Jonathan Foreman

Elegantly photographed family saga that brims with period detail. Unfortunately, the underlying story is less than compelling,

A witty and quietly charming road comedy.

The gleeful teen-horror spoof that proves that the Farrelly brothers have no monopoly on outrageous, politically incorrect comedy.

Bland, occasionally funny.

Fascinatingly, many of the interviewees disagree vehemently about Holmes' personality: some of his co-stars and colleagues found him repellently abusive and selfish.

It's not to say that the adolescent humor isn't funny; some of it is hilarious. It's just that this movie lacks the overarching comic sensibility that made "Mary" and even Adam Sandler comedies like "Happy Gilmore" and "The Waterboy" so satisfying.

But given the potentially gripping subject matter, the film is fatally underedited: Every scene feels too long.

When it was first performed in theaters a couple of years after the L.A. riots took place, Twilight: Los Angeles must have been very powerful. Unfortunately, director Mark Levin's filmed version lacks that impact.

Unfortunately, you really only hear about prostitution from the side of the pimp.

With its endless takes of characters silently waiting, say, or getting out of bed, this is the kind of film that can be seen only after a full night's sleep. But it is also clever, funny and sometimes moving.

While the film contains some terrific, realistically bloody battle scenes, it has a distinctly Germanic feel, both in its epic heaviness and in the peculiar way it revises the history of the American Revolution.

By far the best thing about Pitch Black is the cool-looking lighting and photography.

Represents a kind of progress. Where once only a few ultra-talented, lucky black filmmakers got to make big studio movies, now we have standard-issue Hollywood schlock that happens to be made by, about and for African-Americans.

It tries to be an update of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" crossed with "Pygmalion," but while it has some funny and even original moments, it's too predictable to be "all that."

Essentially a feature-length commercial for both the growing sport of competitive cheerleading and ESPN2 .

Not entirely bereft of chuckles, though it misses one comic opportunity after another (the best jokes are in the trailer).

Besson is unable to weave the comic scenes together with the serious gory ones, so both seem increasingly jarring and unbelievable.

It's hard to feel anything but disappointment and boredom by the time the picture grinds to a mystical ending.

A gorgeously shot endurance test that is impossible to get through on anything less than a full night's sleep and a double shot of espresso.

Begins exceptionally well. Indeed, for at least its first half it's an unusually thoughtful, admirably underplayed piece of work of disorienting, rather harsh realism that builds its mysteries in pleasurably oblique and unpredictable ways.

But even that talent (Freeman) isn't enough to distract you from the general predictability of Spider or the absurdity of its elaborate last-minute plot twists.

A rather crude affair that feels like a student film, due to performances that often lack conviction and would-be "street" dialogue that rings false.

Visually flat and uninteresting and too often feels like a (leisurely paced) filmed play.

A hokey, overblown and deeply unsatisfying movie.

A crude, manic and embarrassingly unfunny satire that feels off from beginning to end.

Pumped-up, dumbed-down Bond, with tattoos instead of brains.

It's a lumpy and disorganized film that remains unsatisfying, perhaps because the fundamental oddness of having sex in public for money as a way of life remains just as mysterious at the end of the film as in the beginning.

Not a movie but a live-action agitprop cartoon so shameless and coarse, it's almost funny.

A slack-paced, surprisingly bland affair, filled with jokes that sound like they should be funny but aren't.

Strong cast is defeated by a labored, screenplay in this overlong, clunky love story.

There's not a moment in it that feels fresh or authentic or inspired. But neither is it offensive.

Doesn't press all its obvious lessons, and there are actually a few surprises -- and even a couple of moving and interesting moments -- before an all too predictable resolution.

A predictable tearjerker whose main redeeming feature is that you don't actually see any of the angels in the title.

Although Vatel is trying to say something about freedom and gilded cages, it feels more like a behind-the-scenes look at the high-end catering business.

Feels much more like a very, very long, music video, albeit one made for an audience that gets off on high-tech firepower rather than nearly-naked babes.

