since "Battlefield Earth."

A screamingly bad melodrama whose message seems to be that people who think they're talking to a deaf person admit things they wouldn't admit to themselves. Silence, please.

The Worst Comedy of the Year race heats up today with the release of Keenen Ivory Wayans' Scary Movie 2. This one is so bad, even Adam Sandler will be impressed.

Hideously ugly to look at and not even worth following.

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!"

Most of the incidents are harmlessly derivative, but the movie has a mean streak that undermines our empathy for the characters, particularly Tom.

Drop Dead Ugly is more like it.

Thekind of misfire that makes you understand why every waiter, parking valet and sushi delivery boy in Beverly Hills has a screenplay under his waistband.

Less a movie than an 80-minute promo for a self-help program for the seriously desperate.

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]

Has sentimental goo oozing from its opening frame, and the gunk gets so thick so fast, it's a wonder the projector doesn't freeze before the molasses-strapped finale.

The stars have little opportunity to engage their characters. The gang-written screenplay and Chris Koch's artless direction turn their scenes into a series of broad, overplayed comic sketches.

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.

Completely false, manipulative, exploitative and insulting.