Jami Bernard

It's enough to encourage the aspiring film makers in the audience, no matter how wee in age, to yell "Cut!"

For devout fans of the greenish monster and for those looking to shoot fish in a barrel.

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

The movie creaks and groans, weighed down by clichés.

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

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

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]

An underwritten drama.

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.

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

So lacking in insight and gravity that it makes Dahmer seem like a pesky, pasty-faced loser who just wasn't popular enough.

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

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

Unless you live and breathe exhaust fumes, there isn't much to sustain a viewer through a lame story and dialogue so pathetic.

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]

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II. It is sickening.

This stripped-down premise made the first "Transporter" fun: It's all about driving skills and choreographed fights, not logic. Even with so few requirements, Transporter 2 runs on empty.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Attempts a coolness quotient it can't pull off.

Shot on digital video, made on the run whenever Watts was available between gigs, the movie is a pointless, tedious eyesore.

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

A hellacious stew of romance and tragedy that gives the words "screwball" and "pathos" a bad name.

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

A really lame attempt to expand the marketing reach of the PBS-TV series.

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

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

It has a distinctive look but a few too many recycled ideas; better luck on the next crash-landing.

Brutal but somewhat endearing.

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

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

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

Unfocused and shrill.

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

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

A gore movie with no teeth.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

An unimaginative schoolyard-bully comedy.

Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant are distilled to the very essence of their annoying tics and quirks.

Silly supernatural Viking epic.

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]

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.

Irritating wish-fulfillment movie.

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

If you like your burger well-done, you're in for a disappointment.

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

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

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

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.

The gimmick is that the script is based on the real-life experiences of actress Stephanie Bennett, who plays Samantha.

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

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.

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

"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]

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.

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

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

Rickman and Richardson are excellent actors put to ghastly waste.

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.

There ought to be a law about transporting humor internationally.

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?

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

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.

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

Crude and giggly.

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.

The main problem with this whole Jerry Bruckheimer-produced mess is that they took a promising comedy setup and squandered it by trying to make a legitimate spy thriller out of it.

Never gets at what makes Quek tick.

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

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

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.

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

The film would be totally unwatchable without the very real charisma of Diesel.

There are lame comedies, and then there is Big Fat Liar, which is so lame that it merits its own reserved parking space.

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.

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

The esteemed actor Derek Jacobi goes slumming as someone who pulls that metal badge from the chest of a cadaver. Shakespeare it's not.

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.