It's moody and atmospheric. But with the exception of a few cool moments that remind you of Ferrara at his best, it's dull and written with little attention paid to basic storytelling.

Thereare moving moments in this over-hyped satire by the Israeli-Arab writer-director-actor Elia Suleiman, and it's fascinating to get a picture of daily life in prosperous Palestinian neighborhoods.

Agonizingly slow-moving and talky, it consists primarily of conversations between two men in a truck.

Hardly a deep examination of gender relations or character, but in its unsentimental way it's a tender and charming story of friendship and tolerance.

One of those films that takes up a potentially fascinating subject only to fumble it.

Unoriginal but effective raunchy drag comedy.

It's a film pregnant with comic possibility that ought to be much funnier than it is.

Tendency to pretentiousness.

One of those exercises in romantic whimsy that misses its mark: It's alternately sappy and uncomfortably harsh.

The documentary equivalent of a Southern Gothic novel.

The first half-hour of Jeepers Creepers is so frightening that it's almost a relief when the movie subsequently collapses into silliness.

Its faults -- banal dialogue, ludicrous and uninspired plotting, dull but vicious fight scenes -- make you realize just how much the summer action movie has declined in the last few years.

Hard-core chick shlock, weakened by odd shifts in tone and a slack pace, but elevated by a luminous performance by Natalie Portman.

Familiar and predictable enough, especially if you have seen Hollywood serial-killer thrillers like "Se7en."

Recycles the teen romantic comedies of the last few years...and it's easily the worst of the lot.

Under the direction of Allan Moyle ("Pump up the Volume"), Nairn, McCarthy and Balaban give confident, believable performances but overacting plagues the rest of the cast.

Uneven but occasionally hilarious teen comedy.

Better Than Chocolate is well-filmed and for the most part well-acted. But its technical professionalism only serves to make the amateurishly crude patches of Maggie Thompson's script more obvious. [13 Aug 1999, p.062]

In general, it's a confusing, rather shapeless disappointment.

Pretentious and trite.

Turns out to be an exercise in flatulent pretension, puffed up with a bogus, empty "spirituality" and dependent on a plot filled with implausibilities.

There isn't a line you haven't heard or a stock character you haven't encountered before.

The whole thing is shot in an irritating, self-conscious way.

Despite a script that occasionally calls for some embarrassingly awkward lines, Kollek's cast generally acquits itself well.

Could hardly be more predictable.

Engaging in a soap operatic, rather glib way.

If it weren't for a terrific central performance by the Icelandic pop singer Bjork, Dancer in the Dark would be all but unwatchable.

It's a wretchedly dumb, lazy and incoherent movie that's magically rendered watchable by Eddie Murphy's charm and Robert De Niro's presence.

A genuinely clever plot.

Slow and predictable, and the characters are so poorly written that its hard to react to them in any way.

It's perfectly entertaining (and well-executed) in its cute, undemanding way.

The best thing about Equilibrium is its impressive look. Along with its generally fine cast and some well-choreographed fights, that goes a long way to making the movie watchable -- despite its underlying stupidity.

Overall, this sci-fi/martial arts hybrid has the stale aura of a product assembled out of bits of other action movies.

A cold, emptily stylish exercise -- and one that sorely lacks the speed and vigor that made "Lola" run.

Disappointing and surprisingly crude.

Simply not up to the task.

Plays to none of Rock's strengths (even though he co-wrote the film with members of his HBO team) and intensifies his tendency to mug and shout.

There are some decent jokes along the way. And none of the performances is bad. But they are limited by the script, which allows each character only one comic note.

Generic memoir of lower-middle-class "white ethnic" life in the '50s.

Boasts some genuinely intelligent and funny sequences and some nicely painful scenes of domestic tension - as well as surprisingly strong performances from actors like Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland.

Though it sometimes feels as if it's four hours long, Underworld has going for it an intriguing fantasy premise, an eventful plot and a look that is diverting, if finally a bit monotonous.

