Jami Bernard

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.

The movie is full of puzzling celebrity cameos, as if Brazilian director Bruno Barreto called in all his chits.

Crude and giggly.

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.

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

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

This movie is not just bad, it is breathtakingly, spectacularly, awesomely bad. You might want to see it out of curiosity. [23 Aug 1996, p.40]

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

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

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

"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]

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.

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

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.

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

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

Profoundly depressing.

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.

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.

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.

Does the testosterone fly? Not as fast as the potty jokes. Ditto the homophobe jokes zing! zing!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The actor's directorial debut is a lugubriously poetic homage to the famed Chelsea Hotel, which is to New York's artistic and beatnik past what Ellis Island is to the story of American immigration.

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.

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

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

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

A gore movie with no teeth.

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

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

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.

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

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

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.

Gigli is a disaster.

Filmmaker Josell Ramos has his heart in the right place, but his camera is usually in the wrong place, complete with bad lighting and all-around lousy tech credits.

It's just as well that John Carpenter makes horror movies, because here's a horrifying thought picture James Woods as an action hero. [30 October 1998, p. 44]

What Short does not deserve - and neither do we - is a feature-length movie about Jiminy.

The bubble-boy niche is thankfully small. John Travolta began his career playing one in a TV movie, but this movie will undoubtedly finish off the genre for good.

You might want to sit out this season.

Gore fans will dig the makeup effects and some of the tongue-in-cheek slice-&-dice.

Evans fumbles through painfully extended homophobic jokes, weak double entendres and agonizingly contorted double-takes.

It's a movie that should have been called on account of boredom.

Silly supernatural Viking epic.

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

Ben Affleck's goose is cooked with Surviving Christmas, a movie that makes "Gigli" look like one of the crowning moments in his career.

A depressingly hollow vehicle.

Overall the tone is dark and nasty, exemplified by the inelegant signature kung-fu move of the good guys -- a backward kick to the groin.

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 screenwriters claim they got the idea for this dreary thing by glimpsing a besieged Chelsea Clinton in the stands at a basketball game.

The fog also does something genuinely eerie: It causes everyone in the cast to deliver dreadful performances and display inappropriate reactions when their friends are drowned, burned, stabbed or thrown into glass display cases.

What really makes the jaw drop is the presence of so many talented actors in what seems like traditional TV treacle. Saddest of all is Debra Winger, reduced to playing the wife-as-wallpaper role. For this she came back to Hollywood?

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.

Not only achingly dull, it has no respect for its origins.

A cheaply voyeuristic story whose "twist" is hardly worth the wait.

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

A painfully unfunny vehicle for Norm Macdonald, who here shows exactly why he was ousted from NBC's Saturday Night Live. [13 Jun 1998, p.27]

A failed experiment in magical realism that makes you wonder where the magic went.

Witless, insulting satire of sorority girls that shamelessly ridicules the mentally challenged. The filmmakers aren't exactly Mensa candidates themselves.

To pay for all the explosions and stunt work, the filmmakers must have decided to skimp on the screenplay. The rule of thumb is that one page of script equals one minute of movie, but there is so little dialogue in Ballistic that it could have been written on a matchbook.

Cuba Gooding Jr. can just return his "Jerry Maguire" Oscar right now. He has no excuse for making Boat Trip, a perniciously unfunny comedy.

Virtually plotless, the movie does its best to be offensive, but not in the service of any particular theme. The use of mentally impaired youngsters as actors is cheap and exploitative. You can only wonder about the emperor's new clothes, and how much Hollywood paid for them. [17 Oct. 1997, p.52]

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.

It all makes the head spin -- in the direction of the exit sign.