Jonathan Rosenbaum

I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

An empty-headed horror movie (1979) with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome, if gimmicky, cinematography.

Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver, a cop and a shrink, are the main trackers, but so little is done in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's script to give them or their colleagues or even their prey interesting human dimensions that the overall ambience is chiefly pornographic.

It has its moments, but not many, and generally speaking it runs neck and neck with Dune as the least successful and least interesting Lynch feature.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.

An offensive premise and a pathetic, almost pleading desire to outrage our sensibilities with it.

The ugly, aggressive, proliferating effects were all I could begin to contend with, and trying to keep interested in them was like trying to remain interested in a loudmouth shouting in my ear.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

For me the film creates more embarrassment than sympathy, but at least it's a kind of embarrassment that's instructive.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

May be amusing if you feel a pressing need to feel superior to somebody, but the aim is too broad and scattershot to add up to much beyond an acknowledgment of small-town desperation--something Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis did much better back in the 20s and 30s.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

The first four letters say it all.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

This runs a close second to September as his worst feature to date--marginally more bearable only because it's a comedy and a couple of gags are reasonably funny.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

Another piece of phony uplift from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Torturously dull.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

The mirthlessly sadistic gags tend to target people in wheelchairs or hospital beds and betray a mild if all-encompassing disgust for the source material and the audience.

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did.

This interminable, poorly constructed drug thriller by writer-director Frank E. Flowers sat on the shelf for two years before winning a release.

Four writers worked on the script, and they all should hang their heads in shame.

Its paper-thin characters turned into caricatures by egregious hamming, this 1996 Japanese comedy-drama about shy ballroom dancers is sentimental goo and downright interminable.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

Mechanical, soulless.

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

Almost no plot here and even less character--just a lot of pretexts for S-M imagery, Catholic decor, gobs of gore, and the usual designer schizophrenia.

The glorification of the FBI, the obfuscation about Jim Crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin.

Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he's outdone himself.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

If you haven't lived until you've heard Geena Davis say "Suck my dick," New Line probably deserves your money.

Payne is just as guilty of using her (Ruth) as a figurehead for his ideas--most of them about the stupidity and futility of politics--as are the targets of his satirical abuse.

Thomas is a couch potato as well as a recluse, and a terminal bore to boot. The women, real and simulated, are only slightly more interesting, and then only when they talk back.

Easy to take but even easier to leave alone.

If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.

Despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little.

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

13 (Tzameti) might seem allegorical, but it’s too cynically concerned with what works as entertainment to offer larger truths about human existence.

Bored me for most of its 178 minutes and then infuriated me with its cheap cynicism once it belatedly became interesting--which may be a tribute to writer-director Lars von Trier's gifts as a provocateur.

[An] unsatisfying mess.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

I can think of only one bit of Tin Cup that's beautiful, imaginative, and different, and it lasts for only a few seconds: a speech delivered by Russo, before her character is transformed into the standard-issue cheerleader, is broken into fragments by jump cuts.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

Every effect is so calculated that only the conscious minds of filmmakers and viewers are engaged--and not by very much or for very long.

An epic about the Irish patriot (Liam Neeson) during the last years of his life (1916-'22), it clearly represents a lot of thought on Jordan's part, yet it's dramatic and cinematic sludge.

Jarhead virtually begins with a rip-off of the basic-training sequence that opens Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."

The indifference of the proceedings and the hero's slapstick behavior to the everyday realities of the camps borders on the nauseating.

Tautly directed by David Slade, this drama probably offers more sadism than anyone could possibly want...The characters are absurd, but if you're up for this sort of thing, then surely you can con yourself into accepting them. Personally, I'd rather have this movie obliterated from my memory.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

As effective as MacDowell was in sex, lies, and videotape, she's clearly no match for the talented Depardieu; perhaps she'd seem less out of her depth if the script wasn't so implausible and threadbare.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

It's an utter waste of Watts; there's not a trace here of the talent on display in Mulholland Drive, perhaps because the script doesn't bother to give her a character.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

A deeply stupid and offensive action comedy-romance.

A horrendous effort all around.

A piece of mythmaking stupidity.

This is mainly a narrative brain-teaser like "Memento" or "The Jacket"; merely keeping up with the game requires so much energy that the thinness of the material becomes fully apparent only toward the end.

The few halfway decent ideas in the story (by John Skip, Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem) and production design (by C.J. Strawn) are mercilessly and fatally crushed by the inept direction of Stephen Hopkins and the flaccid editing.

Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.

A tiresome 1998 rip-off of The Hustler, with poker (in a New York Russian Mafia milieu) taking the place of pool, Matt Damon taking over for Paul Newman, and John Malkovich's scenery chewing supplanting Jackie Gleason's self-effacement.

Laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless.

Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything.

This anachronistic tale goes beyond Capracorn to evoke Depression-era fare like "One Hundred Men and a Girl" in which the charm is overtaken by mush. One wants to protect this, but it's hard not to gag on the cuteness.

At least (John) Waters cares about most of his freaks; for Lynch they're basically exploitation fodder for a puritanical "dark vision of the universe" that seems to come straight out of junior high, complete with giggles.

Proves that the Disney people can sell just about anything--including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution.

Despite the cast -- Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill Murray -- I found it preposterous.

Full of odd notions and interludes, the movie never really comes together, but fitfully suggests a cross between Boys Town and Greaser's Palace.