Could have been written by a computer programmed to cannibalize previous sci-fi films.

Although Scary Movie 3 boasts the same relaxed attitude to racial and sexual humor, some of the same eye for movieland ridiculousness, along with the usual cameos (Pamela Anderson and Simon Cowell), it lacks a single explosive, roll-on-the-floor gag, and too often repeats and belabors jokes that are merely OK.

Staggers between flaccid satire and what is supposed to be madcap farce.

Amateurishly written and directed, and so predictable that it hurts.

The Rock deserves better than The Rundown, a brisk, good- hearted but predictable and uninspired - not to mention bone-crunchingly violent - action comedy.

Isn't boring, but it is sanctimonious, relentlessly predictable and willfully ignorant of the period it's set in.

What makes Final Fantasy a final failure is a predictable, nonsensical plot, laughably lame dialogue and a surfeit of cloying environmentalist piety.

Isn't quite up to the comic standard of Rob Schneider's 1999 hit "Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo."

Woo has never been particularly good at human stuff, and to the extent that Paycheck is, or should be, a love story, it feels forced.

There are some charming moments and some funny scenes along the way. But you end up feeling sorry for the likes of Ron Howard, Karen Black, Fred Williamson and Peter Bogdanovich, who agreed to play themselves in cameo.

Predictable, rarely scary.

Some wonderful films have come out of Iran in the past few years, but A Moment of Innocence, by highly regarded director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is too smug and too self-indulgent to count as one of them.

Two things make this film slightly more interesting than its American B-movie equivalents. There's the artless way it shows the French state exercising its power and the charisma of French stars.

This second installment of Lucas Belvaux's acclaimed "Trilogy" is decidedly inferior to the first: a farce that simply isn't funny.

If Schwarzberg had chosen to concentrate on eccentrics, rural artists or people like his New York bike messenger, female aerobatic champion and California cliff dancer, "Heart and Soul" would have been a much more interesting film.

Resolves the romantic dilemma in the most artificial and unsatisfying way. A blaring swing score and some obvious dubbing do little to ease the pain.

Unfortunately, Impostor doesn't do much with its template, despite a remarkably strong cast.

A messy, woefully uneven chick flick.

It makes not just the "Thief of Baghdad" and the junky Ray Harryhausen movies of the '60s and '70s but even Disney's recent "Aladdin" seem positively multicultural by comparison.

Without a real story to go with the notion of Farm Belt "wiggas," the humor wears thinner and thinner until it disappears.

Slick but painfully precious, it strains to be darkly romantic but is bereft of genuine feeling.

An ultra-stylized, empty mess.

In fact, for long stretches, especially during the first hour, it's as soporific as watching a bank of security cameras.

Travolta is terrific as a bad guy, making Saint almost sympathetic. His co-stars however, flounder in a sea of bad lines, with poor Romijn-Stamos getting stuck with the worst.

After a dreadfully clunky start, Left Luggage picks up and becomes quite moving.

Recycles gags from various, more successful gross-out and romantic comedies, but without any zest or imagination.

Much of Tomcats is actually boisterously, crudely entertaining.

Better than any automobile flick put out by Hollywood in a while and, thanks to some genuinely exciting moments, it is easily the most entertaining so far of this summer's big, brainless action movies.

Has some entertaining moments, thanks mainly to Bullock herself, who is surprisingly glamorous as well as endearing.

The sad truth is that TV series like "Dawson's Creek" do a better job with precocious teen dialogue.

More impressive than the sight of these acts on an eight-story screen is the excellent six-channel IMAX sound system.

Crippled by lame storytelling.

Draggy and contrived.

Flat dialogue and stiff performances (especially by the street kids, like Ballesteros, turned into actors by Schroeder) don't help.

Courageous, convincing performance by Dunst.

About two-thirds of the way through, a stupid, hyperbolic sensibility takes control of the project, running it screaming off the rails.

