Jami Bernard

Juices up the visuals with fancy camerawork and split screens, but it can't distract enough from the vulgarity of the material.

An unimaginative schoolyard-bully comedy.

The production is as gaily colored as the margaritas, but the overall result is wan.

You may not realize just how much it takes to make a great mockumentar like "Waiting for Guffman" until you see Never Been Thawed.

A gangsta rapper without fire in the belly isn't terribly interesting, cinematically or musically.

The wordless six-minute animé shorts - at the end of which our double-jointed heroine would always die - don't lend themselves to a 95-minute action movie where viewers might rightfully expect something to make sense.

It tries to be more existential than gumshoe but falls way short.

It's hard to care what really happened on Wonderland Ave. when the audience hates the neighborhood.

Cedric is certainly the bright spot in this movie - personable, silly and lovable, with just enough of Gleason's girth, timing and humanity to make you wish he'd driven Ralph Kramden's bus onto the lot of a different movie.

Crudup gives it his best, but his character is so economically drawn, there's hardly anything there -- certainly nothing likable.

Lacks the charismatic presence of Vin Diesel, who has priced himself right out of the franchise. Without Diesel, there's not much gas, at least not from the nonvehicular elements.

A preposterous action movie in which a Navy SEAL makes the world safe for democracy one continent at a time.

As in "The Edge," in which Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins were stranded in the wilds, you can earn a wildernesssurvival merit badge just from watching.

Never gives us what it promised: a glorious, totally new sense of horror.

Dysfunction seeps from every pore of this family, and the anger and ugliness of the characters overwhelm not just the story but the movie's stunning National Geographic location.

About as many characters, dragons and force fields as "Pokémon" has pocket monsters, so it may be difficult for the uninitiated to keep track.

A waterlogged bagel, hardly the valentine to New York it imagines itself to be.

The story has a definite ick factor that detracts from even the small pleasures the movie might offer its teen audience.

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.

There are some nicely gory touches for genre connoisseurs...But JC2 lacks the all-important character development we got in the first installment.

The picture's a dud... Instead of Chow's gravitas rubbing off on the kid, Scott's dude-ness dilutes Chow's authority.

The humor is supposed to stem from the clash of kids who have been raised so differently and of partners with opposing views of child care. But there are just so many jokes you can make about who gets to use the bathroom when.

If you think you're tough enough, go ahead and sit through the endurance test that is Bad Boys 2, a brutal, 2 1/2-hour display of production overkill.

The screenplay has no idea how to modulate the banter between the movie's talented stars so that it approximates affectionate and playful sparring.

The award for hardest-to-watch movie of the year.

Falls short of the mark, content to shoot fish in a barrel.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.

A slice of life that adds up to exactly the sum of its parts, no more, no less.

In documentary footage played over the closing credits, the real warrior is introduced to American fast food and returns to his people too fat and sluggish to spear himself a snack, let alone a missionary.

An underwritten drama.

A dreadful animated movie stuffed with bad puns and little internal logic. More dangerous than the world icing over is the danger of eyeballs rolling back into the heads of parents accompanying kids to this.

A serious and thoughtful movie that probably does not mean to trivialize the Holocaust and blame the victim. But it is playing with fire nevertheless.

Director and co-writer Steve Suissa misses every opportunity to go deeper, either for laughs or pathos.

Caught with a shaky hand-held camera, this aimless diary glides indifferently along Weber's stellar collection of photos.

If only half as much attention had been paid to story and character as to set design, the cast wouldn't be playing second banana to a gut rehab.

The problem comes when the movie turns into a tedious, faith-based diatribe against medical science.

If you're looking for cinema, skip this. But as a religion-based self-help workshop for victims of ­childhood abuse, it'sa deadly accurate button-pusher.

It's hard to take this oddball movie seriously.

Some of the jokes will elude Americans while the movie's hip quotient gradually fades away.

The dullest exorcist movie ever made.

Did Lane and John Cusack really have to put themselves through this? Here are two first-rate actors in the embarrassing situation of playing blithering misfits in a lame comedy of errors.

Lohan's good work in movies like "Mean Girls" and the "Freaky Friday" remake is a faint memory as she struggles through antics, unfunny pratfalls and squirmingly bad set pieces.

A movie needs more than a few sexual innuendos and throaty purrs to keep us from taking a catnap. How about a strong story and credible characters?

The movie equivalent of a medical experiment gone horribly wrong and kept in a jar of formaldehyde as a warning to others: Comedy can be a deadly weapon in the wrong hands.

It features an insane amount of violence and a number of visual references to the comic, but it lacks the original's humor and spirit.

All the magic at the disposal of today's filmmakers cannot bring to life this unappealing animated children's movie.

After 45 minutes of incomparable boredom, the movie gets slightly better when it stops reaching for cheap yuks and lets the actors do what they do well.

The main theme is the loneliness of the social outcast. That, plus a soundtrack to wake the undead, and the morbidly entombed presence of Aaliyah, will attract an audience despite the movie's intrinsic cheesiness.

