John Anderson

Reitman's attempt to show he can re-create the success of his biggest comedy ever. What he proves instead is that, given time and money, a comedy director can devolve into a lower life form.

It's not that the movie is never funny. It's just that you don't feel very good when it is.

There's not enough sustained musical momentum to simulate the energy of an actual rave; the characters are likable but unremarkable.

Gracefully bittersweet and balanced. [16 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]

[Shore] seems convinced that the antics of his retarded persona amount to some manner of postmodernist anti-comedy and this makes the resultant boredom seem all the more pathetic.

Brain Candy is not for kids. But adults, especially those cursed with a twisted, jaded or perverse sense of humor, will find plenty in it to laugh about. [12 Apr 1996, p.F12]

By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.

It's a movie on the wrong side side of the so-bad-it's-good line.

That this is the first film for director Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony for directing the stage version, may be compounding the problem. But frankly, if someone wanted to do a parody of a gay film like this, it's hard to imagine the sloganeering being much different.

What she finds is good for her and good for us -- a journey of realization for anyone who's ever felt lost in the crowd.

The special effects are effective and aggressive, although one might occasionally confuse a divine vortex with a flushed toilet.

The difficulty is that Brassed Off operates at an emotional pitch that starts at a crescendo and never relents--rendering almost everything equally inconsequential.

A goofball movie, in the way "Malkovich" was, but it tries too hard.

It only serves to remind one of better movies, at a time when one needs no reminders.

A virulent but thoroughly entertaining trilogy of tales about the besieged lower classes of Edinburgh, ripe with vulgarity, self-loathing, violence and economic disorder.

What we want from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a giddy mix of gruesome horror and campy humor. What we get is less massacre than mess. [29 Aug 1997, p.F16]

Pellington bestows on the film a distracting, if occasionally effective, amount of video technique, and Wakefield’s story is rich and often truthful.

Spears acquits herself as well as anyone might, in a movie as contrived and lazy as this one.

Although Born Romantic is sweetly intentioned and staunchly on the side of love, it meanders long to enough to alienate whatever affection it otherwise earns.

Has been described as a "midnight-style musical." And perhaps it should be seen that way, with a crowd of kindred knuckleheads and some moshing in the aisles.

To resort to strictly ethnocentric references, Fanaa is equal parts MGM extravaganza, Shakespeare lite and James Bond. In their heart of hearts, isn't that what movie audiences really want?

But as Isaac, Rifkin is simply transcendent, giving what is the most accomplished performance of the year. He does not, however, have a completely successful movie around him.

The trick is getting from a conclusion made five minutes into a movie to an ending 90 minutes away. It can be a scary prospect. In The Sweetest Thing it is mostly a hoot.

Ricki Lake, who occupies one of the lower links on the TV trash-talk food chain, is promoted to ugly duckling in Mrs. Winterbourne, a film that waddles through the movie-memory super-mart shoplifting everything but charm.

Take a ridiculous premise, marry it to a situation that is bound to resolve itself in the most obvious way, and keep the whole thing rolling with juvenile gags. What do you have? Television. Or “If Lucy Fell,” whose writer-director, Eric Schaeffer, certainly knows television. Or knew it.

The only thing left unsliced is the ham in BloodRayne, yet another video game adaptation by German genre specialist Uwe Boll and a movie with more fading - or faded - talent than an Italian basketball team.

What makes this film more than mere visual vigilantism is John Schlesinger, of whom it can be safely asked, what happened? He shows flashes of the old brilliance here -- the talent that made "Midnight Cowboy" so moving and "Marathon Man" such a nail-biter -- in telling this modern horror tale of the court system gone awry. It's unfortunate that after the messy construction of his last film, "The Innocent," he hasn't directed his gifted self toward something with a bit more intelligence. [12 Jan 1996, p.F6]