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's Hindenberg.

Though it contains some very funny, cleverly written comic sketches, Human Traffic shares with other drug movies the problem that watching other people on drugs is not interesting.

Merely a watery, poorly directed update of "Clueless."

There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented.

A test of endurance, and not just because you need a rather stronger word than "explicit" to describe this long-unreleased, self-consciously provocative film.

Despite some genuinely funny scenes, American Desi turns out to be inferior to the as yet unreleased "ABCD" and even last year's "Chutney Popcorn."

It proves once again that it doesn't matter if the camera is dancing a jig on the ceiling if the storytelling is no good.

The demands of formula eventually stifle anything that even looks like inspiration or honesty.

There are a few chuckles here and there, and there are odd wisps of cleverness in the script by Steve Adams, but for the most part, Envy is a film that doesn't know where it's going.

The dramatic history of the Soviet space program deserves a far more competent documentary than this amateurish Dutch production.

A shame that this indie's willingness to trade in stereotype leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

So tedious it's almost worth watching to see just how bad acting, inadequate direction and most important, a criminally crass and unimaginative screenplay can make so little out of a proven idea.

One of those "Lifetime"-esque horror stories of evil husbands in the suburbs.

Good-natured but mostly unfunny.

It's no funnier than your average grade-school biology lesson and less pedagogically useful than your typical Farrelly brothers comedy.

Large chunks of the film seem like a record played at the wrong speed: The tempo of the dialogue as delivered doesn't match the lines as written, and the filmmakers are too lazy or too inept to make their convoluted premise jibe with any recognizable idea of human nature.

Boasts exceptionally attractive locations, but its painfully amateurish plotting, dialogue and acting -- combined with slack pacing -- make this Beijing-set indie romance something of a trial.

Honest but also derivative and crude.

It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.

Boring and irritating, and also mildly offensive in its ignorant depiction of both Judaism and Catholicism.

A strange Gallic imitation of a Woody Allen comedy, replete with a neurotic older hero.

James' character is a charmless, boring lump and it's very hard to care if he gets the girl or not.

Richard Jeffries' script tosses together bits of plot borrowed from such "bad things happen when you leave the city" classics as "Straw Dogs" and "Deliverance" without any awareness of how or why genre conventions work.

Toomuch of the humor in Not Another Teen Movie is either lame (the school in the movie is called "John Hughes High") or lamely disgusting.

Bedeviled by labored writing and slack direction.

An inferior factory product, cranked out with little care and less imagination, that seems all the dumber because it's pretending to be smart and topical.

What really wrecks Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is some of the worst casting in recent Hollywood history: The lackluster ensemble hired by the director is overwhelmed by the generally impressive sets and crowd scenes, by the task of playing epic heroes and by David Benioff's rambling, tone-deaf screenplay "inspired by Homer's 'Iliad.'"

A lazy and uninspired knock-off of the hilarious 2002 movie "Road Trip."

This is a lazy, careless film that feels strangely unfinished.

About three-quarters of the way through, Havana Nights suddenly becomes laugh-out-loud awful, with dreadful, lame lines delivered painfully badly - as if a different screenwriter and director had taken over for the movie's final act.

The result is an intermittently instructive and amusing jumble that might have been seen as daring and "transgressive" in both form and content if it had been released, say, three decades ago.

Partly a schmaltzy, by-the-numbers romantic comedy, partly a shallow rumination on the emptiness of success -- and entirely soulless.

This inferior sequel is doomed by a lousy - and extremely vulgar - script.

Fitfully funny at best, it's a sophomoric, facetious road comedy.

Despite its talented and/or attractive cast, Heartbreakers is an ugly movie: The kind that makes you feel slightly soiled afterwards.

It lurches ineptly from lame comedy to hokey melodrama.

It isn't entirely clear if Games People Play is a spot-on but longwinded and excessively campy spoof of those TV "reality" game shows... or just a particularly ingenious and sleazy example of the genre.