The movie walks a tightrope between playing this misunderstood malady for laughs and sentiment.

The only intriguing character is the manager of the diner (and de facto fairy godmother), played by Regina King.

Even a soccer-savvy audience has better things to do - like instilling unsportsmanlike behavior in their kids or sabotaging rival teams.

Structure overwhelms everything, but it's not as if Wicker Park has nothing to say. It's full of ugly truths about emotional frailty, and implies that stalking is a bad thing only when you're not charming enough about it.

It's strictly amateur hour.

Kinsella, in his feature debut, milks cliches, caricatures and an unlikely set of coincidences to tie things up in a neat bundle.

Brutal but somewhat endearing.

Flimsy and forgettable, but it does have a few worthy action and special-effects sequences.

The teen actors grin twitchily as if tickled by sudden growth spurts, but apparently nothing can hurt their chances with the females in this libidinous zip code.

If the Founding Fathers had known National Treasure would be the result of their efforts to forge a new nation, they might have reached for the Wite-Out.

The movie is quite off its rocker: Jerry Springer, Chrisopher Walken, Tom Waits as a roadside prophet, a miscast, nervous Lucy Liu as an FBI agent -- it's a feverish, violent jumble that's shot as if high on mescaline -- the drug, not the salad.

Jazz is a good metaphor for Robert Altman's movies they're often improvisational, free-form and full of unexpected dissonance. Unfortunately, his movies also fall prey to the hazards of jazz they can be boring, screechy and endless. Thus, Kansas City. [16 Aug 1996, p.49]

Rickman and Richardson are excellent actors put to ghastly waste.

The story is a mess, some of the images offensive, the acting under par and the dialogue silly.

Don't see The Inheritance if you're already depressed. This airless downer from Danish director Per Fly is about an heir who makes one wrong decision from which even lousier decisions effortlessly flow.

Crude and giggly.

A desperately unfunny comedy that wastes a brand-name cast.

An abysmal comedy that should have been strangled in its crib.

In his new concert film, a train wreck of self-regard, self-pity and not-so-humble pie, Martin Lawrence doth protest too much.

"On Deadly Ground," "Out for Justice," "Marked for Death" these are the last times Seagal gave us nothing. With Fire Down Below, he outdoes himself. [6 Sept 1997, p.32]

Jackie Chan finally has met his match, an opponent so deadly that none of his considerable talent or charm can fight it -- a bad movie

The movie is paint-by-numbers with several numbers skipped.

It's a humiliating comedown for Ford, and he looks creaky and grumpy, obviously aware that he is miscast and dreading every scene.

It is not the worst movie ever made, as some critics claim, but it does a passing imitation.

Unfocused and shrill.

The movie then becomes John's story, making an unbelievable leap of psychodrama to do so.

There ought to be a law about transporting humor internationally.

Hell is sitting through a movie in which you have no respect for the protagonist and the "surprise" ending is as clearly lit as the exit sign.

The audience for this chaste teen romance won't be film lovers, as the movie is sappy and listlessly paced. But it's just the ticket for people who want their movies sanitized.

See it only if potty-training is still the most vivid life experience in your book of memories.

A dreary comedy in the same mold (as "The Bad News Bears," only moldier.

Exhaustingly manic but curiously unfunny movie.

There's definitely room for a female Woody Allen, an accolade garnered by a previous film. However, Amy's Orgasm is chirpy, shrill and coarse, more in the vein of one of Allen's more depressed periods.

Excuse me, but didn't Bette Midler already play this role?

A remedial comedy for idiots.

Thanks to that dog-torture element, Garfield may be too upsetting for younger kids. Meanwhile, older kids (let alone parents) will want to put this movie behind them like yesterday's hairball.

What if you made a pornographic movie with a real story line and better acting but didn't show any sex? You'd get The Fluffer, a movie that sounds and feels like the real thing but isn't.

It's brain-dead start to finish.

Recycles the most obvious jokes from similar comedies that preceded it, such as "Tootsie," but with the most rudimentary characters.

Satire works when it's sharp and funny. When it's not, you get New Suit, an unremarkable sour-grapes comedy about the obsequious players and inconsequential products of Hollywood.

Certainly a dark spirit is hovering over this inane production. Something has sucked the life out of it.

This self-conscious movie by Katja von Garnier is shot like a music video, stocked with quick cuts, lip-synching and fantasy performances.

The story is tired, the comedy forced and the mother's larger-than-life quirks are an acquired taste.

A gore movie with no teeth.

A movie that shouldn't be allowed on the same campus as "Animal House."

Its shapelessness and the cultural differences in acting style will keep this version filed under "cult oddity."

Has some good music and hot dancing -- filmed choppily -- but it completely lacks the magic of its predecessor.

This amateurish drama about street-dance contests and busted friendship is about as real as Lil' Kim's chest.

Screenwriters look to many sources for inspiration. In the case of Saving Silverman, they looked behind them, and liked what they saw.