May well be the dullest and most pointless version ever filmed, thanks to a stunningly bad lead performance by Ethan Hawke.

A noisy, amateurish mess that doesn't work on any level - an extended, clich-ridden MTV video set to anachronistic bad music.

Hollywood movies are rarely as contemptuous of the audience as Dragonfly, with its half-witted, treacly New Age sappiness and its mechanical borrowings from other, better supernatural thrillers.

The screenplay by Zekri (based on Jorge Amado novel) is crude stuff, and director Ossama Fawzi gets such cartoonish performances from his cast, it's hard to care about the characters.

The contrast between Chan's charm and physical prowess and Tucker's lack of same is even more dramatic in this tiresome, leaden sequel.

Takeshi's elliptical directorial style here is overwhelmed by the script's crudeness and lack of narrative power.

Intermittently funny, often vulgar.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

Works just fine as a generic but fast-paced - and rather ugly - cop buddy flick.

A cast almost talented enough to distract you from Ted Griffin's gimmicky screenplay.

Amateurish in the extreme, the film is a feast of bohemian cliché, bad writing and worse acting.

It's hoary and clunky even by the low standards of contemporary thrillers.

What follows is very gruesome indeed, though the footage of people being chased by hideous ghosts soon becomes rather dull.

So patchy in its laughs, so calculated in its grossness and so lacking in genuine comic exuberance, it makes you look at "Road Trip" in an admiring new light.

What dooms Never Die Alone even as amoral pulp entertainment is the screenplay by neophyte James Gibson, which combines clichéd characters and a contrived plot with stale dialogue.

A bad film with some oddly charming moments.

A non-thrilling occult thrillersolame and unoriginal that it would be an embarrassment for any director, much less a talent like Roman Polanski.

A profound disappointment, given its cast and source material.

The acting, camera work and writing are all crude and amateurish, even by the standards of student films.

It strains belief that nuclear weapons couldn't kill off the dragons, but three people with crossbows could.

One of those thriller-comedy combos that never get the balance quite right.

Neither convincing nor remotely dramatic.

One of those French films whose makers won't lower themselves to tell a story in a way that is entertaining or compelling.

It's muddled and shallow and obvious. Worse, it fails as entertainment, being so ineptly directed and written it often has the feel of a high school production by kids with more money and ambition than talent.

Has the cheesy, deadened feel of a straight-to-cable film.

Smug, often tedious, and comically crude.

Isn't as bad as the year's first abysmal Martian movie, "Mission to Mars," but it's pretty close.

An ugly, failed attempt to pull off a "Heathers"-style, teen-oriented black comedy.

The film is clearly an unfinished work and one that feels like a ragged assemblage of parts from at least two entirely different movies all with the same cast.

Alas, the laughs - courtesy of screenwriters J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis - are unintentional.

For the most part, it's both sitcomishly predictable and cloying in its attempts to be poignant.

Fake-sounding dialogue, some over-deliberate performances and five amazingly trite linked stories.

A campy docu-drama about the secretly gay world of 1950's muscle magazines.

Unfortunately, this version of the familiar formula lacks the inspiration, genuine wit and raunchy charm of 1998's outrageous "There's Something About Mary."

An awkward hybrid of genres that just doesn't work.

In any case, the presence of O'Hara, Kline, Ramis, Black, Tomlin and John Lithgow (who plays Shaun's father) serve mainly to underline the feebleness of the screenplay and the slackness of the direction.

Every good joke in the movie is to be found in those trailers.

A slow, self-consciously low-key, very dull film that strains for eeriness with long silences and affectless performances.

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.

A particularly gross exploitation of the Holocaust for financial gain.

Essentially a downscale TV movie about spousal and child abuse.

Even a hardened voyeur would require the patience of Job to get through this interminable, shapeless documentary about the swinging subculture.

A misguided exercise - a crude merger of "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Schindler's List" that somehow reminds you of "Hogan's Heroes."

A misfiring black comedy oddly reminiscent of all those bad 1990s movies about strippers getting killed at bachelor parties.

It's a thinly disguised lecture about intolerance, spotted with historical inaccuracies and groaning with dialogue so dreadful that it makes a fine cast look ridiculous again and again.

It's unfortunate that the people DuBowski profiles tend to be self-indulgent or otherwise unappealing. It's still more unfortunate that the film focuses more on relatively easy issues of acceptance.

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

This movie, cynically and patronizingly aimed at Seagal's predominantly "urban" audience, is sad, tedious proof that even violent exploitation isn't what it used to be.

Mostly an unfunny, rather dull affair.

Helplessly clichéd, predictable and unaware of its own lameness, it could easily become a camp classic on the order of "Grease 2" and "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

The film is only 91 minutes long, but it seemed to stretch out for days.

It features well-below-par writing, acting, direction, special effects and music, while oozing a nauseating New Age sentimentality that undermines any tension in the underlying story.

A surprisingly nasty fable about a particularly silly, very English brand of animal-rights extremism.

Resembles a period version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" - played dead straight.

A crass, mechanical attempt at a thriller that should have gone straight to video.

This oddly scrambled new version eventually falls apart so badly you feel embarrassed for the people who made it.

An almost chuckle-free mess, so amateurish and lame that the cast often has that embarrassed look you see on dogs given ridiculous haircuts.

Self-righteous, economically illiterate and sometimes flatly dishonest.

A deep disappointment to fans of sci-fi and the once great John Carpenter.

In the end, it is inadequate, juiceless storytelling that deprives Titan A.E. of any dramatic force.

More tedious than affecting.

A miracle of badness, a kind of art- house "Showgirls" -- which actually exceeds "Showgirls" in its self-indulgence, shallowness and sheer stupidity.

Embarrassingly bad - the kind of slapdash exercise that gives even Hollywood formula a bad name, while doing little justice to the sport.

As lifeless and unfunny as a corpse on a slab.

The screenplay is packed with so many hilariously bad lines (it's hard to believe that writer-director Helgeland won an Oscar for co-writing "L.A. Confidential") that the movie would be perfect material for a resurrected version of the TV spoof "Mystery Science Theater."

A laughably bad B-thriller.

This crude, deeply dishonest documentary does no such thing. David Russell's fictional "Three Kings" does a much better job.

The problem with Gigli is that it is an inept attempt to do Elmore Leonard by Martin Brest, a filmmaker whose coarse sensibility makes him catastrophically unqualified to the task.

Relentlessly stupid.

Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.

Darkness Falls was formerly known as "Tooth Fairy," but could just as well have been titled "Dumb Then Dumber" for the way its plot makes decreasing sense even by the low standards of B horror flicks.

It's all so insincere, you can almost imagine the filmmakers rubbing their hands together at the prospect of ripping off the public.

It's a film noir spoof, replete with hard-boiled narration, lounge-music soundtrack and dramatic black-and-white photography.

Occasionally amusing, extremely gross, but mostly tedious.

Sucker bait for the sort of credulous cinast who'll buy anything ugly and boring that looks like it's avant-garde...rancid stew of cheap shocks, sleaze and phony artiness.

Unfortunately, Scorpion King has none of the qualities -- epic sweep, relative originality and heartfelt bloodthirstiness -- that made "Conan" so trashily entertaining.

Isn't really a movie: It's a grab bag of mobster clichés lifted without finesse from "A Bronx Tale," "GoodFellas" and at least a score of lesser Mafia flicks.

If the movie were funny, the implicit sermonizing would be more tolerable, but apart from four or five good one-liners, The Next Best Thing is a thudding failure as a comedy.

The characters are tired stereotypes, the sentimentality nauseating and the situation comedy way below the standards of the very worst WB or UPN shows.

An embarrassing misfire...feels like a long, slow TV pilot about L.A. twentysomethings, only it lacks the polish and wit of your average sitcom.

There's no limit to Coyote Ugly's crass shamelessness.

An example of Hollywood schlock from the team of Joel Schumacher (director) and Jerry Bruckheimer (producer) that lacks the faintest trace of imagination or genuine feeling.

A lobotomized attempt to make a no-budget John Waters movie, Men Cry Bullets is a painful reminder of just how bad indie cinema can be - especially when it plays with gender roles. It's desperately unfunny and dreadfully acted, written and directed.

A big, incoherent bore, interesting only as an example of assembly-line movie-making gone awry.

There is something offensively lazy about the thinness of the Jaglom's movie-industry characters, the simplistic problems they face, and the clumps of clumsy, apparently improvised dialogue they have to deliver.

The result is inept, tedious kitsch that even at its best feels like John Waters minus the joie de vivre.

Mostly ludicrous, but occasionally effective.

During an endless, maudlin last act, it becomes more and more difficult not to laugh -- or barf -- as the protagonists tearfully come to terms with their issues.

You have to sit through 90 minutes that feel like three hours.

A smarmy, smirky but ultimately boring film.

Anyone interested in this remarkably prolific author would be better off visiting a library or bookshop.

An example of lazy, dumb and couldn't-care-less hack movie making.

The "Jurassic Park" movie franchise does not evolve. Quite the opposite: It degenerates at great speed.

Lacks even a trace of imagination. Its by-the-numbers plot is depressingly familiar, and each line of dialogue is so predictable that the script... could have been generated by a computer.

It's hard to imagine how Shyer and script writer John Sweet could have brought this tale to the screen in a cruder, cornier or less interesting way.

Atrociously written.

A criminally slow, all-but-laughless blaxploitation comedy.

It's a film that reeks of stupidity and cynicism, one that makes you feel soiled just to have sat through it.

If this cheesy, cheap-looking update of "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" had been co-produced by the Ku Klux Klan itself, it could hardly be more repellently stereotypical.

The whole movie is so ineptly written and directed that its 90 minutes seem to take twice as long.

Looks and feels like a bad imitation of "Trainspotting" without any of that film's wit or charm.

Everything about National Security is so lazy and uninspired, it's hard to believe that director Dennis Dugan also made "Happy Gilmore," arguably Adam Sandler's funniest movie.

A pathetically inane and unimaginative cross between "XXX" and "Vertical Limit," it could only harm the careers of everyone involved in its making - including top British stage actors Rufus Sewell and Rupert Graves.

Not only is Adored amateurish and mawkish even by the standards of American "gaysploitation" cinema, it's weirdly shy about showing nudity and sex.

Even the lovemaking scenes between two of Hollywood's most attractive stars -- often shot from above, like Cinemax soft porn -- are so unerotic, they make your skin crawl.

The film's staggering incompetence can be measured by the way it makes some of the most fascinating and heart-rending episodes in American history tedious.

An inept, tedious spoof of '70s kung fu pictures, it contains almost enough chuckles for a three-minute sketch, and no more.

Laughs are few and far between, and the film feels brutally long.

Calling it pretentious doesn't do justice to the toxic faux-bohemianism and unearned self-regard that bubble and ooze out of every aspect of Chelsea Walls.

Part of the problem is that the Finbar character is both underdeveloped and unattractive - you don't get a sense of why anyone would miss him, let alone go searching for him in the snow. [17 Mar 2000]

Summer Catch is the sludge at the bottom of the barrel.

Amazingly amateurish, the film lands wide of satirical targets that should be impossible to miss.

A strong, early candidate for the worst movie of the year.

More prettily photographed pretentious rubbish from the ridiculous Peter Greenaway.

Shapeless, tedious, hopelessly bad sequel.

Every possible film student visual cliché (plus quite a few from the world of music video) gets a thorough workout.

It reeks of contempt for the audience. This is not just a "B-movie" -- it's a B-movie that fails to entertain on any level.